The sea demons

by H.M. Egbert

Armchair fiction presents extra-large paperback editions of the best in classic science fiction novels. “The Sea Demons” by Victor Rousseau is the 38th installment of our "Lost World-Lost Race Classics" series. Captain Masterman was a stalwart, seasoned British naval officer. He had been well respected within the ranks of his fellow naval peers—that is until he went missing at sea and came back spouting mad theories about sea demons with his crew having mysteriously disappeared. Submarine commander Donald Paget was skeptical of these wild claims, but he listened attentively to the old captain’s stories in a saloon one day shortly before the captain died. As fate would have it, on his next voyage out Paget’s submarine was assailed by the very monsters Masterman had warned him of! These translucent, insect-like, quasi-humanoid monsters devoured everything in sight and it seemed doubtful that Paget and his crew would ever see the ocean’s surface again.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Pulp

254 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1924

Reviews

[Warren Fournier · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wonder if Malcolm Hulke had this 1916 science fiction adventure in mind when in 1972 he created the classic Doctor Who villains, The Sea Devils. It features anthropoid mermen, actually referred to as "Sea Devils" in the story, who evolved separately from humans into an intelligent civilization and rise from the depths of the oceans to take back the earth from the crazed apes who are in the midst of the First World War. And just like the Doctor Who story, a villainous genius tries to exploit the beasts for his own nefarious plans.

Victor Rousseau Emanuel was a British author who may best be known for "The Messiah of the Cylinder," which I have also reviewed. Though doubtless that novel, published just a year after "The Sea Demons," is the superior work, I think I enjoyed the latter much more. I had just a grand time feeling like a kid again reading this bonkers mess of a book. Rousseau doesn't ask too much of the reader here--only to relax and enjoy. It is clear that this novel knows what it is all about, and that is entertainment. The Radium-Age era of science fiction is loaded with cerebral, elevated fantasy from some of the finest wordsmiths in the world, but there are also plenty of mindless old-fashioned adventures like this one that are just a pure joy to read for their nerdy energy.

For this reason, I was willing to overlook some of the childish narrative and scientific naivete. So what if he says that an old sea captain found a Stegosaurus in the ocean (that looks like a turtle)?

However, there were quite a bit of plot contrivances that were just too ridiculous, and those of you who know me are aware that I will gleefully suspend disbelief as long as the author isn't too thoughtless about their narrative. Rousseau was guilty of taking me out of the story a few times, so I have docked stars from my rating accordingly. For example, early on in the novel, a British submarine just so happens to come across a German cruiser that is attacking a passenger liner. Unfortunately, they are a bit too late to save the passengers and crew. All except one. And wouldn't you know it, the sole survivor happens to be the fiance of the commander of that very sub! Hey look, I am completely excited about intelligent sea creatures trying to take over the earth. But if the writer is going to try to falsify suspense and melodrama with lazy coincidences, then I just can't get on board (pun intended). You guys that bounce in your seat rooting for Godzilla while simultaneously getting annoyed when the ineffectual main human characters conveniently happen to be everywhere and anywhere there are monsters--you know exactly what I mean.

Then there were moments that were just inexplicable. The Queen of the Sea Demons is much more humanoid than the titular monsters. In fact, she's supposed to be beautiful. She sneaks onto the submarine and our hero catches a brief glimpse of her. So does our hero's girlfriend, who immediately gets jealous. And one of the crew members becomes obsessed with a personal mission to lead the Queen away so that his commander won't have any more trouble with the misses. Uh, people, she's a fish. An alien lifeform that invaded your ship. And everyone's first concern is that the captain is going to sleep with her? It's quite comical in the sheer pulp silliness.

Not that this book is devoid of intelligence. The entire second act takes place almost entirely underwater or within the submarine, and is quite tense and claustrophobic. I also thought the characters were fairly well drawn for the most part. The main protagonist, Donald Paget, was fairly interesting. He is captain of an 8-man submarine back when that technology still felt like science fiction in itself. But he doesn't come across as your typical pulp badass. He is obviously very well-read but humble, able to converse with ease and intelligence about a variety of subjects without being pompous. When an old acquaintance first tells him about the sea devils and the threat they pose to the world, he is patient but not patronizing, even though he thinks the man is incapacitated from dementia. He is brave and noble, but like any real person, gets the shit scared out of him when he encounters something completely beyond his expectations. Unfortunately, there isn't much chemistry between him and his love interest, Ida, who he literally drags around the narrative like a rag doll. Her only function is to be the damsel in distress.

As a lover of underrated and almost forgotten works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, I certainly appreciate the work of Armchair bringing this and other obscure titles back into print and the public consciousness. I only wish they had spent just a little more effort on proofreading their transfer, as the text is riddled with flaws. It's possible that these are artifacts carried over from previous editions, but either way, it wouldn't have taken much investment to clean all this up before publication. Regardless, these typos and mistakes don't render the book unreadable.

But any science fiction fan should be happy to have this book on your shelf. The 2021 Armchair version features the stunning artwork for the story that originally graced the cover of the January 1916 edition of "All Story Weekly." It's not a perfect novel, but damn if I don't love it. And I think most of you will have a blast with this wild ride to the unknown secrets of the ocean.

[Sandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his 1896 short story entitled "The Sea Raiders," British author H. G. Wells wrote of a newly discovered race of giant cephalopods, Haploteuthis ferox, that suddenly takes to terrorizing and devouring some unfortunate residents on the Devonshire coast. It is a wonderful tale, really, expertly written by the legendary author in an almost documentary manner. But this, of course, was hardly the first time that an English writer would give us a tale of oceanic monstrosities rising up from the deep. Just 20 years later, thus, the world was given another such story, one that was not nearly as well written as the Wells piece, but, to its credit, posited a menace on a much broader geographic scale. The book in question, "The Sea Demons," was written by an author named Victor Rousseau and has, like its titular protagonists, emerged from obscurity to flabbergast a new generation.

"The Sea Demons" first saw the light of day as a four-part serial in the January 1st, 8th, 15th and 22nd, 1916 issues of the American pulp magazine "All Story Weekly" (cover price: 10 cents); incidentally, the final segments of Edgar Rice Burroughs' six-part serial "The Son of Tarzan" also appeared in those first two issues, and the January 1st magazine featured beautiful cover artwork by one W. C. Fairchild for the Rousseau story. Eight years later, in 1924, the British publisher John Long Ltd. would release Rousseau's novel as a hardcover book (bearing on its front cover, for some strange reason, one of Rousseau's many pen names, in this case, um, H. M. Egbert!), after which the novel would go OOPs (out of prints) for a good 52 years, until Hyperion Press revived it, in 1976, in both paperback and hardcover editions. And then, Rousseau's tale would submerge into oblivion once more, for another 45 years, till the fine folks at Armchair Fiction decided to salvage it for the modern-day reader, in the fall of 2021, and boasting the same Fairchild cover artwork as had appeared 105 years earlier.

As for Rousseau himself, his career is difficult to synopsize. Born in London in 1879 with the name Avigdor Rousseau Emanuel, the author would later live in South Africa, Canada, Britain and New York. His work covered many fictional genres--sci-fi, horror, Westerns, Canadian adventure tales, "spicy stories"--and, besides working as an author, he would become an editor for "Harper's Weekly" magazine, as well as a screenwriter for Universal. Before his death in 1960, at age 81, Rousseau would release three "serious novels," hundreds of short stories, and a bewildering number of serialized genre novels. "The Sea Demons," as far as I can make out, was written just six years after Rousseau became a published author, in a career that would extend for almost four decades. Thus, it is a relatively early work by a writer clearly still attempting to hone his craft, yet one who surely displays hints of a definite talent.

In Rousseau's book, we are introduced to a British naval lieutenant named Donald Paget, who has just been given his first command, that of the eight-man sub the D55, in the middle of WW1. While emerging from the Admiralty's office in Whitehall, Donald chances to bump into an old instructor of his, Capt. Jonathan Masterman, who has been pretty universally derided by the Royal Navy as being a crank, following his reports of sea serpents and whatnot. Masterman buttonholes Donald, coerces the lieutenant to join him for dinner at his club, and proceeds to pour into the younger man's ears a fresh tale of marine monstrosities that he had just tussled with up by the Shetland Islands. Masterman, unfortunately, dies of some kind of a fit at the conclusion of his tale, leaving the skeptical Donald shaking his head in wonder. But later, while searching through the captain's London abode, Donald happens to come upon several vats, containing...well, something; semitransparent, gilled creatures, being kept alive in a liquid solution. Before he can investigate further, he is knocked unconscious by Masterman's nemesis, the evil genius Prof. Ira MacBeard, who absconds with some of the captain's papers and flees into the night.

Several days later, now on the high seas searching for German destroyers while in command of the D55, the events surrounding Masterman's warning of an attack by suboceanic monstrosities seem like a dream to Donald. He has other things on his mind now, like sinking a German destroyer in the North Sea. After a tense battle, that destroyer is indeed torpedoed and wrecked, but not before it itself sinks the passenger liner S.S. Boeotia. (It will be remembered that the British passenger liner Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat just eight months prior to this novel's release.) Donald is then given a double shock when he picks up the liner's sole survivor, Ida Kennedy, his lady love from the U.S., and when her lifeboat is attacked by the very monstrosities that Masterman had warned him about! After several run-ins with the ravenous "sea demons," both above water and aboard the sub, the crew is reduced to just Donald; his second-in-command Davies, a 17-year-old "snotty" fresh out of training; and Sam Clouts, an amiable, harmonica-playing bear of a man. Along with Ida, they fetch up on lonely Fair Island, in the Shetlands, where they get into still more trouble, both under the ocean and on land, with the amphibious demons and their Queen, who develops a strange, sexual yearning for Donald himself. And as if that weren't enough for our quartet of heroes to handle, that diabolical mastermind MacBeard soon pops up as well, having recently discovered, from Masterman's stolen papers, how to control the sea folk and use them in his plot to conquer the world! And, despite Donald & Co. doing their best, the sea demons do indeed wind up swarming south from the Shetlands, to wreak havoc on not just England, but on the French and Belgian/Dutch coastlines as well....

Despite its interesting and fast-moving story line, "The Sea Demons" is ultimately revealed to be a rather middling affair, albeit an entertaining one. Let's look at some of the novel's numerous selling points first, though, shall we? Paget and his men make for a likeable and well-depicted crew, and Ida, happily, despite some seemingly inevitable screams, crying jags and fainting spells, is quite a spunky young gal, in a clutch. MacBeard makes for a fine, realistic villain, although his sudden infatuation with Ida strikes the reader as ringing a tad false. Actually, MacBeard can almost be seen as a prototype for the Ian Fleming 007 villain (although I doubt that Fleming would have chosen the first name "Ira" for one of his evildoers); we are told that he had previously harbored plans to utilize solar energy to precipitate worldwide volcanic eruptions, and also wanted to create a new race of supermen from a lair in Greenland! The diaphanous Queen is nicely mysterious, her sad eyes communicating her desire to evolve to human status, while bemoaning the fact that it will be eons before her kind looks like Donald and Ida. She is, unfortunately, underutilized in the book. As for her minions, the sea demons themselves, they are a memorable lot, being practically transparent while alive, as well as wholly vicious and quite ravenous. Their ability to separate the hydrogen from ocean water, leaving an oxygen-nitrogen area in which Donald and his friends are actually able to breathe beneath the waves without diving gear, also produces clouds of explosive hydrogen when they march on land, only adding to their fearfulness. Rousseau gives us some interesting locales for his action sequences (Fair Island, the Skjold Fjord in Norway) and dishes out for his readers any number of exciting and suspenseful scenes. Among the best: Donald's discovery of those two sea demon samples in Masterman's home; the tense cat-and-mouse game between the D55 and the German destroyer; Donald's first dukeout with a gaggle of the sea demons, in that lifeboat on the high seas, and armed only with a set of oars; the desperate undersea walk that Donald and Ida take through murky waters, encountering a giant killer fish of some kind as well as grasping crinoids; the sea demons' attack on Europe, while the populace begins to panic; and finally, that thrilling final showdown in Norway. Throw in the edgy strangeness of the Queen's love for a human--and Donald's atavistic and almost hypnotized attraction to her--some well-rendered dialogue, and glints of pleasing humor (the eccentrics at Masterman's Inventors Club are a real hoot!), and you've got yourself a rather nice book to settle in with, indeed.

Unfortunately, as mentioned, there are some problems to be had here also. Although Rousseau's writing is spirited, it can also be a bit fuzzy at times, and some of his descriptions (particularly of the sea demons' underwater cavern) are a bit hard to visualize. He gets an occasional bit of information wrong (such as when he repeats the erroneous "fact" that Dagon was a Phoenician fish god), is guilty of a few instances of faulty grammar ("But soon he became as utterly lost as if he was threading the mazes of a primeval forest...."), and gives his readers several rather awkward lines ("[the German ship] might lie too unobserved for observation...."). Some of his throwaway references will most likely come off as dated for a 21st century reader (such as those to suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, and to the Dutch waterway the Zuyder Zee, which, following a flood in Holland in January 1916--the same month that Rousseau's novel was released--would be dyked off and largely reclaimed as usable land). The fact that the D55 just happens to be in the same area as the Boeotia when she is sunk, and the additional fact that the only survivor of that catastrophe just happens to be Donald's girlfriend, constitute a double coincidence that is almost too large to be swallowed. And then there's the unsatisfying explanation as to how the sea demons are able to convert the ocean floor to a livable, breathable zone of comfort; "far-fetched" doesn't come close to describing it. So as you can see, Rousseau's novel, fun as it is, must be deemed something of a mixed bag. Adding to the problematic nature of the book is the Armchair presentation that has been given to us here, another typo-riddled affair with numerous misspellings, missing words, and botched punctuation. Most of the Armchair releases that I've encountered over the years have been in fairly good shape; this one, sadly, is something of a mess. Still, the volume comes with my reserved approval. I only hope that the next Lost World/Lost Race novel that I read from Armchair, which will be Patrick and Terence Casey's "The Strange Story of William Hyde" (also from 1916), will be in much more presentable shape than Victor Rousseau's "The Sea Demons"....

(By the way, this review originally appeared on the FanLit website at http://www.fantasyliterature.com/ ... a most ideal destination for all fans of Lost World/Lost Race literature....)

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Sea Demons was written by the now-forgotten H.M. Egbert, a pseudonym for British pulpster Victor Rousseau Emanuel, one of the earlier writers of science-fiction and lost race adventures. Here, the story depicts a race of carnivorous invisible humanoids living deep beneath the sea. The protagonist is Donald Paget commander of a rickety British submarine; he's warned by an eccentric deep-sea scientist, but Donald ignores his warning and continues on to war. He engages a German cruiser pursuing a passenger vessel, and the sinking of the passenger liner brings Donald's fiancee into the novel. After that, the aquatic menace assaults the submarine before heading landward.

One of those old-fashioned pulp stories that has everything: Swashbuckling adventure! Mad scientists! World War I submarine warfare! Cannibalistic humanoid undersea monsters! Chivalric love! London razed by amphibious horrors! What's not to like? Well---the writing is dated and reveals a few flaws, and the science is... implausible, to put it nicely. That said, The Sea Demons is an entertaining work if you enjoy old-school pulp fiction. And I mean old-school; this one was published in All-Story Weekly back in 1916, when submarine warfare was cutting edge. An entertaining historical curio.

(Full review found here.)

[Jouni · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretty stupid.