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The Black Druid and Other Stories
Think of your worst nightmare - and multiply it by Eleven.Here are eleven tales of brain-freezing terror by master fantasist Frand Belknap Long. Within this book are tales of horrible, crawling, devoring things, creatures from some obscene region beyond the mind'sc comprehension, vile monsters that wallow in the deep night of the imagination. This is the ultimate in horror. Read it - if you dare.
- GenresHorrorCollections
174 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1975
About the author
Frank Belknap Long
431 books103 followersAka Lyda Belknap Long.
Frank Belknap Long was a prolific American writer of horror fiction, fantasy, science fiction, poetry, gothic romance, comic books, and non-fiction. Though his writing career spanned seven decades, he is best known for his horror and science fiction short stories, including early contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos. During his life, Long received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (at the 1978 World Fantasy Convention), the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement (in 1987, from the Horror Writers Association), and the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award (1977).
Frank Belknap Long was a prolific American writer of horror fiction, fantasy, science fiction, poetry, gothic romance, comic books, and non-fiction. Though his writing career spanned seven decades, he is best known for his horror and science fiction short stories, including early contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos. During his life, Long received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (at the 1978 World Fantasy Convention), the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement (in 1987, from the Horror Writers Association), and the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award (1977).
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 29, 2023
the stories here that aren't repeats from The Hounds of Tindalos were... somewhat more enjoyable? I guess? 2.5 stars, rounded down. because although the ideas were admirably bizarre, the writing is often eyerolling.
"The Ocean Leech" - a monstrosity from the sea devours various unlucky sailors, including our narrator. despite the poor quality of the prose, there's something very original about a story told by a ship's captain who is being devoured by a giant ocean leech. apparently due to various ocean leech excretions, being digested feels kinda great - color me surprised! although it does make our narrator rather forgetful of various details - interesting side effect.
"It Will Come to You" - similar to "The Ocean Leech" this story features a forgetful narrator. in this case, he's forgetful of who he is and why he's been given various jobs, including food-taster. this results in some deadly food poisoning for those whom he's supposed to be tasting food because BIG SPOILER NOW our narrator has forgotten that he's an undead ghoul, disguised as a human by Satan, and so what tastes "good" to him should be marked as inedible to humans. a surprising story, to say the least.
"Step Into My Garden" - a traveling salesman comes home to find his house & garden overtaken by cloying smells, invisible pests, some sort of disappearing gnome, and the maybe-undead criminal who was shot in his garden. this is one of the most bizarre stories I've ever read and that's saying something. even though I just gave sort of a synopsis, I still have no idea what this story was about, what happened and didn't happen, and that ending was very ?!?!?!
"The Flame Midget" - tiny evil gnome from space hangs out in a slide in a microscope and telepathically says Hello, My People Are About To Invade Earth And Kill You All. it also emits lethal needle-thin rays of burning heat and hides its spaceship in one character's kidneys. I don't even know what to say about this story other than it is certainly different.
"Death-Waters" - the narrator tells the tale of his dead friend, bitten to death by swarms of snakes summoned by an evil black fellow. this is one of those stories that could either be about racist characters or could itself be as racist as its characters. I tend to want to think the best of folks, even authors, but I'm going to have go with the latter in this case. check out this description, where apparently the very body of the black character inspires certain kinds of feelings:
and then there's this line, which is just so funny yet dumb:
also "lethal" chest & arm hair... that's a new one for me!
"The Ocean Leech" - a monstrosity from the sea devours various unlucky sailors, including our narrator. despite the poor quality of the prose, there's something very original about a story told by a ship's captain who is being devoured by a giant ocean leech. apparently due to various ocean leech excretions, being digested feels kinda great - color me surprised! although it does make our narrator rather forgetful of various details - interesting side effect.
"It Will Come to You" - similar to "The Ocean Leech" this story features a forgetful narrator. in this case, he's forgetful of who he is and why he's been given various jobs, including food-taster. this results in some deadly food poisoning for those whom he's supposed to be tasting food because BIG SPOILER NOW our narrator has forgotten that he's an undead ghoul, disguised as a human by Satan, and so what tastes "good" to him should be marked as inedible to humans. a surprising story, to say the least.
"Step Into My Garden" - a traveling salesman comes home to find his house & garden overtaken by cloying smells, invisible pests, some sort of disappearing gnome, and the maybe-undead criminal who was shot in his garden. this is one of the most bizarre stories I've ever read and that's saying something. even though I just gave sort of a synopsis, I still have no idea what this story was about, what happened and didn't happen, and that ending was very ?!?!?!
"The Flame Midget" - tiny evil gnome from space hangs out in a slide in a microscope and telepathically says Hello, My People Are About To Invade Earth And Kill You All. it also emits lethal needle-thin rays of burning heat and hides its spaceship in one character's kidneys. I don't even know what to say about this story other than it is certainly different.
"Death-Waters" - the narrator tells the tale of his dead friend, bitten to death by swarms of snakes summoned by an evil black fellow. this is one of those stories that could either be about racist characters or could itself be as racist as its characters. I tend to want to think the best of folks, even authors, but I'm going to have go with the latter in this case. check out this description, where apparently the very body of the black character inspires certain kinds of feelings:
"He sat hunched in the bow, with his back towards me, with his hands on his knees and his eyes turned towards the shore. He was naked to the waist and his dark, oily skin glistened with perspiration. There was something tremendously impressive about the rigidity of this animal-like body, and I didn't like the lethal growth of crisp black hair on his chest and arms. The upper portion of his body was hideously tattooed.this character is literally just the native guide these two assholes have hired to row them to the center of a lake in Central America, where one of the pair forces him to drink what looks and smells like toxic lake water.
I wish I could make you perceive the deadly horror of the man. I couldn't look at him without an inevitable shudder, and I felt that I could never really know him, never break through his crust of reserve, never fathom the murky depths of his abominable soul. I knew that he had a soul, but every decent instinct in me revolted at the thought of coming into contact with it.
and then there's this line, which is just so funny yet dumb:
"There is no understanding the psychology of a black man in the centre of a black lake."hard to understand the psychology of someone forced to drink "yellow, sulfurous" lake water and is now mad about it?? I mean, if I had the ability to curse someone to death by snakebite who had forced me to guzzle down foul, parasite-ridden lake water, that curse is 100% happening.
also "lethal" chest & arm hair... that's a new one for me!
September 25, 2018
In my recent review of Frank Belknap Long's short-story collection "The Hounds of Tindalos," I mentioned that when this hardcover volume was initially released by Arkham House in 1946, it contained 21 tales, encompassing the genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror. I also mentioned that most later reprintings of this now classic collection contained only half of those 21 stories, including the 1975 edition that I recently wrote about; the one from the British publishing firm Panther. But later that same year, Panther released the other half of the 1946 classic in a collection entitled "The Black Druid," a paperback that I eagerly sought out after enjoying Part 1 so very much. As would be expected, this second volume also contains stories in the sci-fi, fantasy and Lovecraftian horror fields, similarly written in Long's highly literate style. Read in tandem with that first volume, it reaffirms why the 1946 hardcover has become such a beloved, highly collectible item today (currently going for $500 on eBay and $400 on Amazon!). As in that first volume, all the tales in "The Black Druid" originally appeared in various pulp magazines of the day; here, from the period 1924 – '43. And all are marvelous and strange, in their own wonderful way.
As to the tales themselves, this collection kicks off with the title story, "The Black Druid" (from the 7/30 "Weird Tales"). In this one, a studious archeologist puts on the wrong overcoat after doing his researches at a public library and hideously transforms into the clawed demon of the title, replete with a face that was "slimy, blubbery." Beautifully overwritten (we're told that the archeologist's socks "bulged above his shoes like the elephantine folds on the torso of an Abyssinian eunuch"!) and almost Lovecraftian in its references (such as to the 5th century Roman poet Rutilius Namatianus), this brief tale serves as a wonderful opener here.
"Fisherman’s Luck" (7/40 "Unknown") mixes fantasy and horror to quite winning effect. Here, a man on vacation takes his fishing rod and catches both the severed head of a murdered Chinese man and the living person of a woman who had died over a century before! This tale manages to stir in humor, mythology and pathos into its short compass, and thus was a perfect fit for the magazine in which it first appeared, which, as "The Science Fiction Encyclopedia" so rightly claims, emphasized "the exuberantly wacky approach to fantasy which 'Unknown' made its own."
Next up in "The Black Druid" is "The Ocean Leech" (1/25 "Weird Tales"), a tale that should especially appeal to all lovers of eldritch stories of the high seas, particularly those written by William Hope Hodgson. Here, a becalmed sailing vessel contends with a monstrous denizen of the deep in the shape of an enormous squid of only semisolid consistency! Written in wonderfully pulpy style and not a little gory, this tale gives us a truly memorable monster: "…mute, misshapen, blasphemous...industrious retching matter, brainless and self-sufficient, obeying a law older than man, older than morality. Here was life absorbing life, and doing it forcefully, and without conscience, and becoming stronger and more exultant through the doing of it...." Marvelous fun, this one...for the reader, anyway.
"The Space-Eaters" (7/28 "Weird Tales") is, in some respects, the most noteworthy tale in this collection, as the narrator is a man named Frank (probably Long himself), and his close friend in the story is a writer who focuses mainly on "remote and unholy realms of imagination and horror," and named Howard (beyond doubt a stand-in for Long's close personal friend Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and indeed, the "Necronomicon" is referenced in the story). Here, the two men, while ensconced in a lonely rural cabin, run afoul of creatures from outer space that literally eat the brains out of their victims! Another marvelously pulpy affair, this tale, the longest in this collection, culminates in a seeming warning to Lovecraft, beseeching the "Sage of Providence" to caution when writing of mysterious powers and malignant beings. Some amazing stuff here, really.
"Step Into My Garden" (8/42 "Unknown Worlds") is a compelling, somewhat confusing fantasy that again utilizes mythology (the legend of Proserpine, in this case) to tell the story of John Kendrick, who returns home one day to find his wife gone, his backyard completely changed, and invisible creatures (shants, digglies and gnores) overrunning everything. Seemingly inspired by Algernon Charles Swinburne's poem "The Garden of Proserpine" (one of at least three Swinburne references in the 21-story collection; Long was a big fan of the Victorian poet, I'm guessing), the tale also conflates modern-day psychology and James George Frazer's "The Golden Bough" into one very strange stew indeed, culminating with a finale straight out of "The Twilight Zone."
"Dark Vision" (3/39 "Unknown") also mixes in some modern-day psychological rationalization into its gripping story line. In this one, a reporter falls into a high-voltage generator and is zapped with a lethal quantity of current, but miraculously does not die. He soon realizes that he is now privy to the thoughts of others, as well as to their most unpleasant subconscious urges and daydreams. He comes to understand that even the sweetest-looking people around him are harboring ugly thoughts, including his own fiancée, and is driven close to the brink of madness before seeking help at a shrink's office. The subconscious mind is a "cesspool of...horrible, vagrant and lightly held thoughts," as our hero learns in this very well-done fantasy.
In "It Will Come to You" (12/42 "Unknown Worlds"), the shortest short story in "The Black Druid," a man who is afflicted with intermittent amnesia gets a job as a food taster after blowing a series of previous work placements. Just who this man is, and why he cannot remember anything about his past, are ultimately revealed in the final words of this pleasant trifle of a fantasy.
The collection's next offering, "The Flame Midget" (12/36 "Astounding Stories"), is a truly superlative piece of science fiction. Here, a reclusive bacteriologist invites his best and only friend, our narrator, to his lab in rural South Carolina to show off his latest discovery. It is a fully recognizable human figure, capable of telepathy and of emitting lethal heat radiation, who the scientist has found on one of his culture slides; a microscopic alien from another world, who has communicated its intentions of returning to its home planet, via microscopic spaceship, to inform its people that Earth is ripe and ready for conquest! What must sound ludicrous in synopsis is convincingly brought off by Long here, as he pulls in convincing scientific sources (from Van Maanen's star to Dr. George Crile) to back up his conceit. Ending on a note of distinct paranoia and despair, "The Flame Midget" is one of this collection's very best.
"Death-Waters" (12/24 "Weird Tales") returns us to the realm of queasy horror. It is narrated by an American who had come to the jungles of Honduras with his partner, Byrne, looking for a mineral water source to bottle and sell back in the States. But Byrne, it seems, had angered one of the natives there by forcing him to drink the evil-looking water of one particularly nasty lake, not knowing that the native has some kind of supernatural control over the area's varied snake and reptile life. And before long, Byrne and our narrator are fighting for their lives against thousands of such, in this remarkably grisly affair. Combining horror, fantasy and jungle adventure into one fun package, "Death-Waters" was indeed a natural fit for the pages of "The Unique Magazine."
In the charming fantasy "The Elemental" (7/39 "Unknown"), a young man discovers that he has suddenly attained the ability to push objects about from afar, using goads of invisible force (a la Sue Richards in the Fantastic Four), as well as the ability to fly! He uses his newfound flying skills to soar from Kentucky to the Atlantic (in passages that may bring to mind Edmond Hamilton's 1938 story "He That Hath Wings") before crash-landing on a lonely little islet in Chesapeake Bay and learning the truth: He had been experimentally taken over by a nature spirit, the elemental of the title, who is now, sadly, dying. It is a lovely fantasy, really, supremely well imagined and brought off by the author.
"The Black Druid" wraps up with what might unfortunately be its weakest offering, "The Peeper" (3/44 "Weird Tales"). In this one, journalist Mike O'Hara, an alcoholic Irishman, returns home one night and finds the corpse of his younger self lying on his bed! At work the following day, he tries to convince himself that he had only imagined the incident, but subsequent events go far to convince him otherwise. As in "The Refugees" (a story in Part 1 of this two-volume affair), Irish folklore is brought into play here (to far less charming effect), as well as Greek mythology, but the net result is a decidedly head-scratching conclusion to bring this otherwise sterling collection to a close.
So there you have it: 11 fascinating tales from a writer who assuredly deserves to be better remembered today. In "The Peeper," O’Hara is described thus: "He had written stories like dew-drenched spider webs, prismatic and strange and with a little gruesome wrench at the end which made people happy deep down inside. Very sensitive and imaginative people, of course, because only such people deserved to be made happy in precisely that way...." A perfect description, it seems to me, of Frank Belknap Long himself, and the potential readers who might enjoy these books....
(By the way, this review originally appeared on the FanLit website at http://www.fantasyliterature.com/ ... a perfect destination for all fans of Frank Belknap Long....)
As to the tales themselves, this collection kicks off with the title story, "The Black Druid" (from the 7/30 "Weird Tales"). In this one, a studious archeologist puts on the wrong overcoat after doing his researches at a public library and hideously transforms into the clawed demon of the title, replete with a face that was "slimy, blubbery." Beautifully overwritten (we're told that the archeologist's socks "bulged above his shoes like the elephantine folds on the torso of an Abyssinian eunuch"!) and almost Lovecraftian in its references (such as to the 5th century Roman poet Rutilius Namatianus), this brief tale serves as a wonderful opener here.
"Fisherman’s Luck" (7/40 "Unknown") mixes fantasy and horror to quite winning effect. Here, a man on vacation takes his fishing rod and catches both the severed head of a murdered Chinese man and the living person of a woman who had died over a century before! This tale manages to stir in humor, mythology and pathos into its short compass, and thus was a perfect fit for the magazine in which it first appeared, which, as "The Science Fiction Encyclopedia" so rightly claims, emphasized "the exuberantly wacky approach to fantasy which 'Unknown' made its own."
Next up in "The Black Druid" is "The Ocean Leech" (1/25 "Weird Tales"), a tale that should especially appeal to all lovers of eldritch stories of the high seas, particularly those written by William Hope Hodgson. Here, a becalmed sailing vessel contends with a monstrous denizen of the deep in the shape of an enormous squid of only semisolid consistency! Written in wonderfully pulpy style and not a little gory, this tale gives us a truly memorable monster: "…mute, misshapen, blasphemous...industrious retching matter, brainless and self-sufficient, obeying a law older than man, older than morality. Here was life absorbing life, and doing it forcefully, and without conscience, and becoming stronger and more exultant through the doing of it...." Marvelous fun, this one...for the reader, anyway.
"The Space-Eaters" (7/28 "Weird Tales") is, in some respects, the most noteworthy tale in this collection, as the narrator is a man named Frank (probably Long himself), and his close friend in the story is a writer who focuses mainly on "remote and unholy realms of imagination and horror," and named Howard (beyond doubt a stand-in for Long's close personal friend Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and indeed, the "Necronomicon" is referenced in the story). Here, the two men, while ensconced in a lonely rural cabin, run afoul of creatures from outer space that literally eat the brains out of their victims! Another marvelously pulpy affair, this tale, the longest in this collection, culminates in a seeming warning to Lovecraft, beseeching the "Sage of Providence" to caution when writing of mysterious powers and malignant beings. Some amazing stuff here, really.
"Step Into My Garden" (8/42 "Unknown Worlds") is a compelling, somewhat confusing fantasy that again utilizes mythology (the legend of Proserpine, in this case) to tell the story of John Kendrick, who returns home one day to find his wife gone, his backyard completely changed, and invisible creatures (shants, digglies and gnores) overrunning everything. Seemingly inspired by Algernon Charles Swinburne's poem "The Garden of Proserpine" (one of at least three Swinburne references in the 21-story collection; Long was a big fan of the Victorian poet, I'm guessing), the tale also conflates modern-day psychology and James George Frazer's "The Golden Bough" into one very strange stew indeed, culminating with a finale straight out of "The Twilight Zone."
"Dark Vision" (3/39 "Unknown") also mixes in some modern-day psychological rationalization into its gripping story line. In this one, a reporter falls into a high-voltage generator and is zapped with a lethal quantity of current, but miraculously does not die. He soon realizes that he is now privy to the thoughts of others, as well as to their most unpleasant subconscious urges and daydreams. He comes to understand that even the sweetest-looking people around him are harboring ugly thoughts, including his own fiancée, and is driven close to the brink of madness before seeking help at a shrink's office. The subconscious mind is a "cesspool of...horrible, vagrant and lightly held thoughts," as our hero learns in this very well-done fantasy.
In "It Will Come to You" (12/42 "Unknown Worlds"), the shortest short story in "The Black Druid," a man who is afflicted with intermittent amnesia gets a job as a food taster after blowing a series of previous work placements. Just who this man is, and why he cannot remember anything about his past, are ultimately revealed in the final words of this pleasant trifle of a fantasy.
The collection's next offering, "The Flame Midget" (12/36 "Astounding Stories"), is a truly superlative piece of science fiction. Here, a reclusive bacteriologist invites his best and only friend, our narrator, to his lab in rural South Carolina to show off his latest discovery. It is a fully recognizable human figure, capable of telepathy and of emitting lethal heat radiation, who the scientist has found on one of his culture slides; a microscopic alien from another world, who has communicated its intentions of returning to its home planet, via microscopic spaceship, to inform its people that Earth is ripe and ready for conquest! What must sound ludicrous in synopsis is convincingly brought off by Long here, as he pulls in convincing scientific sources (from Van Maanen's star to Dr. George Crile) to back up his conceit. Ending on a note of distinct paranoia and despair, "The Flame Midget" is one of this collection's very best.
"Death-Waters" (12/24 "Weird Tales") returns us to the realm of queasy horror. It is narrated by an American who had come to the jungles of Honduras with his partner, Byrne, looking for a mineral water source to bottle and sell back in the States. But Byrne, it seems, had angered one of the natives there by forcing him to drink the evil-looking water of one particularly nasty lake, not knowing that the native has some kind of supernatural control over the area's varied snake and reptile life. And before long, Byrne and our narrator are fighting for their lives against thousands of such, in this remarkably grisly affair. Combining horror, fantasy and jungle adventure into one fun package, "Death-Waters" was indeed a natural fit for the pages of "The Unique Magazine."
In the charming fantasy "The Elemental" (7/39 "Unknown"), a young man discovers that he has suddenly attained the ability to push objects about from afar, using goads of invisible force (a la Sue Richards in the Fantastic Four), as well as the ability to fly! He uses his newfound flying skills to soar from Kentucky to the Atlantic (in passages that may bring to mind Edmond Hamilton's 1938 story "He That Hath Wings") before crash-landing on a lonely little islet in Chesapeake Bay and learning the truth: He had been experimentally taken over by a nature spirit, the elemental of the title, who is now, sadly, dying. It is a lovely fantasy, really, supremely well imagined and brought off by the author.
"The Black Druid" wraps up with what might unfortunately be its weakest offering, "The Peeper" (3/44 "Weird Tales"). In this one, journalist Mike O'Hara, an alcoholic Irishman, returns home one night and finds the corpse of his younger self lying on his bed! At work the following day, he tries to convince himself that he had only imagined the incident, but subsequent events go far to convince him otherwise. As in "The Refugees" (a story in Part 1 of this two-volume affair), Irish folklore is brought into play here (to far less charming effect), as well as Greek mythology, but the net result is a decidedly head-scratching conclusion to bring this otherwise sterling collection to a close.
So there you have it: 11 fascinating tales from a writer who assuredly deserves to be better remembered today. In "The Peeper," O’Hara is described thus: "He had written stories like dew-drenched spider webs, prismatic and strange and with a little gruesome wrench at the end which made people happy deep down inside. Very sensitive and imaginative people, of course, because only such people deserved to be made happy in precisely that way...." A perfect description, it seems to me, of Frank Belknap Long himself, and the potential readers who might enjoy these books....
(By the way, this review originally appeared on the FanLit website at http://www.fantasyliterature.com/ ... a perfect destination for all fans of Frank Belknap Long....)
March 17, 2009
A visionary with some great ideas but sometimes not executed quite so well, often struggling to end a story.
December 10, 2023
A selection of terrifying little tales, and a few boring ones, which normally follow the lives of a random male character who seems to get caught up in mystifying or strange and horrific occurrences. Such a a fisherman who discovers he can dig ups the past (people who have died long ago) by fishing with his new found rod. Only to come face to face with a God who claims his staff (the rod) back in the end, telling the fisherman that he has been made a fool of, as this God likes to use his staff to trick humans now and then for his humour. This was such a great short story and whenever I came upon a tale I didn't care for I couldn't stop reading with the hopes of finding another as good as this
Great stuff
Great stuff
August 26, 2022
Only The Space-Eaters in this collection is up to much, and even that pales in comparison to The Hounds of Tindalos. Largely forgettable. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/201...
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