The real appeal of many of the stories I discuss in this series isn't so much their plots or characters as their ideas. This isn't to suggest that pulp fantasy tales necessarily lack interesting plots or compelling characters. Rather, it's to emphasize that their greatest value, particularly from the perspective of roleplaying games, often lies in the author's imaginative conceptions of strange lands, weird magic, or terrifying monsters. One need not look very far into the contents of Dungeons & Dragons, for example, to find examples of ideas inspired by – if not outright stolen from – the works of fantasy and science fiction authors popular during the younger days of Dave Arneson or Gary Gygax. 

The early horror stories of Ramsey Campbell demonstrate my point quite effectively, I think. Like his fellow Brit, Michael Moorcock, Campbell began writing fiction at a very young age. His first professional sale was to Arkham House in 1962, when he was only 16 years old. This early success encouraged him to submit several more stories. Arkham House's editor, August Derleth, initially rejected them on the grounds their New England settings didn't ring true, since Campbell, a native of Liverpool, had never visited the region. Instead, he encouraged the young Campbell to rework the stories by setting them in England, leading to his development of the Severn Valley and its fictional city of Brichester. The result was the 1964 anthology, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants.

Among the best stories included in The Inhabitant of the Lake is "The Insects from Shaggai." Campbell later explained that the tale

is based on [an] entry in the Commonplace Book, or rather on my misreading of it. Lovecraft wrote "Insects or some other entities from space attack and penetrate a man's head & cause him to remember alien and exotic things – possible displacement of personality," a superb idea I rushed at so hastily that I failed to notice he hadn't meant giant insects at all ... Of all my stories, this is probably the pulpiest. As such, it has some energy, I think, but I wish I'd left the note alone until I was equipped to do it justice.

This is a very fair and indeed self-aware assessment of "The Insects from Shaggai." Campbell recognizes that its central idea, one he borrowed from Lovecraft's Commonplace Book – his notebook of story germs – is a strong one. He also recognizes that, at his young age, he wasn't quite up to the task of fleshing it out into a fully satisfying story. Yet, for all that, I still think it a story worth reading, if only for that central idea, which has stuck with me all these years and which likely served as the inspiration for at least one of my own creations.

The story itself is told from the perspective of a writer of fantasy, Ronald Shea, who "feel[s] bound to write down some explanation for [his] friends," since he "must not be alive after sunset," as his "continued existence might endanger the whole human race." This is another variation on a tried-and-true Lovecraftian formula: a narrator who wishes to explain his actions and why they were necessary to safeguard mankind, no matter how insane they might sound. When one considers that this is the work of a very young author who was attempting to imitate his literary idol, I think it's a forgivable set-up. 

While drinking at a hotel bar in Brichester, Shea is approached by a middle-aged teacher who promises to tell him "all the Severn Valley legends which might form plots of future stories." The teacher speaks of a meteorite that fell in Goatswood sometimes in the 17th century. The meteorite soon attracted the attention of the local folk, including one who discovered a metal cone "made of a grey mineral that didn't reflect, and more than thirty feet high." The cone had a "circular trapdoor on one side" and "carved reliefs" on the other. When he got near the cone, he heard "a sort of dry rustling inside," as well as "a shape crawling out of the darkness inside the trapdoor."

Shea is unimpressed with the legend's vagueness and Campbell uses this as an opportunity to mock the conventions of many Lovecraftian pastiches.

"Too vague – horrors that are too horrible for description, eh? More likely whoever thought this up didn't have the imagination to describe them when the time came."

It's a solid jab at the worst of HPL's imitators – and, honestly, some of the worst of HPL's own stories – that I can't help but think that Campbell was using it at least in part to cover for the flaws in "The Insects from Shaggai." In any case, Shea is nevertheless interested enough in the legend, vague though it is, that he seeks out more details and then sets out to look for the supposed location of the metal cone. 

Shea succeeds in finding the cone in a clearing within Goatswood – something he had not expected, given the vagueness of the legend. Equally unexpected was the fear he felt upon seeing it and hearing the "faint dry rustling sound which came from somewhere in the clearing." Not long thereafter, the circular trapdoor opened and

a shape appeared, flapping above the ground on leathery wings. The thing which flew whirring toward me was followed by a train of others, wings slapping the air at incredible speed. Even though they flew so fast, I could, with the augmented perception of terror, make out many more details than I wished. Those huge lidless eyes which stared in hate at me, the jointed tendrils which seemed to twist from the head in cosmic rhythms, the ten legs, covered with black shining tentacles and folded into the pallid underbelly, and the semi-circular ridged wings covered with triangular scales – all this cannot convey the soul-ripping horror of the shape which darted at me. I saw the three mouths of the thing move moistly, and then it was upon me.

The insect-creature flew straight into Shea's head but he "felt no impact" and, when he turned to look behind him, there was no sign of it. Yet, "the whole landscape seemed to ripple and melt, as if the lenses of [his] eyes had twisted in agonizing distortion." He then realizes that the thing "had entered [his] body and was crawling around in [his] brain." It's here that the story truly becomes interesting – or at least grapples toward being so. 

With the insect-creature somehow ensconced like a parasite within his mind, Shea experiences strange perceptions and equally strange thoughts. The young Campbell then attempts to convey the twisting, phantasmagoric experience of Shea's being a host to an Insect from Shaggai and, while the end result doesn't quite succeed, I appreciate his effort nonetheless. What the reader gets echoes the experiences of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee in Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time," as his mind travels through time in bodies other than his own. It's a potent idea and should be at once wondrous and terrifying – if it weren't for the fact that Campbell uses this as an opportunity to regale the reader with a needlessly lengthy exposition of the history of the Insects, the home planet, their worship of Azathoth, and many other details. The elaborate exposition undoubtedly pleased August Derleth, whose own Lovecraftian pastiches luxuriated in similar catalogs of otherworldly places and entities, but it does little to improve the story.

And that's a great shame. As I said at the beginning, some pulp fantasies are best appreciated for their ideas than for their plots or characters and "The Insects of Shaggai" is a prime example of this. I absolutely adore the idea of psychic parasites that employ human beings as their vehicles on Earth. Likewise, the bizarre sensations and knowledge that come with playing host to these entities is worthy of exploration, since it's a splendid way to convey the cosmicism of Lovecraft's literary vision. Unfortunately, Campbell is quite right in judging that "The Insects from Shaggai" falls quite short of the mark. Yet, for all that, it's still of genuine interest to readers for whom ideas are paramount.

Last week, I wrote about Clark Ashton Smith's "The Devotee of Evil," whose original appearance in the pages of Stirring Science Stories featured an illustration by the incomparable Hannes Bok. Seeing that illustration led me down a rabbit hole of investigation into the life and work of Wayne Woodard, known to history by his artistic pseudonym, Hannes Bok (apparently derived from the name of the composer Johannes Sebastian Bach). Among Bok's most famous pieces is the cover of the 1948 collection of science fiction stories by John W. Campbell, Jr, Who Goes There? (appended to the end of this post).

The collection's title comes from its lead story. Campbell first published it in the August 1938 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, the magazine he edited from 1937 to 1971. He did so under the nom de plume, Don A. Stuart, a pen name he'd used even before he took up editorship of the premier SF pulp of the Golden Age. In its original form, Who Goes There? is a novella consisting of twelve chapters, while the version that appeared a decade later in the collection mentioned above is expanded to fourteen chapters. An even longer version, bearing the title, Frozen Hell, was discovered just a few years ago among Campbell's papers, but it never appeared during his lifetime.

Despite their differences in length, the 1938 and 1948 versions are nearly identical in their essentials. The story concerns a team of thirty-seven men, most of them scientists of one type or another, stationed at an Antarctic research facility who have stumbled upon something strange. In this, the tale bears a superficial similarity to H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, which appeared in three successive issues of Astounding a little less than two years prior. The similarity is primarily their shared setting of Antarctica, a continent still largely unknown in the 1930s, the decade that saw several scientific expeditions to it, most notably those of Richard Byrd. As an admirer of Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness is usually in my mind whenever a think of Antarctica and stories set there, particularly those of a science fictional and/or horror variety; Who Goes There? is both.

The novella begins shortly after the Secondary Magnetic Pole team under the leadership of the facility's second-in-command, McReady, returns, bearing an unusual find: the body of what appears extraterrestrial being frozen in a block of ice. The body was found on the South Polar Plateau, where it was "frozen since Antarctica froze twenty million years ago." The team that found it, consisting of McReady, Barclay, Blair, Dr. Copper, Norris, and Van Wall, speculate that 

"It came down from space, driven and lifted by forces men haven't discovered yet, and somehow – perhaps something went wrong then – it tangled with Earth's magnetic field. It came south, out of control probably, circling the magnetic pole. That's a savage country there, but when Antarctica was still freezing it must have been a thousand times more savage. 

They further speculate that one of the ship's passengers – the thing they brought back with them – had managed to get clear of spaceship's wreck and then quickly froze to death in the cold of Antarctica. The team hoped to examine the ship more closely, but their use of decanite and thermite bombs to soften the ice in which it was encased inadvertently set the ship's magnesium metal hull on fire and it, along with whatever secrets it might have held, was lost in a blinding inferno of heat and light.

There is disagreement between Norris, a physicist, and Blair, a biologist, regarding the danger in thawing the thing in the ice, with the former thinking it dangerous and the latter seeing no cause for concern. Norris worries that the thing, even if dead, might be host to microscopic organisms that, when thawed, could unleash a new plague upon the world. Blair, for his part, argues that alien germs would probably be no threat to Earth, since their biologies would probably be incompatible. The debate between the two goes on for some time with neither scientist ceding ground to the other. 

Before the facility's commander, Garry, can make a decision, Blair eagerly gives the men present a look at the thing, hoping that, by doing so, he will win the others over to his point of view. 

The room stiffened abruptly. It was face up there on the plain, greasy planks of the table. The broken haft of the bronze ice-ax was still buried in the queer skull. Three mad, hate-filled eyes blazed up with a living fire, bright as fresh-spilled blood, from a face ringed with a writhing, loathsome nest of worms, blue, mobile worms that crawled where hair should grow –

Seeing the alien's appearance has the opposite effect, shifting the men's mood against the possibility of thawing it. Nevertheless, Blair is persistent and Dr. Copper largely agrees with him. He believes that much could be learned about the nature of extra-terrestrial life and that this knowledge was worth the risk. The pair eventually win over Garry by arguing "things don't live after being frozen," especially not "higher animal life." Reluctantly, the commander acquiesces to their wishes and the block of ice is allowed to thaw overnight, under the watchful eye of Connant, the facility's cosmic ray specialist.

During his vigil, Connant falls asleep and, when he awakes, discovers that the presumed alien corpse is gone. 

"Your damned beast got loose. I fell asleep about twenty minutes ago, and when I woke up, the thing was gone. Hey, Doc, the hell you say those things can't come to life. Blair's blasted potential life developed a hell of a lot of potential and walked out on us." 

Copper stared blankly. "It wasn't – Earthly," he sighed suddenly. "I – I guess Earthly laws don't apply."

"Well, it applied for leave of absence and took it. We've got to find it and capture it somehow."

The men of the facility fan out, looking for the thing, assuming that it couldn't have got very far in the confined spaces of the buildings in which they dwell, They likewise assume that the extreme cold of the outdoors – the tale takes place toward the end of the Antarctic winter – would freeze it again and so it would avoid leaving the facility. 

Soon, Connant believes he has located the alien. It's made its way to Dogtown, the building where one of the men, Clark, houses the huskies used to pull their sleds. The dogs are howling, yelping, and snarling at one of their own, a dog named Charnauk. Charnauk reveals himself to – somehow – be the alien, its three red eyes giving it away. A combination of bullets, ax blows, and finally 220 Volts of electricity seemingly kills the thing, whose corpse Blair wants to examine more closely. In doing so, he concludes that the alien had somehow turned itself into Charnauk.

"Turned?" snapped Garry. "How?"

"Every living thing is made up of jelly – protoplasm and submicroscopic things called nuclei, which control the bulk, the protoplasm. This thing was just a modification of that worldwide plan of Nature; cells made up of protoplasm, controlled by infinitely tinier nuclei. You physicists might compare it – an individual cell of any living thing – with an atom; the bulk of the atom, the space-filling part, is made up of the electron orbits, but the character of the thing is determined by the atomic nucleus."

"This isn't wildly beyond what we already know. It's just a modification we haven't seen before. It's as natural, as logical, as any other modification of life. It obeys exactly the same laws. The cells are made of protoplasm, their character determined by the nucleus."

"Only in this creature, cell-nuclei can control those cells at will. It digested Charnauk, and as it digested, studied every cell of his tissue, and shaped its own cells to imitate them exactly. Parts of it – parts that had time to finish changing – are dog-cells. But they don't have dog-nuclei."  Blair lifted a fraction of the tarpaulin. A torn dog's leg, with stiff gray fur protruded. "That, for instance, isn't dog at all; it's imitation. Some parts I'm uncertain about; the nucleus was hiding itself, covering up with dog-cell imitation nucleus. In time, not even a microscope would have shown the difference."

"Suppose," asked Norris bitterly, "it had had lots of time?"

It's then that the men first begin to realize that the alien thing possesses the ability to assimilate any living thing. Worse still, there was a good chance that the thing was still at large and that one or more of the men had already been copied by it ...

Who Goes There? is a remarkable classic of science fiction, all the more remarkable because it was written in 1938. Campbell's writing is spare and dialog-heavy and his cast of characters, most of whom don't even have names, are often difficult to tell apart from one another. Nevertheless, the central idea of the story and the scientific basis for it remains compelling even today. It's no wonder that it inspired multiple films, the most faithful of which is John Carpenter's The Thing, which celebrated its fortieth anniversary earlier this year. If you've never read the original story, I highly recommend it.

Bok's cover illustration from the 1948 collection containing the story

As a fan of the horror tales of Ramsey Campbell, I was beyond delighted to see that Dan Collins and Paul Siegel of the Wandering DMs channel recently had him as their guest. It's a very good, though regrettably short – just an hour! – interview, but there's a lot of excellent discussion during that time, including the relationship between fantasy and horror. Check it out if you have the time to do so.

Ramsey Campbell is generally called a horror writer, because he was deeply influenced by the work of H.P. Lovecraft, whom he first read at a young age. So enamored was he of HPL's tales that he wrote his own pastiches of them as a teenager. He submitted some of them to Arkham House for publication, where they caught the attention of August Derleth. Derleth was impressed with young man's abilities but rejected his submissions, advising him to rework them into stories set in Campbell's native Britain rather than in Lovecaft's New England (if only Derleth had followed his own advice). Campbell did as directed, leading to the publication of The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants in 1964 at the age of eighteen. 

Though the bulk of his work can be called "horror," Campbell has also written a number of fantasy stories featuring the swordsman Ryre. One of these, "The Pit of Wings," appeared in the third anthology in Andrew J. Offutt's Swords Against Darkness series. The series as a whole is well regarded for its inclusion of so many excellent sword-and-sorcery tales, but volume three holds particular interest for roleplayers, as it's singled out by Gary Gygax's list of inspirational and educational reading in Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. Precisely why Gygax included only the third volume of the series and not the previous two already available at the time remains a matter of debate among those with an interest in such things. 

What's not up for debate, though, is whether Campbell was as good a writer of fantasy as he was of horror. "The Pit of Wings" begins with Ryre traveling by horseback when arrives outside the port town of Gaxonoi. He sees laves, chained and obviously mistreated by their captors, hard at work along the road. 

Ryre hated slavery as only a man who has been enslaved can. Fury parched his throat. Yet he could not fight a town, or its customs, however deplorable.

He elects to ride past the town but cannot do so without a look of obvious distaste growing across his face. One of the slave-drivers notices Ryre "glare of contempt" and counsels him.

"Yes, ride on, unless you're seeking honest toil. We've a place for you, and chains to fit." His slow voice was viciously caressing as a whip. As he gazed up at Ryre, he licked his lips.

Ryre's grin was leisurely and mirthless. Though he could not battle slavery, he would enjoy responding to this challenge. He stared at the man as though peering beneath a stone. "Ridding the world of vermin? Yes, I'd call that honest."

The man's tongue flickered like a snake's. His smile twitched, as did his hand: nervous, or beckoning for reinforcements? "What kind of swordsman is it who lets his words fight for him?" he demanded harshly.

"No man fights with vermin. He crushes them." 

Despite the growing tension, a fight does not break out between Ryre and the slavers – yet. Instead, they allow him to enter Gaxonoi, where he makes his way down toward its docks. There, he enters a tavern and quickly gets the sense that something is odd about the town and its inhabitants. He later learns just what that is: a procession of cowled figures was making its way amidst the wharves.

Their robes were pale as fungus. They emerged two by two from a wide dark street at the edge of the dock. The slow pallid emergence reminded Ryre of worms dropping from a gap. There seemed to be no end to the procession; surely it would fill the wharf.

Despite its size, the procession was unnervingly silent. A distant flapping could be heard. There was violence amid the ceremony: figures struggling desperately but mutely, which seemed to hover in the air among their robed captors. Ryre distinguished that the victims were bound and gagged, and kept aloft by taut ropes held by robed men. The sight made him think of insects in a web.

 As they get closer, Ryre recognizes one of the cowled men as the slave-driver who'd taunted him earlier. This time, the swordsman is unwilling to stay his anger and a melee ensues, one that sees Ryre not only defeated but left alive so that he too could witness whatever it was that these robed figures planned to do with their captives. Needless to say, it's nothing pleasant and Ryre must find a way to free himself and possibly the others before they all die horrifically.

Like the best sword-and-sorcery yarns, "The Pit of Wings" is short and its action moves quickly. Ryre himself is not particularly memorable as a character; he's a fairly typical pulp fantasy warrior in most respects, certainly nothing special when compared to the likes of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or Conan. Yet, Campbell's experience as a horror writer serves him well here, elevating the story with his command of rising suspense and hidden menace. Gaxonoi is a genuinely creepy place and the reader can feel Ryre's growing anxiety, which builds throughout the second part of the story until it reaches its unnerving climax – a compelling little story, better than most fare of its kind.