The Shaver Mystery Book Eight!

The Shaver Mystery Book Eight wraps up my look at these bizarre tales by Richard S. Shaver from way back in the 40's and 50's. The stories have been bristling with imagination and while Shaver's writing style is bewildering at times, it's almost always filled with energy and momentum. I've been confused many times reading these stories, but rarely bored. Armchair fiction claims to have two more volumes of Shaver's work due out eventually. But this latest was released in 2020 and that seems a long time between volumes. 

"Witch of the Andes" kicks off this volume and it's a harrowing tale of an American agent who flies to the Amazon basin to check up on a scientist who has gone silent. He finds him deeply imbedded in his research which  has resulted in new life forms, including a twenty-foot woman of immense intellect. Other creatures are small flying men and other kinds of life. The scientist falls out of the narrative fairly quickly, but we learn his creations know his secrets and using them create life on a scale which comes to threaten the whole world. 

 

"The Crystal Sarcophagus" is a short story about a small town in which a scientist sets up shop and seems have discovered a very strange way to stop aging and so tap into mankind's amazing potential. This is a snappy little tale that gets right to its point. 

"The Sea People" is a sequel to an earlier Shaver story called "The Cult of the Witch Queen". The only problem is Armchair Fiction hasn't reprinted this story yet. So we begin in the middle of a truly strange tale a man is hiding from his past but finds himself in jail in Canada. He is taken from the security of his cell by a race of hostile Venusian mermen and merwomen who find themselves in conflict with a witch named Hecate. The man's earlier involvement with her makes them think he might prove useful as a hostage. But a mighty undersea battle results with devastating results and only this fellow holds the key to victory. What follows is grim stuff indeed. 

(Richard S. Shaver in the 70's)

These are pretty decent Shaver stories. While technically part of the Shaver Mystery series the first two feel they could've been told apart from that mythos while the third seems fresh as well. The notion of the ancients is kept at bay in all of these stories. Over the course of the last few months, I have found Shaver a fascinating writer and his stories are compelling if utterly bizarre. Many aspects of the stories put me in mind of the work of Jack Kirby to be honest. So much so that it inspired me to take a good long look at Kirby's masterpiece during his birthday month of August. More on this in a few days. 

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The Shaver Mystery Book Seven!

The Shaver Mystery Book Seven from Armchair Fiction gives the reader another heady dose of those riotous Shaver stories. Some are directly connected to what has come before but others diverge quite a bit. All in all a decent batch. 

"Invasion of the Mirco-Men" is another tale of Mulan Muton, though truth told he and his lovely impish mate Arl are mostly observers in this strange story of a kingdom brough low by an invasion of microscopic people who invade the brain and drain the will. These microscopic men are part of vast sub-atomic cultures which develop at lightning rates. A servant race called the Jotunds use this nano menace to take over the city of Nor and pillage it. The Jotunds are too stupid to do much with their victory and we follow how it was mostly doomed from the start. 

"The Sea-Witch of Ether 18" is a tale of Nydia and Shaver himself, but once again they are in the role of observers. Apparently, it is possible to see other realities with the turn of a knob in these underground societies and Shaver does just that, turning to "18" and finding a vast undersea kingdom which has come under attack and depends on its queen who it turns out is a sorceress from another land. This is an unusually spiritual tale from Shaver, and a terribly tragic one as well. 

"The Tale of the The Red Dwarf Who Writes with His Tail" is a very different kind of Shaver yarn. This one seems less connected to the overall Shaver Mystery and is more of a fanciful fairy tale of its own. A purple-skinned man named Druga goes off in search of wisdom to soothe his beloved and seeks out the Red Dwarf who sends him on a wild odyssey which lasts years and has our hero snuggled up to several femme fatales. Some prove worthier than others, but after much suffering of sundry kinds he does indeed find wisdom where he least expected to find it. This one is a lark and a story you can wrap up in quite nicely. 

"A Dictionary of the Mantong Language" is exactly what it seems to be. I find little interest in Shaver's alphabet, though he and his editors seem fascinated. 

"A Witch in the Night" is something between a short story and an essay of reflection which purports to explain how Shaver came to be inspired to search by the poetry of Byron, which cause him to be able to conjur visions of reluctant women in the night. Not much here in terms of actual narrative. 

A wild hodge podge of material in this seventh volume, but fun. I read this one with a good deal of gusto. Only one more volume to go. 

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The Shaver Mystery Book Five!

We get three more wacky novellas by Richard S. Shaver, sagas about the underground world which Shaver insisted actually existed beneath you and me. 

"The Quest of Brail" features a heroic leader of an underworld kingdom who is himself slave to debased secret leaders. He seeks a way to free himself and his people from their hold and an invasion from outer space by The Horde offers him his chance. Recruiting some of the disaffected members of the Horde he uses a remarkably fast fleet of ships to escape into space with as many of his subjects as he can safely steal away. In the leader Brail we find one of the best figures in these yarns so far, a goodly man who seeks genuinely to help others as well as himself. He's a virtuous leader, thoughtful and strategic. This is an overall very positive tale. 

"Slaves of the Worm" is very much back to Earth, beneath it in fact. This is a grim sword and sorcery saga. A bizarre culture ruled by enormous slugs with "human" faces seeks to dominate all around them. This is one of the more lurid Shaver stories I've read so far. But also a story filled with the most erotic descriptions, especially of the dark queenly figure of Vana. Shaver lavishes a lot of words describing her beauty and to good effect. One big problem is the eventual hero and the nominal villain have very similar names which caused me confusion early on. I was put in mind of Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone stories since the protagonist is a man conflicted as he is of evil attempting to do some measure of good. There's a touch of Snow White in this tale as well. 

"The Fall of Lemuria" is a tale which is set in the same time as Shaver's debut yarn "I Remember Lemuria". But where that story followed Mulan Muton and his love Arl into space to find help to save their land, this tale stays on the planet. Our heroine is the serpent woman Maiya and when attacks break out on Mu, she takes heroic steps to forestall the war. Her land of Serpena is saved by great sacrifice. This tale also gives us a glimpse of the early settlement of Earth by the peoples who would become the inhabitants of Atlan and Serpena. This story has a rather fundamental nature to it and is not as invigorating as the best of Shaver's material can be. 

More Shaver Mystery next time as we tumble into volume six. 

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The Shaver Mystery Book Four!

The Shaver Mystery Book Four offers up three rather different tales set in and around Richard Shaver's gobsmacking underworld. These are pulp stories first and foremost, so a reader must grade them on that standard. The emphasis is on plot, though to be fair to Shaver he does carve out some decent heroes to carry the weight of the stories. 

"Cave City of Hel" offers up more Norse mythology reimagined for a modern audience. Shaver sets up the story by suggesting it originated from a manuscript from an eye witness, an attempt to push the notion that all the Shaver Mystery tales are true or based on truth. The story is set in Hel, a city beneath the surface of Norway. Norway at the time was still under the occupation of the Nazis and our hero heads underground to escape their attentions. He finds Hel and the source of many of our Norse legends to boot. As most of the Shaver heroes do, he finds a romance in the from of a woman named Tanee. It's not giving anything away to say they lived happily ever after. Getting to that point is the story. 

"The Mind Rovers" is one of the strangest of Shaver's stories I've read so far. This one begins in a remote prison and our heroes are the prisoners themselves. They discover that they can escape the prison in their dreams and proceed to do so. They find a weird landscape filled with strange threats and women that grow on trees literally. The prisoners organize and then form an army to turn the tables on the corrupt officials who run the prison and other institutions which use people for profits. Shaver is said to have spent time in an asylum and this story suggests to me that he imagines the whole system of institutionalization is a vast conspiracy against the common man. 

"Earth Slaves to Space" is a direct sequel to "The Masked World" (see volume three). Our assembled heroes from that story, having put down the dictator that ruled their underground city with a corrupt iron fist, are caught unawares when some of his allies bring in Amazons from the depths of space to take them all into slavery. Apparently slavery is a big thing, and people are lured down from our modern surface world and they too are enslaved. The whole gang head into space to distant planets where they see many different races, but all are to sold. Our heroes manage to remain together for the most part and some even escape ultimately turning the tables on the cruel Amazons. 

The stories are brisk reads, wild rides into the imagination of a guy who for all his many literary failings knows how to cook up a yarn. 

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The Coming Of The Saucers!

There might have well been ancient aliens, but the modern age of flying saucers began in 1947 when a lone pilot of a small plane reported nine shiny objects in the sky over Mount Ranier. That pilot was Kenneth Arnold and he wrote of this life-changing event in the book The Coming of the Saucers, a book co-written with Shaver Mystery enthusiast and Fate magazine editor Ray Palmer. 

The book is divided into two parts. The first was written by Arnold and he relates from a first-person perspective his famous sighting. He tells how he first saw the objects and the steps he used to guage their distance from him and their relative speeds. He says he saw nine mostly identical objects, save for one which had a bit of dark on its perceived front. Arnold gained notoriety for his sighting, one which touched off a wave of UFO sightings which have waned now and again but have never ceased into our current day. One such later sighting happened on a place Maury Island where another sighting had occurred, one in which debris had been spread and collected. Arnold was tasked by Ray Palmer to check out his new sighting and Arnold took with him an airline pilot named Captain E.J. Smith who himself along with is crew had reported a UFO less than two weeks after Arnold's. In fact most of the first part of the story is about how these two guys try to get to the bottom of a strange and bizarre tale which is filled with mysterious and likely untrustworthy types both in the government and out. The story is given much additional weight when two Air Force officers are killed in a strange crash after gathering up the purported fragments. 

The book then shifts authors and focus, when Palmer takes over. He discusses the Air Force's investigation of the events described above along with others. He then turns his attention to the long history of unknown objects in the sky reaching back to ancient times and moving forward relating scores of unusual fireballs and whatnot folks have witnessed through history.  He covers the infamous "Foo Fighters" in WWII. He then looks at modern UFO sightings across the globe up the time of the publication of this book in the early 50's. Most of the book is this kind of information, great for folks who had never had access to these strange facts. 

This is an historical tome, a record of the events which in many ways marked the beginning of a modern era for society after the end of World War II. It's a quick and information laden read. Recommended to those deeply interested. 

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The Shaver Mystery Book Three!

The Shaver Mystery Volume Three offers up two more tales from Richard S. Shaver of his revelatory look into the vast underground which sits beneath us all. The folks at Armchair Fiction had only intended to do two volumes dedicated to Shaver's works, but the stuff sold so magnificently that they couldn't help but to continue. It's a repetition of the situation when Ray Palmer realized he had a tremendous moneymaker on his hands way back when Amazing Stories first presented Shaver's yarns to the world. 

After an introductory letter from Shaver and an introduction by Ray Palmer we get the story "Thought Records of Lemuria". In this one our hero is none other than Richard Shaver himself and we are to presume I guess that the truth of this story will be enhanced by him using his real name. He becomes aware of thoughts in his head from mysterious sources and meets a woman named Nydia. She introduces him to devices which allow a person to see the past and that's just what "Shaver" does in this story. He mentally travels into a far distant time and hooks up with versions of the Norse Gods. 

"The Masked World" is a story of an underworld stronghold which is ruled by a despot. We follow several people who work together at great risk to slay the tyrant. They seek to use poison, a very special kind of poison. The villains in this one are really despicable, using people like cattle and using violence on helpless folks as entertainment. In Shaver's universe the hero often wins, but often at great cost. 

Armchair Fiction knew a good thing when they had it. The next volume of the series comes around next time. 

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The Shaver Mystery Book Two!

The Shaver Mystery Book Two offers up two more vintage Richard S. Shaver yarns about the expansive and utterly bizarre underground world which nearly all of mankind ignores at its peril. Despite being published in a science fiction magazine these Shaver tales are touted by their creator and the editor Ray Palmer as true, for the most part. Names might have been changed but little else. 

The first offering is "The Red Legion" and it's another offering from that June issue of Amazing Stories we looked at last time. This time we follow an secret order of Native Americans who are plugged into the truth of the underground world and who are fighting for their very lives against the enemy "Deros" who strike from beneath the Earth. The join forces with good underground forces, especially an ancient mal-formed giant named "Eemeeshee" and his lovely girl assistant "Saba". The fighting is ferocious before (predictably) a small is won with great cost. This story was reputed to be a mess by the publisher, but I found I liked it a lot. 

The real highlight of this installment is a reprint of the very first story in the Shaver Mystery, a novella entitled I Remember Lemuria from the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories. This is originally presented by editor Palmer as a race memory yarn, but he corrects that with the next story and goes with a story which was retrieved by means of ancient underworld technology. In this story we are transported back into time to the city of Atlan and an Earth which is just beginning to suffer from the harmful radiations of its older sun. (These radiations are what limit us today in our modern world and make us mortal.) We follow a young citizen named "Mutan Mion" who is out tour guide for the wonders of the city of Atlan and then later for a wild trip into outer space with refuges from the sudden horrors of war. This is a varied and wild gallery of beings, since shape and size were utterly malleable in this society at this time. These survivors find a race of even older and purer and bigger aliens called "Titans" who agree to return to ancient Earth and take up the battle against these Deros who seek to destroy. 

I Remember Lemuria is said to have begun when Shaver submitted a vast sprawling letter with the core details of the story titled "A Warning to Future Man", which Palmer and his outfit saw promise in and cobbled into an actual story possessing some more literary aspects. Then according to Palmer an odd series of events allowed Amazing Stories to increase its publication numbers and with the Shaver story the magazine still sold out making it a bonafide hit with fans if not with other sci-fi pros. 

One element of these collections I haven't mentioned yet is "Mantong". "Mantong" is an alphabet Shaver "discovered" which allows for a modern reading of ancient Lemurian texts. He actually sent this to Palmer first and the letter second. It's a complicated system with letter equivalents having individual meaning. "D" for instance is a sound associated with bad things, hence the names "Deros" for the critters which are infesting the once highly civilized underground world. ("Dero" is a shortened form of "Detrimental Robots" which didn't mean a mechanized creature, but only one who could not control their actions. In this case they could omnly do evil.) Included in this particular volume is an article title "Proofs" in which Shaver speaks directly to the reader about the material he's presented in his yarns which have appeared in Amazing Stories. 

More next time as we take a look at volume three. 

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The Shaver Mystery Book One!

I remember reading about "the Shaver Mystery" in the comments in science fiction digest way back in the 70's. I never knew exactly what it was, but I knew that serious science fiction writers had a real disdain for the concept. It was some kind of crackpot theory which had given the all field of speculative fiction a bad name, at least that was case according to what I remember from the time, now so long ago. Well, now decades later, I'm finally have enough experience and an opportunity to judge for myself. And it is a crackpot theory of the most delirious kind, but as it turns out, a wildly entertaining one. 

(Richard S. Shaver)

"The Shaver Mystery" is the confabulation of Richard S. Shaver in conjunction with famed science fiction editor Ray Palmer. (Yes, the boys at DC Comics did name the Atom after him.) Palmer was editing Amazing Stories when he was offered a wild yarn which (with the help of editor Palmer) became the novella "I Remember Lemuria" (More on this novel next week). It was the first of the writings of Shaver to be published which put forth the bizarre notion that a vast underground civilization existed, a mere shadow of a once even greater civilization which ruled the Earth and traveled into space with ease. But time had degraded things, thanks in no small part on the Sun which as it aged released deadly toxins which among other things limited man's life span. The underground areas which sprawl across the globe are inhabited by "Deros", dangerous devolved beings who eat man and seek endlessly to do harm to him in other ways with the technology they have inherited from ancient times, and can use but understand very little. 

"Formula From the Underground" kicks off this collection and serves as an adequate introduction to the Shaver Mystery universe. We follow along with our stalwart hero "Harte Manville" (names mean everything) as he enters the underworld and discovers the creatures which dwell beneath. The leader of the creatures is an immense character named "Mula". The creatures in this universe grow as long as they live, so immense size connotes immense age. There is a battle between the less corrupt Mula and his forces and the Horblocks, wretched creatures who prey on all concerned. The formula referred to in the title is one for immortality, and Harte does indeed discover it. 

"Zigor Mephisto's Collection of Mentalia" is an even weirder story in which our de rigueur manly hero is an escaped prisoner and is joined by another man from beneath the world, a mysterious woman and her diminutive servant and they seek none other than Mephisto himself. The relationship of his creature to the devil we know is debated and explored. One of the keys to the Shaver Mystery is that the many diverse myths we are familiar with are all attributable to creatures from beneath the surface. 

"Witch's Daughter" is regarded by the publisher as the strongest of the stories here. In this one our hero Tom Kent comes under the spell of a beautiful woman who herself is the daughter of a powerful sorceress from beneath the surface of the Earth. The trio have somewhat different motivations in this one but finally join forces to defend the whole of the Earth from ancient threats. 

All three of these outlandish tales are from a single issue of Amazing Stories in which the Shaver Mystery holds fort. There is a fourth tale in this monumental issue but it's in the second volume I'll take a gander at next week. The cover above is an amazing evocation of the Shaver Mystery world, filled with technology and cyclopean imagery. These stories reminded me again and again of the work of Jack Kirby, specifically his stuff on The Eternals, and it would not end with that comparison. (More next time.) I was also quite reminded of Wally Wood's Thunder Agents tales which began with deadly Warlords from beneath the surface of the Earth appearing with vast armies and mysterious machines. Telling stories of a strange underworld is common enough, but developing these elaborate civilizations, hidden and deadly is less common. 

What makes these weird yarns offensive to many a science fiction fan is that they are reputed to be true tales, or at the very least true stories that have been revised a bit here and there for dramatic purposes. These are stories that Shaver says really happened or nearly so in a world which really does exist beneath the surface of the Earth. The Deros are real, and they use the ancient machinery at their disposal to interfere with life here on the surface, and further we are all of us subject to coming under their influence. Ray Palmer plays it off as it these stories are versions of true events, and this caused great friction between him and many other editors and writers of science fiction. But what he found out was that these Shaver Mystery tales sold like crazy, and if for no other reason he found it prudent at the time to continue. Later Palmer shifts is focus from science fiction to UFOlogy and other such mysteries. So in some ways there is an intersection between the supposedly true Shaver Mystery and the UFO phenomenon which would erupt into popular culture after 1947.

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