Elak of Atlantis - Henry Kuttner

I’ve been meaning to read Henry Kuttner’s Elak of Atlantis stories for a long time now, and I’m getting to the age where I’m feeling a bit more urgency about getting around to the things I want to do. Also, there are collections of new Elak stories by Adrian Cole coming out, and I want to give them a try, but I thought I ought to read the originals first. Also, I’m a sucker for Atlantis stories, and Kuttner appears to have done a pretty good job of world-building in this four story series, originally published in the iconic pulp WEIRD TALES.

The saga gets underway with the novella “Thunder in the Dawn”, the longest of Kuttner’s Elak stories that was serialized in the May and June 1938 issues of WEIRD TALES. It introduces us to Elak, a lean adventurer who favors a rapier rather than a broadsword, and his rotund sidekick/comedy relief Lycon. Elak is actually the stepson of the former rule of one of Atlantis’s northern kingdoms who killed his stepfather in a duel and fled, leaving his stepbrother to take over the throne. Elak and Lycon encounter a druid priest named Dalan, who brings the news that Elak’s stepbrother has been imprisoned by an evil wizard and Vikings are besieging his homeland. Who better to travel north, unite the feuding tribes, battle the Vikings, and rescue the imprisoned king than Elak?

Nobody, of course. With a little reluctance, Elak takes up the quest. Along the way wait adventures and beautiful women and epic battles against enemies both human and sorcerous. Kuttner really packs a lot of plot and incident into this yarn, a novel’s worth despite its novella length, and it’s all very fast-paced and well-written. This is an exciting and very satisfying debut for the series.

The short story “Spawn of Dagon” appears the very next month in the July 1938 issue of WEIRD TALES and even makes the cover. There’s very little reference to the preceding story and Dalan the Druid doesn’t appear. Elak and Lycon are back to being drifting adventurers. They get involved in some political intrigue and are hired to kill a wizard and destroy the source of his power. Of course, the situation doesn’t turn out to be exactly what our two heroes believe it is. Even though I’m not the biggest fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s work, I recognized the name Dagon right away, and sure enough, the boys encounter some of HPL’s fish-people and there’s talk of the Elder Gods. This story has a good deal of well-written action, but after the epic scale and grand, colorful concepts of the debut novella, I found it a little disappointing. Not bad, mind you, but a very standard sword and sorcery adventure yarn enlivened a bit by the presence of the fish-people.

“Beyond the Phoenix”, from the October 1938 issue of WEIRD TALES, once again finds Elak and Lycon involved in political intrigue, but this time they’re trying to protect a king from a deadly rival, and when they fail in that, the dying monarch charges them with the job of saving his daughter and delivering his body to the god he worships. This involves a trip on an underground river reminiscent of the second novel in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series, THE GODS OF MARS. I have to wonder if Kuttner read Burroughs. It certainly seems possible. I also wonder if C.L. Moore had a hand in this story, as well as the previous one. By 1938, Kuttner and Moore knew each other and had even collaborated on one story, “Quest of the Starstone” in the November 1937 issue of WEIRD TALES. If the Elak stories had come out after they were married and collaborating on a regular basis, I would have been confident that Moore wrote all the colorful, vividly descriptive passages. But since I’ve never seen any speculation about her involvement, at least as far as I recall, I’ll just assume that being a fan of her work had an influence on Kuttner as he was writing these yarns. At any rate, “Beyond the Phoenix” is a good story with plenty of action.

The fourth and final Elak story by Kuttner is the novelette “Dragon Moon” from the January 1941 issue of WEIRD TALES. This one is very reminiscent of “Thunder in the Dawn”, the tale that launched the series. Once again Elak and Lycon are summoned northward to Cyrena, Elak’s homeland, by Dalan the Druid, who tells them that Elak’s stepbrother the king was possessed by some sort of evil entity and killed himself rather than give in to it. That mystical being has now possessed the king of a neighboring country and plans to conquer Cyrena by force. Being without a king, the realm has no chance of defeating its enemies. Elak is the only one who can save the day, and he can only do that by reclaiming the birthright he doesn’t want. This is another epic yarn with several adventures along the way before the final showdown, which is a huge, very well-written battle. I’ve seen comparisons between this story and Robert E. Howard’s THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON, and maybe Kuttner was inspired by Howard’s only novel-length adventure of Conan, but they’re very different stories because Conan and Elak are very different characters. “Dragon Moon” isn’t the equal of THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON, but I enjoyed it very much anyway. It’s my favorite story of the four about Elak written by Kuttner.

Overall, I really like this collection. The writing is excellent, it’s full of colorful settings and intriguing concepts, and the action is great. If you’re a sword and sorcery fan, I give ELAK OF ATLANTIS a very high recommendation. And the world Kuttner creates in these stories is interesting enough that I’m looking forward to seeing what Adrian Cole does with the series.