bruceb

One of the fun things about modern publishing technology and culture is the quiet little floods from obscure corners of things you - or at least I - would never think to look for on my own, but that turn up when browsing through aggregrators' and front ends' listings. Renaissance eBooks is a publisher like that, digging up old-school sf/f/h (and other genres) and listing them in storefront operations like Fictionwise, which is where I found this one.

The Citadel of Fear was known to me previously only as something mentioned in Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature". "Francis Stevens", the author, turns out to be quite an interesting person in her own right, and it's worth your checking out that link there - she'd be a good character in someone's historical novel. And now here's one of her novels.

This was a blast. I had so much fun reading it, a nibble at a time before bedtime, when up during the night, and in snippets during the day. If I'd known about it then, it would most certainly have gone onto the Adventure reading list. Two tough-guy treasure hunters stumble onto a lost city of the Aztecs in the southwestern desert, get taken prisoner, escape, don't quite make it out, skeptically scrutinize mystic phenomena, and get separated. Time passes. The survivor settles down and marries and goes on to a reasonably steady life, only to have all that he thought he'd left behind show up again with nasty sharp pointy teeth. The prose...okay, I'm not going to try to describe it. This is the opening:

"DON'T leave me-All-in--" The words were barely distinguishable, but the tall figure in the lead, striding heavily through the soft, impeding sand, heard the mutter of them and paused without turning. He stood with drooped head and shoulders, as if the oppression of the cruel, naked sun were an actual weight that pressed him earthward. His companion, plowing forward with an ultimate effort, sagged from the hips and fell face downward in the sand.

Apathetically the tall man looked at the twitching heap beside him. Then he raised his head and stared through a reddening film at the vast, encircling torture pen in which they both were trapped.

The sun, he thought, had grown monstrous and swallowed all the sky. No blue was anywhere. Brass above, soft, white-hot iron beneath, and all tinged to redness by the film of blood over sand-tormented eyes. Beyond a radius of thirty yards his vision blurred and ceased, but into that radius something flapped down and came tilting awkwardly across the sand, long wings half-spread, yellow head lowered, bold with an avid and loathsome curiosity.

"You!" whispered the man hoarsely, and shook one great, red fist at the thing. "You'll not get your dinner off me nor him while my one foot can follow the other!"

And with that he knelt down by the prostrate one, drew the limp arms about his own neck, bowed powerful shoulders to support the body, and heaved himself up again. Swaying, he stood for a moment with feet spread, then began a new and staggering progress. The king-vulture flapped lazily from his path and upward to renew its circling patience.

Which is to say that it's florid as all get-out, with some striking imagery along the way. Stevens has a lot of engaging similes. The pacing is also keen, and reminded me a lot of the original Dracula with its epic cliffhangers (literally, in some cases). There's a certain daredevil recklessness about the whole thing, partly just the freedom of working without an extensive genre history to set expectations, but partly (to judge from this and the part of another of her books I've read so far) a very theatrical sense of her own.

Another part of the pre-genre fun is the authorial sense of just how much you can mix and match. There's truth in the Aztec myths here, and that's no surprise, but there's also truth in other myths, in ways that are very much not like Moore/Gaiman syncretism or anything else that readily comes to hand now. The way the gods manifest in the extended showdown near the end just plain didn't remind me in detail of a whole lot else, and felt very fresh as well as very vivid to me.

Here be pulp! Highly recommended for those who like their adventure with a healthy dose of magic and horror.