Elak! Out From The Shadow Of Conan!

Henry Kuttner's Thunder in the Dawn

Illustration by Virgil Finlay from Weird Tales, May 1938.

According to Gary Lovisi’s introduction to Elak of Atlantis, a 1985 fan publication with a print run of 500, Henry Kuttner created his barbarian sword and sorcery hero Elak to step into the void in Weird Tales left by the absence of Conan following Robert E. Howard’s suicide. By many accounts, including Lovisi’s, the Elak novellas are Kuttner’s take on Howard with a little touch of H. P. Lovecraft for good measure.

In looking at Thunder in the Dawn, the first Elak novella—originally serialized in the May and June 1938 issues of Weird Tales—I want to see if we can take Kuttner and Elak on their own terms. To get us there, I’ll concede that comparative fantasy will be unavoidable.

If you’re unfamiliar with Howard and Lovecraft, I’d invite you to rectify that because they were two of the greatest stylists in 20th century American fantasy. Howard was a poet, literal and figurative, of blood and guts. Moreover, he had a habit of embedding his philosophy and theory of history into his adventure stories. Lovecraft was a master of portraying that there is something wrong about the way the world is. It could drive you insane if you really looked at it.

All this to say Howard and Lovecraft were, you know, artists but they were both highly specialized in what they were doing. By contrast, Kuttner’s great strength was that he could produce any kind of story and have it turn out at least decent and sometimes brilliant. If the prose is workmanlike, it’s also highly readable.

How does this play out in Thunder in the Dawn? In practice, the novella is an 80 or so page chain of fight scenes and magical happenings. It runs from its opening with an obligatory tavern brawl to its climax wherein Elak goads his brother to free himself from a magical prison and defeats a warlock in battle in another dimension. There’s not much beneath the surface.

Now it sounds like I’m beating up on Kuttner here and maybe I am. For the first 20 pages of the novella I wasn’t sure how I was gonna make it. I kept taking breaks to listen to my favorite fantasy power metal jams. Then I started to get really into the fight scenes—something I used to not be able to do—and magic. Kuttner’s prose is not as sophisticated as Howard’s and his style is not as otherworldly as Lovecraft’s but this novella has the charm of being fast-paced and comprehensible.

I want to put the comparative fantasy to bed for a moment and get to what actually happens in this novella for the sake of my readers who use this blog as Spark Notes so they don’t have to do the reading. So Elak, who is he? What is he about? What world does he inhabit? And who are his friends and enemies?

Elak is secretly Prince Zeulas of the barbarian Atlantean kingdom of Cyrena. He wields a rapier and Lovisi suggests that in the movie version he ought to have been played by Errol Flynn. He left Cyrena and became a wandering adventurer after killing his step-dad the king in a duel that all deemed justified and a fair fight before exiling himself and leaving the throne to his younger brother Orander.

When the reader meets Elak, he is in the civilized Atlantean dukedom of Poseidonia hanging out with his little alcoholic friend Lycon and seducing the Duke Granicor’s wife Velia. The story kicks into gear when Dalan, a “hog-fat” and “toad-ugly” Druid from Cyrena, appears on the scene to let the prodigal prince know that Viking hordes led by King Guthrum have invaded Cyrena and that his brother now-King Orander has been imprisoned by an evil warlock named Elf. After a rough scrape with Granicor, who is described as ugly and ape-like and who enjoys the pastime of flaying his prisoners alive, Elak, Lycon, and Velia set off via riverboat with Dalan and his loyal crew.

You may have observed by now there are some goofy things and anachronisms going on here. What are medieval Northmen doing in antediluvian Atlantis? And a Druid? Along the way there’s also a run in with a lost tribe of “Pihkts” and all manner of gods are invoked. The Northmen invoke Thor, Loki, and Odin—so yes, they are those Northmen. Elak swears by Ishtar and Bel. Dalan devoutly worships a very real and living god named Mider. There’s also a Satyr goddess called Solonala.

This sort of tossed salad of medieval, ancient, and wholly fictional elements position Elak in a weird place between high fantasy (secondary world fantasy) and historical fantasy. Kuttner is serving a less well realized version of the Hyborian Age that Howard’s Conan stories take place in. Howard’s approach was to make historical fantasy commercially viable by filing the serial numbers off so he wouldn’t have to do painstaking research. It turns out your return on investment is better when you can just make stuff up. The difference between Howard and Kuttner in this regard is that Howard’s head was already full of historical lore for the grist mill and Kuttner didn’t bother to file the serial numbers off.

And while we’re back on comparative fantasy, it’s worth casting away this notion that the treatment of the supernatural in Thunder in the Dawn has anything to with its treatment in Lovecraft’s work. In Thunder in the Dawn, Kuttner’s approach is overall less subtle and more explained than Lovecraft’s or while we’re at it Howard’s. It’s also just more neutral. In Lovecraft’s work the supernatural elements have a tendency to drive characters insane.¹ In Howard’s, they’re always tinged with evil.

One can see Kuttner’s unique approach to the supernatural in a scene that takes place following Elak’s skirmish with the Pihkts. Elak falls into a dimension called Ragnarok where gods go to be devoured by an entity called the Shadow after they are no longer relevant. There Elak is saved by Dalan the Druid and not one but two gods. The aforementioned Satyr goddess Solonala sacrifices herself to the Shadow to distract it long enough for Dalan’s god Mider to bodily reach into Ragnarok. Mider’s divine intervention is not subtle. It takes the form of a giant eight-fingered hand opening up to carry Elak back to the terrestrial realm. Conan would never have a wizard friend. Conan’s god Crom would never deign to rescue anyone. And Cthulhu has no benign counterpart.

The last note I have on comparative fantasy is that this novella starts to cross the bridge from sword and sorcery toward epic fantasy. Bog standard sword and sorcery involves outsiders and outcasts on personal missions or just trying to get by in an uncaring magical universe. Now as an exiled prince living under a false name, Elak is certainly an outsider. And I’ll allow that saving one’s brother from a warlock is a personal mission. But the quest he and his friends are on to save the realm of Cyrena is at least creeping towards epic fantasy. Restoring a rightful king to his throne is more like something Frodo would do than like something Conan would do.

Okay so we’ve waded through a lot of comparative fantasy to get here but I hope we can now delineate what makes Elak Elak. He’s not a Conan clone (Clonan?) with Lovecraftian elements. Instead, Thunder in the Dawn presents a different sort of prose and approach to the supernatural than the two touchstones that get used to describe Elak. Moreover, we’ve seen that at least in this instance Elak pushes in an epic fantasy direction that Conan does not. The one fair comparison with Conan is the quasi-historical setting.

Overall, Thunder in the Dawn was fun to read. For me, it came down to two aspects. One, I ended up being won over by the easy fast-paced prose. Two, I found myself getting really into the characters. They’re pretty thin and don’t have much interiority to speak of but they’re always doing cool stuff. For example, Dalan is always chopping people up, and shooting and fire and lightning at people, and threatening to use arcane forest magic. Maybe this novella is not as intellectually rewarding as some of the science fiction I like or as aesthetically pleasing as some of the fantasy I enjoy. But there’s meat and potatoes here.

P.S. If you liked this post, you may want to check out a couple posts I wrote this time last year about sword and sorcery. Here’s one on Robert E. Howard’s Kull of Valusia. And here’s one on C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry.

1. In the novella under review, Guthrum does say that he has seen things in Elf’s redoubt that would drive another man mad but this is the only hint the reader gets of the Lovecraftian.