“In the plate could be plainly seen the hind quarters of the sheep held in the grasp of such a monster as even the drug-laden brain of an opium smoker never pictured. Judging from the sheep, the monster stood about twenty feet tall, and its frame was surmounted by a head resembling an overgrown frog. Enormous jaws were opened to seize the sheep but, to the amazement of the three observers, the jaws were entirely toothless. Where teeth were to be expected, long parallel ridges of what looked like bare bone, appeared, without even a rudimentary segregation into teeth. The body of the monster was long and snakelike, and was borne on long, heavy legs ending in feet with three long toes, armed with vicious claws. The crowning horror of the creature was its forelegs. There were of enormous length, thin and attenuated looking, and ended in huge misshapen hands, knobby and blotched, which grasped the sheep in the same manner as human hands. The eyes were as large as dinner plates, and they were glaring at the camera with an expression of fiendish malevolence which made Carnes shudder.”
This short descriptive passage from the story The Cave of Horror, by Captain S. P. Meek, is rich with vivid adjectives, and has an economy of words that is reminiscent, to me, of some of the prose of the great heroic fantasy writer (and contemporary of Meek), Robert E. Howard. Just as Howard often did, Meek conjured an entirely fantastic, horrific new life form using comparative terminology (head “resembling an overgrown frog” and body “snakelike”). Such passages make me appreciative of the imaginations of Meek and the other Science Fiction and Fantasy writers of the early pulp magazine age, who could pick and choose features and characteristics of commonplace life forms and combine them to create fanciful abominations. At the same time, though, it makes me wonder: Does the imagery evoked in me by Meek’s words equal, in its vividness, the beast that lurked in the author’s mind?
Alas, I can never know.
John Racette