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Slayer of Souls

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The Slayer of Souls, 1920

The Slayer of Souls, concerns a young American girl rased by the Yezidee-Mongols, a murderous cult of killers with psychic power, who want to rule the world. Because of her training in the East and her own powers, she is all that stands in the way of their evil plans. With the help of a standard issue dashing viral hero, the state department, and a female friend from her temple days they face danger and she falls in love with the hero.

Chambers before 1900 was a force to be reckened with in weird literature. By the time of this book his sugery romance style had corroded his formibable dark prose but there is still power here. This is his standard romance with all kinds of weird things thrown in. Every time you turn around some Mongol is stealing the bed sheets for his death shroud and going off to die.

This is not The King in Yellow but it is still a fun book and well worth the time if for no other reason then Robert W. Chambers wrote it. H. P. Lovecraft loved this book, maybe because he saw Chambers returning to his roots. Great ideas, good prose, written too fast most likely for a magazine sale. Could have used with a re-write.

Larry Loc
for more information on Robert W. Chambers see www.ioc.net/~larryloc/yking001.html

Robert Chambers' second book, The King in Yellow (1895) is one of the greatest pieces of weird and horror fiction ever printed. His other books - over sixty of them - are now largely condemned as rubbish.

A best-selling author at the time, Chambers churned out historical romances (also occult romances, occasionally spy romances and occasionally colonial romances) to an eager audience. As a result, Chambers has largely been consigned to the derision of history - damned by his peers as an author that could have done better (as evidenced - once), but simply chose not to.

The Slayer of Souls (1920) only adds to the disappointment that Chambers has fostered in his critics. One of his 'romances', except with an occult twist, The Slayer of Souls has all the right pieces to make things interesting - an escaped temple priestess, a complicated esoteric mythos that harkens back to evil, extra-terrestrial elder gods and a sinister, world-spanning psychic cospiracy.

Alas, evil, extra-terrestrial elder gods do not a proper Lovecraftian short story make. (Please take note of that, all contributors to Chaosium-published short story collections). The Slayer of Souls is simply wacky hijinks, with fluttering lashes, manly 'secret agents' and conniving non-Aryan villains with ludicrous accents. Chambers does manage to fulfill one of Lovecraft's literary fantasies, in that he blatantly ties in capital-E-evil with all of the racist, anti-liberal issues of the day.

Fortunately, the last line of defense is a group of volunteer 'Secret Servicemen' and a single woman, Tressa Norne, escaped sorceress from the Yezidee temple. The Secret Service are a willing - and surprisingly inept - lot of gentlemen scholars. Largely their contribution to the battle against Evil is to serve as social chaperones to Ms. Norne, who single-handedly takes out the greater part of the Yezidee brotherhood. Tressa's powers consist of astral projection, snake-summoning and an uncanny ability to make romantic matches between her temple sisterhood and the brawny young men of the Secret Service. By the end of the book, the Yezidee threat seems little more than a Fraternity theme party - an excuse for the Secret Service to be introduced to lithe young temple priestesses.

Chambers made his literary mark with The King in Yellow. Any commercial success he gained afterwards (with, say, every other book he wrote) was undoubtedly well-deserved, and it is hard to begrudge him any success. That said, The Slayer of Souls is pure, ludicrous drivel. Come for the Cthulhu, stay for the anti-Communist rants.

Twenty five years separates this tale from Chamber's classic The King in Yellow. Unfortunately the Slayer of Souls supports the position that it was all downhill for Chambers, and I agree with the other reviewer that this was possibly rushed out for publication in a magazine and never intended as a novel.

Written nearly a hundred years ago, Slayer of Souls would be unreadable to many as it creaks along like the worst pulp romance of the period. It's marred by sexism and racism plus a copious amount of Chambers personal politics with the yellow menace and Bolsheviks lurking under every bed. The pseudo-foreign rituals and exotic names that seemed so masterful in King in Yellow fall flat, and the saccharine relationship between Secret Service agent Cleves and helpless Tressa is equally unsatisfying.

My recommendation - go back and read the King in Yellow again, and consign the Slayer of Souls to the dustbin of history. Even the most resolute fan of Chambers and early American gothic horror will find this novel hard to enjoy.