Ah, gentle reader. I thought this Robert E. Howard book, one of the paperbacks upon which I blew all my cash in Berryville, Arkansas, in 2021, would slot into the Fantasy category in the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge, oh, but no.
The book is a mere adventure story, a pulp version of Kim after a fashion dealing with The Great Game in Afghanistan (so it couldn’t fit in the Set Somewhere You’d Want To Visit category). An American adventurer who works for the British, sort of, a legendary swordsman and shot, investigates a series of attempts (some successful) on leaders in the region. It leads him and some retainers to a hidden city in the mountains where a descendent is trying to build a new caliphate based on the Assassins order, but apparently a Russian is funding it and pulling the strings from behind the scenes.
A couple of action scenes lead to fisticuffs, skulking around the city, intrigue, and whatnot, and all the while I’m hoping for some magic or a demon or something. There’s a dungeon and a door to a mysterious place where the tortured and sometimes babies are thrown, and I was all right! Here we go!. But the adventurer, El Borak, as he is known, (real name: Francis Xavier Gordon) discovers it’s just a labyrinth with a yeti in it. I mean, a touch of cryptozoology does not make it a fantasy book. Or Harry and the Hendersons would be a fantasy movie, ainna? Maybe it is, but I’m making the arbitrary Rules up as I go, so no to this.
Apparently, it started out as a short story and first came to the light of day (publishing) in the middle 1970s (according to Wikipedia) which says it came in various flavors and with various revisions in the 1970s. So I was going to say that this book is a direct ancestor of mid-1960s pulp such as Don Pendleton’s Executioner novels, where the hero is known by many names and who uses ruses to get into the hard sites he’s going to hit. But given that most of the text here is likely later than 1960s pulp, perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that things written forty years after Howard’s death influenced this book attributed to him.
Although I could not, due to the impartial judge’s (my) ruling on the yeti thing, count it as Fantasy, and I could not count it as Set Somewhere Where You’d Like To Visit, I did decide to slot this as Chosen Based on the Cover. I mean, it’s not like I was likely going to be able to choose a book from the stacks based on the front cover as they’re jammed tightly into the shelves. But I did choose this one which I judged to be a fantasy book based on Howard’s name and the cover which features a domed citadel, a man with a sword, and a damsel. So let this also be an illustration, again, about how you should not judge a book based on its cover.
It’s only the second entry in the reading challenge, and I am almost a week in. I’d better lock in, as the kids say these days.
Harry and the Hendersons is a fantasy movie