126 pages
Published 1946
Read May 3
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
I want to get back into my old habit of reading an eclectic mix of books new and old, classic and forgotten, pulpy and literary. I've been reading a ton of books from the 2020s, and the books have been excellent—fantasy fiction, in particular, is better now than it ever has been. But weird old pulps sometimes scratch an itch.
This book is more entertaining than it should be. Edward Bond, a veteran and pilot from Indiana, has felt strange ever since he blacked out and crashed in Sumatra in the waning days of World War II. The Batak healer who treated him after the crash warns him to stay away from magic: “All your life you must hide. Something is searching for you.” Soon, despite himself, Ed gets pulled into an alternate Earth called the Dark World, where trees move, mutated vampires and werewolves prowl, and sorcerers rule under a huge red sun.
Goodreads cited this as an early Dying Earth-style story, which I suppose it could be, though the vibe is closer to Andre Norton than Jack Vance. What’s surprising to someone reading nearly eighty years later is the prominence and relative competence of Kuttner’s female characters. Perhaps it’s because he was writing in the immediate aftermath of the war, with its broader feminist gains still fresh, and not in the ’50s and ’60s, when the modern American concepts of the (white) nuclear family and the (white) housewife had been manufactured for the propaganda war against international socialism. Whatever the reason, The Dark World features a whopping four women as major named characters, all of them leaders in their respective factions, plus an unnamed but indomitable female fighter-scout. Kuttner still does the manly pulp thing and has his hero forcefully kiss two of them, but The Dark World feels way more progressive with its gender norms than Witch World did seventeen years later.
Unfortunately, Kuttner’s prose is of its time, which means it has a pulpy comic book quality (and more em dashes than modern poets could even dare to dream of). It does the story no favors. The story itself, though, is surprisingly ahead of its time.
Spoilers here for the central twist: Our narrator, who at first believes himself to be Edward Bond, is in fact Lord Ganelon, an evil and ruthless sorcerer who rules with his Coven over this corner of the Dark World. Ed and Ganelon are each other’s multiversal doppelgängers, switched by the powerful Valkyrie Freydis (who is huge and completely fucking jacked, by the way) to give her people a chance to overthrow the sinister Coven. Ganelon’s return sends the real Ed back to Earth, right in the middle of Ed’s own plan to overthrow the Coven. As Lord Ganelon’s own memories gradually displace Ed’s implanted memories, he uses Ed’s connection to the rebellion to use the freedom fighters for his own ends. It’s the flipside of the expected narrative, the evil mirror image of the standard portal fantasy. It’s a bit startling for 1940s sci-fi.
Despite its myriad problems, I found The Dark World fairly enjoyable.
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