When his friends and his old mentor return from a 2 year expedition in the Gobi desert, he is there at the airport waiting for them.
As together with friends and family, looking for the telltale sights and sounds that'll herald the arrival of the plane, he is approached by an intoxicating young woman.
Her name is April Bell. She is a new reporter in town with green dress to match her eyes, red lips to match her hair and white wolf fur coat to offset it all. Together with Will she waits for the plane to come down and somehow he finds himself telling her everything;
Of studying with his friends under doctor Mondrick, of the weird research into the past, research that encompassed every imaginable ethnological field. Of the geological maps of ages long gone and of the charts with every strata of human evolution, of greek and latin, and every myth the world has on offer, and then of the sudden break, when old Mondrick ousted Will out of his circle, giving no reason at all for the sudden dismissal.
And when the plane lands and when, right before announcing the results of the expedition, old Mondrick falls dead, it is to be the harbinger of still worse to come.
In the night the dark and violent nightmares arrive, blurring the line between waking and dreaming and soon Will Barbee finds himself isolated from those he once knew.
While slowly going mad he will have to fight for his very humanity or suffer a dark and monstrous fate.
In the night the dark and violent nightmares arrive, blurring the line between waking and dreaming and soon Will Barbee finds himself isolated from those he once knew.
While slowly going mad he will have to fight for his very humanity or suffer a dark and monstrous fate.
Story, Background and Writing
Expanded on from a short story and published in 1948 Darker than You Think was quite an amazing novel for its time, darkly imaginative and very original in its marriage of science and mythology, it's no wonder then that it and its author, Jack Williamson, received wide acclaim.
One of the grand masters of american Science Fiction, Darker than You Think is his only entry into horror fiction.
70 years on, however, it seems rather dated. But despite its many flaws, it still manages to build up enough drive on its own to keep a reader going.
The story makes no attempt to hide its pulp origins and is paced like one as well, with large amounts of thinly-veiled-as-dialogue exposition dumped on the reader in the very first few chapters in order to quickly kick start the narrative. The reader is forced to run to keep up with its fast-paced story or fall by the wayside, sink or swim.
Expanded on from a short story and published in 1948 Darker than You Think was quite an amazing novel for its time, darkly imaginative and very original in its marriage of science and mythology, it's no wonder then that it and its author, Jack Williamson, received wide acclaim.
One of the grand masters of american Science Fiction, Darker than You Think is his only entry into horror fiction.
70 years on, however, it seems rather dated. But despite its many flaws, it still manages to build up enough drive on its own to keep a reader going.
The story makes no attempt to hide its pulp origins and is paced like one as well, with large amounts of thinly-veiled-as-dialogue exposition dumped on the reader in the very first few chapters in order to quickly kick start the narrative. The reader is forced to run to keep up with its fast-paced story or fall by the wayside, sink or swim.
Said story wil probably also seem familiar: From the Femme Fatale and the alcoholic reporter (in lieu of detective), to most of the action taking place at night, the first person narration; its tropes are distinctly noir. And its supernatural elements are also a dime in a dozen, or at least at first glance they might appear to be so. Taken on its own, in this day and age, the novel comes across as so clichéd that a casual reader is very likely to figure out what is going on in the very first chapter of the novel, if not in detail then in general plot.
But Williamson then spends the rest of the narrative throwing red herrings or complications our way, and supported by aforementioned fast pace, manages to lull expectations and conjectures to a muted background hum in the rush to the end where, even though any initial assumptions are likely to be proven correct, you're just as likely to find a few surprises there too.
That ending is quite good actually, provided you have an open mind and aren't too hellbent on dead seriousness in your literature*. It's not a long novel and can be read in a few sittings.
There's also a genuine sense of tension preceding the novel's bloodier moments, where the shocks are rather ahead of their time.
Mythology and Themes
Darker than you think is very much a product of its time and the author who wrote it:
In 1933 Williamson submitted himself to the Menninger Clinic where he became more in touch with himself. It seemed to have helped him resolve some of his inner conflicts and as a result his fiction became endowed with a less fanciful tone.
As another result of this, Freud's teachings of psychoanalysis permeate the novel, but are carried forward only up to a certain point and without too much depth because Williamson uses it primarily as the central springboard for his mythological framework.
Via this system the novel suggests that a supposed primordial evolution was responsible for the primal duality in man's psyche, and then carries that forward to underbuild a very specific type of genre creature.
It's clever but it's not all good, as it's mythological framework stretches too far and in fact overreaches itself in trying to bring every imaginable supernatural element under one all-encompassing umbrella.
It's clever but it's not all good, as it's mythological framework stretches too far and in fact overreaches itself in trying to bring every imaginable supernatural element under one all-encompassing umbrella.
Its magical system is built on ideas of probability which I thought was a nice touch, but I'm also pretty sure that not much of it makes much actual sense when delved into. Incidentally, failure to adhere to probability is warned against but the possibilities of that possible failure are never actually explored, leaving its precise workings up for conjecture.
Mention of possible failings also only come into play when confronted with humanity, while animals at large tend to get murdered without a second thought.
The psychoanalysis and the scientific explanations serve to undercut, to waylay the fantastical elements of the novel, at least until the supernatural events become impossible to deny. And I don't think that I'm giving much away here, because once you've read the first few chapters any guess you can make is liable to be very much right on the money.
*The ending is very good, though that's maybe because of me glancing ahead to see how many pages were ahead, and catching a fleeting glimpse of a word that prepared me for a certain element of the novel that I otherwise might've been disbelievingly annoyed by. It was only one word, or rather one name and it would likely be met with ridicule or laughter today, and although Williamson manages to hint beforehand, there still might be a little giggle to be had.
Those final chapters were a lot of fun to read. With every expectation met in a manner that didn't feel hopelessly contrived.
Spoilers and some Meta-views
-It's not exactly a spoiler, because every cover blurb ever will have already given this one's plot away. The novel's greatest accomplishment is that it is the first to have given a cohesive mythology for werewolves, or rather; shapeshifters, which are also witches.
-There's also nice bit of postmodern meta-narrative near the end, which I always love to see in my novels. It wasn't particularly deep or clever but it was an unexpected little treat nonetheless and managed to engender some more good will from me that it might not've had otherwise.
Characters and Identity
Mention of possible failings also only come into play when confronted with humanity, while animals at large tend to get murdered without a second thought.
The psychoanalysis and the scientific explanations serve to undercut, to waylay the fantastical elements of the novel, at least until the supernatural events become impossible to deny. And I don't think that I'm giving much away here, because once you've read the first few chapters any guess you can make is liable to be very much right on the money.
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*The ending is very good, though that's maybe because of me glancing ahead to see how many pages were ahead, and catching a fleeting glimpse of a word that prepared me for a certain element of the novel that I otherwise might've been disbelievingly annoyed by. It was only one word, or rather one name and it would likely be met with ridicule or laughter today, and although Williamson manages to hint beforehand, there still might be a little giggle to be had.
Those final chapters were a lot of fun to read. With every expectation met in a manner that didn't feel hopelessly contrived.
Spoilers and some Meta-views
-It's not exactly a spoiler, because every cover blurb ever will have already given this one's plot away. The novel's greatest accomplishment is that it is the first to have given a cohesive mythology for werewolves, or rather; shapeshifters, which are also witches.
-There's also nice bit of postmodern meta-narrative near the end, which I always love to see in my novels. It wasn't particularly deep or clever but it was an unexpected little treat nonetheless and managed to engender some more good will from me that it might not've had otherwise.
Characters and Identity
-Femme Fatale April Bell is supposed to be thrilling and alluring, but when you're not feeling what your main character's feeling and instead can do nothing but see the manipulation and mockery going on right in front of your nose, it's hard to bring up the same level of interest and adoration that the main character apparently bestows on her.
In large part this is because Will Barbee is exactly what he needs to be for the elements of the story to not fall on their nose. It requires him to very much let things happen to him, not open his mouth when he should, to go along with suggestions and blatantly fall into whatever plot of the moment the writer has decided to introduce to the narrative, or just plain to manipulate the reader; he's not exactly an unreliable narrator but Williamson does pull a fast one there at the end.
He's in fact a very unactive character, always swept up in the devices and schemes of others, always reacting, ever in response to others, and that likely the author made him this way to the easement of the plot.
This un-activity makes of him a non-entity, EXCEPT when he is 'dreaming', where he is a decidedly more active player and during which time the world ends up being a more vibrant place, and maybe that's exactly why he is depicted as he is during the waking hours as the alcoholic without a purpose: To contrast those two states.
In large part this is because Will Barbee is exactly what he needs to be for the elements of the story to not fall on their nose. It requires him to very much let things happen to him, not open his mouth when he should, to go along with suggestions and blatantly fall into whatever plot of the moment the writer has decided to introduce to the narrative, or just plain to manipulate the reader; he's not exactly an unreliable narrator but Williamson does pull a fast one there at the end.
He's in fact a very unactive character, always swept up in the devices and schemes of others, always reacting, ever in response to others, and that likely the author made him this way to the easement of the plot.
This un-activity makes of him a non-entity, EXCEPT when he is 'dreaming', where he is a decidedly more active player and during which time the world ends up being a more vibrant place, and maybe that's exactly why he is depicted as he is during the waking hours as the alcoholic without a purpose: To contrast those two states.
As an as of yet unawakened Lycanthrope he has little or no interest in going along with whatever the waking world has in store for him, he is drifting and deprived of purpose, because at the core of his nature he is not part of that world; the human world, it cannot connect with him at a primal level.
But when he dreams with April Bell, in the realm of the were-creatures, something 'clicks' and though he fights for the ties that bind at first, in the end he abandons himself fully, because it feels right, like he's come home. And in April Bell's claims of the Dark Messiah it also bestows meaning and purpose.
But when he dreams with April Bell, in the realm of the were-creatures, something 'clicks' and though he fights for the ties that bind at first, in the end he abandons himself fully, because it feels right, like he's come home. And in April Bell's claims of the Dark Messiah it also bestows meaning and purpose.
There's in fact a conflict at the heart of the novel: the struggle between the status quo of remaining what you are, where you are and what others think of that and you, all the ties that bind; and what you yourself want and what you could be, the possibility of an evolution, of transcendence. It's a novel about identity, or rather self-actualization (Does it show I read Sartre this month?)
But then this, because of the particular conflict at the heart of Barbee, the war between his humanity and the beast within, necessitates that this would be Self-Actualization at the cost of others (as it always is?). Human or beast, someone has to pay the price.
And because everyone has, at their basis, good intentions, built either on shared history or new goals, but because the novel starts where it does, at the exact moment where it's most relevant for the story Williamson wants to tell, we don't have those emotional attachments to his friends that Will Barbee does.
So, unburdened by the ties of friendship, we see clear and we see only what is possible, we see the hints of it, but rather than that he sees it as we do; as a shadowy form of destiny and the likely culmination of the novel, Will sees it as being a negative; as a loss of humanity or descent into evil, at best the upsetting of the status quo and the initiation of change fueled by the spilling of blood.
Because of where we start the plot instead becomes fated, fixed and end goal, and everything thrown up as a barrier to this end becomes clutter in the path of the plot, which almost willingly puts us on the side of the dark, on the side of the devil, so to speak. We want him to turn away from past ties, to drown his humanity in the blood of his friends and give in to April Bell every step of the way.
So, unburdened by the ties of friendship, we see clear and we see only what is possible, we see the hints of it, but rather than that he sees it as we do; as a shadowy form of destiny and the likely culmination of the novel, Will sees it as being a negative; as a loss of humanity or descent into evil, at best the upsetting of the status quo and the initiation of change fueled by the spilling of blood.
Because of where we start the plot instead becomes fated, fixed and end goal, and everything thrown up as a barrier to this end becomes clutter in the path of the plot, which almost willingly puts us on the side of the dark, on the side of the devil, so to speak. We want him to turn away from past ties, to drown his humanity in the blood of his friends and give in to April Bell every step of the way.
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