"This region is a hellhole beyond the Swamp of Kushh, and no man knows what dangers, aye what horrors lie in wait there.  The King will risk no loyal subject on an errand of such peril; he sends only an army of the condemned--aye, the damned.  And I--damned as well--to lead it."

Warning: There is no archer girl in this book, and no giant snake

Come, my friends, it is time to return to the Gray Lands, the setting of Ben Haas's 1968 novel, The Sword of Morning Star, the subject of the last episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.  I have no doubt that burned into your memories is the plot of The Sword of Morning Star, which saw Helmut, son of the murdered King of Boorn and Emperor of the Gray Lands, deposing the usurper who killed his father and took Dad's throne and putting his own seat in that throne, thus saving the post apocalyptic future from a fate worse than death--rule by a marginalized population of wolfmen in league with undocumented immigrants AKA cattle-riding barbarians!  I had assumed that the novel we will examine today, 1970's Exile's Quest, would take place after Helmut's ascension to the throne, but I was wrong--Exile's Quest is a prequel that is set before Helmut's birth, during his father Sigrieth's benevolent rule.

Exile's Quest is the story of Baron Gallt.  "Who is Baron Gallt?" you ask?  He is the twenty-three-year-old feudal ruler of the Barony of the Iron Mountains, which lies on the edge of the Empire, far from Boorn.  Gallt owes fealty to King Sigrieth, and is at court in the Kingdom of Boorn to participate in the tourney; Gallt is one of those giant musclemen with "upper arms...as large as most men's thighs" whom we so often find in sword and sorcery stories and so naturally he was the victor of the tourney.  But Gallt has problems.  Problem number one is his drinking problem: he's been hitting the sauce ever since his father died not long ago.  Problem number two is a problem with the ladies: while he has been at court a sexy raven-haired woman, Kierena, whom we knew in The Sword of Morning Star as the evil sorceress who could turn herself into a wolf and was called by her detractors "The Black Bitch," has been coming on to him, even when her husband is right there with them!  As the novel begins Kierena proves herself one dangerous character when she instigates a sword fight between a drunk Gallt and her husband by throwing herself into Gallt's arms to inflame hubby's jealousy.  Gallt tries to just disarm and overpower Kierena's wronged husband, but Kierena pushes this poor sap from behind during the fight so that he gets impaled on Gallt's sword.  As her husband falls dead Kierena tells Gallt they should get married, but Gallt spurns her and hurries to the King to confess.

For their crimes, Kierena and Gallt are exiled and Gallt loses his barony.  To my disappointment Kierena disappears from the narrative--after taking the radical step of murdering her husband to get her hands on Gallt you'd think she wouldn't just abandon her pursuit of the Gray Land's hunkiest slab of beefcake, and all through the rest of the book's 190 pages I kept hoping that she would reappear to add some sexual tension and some evil sorcery, but Kierena never resurfaced--she was never even mentioned again!  A lost opportunity for some primo femme fatale action!

The King thinks Gallt is a good guy, just a little immature when it comes to the booze and the babes (and we've all been there, right?), so he offers him a chance to get his lands back.  All Gallt has to do is lead an expedition to the "Unknown Lands" on the other side of an almost impassable swamp.  This place is reputed to be full of monsters, and the last expedition the King sent there has never been heard from again, but His Majesty still holds out hope that the Unknown Lands would be a worthy addition to his Empire.  Because he doesn't want to risk any more good men on this scheme, King Sigrieth empties his dungeon of thieves, rapists and murderers and puts Gallt at the head of a company of "the scum of the kingdom--all expendable!"

(This will remind moviegoers of 1957's The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, a personal favorite of mine, and 1967's The Dirty Dozen.)

You might wonder, "Why the hell does the Emperor give a rat's ass about what is on the other side of some god-damned swamp?"  Well, in a secret meeting in his book-lined library, the King tells Gallt why: the Unknown Lands are said to be the current location of "the Power Stone," the cursed talisman that warped the minds of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Adolf Hitler and gave them the wherewithal to commit their mass-scale crimes against humanity!  The King doesn't want this dangerous artifact falling into just anybody's hands, and hopes Gallt and his company of ne'er-do-wells can find it and bring it back.

(You'll remember that one of my beefs with The Sword of Morning Star was that it limited Helmut's agency--a lot of Helmut's accomplishments are the product of his being manipulated into doing them or being fated to do them.  In general, an adventure story is better if the protagonist (and the villain!) is driven by his own passions and achieves or fails to achieve his goals because of his own decisions and abilities, says I.  So I find the idea that Alexander, Caesar, Boney and Hitler's monstrous atrocities were a result not of their psychologies and choices, but because of a rock, and that their initial successes were a result not of their talents and skills as politicians and fighting men, but because of a rock, to be pretty damn lame.)

One of the best things in the novel is the development of Gallt's relationship with his army of criminals, represented by their leader, the biggest and strongest of the convicts, Gomon.  Gomon stayed in shape in the dungeon by bullying all the other prisoners and stealing their food; they are all wasted but he is still muscles all over.  Gomon hates the aristocracy, and before this brute chooses to follow Gallt to the Unknown Lands instead of making a one-way trip to the chopping block, the former-Baron of the Iron Mountains has to prove to Gomon that he is no mamby pamby pencil neck pantywaist dandified fop, but as rough and tough a fighting man as Gomon himself!  Our man Gallt takes this in stride--he wants Gomon in his company because Gomon has a lot of military experience and he thinks Gomon is just the man to maintain discipline among his army of killers and thieves.

The company rides into barbarian territory and through the swamp, and Gallt and his force have to deal with cattle-riding barbarians, quicksand, a village of degenerate inbred fishermen, a friendly race of people who are half-human and half-frog, giant leeches, mutiny, and so forth.  All this is entertaining; Haas does a good job with the landscape and obstacles and Gallt's methods of dealing with everything.  Halfway through the book our heroes reach the Unknown Lands, but instead of the hellhole of horrors promised us, Gallt finds an idyllic forest inhabited by beautiful blue-eyed blondes who wear no clothes and live in harmony with nature.  These hippies don't even eat--they are part plant, and absorb sustenance directly from trees by hugging them.  Oh, brother!

As we so often find in SF stories, this lost race of weirdos is ruled by a beautiful purestrain human woman, Queen Thayna, the daughter of a wizard whom King Sigrieth sent into exile (exiling people is one of the Emperor's go-to methods of maintaining order in his Empire.)  Thayna is even more beautiful than the plant people, but she wears clothes and eats food just like you and me.  (You wear clothes, right?)

Paradise is in trouble, Gallt learns.  The guy who lead the last expedition from Boorn, a dude named Barrt, the cousin of Albrecht, the villain of The Sword of Morning Star, overthrew Thayna and her pacifistic plant peeps and is now in charge of the Unknown Lands.  Barrt has recruited the local bat-people, the "Weer," and snake-people, the "Slyth," to be his army (whoa, somebody should talk to Barrt about that coronavirus that is all over the news), and is exploiting the local gold mine with the idea of marching back to Boorn and taking over the world.  The hippies and Thayna are on the run, and Barrt is going so far as to burn down whole tracts of the forest in his hunt for them.

You may recall that in The Sword of Morning Star the daughter of a noble who fell in love with Helmut gave a whole speech about how women are nurturers who love life, unlike men who are violent killers.  Haas presents the same theme here in Exile's Quest.  Thayna knows where the Power Stone is hidden, and when Barrt started taking over, she tells Gallt, she tried to use it to fight him, but it only works for men!  (Who do you report Title IX violations to in the post-apocalyptic future full of wolfmen and snakemen?)  You might also notice how Haas here reuses The Sword of Morning Star's theme of a bunch of defenseless goody goodies who know a better way of life who need the protection of our he-man protagonist from a bunch of half-human creepos lead by the fully human creepo.  Recycling!     

Gallt and Thayna fall in love almost at once and pledge to cooperate in the overthrow of Barrt, but before they can make whoopee or make war they are captured by snakemen and batmen and dragged before Barrt, who has Thayna thrown in the dungeon under the castle Thayna used to liver in and Gallt and his men thrown in the mines!  Barrt tries to get Thayna to tell him where the Power Stone is by threatening to exterminate the defenseless hippie plant people if she won't fess up.  When she keeps mum he and his army of mutants marches off to do some hippie bashing.  Luckily, before Barrt can kill the tree huggers, Gallt, with the help of members of Barrt's original force who have stayed loyal to Borrn, and of Thayna's wizard father, who returns briefly to pitch in with some magical weather control which grounds the Weer air force, leads a slave rebellion and takes over the castle in Barrt's absence.  Barrt hurries back to the castle at the head of his army, but by this time Thayna has given Gallt the Power Stone, which renders Gallt a military genius and his men invulnerable.  Gallt's tiny force easily wipes out Barrt's massive army of scaly infantry and furry flyers, and Gallt becomes addicted to the Stone.  Thayna spares the world the Galltonionic Wars by withholding sex and then threatening to commit suicide, by these womanly strategies convincing Gallt to give back the Power Stone so she can hide it from us bloodthirsty men.

In the last chapter of the novel the King notes that Gallt's adventures have matured him and we see Gallt and Thayna head off to the Iron Mountains to live happily ever after.

I have somewhat mixed feelings about Exile's Quest.  The journey through the swamp is quite good, and I liked the snake-men and the bat-men, and the role the Power Stone plays in the story is interesting (I just wish Haas had skipped the sensationalistic references to Hitler, Bonaparte, et al.)  The love story element--Thayna's relationship with Gallt-- is lame, and the utopian plant people are just silly.  Thayna and the tree huggers are mostly superfluous; Gallt already has a reason to fight Barrt and his snake- and batpeople--Barrt is going to try to overthrow the King of Borrn, to whom Gallt owes allegiance and who seems like a good guy, a man worthy of Gallt's dedication.  Instead of including childishly perfect hippies and a bland perfect girlfriend, Haas could have used those pages to develop a love triangle in which the evil Barrt pursued Kierena while evil Kierena pursued Gallt and to depict Gallt's efforts to resist being corrupted by those two charismatic traitors.  Well, I guess Haas was looking to give Exile's Quest a happier ending than my own ideas would have permitted.

Despite my reservations, I enjoyed Exile's Quest; it is probably a little superior to The Sword of Morning Star.  Worth my time. 

"I loved you then.  That was when I could still love.  But you were right, Sandivar.  It is a freezing of the soul.  All laughter is frozen, and all love.  What remains is death; but for my purposes, death is enough."

Benjamin Leopold Haas wrote mainstream novels and nonfiction about the American South under the name Ben Haas, and paperback genre fiction, like sex novels and Westerns, under a variety of pen names, including three fantasy/SF titles listed at isfdb, all of which I own.  I read Quest of the Dark Lady, published under the Quinn Reade pseudonym, back in 2015, and today I am cracking open the first book in Haas's two-volume Gray Lands series, The Sword of Morning Star, published under the Richard Meade pseudonym in 1969.  I liked Quest of the Dark Lady, and with luck this novel, and its sequel, Exile's Quest, will be equally entertaining.

Our tale is set in what we today call Europe, thousands of years in the future, long after "the Worldfire," which is either a euphemistic term for a nuclear war or a catastrophic war between wizards that Haas is using as a sort of allegory for nuclear war.  Mankind has been reduced to feudalism; most people are illiterate, men ride horses and fight with swords and are ruled by kings.  Living alongside human beings like you and me are mutants, people who are half man, half wolf!  But human and wolfman aren't exactly living in comity--one of the leitmotifs of The Sword of Morning Star is how terrible the wolfpeople smell to purestrain humies, and the contempt most humans have for the wolfmen, and the inferiority complex felt by the wolfpeople, who can't stand to look a real human in the eye!

The most civilized and sophisticated polities of this future world lie to the South in what are called "the Lands of Light," this is Italy, its capital Neoroma.  To the North and East are "the Dark Lands," where live dangerous barbarians; I guess these are Scandinavia and Eastern Europe.  Lying between the peaceful people of Italy and the barbarians is the "Empire of the Gray Lands" of what I assume is Germany, including the Kingdom of Boorn, whose king is Emperor of the Gray Lands; the duty of the Emperor is to protect the South from all those barbarians. (The novel's setting presumably reflects the fact that North Carolina-born Haas lived in Austria for some years.)  Our hero, Helmut, is the 12-year-old bastard son of the King of Boorn; Helmut spent his youth in the palace, living the life of a prince, learning how to read, ride horses and sword fight and all that.  The Emperor recently died of a mysterious illness, and the Emperor's legitimate son Gustav is the current holder of the throne, but he's a kid himself and rules under the close supervision of Albrecht, Duke of Wolfsheim.  Albrecht is one of the few humans who like the wolfmen, and his ducal army is constituted of these smelly brutes--these lupine creeps can talk and walk bipedally and ride horses and fight with swords, just like a purestrain human, but their claws and fangs make them unbeatable in unarmed combat, a fact we see demonstrated in Chapter I when Albrecht lays a trap for Helmut's personal guard.  The wolfmen kill Helmut's retinue, and Albrecht wants to kill Helmut as well, but Gustav insists his half-brother be spared.  Helmut is sent into exile in the swamps, but only after Albrecht has chopped off Helmut's right hand so he can't wield a sword--a precaution meant to short circuit any attempts on an older Helmut's part to seek revenge or the throne for which he has a claim, should anything happen to half-brother Gustav.

In the swamps an ailing Helmut is revived and educated by a mentor character, Sandivar, a sorcerer who lives in an old 150-foot tall tower and can talk to the animals.  This dude can put a saddle on a bear and ride around on it, which comes in handy when a ten-foot tall mud man, a mrogg, attacks in Chapter III.

Sandivar's powers enable him to view events over long distance of both space and time; in fact, his magical abilities seem practically unlimited, but whenever his powers threaten to undermine the plot, Haas has him claim that he can't do such and such a thing (like annihilate Albrecht's army with lightning bolts) because that would go against a vow he took to limit the use of his powers; it was overindulgence in special powers that led to the Worldfire, after all.  (Following similar logic, Sandivar advises Helmut to refrain from building catapults, arguing that constructing such engines will set off an arms race that will lead to catastrophic results.  This presumably reflects Haas's concerns about nuclear war, and perhaps a romanticism about war before industrialism, when, at least as Haas envisages it, combat was a test of bravery and muscle power conducted at close range.) 

Anyway, thanks to abilities Sandivar does not hesitate to employ, he knows that the evil Albrecht has murdered Gustav and made himself Emperor, and that as Emperor he is going to make common cause with the barbarians of the North and pillage the practically defenseless South.  This will be an even bigger disaster than it initially sounds like because the peaceful people of the Lands of Light are developing a vaguely defined "New Learning" that will bring peace to all the world.  Sandivar can also see Helmut's future, and knows Helmut is the man who can stop Albrecht.  Of course, Helmut is only twelve years old, but Sandivar has a plan for that!  After getting Helmut all charged up to seek revenge by telling him that his father the Emperor didn't just get sick but was actually poisoned by Albrecht, Sandivar uses his sorcery to send Helmut to hell!

Haas proposes a universe of multiple dimensions that operate at different speeds.  One such dimension is a world of war, where the shades of the great fighting men of history fight eternally; Beowulf, Siegfried, Arthur and Charlemagne are name-checked--interestingly, they are all Northern medieval heroes, and Haas directly names not a single one of the famous Mediterranean heroes of ancient times like Achilles, Hercules, Alexander or Caesar.  Helmut stands in a pentagram and Sandivar intones a spell and the twelve-year old prince vanishes.  Ten minutes later Helmut returns, but for each minute Sandivar waited an entire year passed in the dark and dreary dimension of war, and Helmut is now a twenty-two year old muscleman and a master of the battlefield!  His trials in hell (which Haas only ever hints at--like Sandivar, we readers only see little Helmut vanish and then return as a grizzled veteran) have turned Helmut's soul to stone--he can no longer laugh or love, never again will the sight of the blue sky or the scent of the sea air bring him joy: "There was no love of life left within him."  All he cares about is overthrowing Albrecht.

Sandivar takes Helmut on a trip to sunny Neoroma to get a powerful warhorse (a tremendous beast that, reminding us of the story of Alexander and Bucephalus, only Helmut can tame), a pair of huge hunting dogs, and weapons and armor made from a special super-strong metal.  Halfway through the 144-page novel we get the scene we have all been waiting for after seeing Jeff Jones's cover for The Sword of Morning Star: the scene in which a blacksmith affixes to the stump at the end of Helmut's right arm the head of what Haas variously calls a mace or morning star.  "Morning Star" soon becomes the name by which people far and wide call Helmut.


The second half of the novel deals with Helmut and Sandivar's campaign to overthrow Albrecht and put Helmut, the rightful heir now that Gustav is pushing up daisies, on the throne of the Kingdom of Boorn.  Albrecht has disbanded the Empire's army of humans and replaced it with an army of wolfmen.  The fortified town of the one noble who has been actively resisting Albrecht, Hagen of Markau, is under siege by an army of wolves (the quadruped kind) led by a sexy sorceress, Kierena ("dark of hair and ivory white of skin and red, red, red of lip"), who can transform herself into a huge black shewolf.  Her enemies call her "The Black Bitch," but Albrecht has a crush on her and hopes to make her his Empress.  As there is no human army at Helmut's disposal, Sandivar, saying that "fire must be fought with fire," recruits an army of bears and wild boars to lift the siege of Markau.

Sandivar's raising an army of bears and boars, while kind of cool, illustrates some of my gripes with the novel.  First, there is the fact that Sandivar's capabilities wax and wane to suit the needs of the plot.  Second, it is one of many examples of Sandivar, not Helmut, making decisions and solving problems.  Helmut doesn't come off as an ambitious hero who makes decisions and bends his environment to his will, but as a guy who is led by the nose by a clever wizard to fulfill a prophecy.  The Sword of Morning Star isn't about an individual's ability to overcome obstacles and achieve his vision, but about respecting limits and fulfilling the role handed you by others or by impersonal forces.  Obviously the reader can see this is a strength, say that the novel is about one's duty to the community and the need to accept fate, but I kind of think following a bold individual who carves his own path might be more fun. 

Anyway, the siege of Markau is broken and the wolf army wiped out.  Kierena, whom I had hoped to see develop into an interesting character, is stabbed to death by Sandivar as she embraces him in hopes of seducing him--she knows she is not a powerful enough witch to match his wizardry and tries to undo him with her feminine wiles in a brief, cursory, scene.  The bears and boars depart and Helmut rests in Hagen's castle, tended to by Hagen's beautiful blond daughter, Nissilda.

A recurring theme of the novel is men rejecting women's sexual advances.  Back in Neoroma, Helmut, after having that mace head attached to his arm and fighting off five of Neoroma's muggers (I guess "the New Learning" has a ways to go), quickly became a celebrity, and the most beautiful woman in town, Lady Viira, came to his room intent on having sex with him, but Helmut, dead inside after his ten years in the bleak dimension of constant war, was indifferent to her charms, and in fury she slapped his face.  Then Kierena, recognizing Sandivar, her former teacher in sorcery, as her wizardly superior, sought to seduce Sandivar rather than fight him, without success.   And now, while Helmut and Hagen try to rebuild the Gray Empire army to use against Albrecht's army of wolfmen, we get Nissilda trying to win Helmut's heart.  When Helmut tells her he is dead inside, she tells him that, to a woman, such talk is not discouraging, but is in fact an irresistible challenge: 

"No man's so dead but what the right woman can bring him back to life.  For that is what women are, my prince--life.  It comes from us, and we tend it till it's grown, hold, suckle, nourish it.  Women are specialists in life, as men are in killing one another off.  And this I will say to you: show me a man convinced he cannot love, and every woman in the country will attempt to prove he's wrong.  Your condition, to a woman, is not a disability, only a challenge."

"A challenge?"

"The greatest man can present to woman; and no woman could e'er turn it down."

You have to love how they integrated the morning star idea into the back cover design

The Empire's army reassembled, it battles Albrecht's wolfman army.  Albrecht has made an alliance with an army of Northern barbarians who ride not horses but cattle into battle, but these people are superstitious and Helmut scares them off by exploiting their fears of ghosts and demons.  Albrecht's army of wolfmen is routed, and the usurper is killed by Helmut in single combat, his skull pounded by Helmut's metal right hand.  Helmut is crowned king of Boorn and Emperor of the Gray Lands, and Nissilda's love cures him of his coldness--in the novel's last paragraph Helmut laughs for the first time since his return from the bleak dimension of war, and admires a sunset.

As so often happens here at MPorcius Fiction Log, after airing a list of grievances against a piece of fiction I am going to tell you that it is fundamentally sound and I enjoyed it despite its various shortcomings; The Sword of Morning Star is alright.  One frustrating thing about it is that Haas presents numerous intriguing ideas that he doesn't develop, like Helmut's relationship with Gustav (they grew up as brothers, but there was tension because strong warlike bastard son Helmut was Dad's favorite but fat Gustav, as the legitimate son, was destined to take the throne) and Sandivar's relationship with the dark beauty Kierena (Kierena seduced Sandivar before Helmut was born and convinced him to teach her his magic powers, which she used for evil); similarly we only get hints of what hell was like and what "the New Learning" down in Italy is all about.  Still, the novel is competently constructed and written, and I'm judging this one acceptable/marginally good.

In our next episode, the sequel to The Sword of Morning Star, 1970's Exile's Quest!   

"Once I lived, even, in rancid caves.  Before that, I was born in the swirl of flames and gases of a world.  I have only vague knowledge of my own beginnings, but I am old and mighty; and yet I am always young and vulnerable as well.  That is because I am Woman.  It is my mission to give; but I must take as well."  

Belmont must have had a genius art director or PR guy or something--I love the covers of their paperbacks.  Remember how much I adored the gorgeous cover illustration of their Novelets of Science Fiction and how I admired their bombastic and misleading ad copy ("BOOK OF THE YEAR!")?  Well, by gracing it with an evocative Jeff Jones cover and the declaration that it is "FANTASY ADVENTURE AT ITS FINEST," Belmont has made me fall all in love all over again, this time with Quest of the Dark Lady by Quinn Reade, published in 1969.

When a new love enters your life, you are always beset by questions, and this love is no different.  Is it by mere coincidence or clever design that the cover image and book title of Quest of the Dark Lady remind prospective readers of the oeuvre of the Swan of Avon?  Is there any chance the actual novel, by prolific writer of Westerns, sex novels, and books on racism in the American South, Ben Haas, using one of his many pseudonyms, will be as fun as the cover?  Let's read the book and see what answers we can find!

Quest of the Dark Lady appears to be set on the Earth of the future, 500 years after a nuclear war that nearly exterminated mankind.  The human race, reduced to a medieval technological level, is organized into the Empire of the Iron Lands and besieged by armies of hideous mutants.  Only the tireless leadership of the strongest and cleverest man on Earth, Emperor Langax, keeps humanity from collapsing into anarchy or being overrun by the giant slugs known as the Slimy Ones, the taloned Gibberers, and the shapeless Soft Creatures.  But now Langax has lost the will to live and retired to bed to waste away!  This is no doubt the work of sorcery!

In a rare moment of lucidity the stricken monarch orders the First Minister and Chief Physician to release the traitor Wulf from the dungeons and send him into monster territory to find "the Dark Lady." Wulf, an aristocratic army officer, has been sneaking into the cell next to his to have sex with a gorgeous blue-eyed blonde, Reen, the recently-captured leader of a band of brigands.  Reen is not merely a striking beauty, but an expert rider, swordswoman, and archer.  So when Wulf heads out into the nightmare forest in search of the Dark Lady, he brings Reen with him.  Also coming along is the Chief Physician, Delius, who, it turns out, is a master wizard as well as a Grade AAA sawbones!

Our three heroes cross a tangled forest and a scorching desert to meet the Dark Lady. Who is this Dark Lady, anyway?  Delius tells his comrades (and us) that she is "a sorceress, unimaginably ancient, yet always new and beautiful...."  Her magic power is dormant until she is "mated with a King....a woman's magic is different from a man's; that's why she needs the marriage to a King to activate hers."  He quotes Keats' "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" more than once in describing her.  It seems that the reason King-Emperor Langax is sick is that the Dark Lady has married some evil king who is trying to use the monsters to conquer Langax's Empire of Iron.  (The Iron Lands are not the last colony of humanity after all.)  The only hope for the Iron Lands is that Wulf, Reen and Delius get that marriage annulled and get the Dark Lady wed to Langax tout suite!

Wulf and company are captured and dragged before the evil King and his queen, the mesmerizingly beautiful Dark Lady.  Reen is raped, Delius is tortured, and Wulf is forced to fight a duel at a banquet against the best swordsman in this evil kingdom, who happens to be Reen's rapist!  Having won the duel, Wulf is taken into the evil king's service and provided a harem that includes Reen.  But Wulf puts Reen on the shelf when the Dark Lady, amoral and fickle, sneaks into Wulf's bed and he has the best sex of his life!

A 1976 printing with a different Jeff Jones cover

The Dark Lady is an ambitious sort, and, recognizing that Langax is a stronger and wiser king than her current spouse, she conspires with Wulf to murder the evil king and liberate Delius.  Torture-victim Delius uses his magic to spirit the four of them back to the Iron Empire--where the Dark Lady marries Langax.  In a matter of weeks Langax is ruler of the world, and he gives Wulf and Reen full pardons and a big estate.  Reen forgives Wulf his dalliance with the Dark Lady, and everybody lives happily ever after.  

When I bought Quest of the Dark Lady I expected it to be weak; it was a novel by a writer I had never even heard of before, after all.  But I was wrong--Quest of the Dark Lady works quite well as a fast-paced sword and sorcery adventure story, and I really enjoyed it.  The descriptions of weird settings, unusual monsters (Haas wisely eschews the traditional goblins, trolls, dragons, giant snakes and giant spiders), magic spells and hand-to-hand combats are all well done.

The novel also benefits from its main themes: love, marriage and sex, how difficult sexual relationships can be and how love and lust can make us act crazy.  Here is a compelling topic that most of us can identify with in one way or another, and Haas really pours it on--we have a woman who uses her sexuality to manipulate and betray men, a man who betrays a woman who loves him, men sexually abusing women, and men and women who can only achieve their true potential through marriage.  Haas means the Dark Lady to be the ultimate femme fatale, the archetypal irresistibly sexy woman, and matches her with the ultimate man, the brave and honorable nobleman Wulf.  Wulf struggles to choose between the black-haired queen, that conscienceless manipulator and sex goddess, and blonde Reen, who sincerely loves him and with whom he can have a healthy relationship based on mutual background, experiences and interests.  

The book is suffused with sex, though the actual sex scenes are not terribly explicit (no "throbbing members" or anything like that.)  The numerous instances of characters expressing, demonstrating and satisfying their physical desire for each other are supplemented by many mentions of the "erotic statues" that decorate Langax's castle and the legions of half-naked concubines that serve the inhabitants of both Langax's and the evil king's castle, generating a lascivious atmosphere that permeated the book.

An ably-written, solid adventure story with elements of sexploitation literature and characters representing all the stereotypical gender roles we are not supposed to believe in anymore--I'd definitely recommend it to sword and sorcery fans, aficionados of odd vintage paperbacks, and those studying gender in speculative fiction.  Haas wrote two more sword and sorcery capers, those under the pen name Richard Meade, and after experiencing Quest of the Dark Lady, I am definitely interested in reading them.

**********

My copy of Quest of the Dark Lady has four pages of terrific ads in the back, including one for what appears to be an operatic account of the troubles faced by America's own royalty, those expert navigators of boats, automobiles, skis, aircraft, and young ladies, the Kennedys!

I'm more likely to pursue one of the advertized novels by previous MPorcius Fiction Log subjects Edmond Hamilton ("One man against the universe"), Mack Reynolds ("His unearthly power could destroy the world"), Murray Leinster ("all that's curious and terrifying"), James Schmitz ("men without souls join forces with living machines") or Frank Belknap Long ("a top-rated author"???)


An entire page is devoted to "Gothic Suspense Novels," which I guess are those 20th-century women's romance novels which have some kind of stylistic connection to those classic 18th and 19th century Gothic novels like Castle of Otranto (which I thought was lame when I read it back in the '90s), Frankenstein and Dracula (which I think are great) and Jane Eyre (which I have not read.)  Another covers Sword and Sorcery novels, mostly by the mediocre writer but important editor Lin Carter.

Click for a legible version