The Great White Space: Black mountain side

The Great White Space by Basil Copper

For those of you who have read everything written by the great H. P. Lovecraft but are still hankering for another solid dose of cosmic horror and tentacled monstrosities, hoo boy, have I got a doozy for you! Although written four decades after the so-called “Sage of Providence” dominated the field of weird fiction in the 1930s, this book – Basil Copper’s The Great White Space – is such a convincing pastiche that all fans of the genre should be left happily grinning nevertheless. More on the novel’s similarities to Lovecraft’s work, in particular his classic 1936 novella “At the Mountains of Madness,” in a moment.

The Great White Space was originally released in 1974 as a hardcover book by the British publisher Robert Hale, with cover art by Colin Andrews. A year later, St. Martin’s Press, here in the U.S., came out with its own hardcover edition, but featuring the same Andrews cover art. In 1976, also in the U.S., Manor Books issued the novel in paperback (with a very freaky cover by Bob Larkin), and in 1980, Sphere Books in England came out with its own paperback, cover by Terry Oakes. The book would then go OOPs (out of prints) for 22 years, till the German publisher Festa revived it in 2002 under the misleading title Die Eisholle (The Ice Hell), and with cover art by the illustrator professionally known as Babbarammdass (aka Hanno von Bran). And finally, for readers today, there is the trade-sized paperback released by Valancourt Books in 2013, with its faithful cover art by Eric Robertson and an introduction by horror authority Stephen Jones.

Now, before diving into the myriad wonders to be encountered in this volume, a quick word on the author himself. Basil Frederick Albert Copper was born in London in 1924. Today, Copper is assuredly best known for three very different literary endeavors. First, he was the author of no fewer than 52 novels centering on Los Angeles private detective Mike Faraday, written from 1966 to 1988. He also continued the character of Solar Pons, created by Lovecraft champion and Arkham House founder August Derleth, in seven collections of short stories and one novel. And last but certainly not least, he authored six novels and 10 collections that dealt with weird, cosmic and supernatural horror. Copper ultimately passed away in 2013 at age 89.

His very first novel of weird and cosmic horror, The Great White Space is narrated to us by Frederick (same spelling as Copper’s middle name, right?) Plowright, a professional photographer and filmmaker who had achieved some renown by having accompanied several explorers on rather hazardous journeys. Still in his mid-30s at the time of his narrative, Plowright, we are told, is currently a broken man; the sole survivor of the so-called “Great Northern Expedition” of (circa) 1934, the tragic events of which are given to us in some detail. The photographer, we learn, had been contacted by no less a figure than Professor Clark Ashton Scarsdale, who had convinced the younger man to join him in his next venture. Several years earlier, Scarsdale had penetrated a cave system somewhere in the neighborhood of Tibet but had been forced to turn back after encountering a vast subterranean lake. A student of esoteric and arcane lore, Scarsdale now hoped to discover wondrous things on the other side of that lake, and this time would come prepared with four tractors (more like enormous tanks, we soon discover) and collapsible rubber rafts … not to mention a small army’s worth of armaments. Another professor of hidden knowledge, as well as an engineer and geologist, Cornelius Van Damm, in addition to Norman Holden (historian) and Geoffrey Prescott (linguist and Egyptologist), would be accompanying them; a team of five to penetrate a subterranean area where no man had trod before.

And so, Plowright tells us, after an intensive few weeks of training at handling the tanks and other gear at the professor’s temporary home in Surrey, the quintet had indeed set off by ship. It had taken them many weeks to reach the isolated village of Zak, acquire a dwarfish and treacherous guide named Zalor, arrive at an even more primitive village called Nylstrom, cross a burning desert and the Plain of Darkness to reach their ultimate destination, the Black Mountains. There, Scarsdale had led the men to the ancient, 500-foot-high doorway that had been carved into the mountainside, guarded by a hieroglyph-covered stone that forbade entry. But feeling secure in their rolling fortresses, the men had of course proceeded. They had arrived at the underground lake (85 miles into the mountain system and five miles beneath it!), made a safe transit across it in their rubber rafts, and then discovered numerous wonders: a gallery of the embalmed dead; an ancient and seemingly abandoned city; and, most horrible of all, the Great White Space, an area of palpitating, resounding light that acted as nothing less than a portal to the stars! And through that blinding and deafening zone of incandescent light had emerged nightmarish shapes that had proven to be the undoing of the Great Northern Expedition … to put it very mildly!

As you may have already discerned, The Great White Space really is something of a must-read for all fans of cosmic horror, sci-fi, lost-world adventure novels, and especially H. P. Lovecraft. As mentioned, it is truly an excellent pastiche of the 1930s style of weird-fiction writing; the book just doesn’t feel like a modern novel, especially one written in the 1970s. Copper turns out to be a fairly wonderful wordsmith, and yet he is certainly not above occasionally employing the language that made pulp fiction so much fun. Thus, we can get a sentence such as “I glimpsed the forms of the slug-things all about me now, their monadelphous outlines fibrillating and undulating in the pitiless glare from outer space,” as well as “I tasted the bitter taste of blood and bile in my mouth and my brain was a seething cauldron of white-hot terror”! And speaking of those slug-things, the alien menaces encountered here would surely make ol’ H. P. beam in approbation! We are thus treated to those sluglike jelly creatures that are impervious to gunfire; 50-foot-high, tentacled bat monsters that can suck a living man to a collapsible husk (!); and five-foot-high grasshopper thingies. Another nod to Lovecraft comes via the forbidden tomes that Scarsdale has studied; not The Necronomicon, but here, The Ethics of Ygor and The Trone Tables, which have given the professor a good idea of what he might find beyond that underground lake. Too, as in Lovecraft, a sense of cosmic awe is engendered in the reader, while many mysteries perforce go unexplained.

And Lovecraft isn’t the only writer who is paid homage to here. There is a tip of the chapeau, surely, to H. Rider Haggard, the so-called “Father of the Lost-Race Novel,” especially when those two isolated villages are arrived at, when three of Scarsdale’s tanks draw themselves up “into a rough laager,” and when the underground cavern is first explored. Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) is of course brought to mind, and the macabre atmosphere is at times reminiscent of some of the writings of William Hope Hodgson, such as in The Night Land (1912). And need I even mention that the character Clark Ashton Scarsdale (an homage to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger, Stephen Jones mentions, although I did not quite see it) takes his name from the great fantasist of the 1930s and ‘40s, Clark Ashton Smith?

Copper’s book is a taut and lean affair, not exceeding 170 pages in this Valancourt edition; there is no excess flab, and our narrator even tells us at one point that “it would sorely overburden this narrative if I went into great detail” regarding certain items. Still, there is an abundance of detail as to other important matters. The first half of the novel comes off like a simple (although fascinating) story of Asian exploration, and our intrepid quintet does not even arrive at the Black Mountains until the tale is around one-third done. But the book’s final 40 pages or so, it must be added, are absolutely thrilling. Any number of splendid sequences are given to the reader, including our narrator’s brutal fight with the dwarf guide Zalor; the discovery of Zalor’s desiccated corpse in the cavern system; the exploration and crossing of the underground lake; the discovery of an alien embalming gallery, and the opening of some of the canopic-style jars therein; walking through the deserted (?) alien city of Croth; the initial finding of the Great White Space and its cosmic users; the hideous and horrible deaths of four of our heroes; and Plowright and Scarsdale’s protracted battle against the alien beings, armed with useless guns and more-than-useful hand grenades. All five of the men, it should be said, are hugely likeable sorts, which only makes their very gruesome ends all the more upsetting. They are all brave men who realistically become panicky and even unhinged – even, at some moments, Scarsdale – when confronted with those inhuman horrors from beyond. All told, The Great White Space is a wonderfully entertaining read that could easily have been sequelized. Jones tells us that Copper also came out with a “companion piece” (not quite sure what that means in this instance) entitled Into the Silence (1983), and I sure would love to read that one now!

In truth, I have very few complaints to lodge against Copper’s very impressive work here. Oh, there are a few instances of faulty grammar (“The contrast of the splendours of Zak were so marked…”; “…neither of us were exactly impatient…”), and many mysteries remain unsolved by the book’s end. (Just what were Zalor’s motivations, and how did he beat the men back to the underground cavern?) But perhaps my biggest beef with Copper here is his unusual use of commas throughout the book; sometimes too few, sometimes too many. I’m not sure if this was a stylistic affectation used in this novel only to bring about a sense of strangeness (as Hodgson did in many of his works) or not, but it did make for some genuine stumbling blocks for this old copy editor. Tell me if I’m wrong about there being too few commas in these sentences: “Number 1, I saw was labelled Command Vehicle…”; “We reached Zak on September 1^st and there, with much haggling and grumbling the porters were paid off…”; “The Mir, in laboured conversations conducted through Scarsdale told us something of his people’s customs…”; “Stretching behind us, like the slime-track left by a gigantic slug was our own trail…”; “’I know the route, as you realise and I shall need you to control the radio…’”; “He took the tea sullenly, quite unlike his usual self and sipped it with great shuddering gasps…” Do you see what I mean? Conversely, at times there are too many commas; to wit: “Altogether, it was a strange, and fascinating place in which we found ourselves…”; “…I noticed, that, even when off watch, he cast occasional glances through the windscreen…”; “…he was of course, right”; “There was little, or nothing we could now do…” As I say, this kind of awkward and jerky punctuation can be a little offputting, but does fortunately pale into insignificance when compared to the book’s many other fine qualities.

I would now be very interested in checking out some more of Basil Copper’s works that are currently in print, and fortunately for me, Valancourt does at the moment have available two more of the author’s novels, namely Necropolis (1980) and The House of the Wolf (1983). I look forward to experiencing those two books one day in the near future … weird comma usage or no…