The Living Death and Drome: A John Martin Leahy “Double Feature”

The Living Death and Drome by John Martin Leahy

The double-decker volume entitled The Living Death and Drome, from the Seattle-based imprint Sarnath Press, gathers together two novels from the weird-fiction author John Martin Leahy; the second of two volumes that Sarnath has recently issued focusing on this relatively unknown pulp writer. The entirety of Leahy’s fictive career was limited to just three novels and four short stories; that initial collection, Draconda and Others, had given the reader the author’s first novel, Draconda (1923), and the quartet of shorter works, while volume 2 rounds things off neatly. These are both big, handsome volumes, with a few too many unfortunate typos, and eruditely introduced by weird-fiction authority S. T. Joshi in the first. As regards this second volume, we are here given a brace of full-length works that have either never been reprinted (in the case of the first) or have gone unpublished for over 70 years (in the case of the second). But the resurrection of them both should come as welcome news for all fans of pulp fiction, Radium Age sci-fi, and lost world/lost race fare.

Let’s take a look at each of the novels in this volume 2 individually, shall we? The Living Death was Leahy’s only piece of fiction that did not make its initial appearance in the pages of the legendary Weird Tales magazine. Rather, it was first published in Hugo Gernsback’s Science and Invention magazine as a 9-part serial, beginning in the October 1924 issue and wrapping up in the June 1925. (Science and Invention, incidentally, dealt mainly with nonfiction articles on scientific matters; from 1913 – 1920, it was known as The Electrical Experimenter. It is not to be confused with Gernsback’s earlier Modern Electrics magazine, in which his classic novel Ralph 124C 41+ first appeared serially from 1911 – 1912.) And after the 9^th and final installment of The Living Death ran in June ’25, the novel would go OOP (out of print) for a full 99 years, till Sarnath Press brought out these two Leahy collections in 2024.

The Living Death cleaves fairly evenly into two discrete halves, and is narrated to us by a fellow named Bond McQuestion (the first of a slew of characters here with unlikely monikers), who returns to the area around Puget Sound (Leahy’s stomping ground as well) to visit his old friend Darwin Frontenac. This latter is a scientist who had lately caused an uproar in the press after it was revealed that he had come up with a means of placing living creatures in a type of drug-induced suspended animation, as well as bringing them back to life! While the two men catch up with one another they are visited by the famous explorer Stanley, uh, Livingstone, who regales them with a rather astounding story. Livingstone had also recently caused waves in the national papers when he’d reported that, during his recent explorations in Antarctica, he had come across a tropical valley in which palm trees grew in abundance! Now something of a laughingstock as a result, Livingstone tells Frontenac and our narrator his story in some detail. Thus, in the novel’s first section, we learn how the great explorer had discovered a geothermally warmed Antarctic Ocean inlet that he’d dubbed Summer Haven, and how, many weeks later, the hidden tropical valley had been found in a mountain chain thousands of feet above sea level. While exploring this valley, three of his men had been lost … decapitated by an unknown attacker! While returning to Summer Haven with his remaining companion, Hampden, the two men had made an even more astonishing discovery: In a snowed-over cavern atop a low mountain had been found nothing less than a beautiful young woman encased in a block of ice; a woman who did not appear to be dead and who was dressed in scanty apparel, leading the explorer to surmise that she might have been a resident of the continent when it was still tropical; that is to say, around 90 million years ago! But could she possibly still be alive in that frozen condition … and for such an unimaginable length of time? Sadly, Hampden had met with a fatal accident in a crevasse before the two could return to their ship, with the result that Livingstone was left with no photographs or other proofs to back up his remarkable claims.

I think you can see where this is heading. Livingstone, currently dying of a heart ailment, pleads with Frontenac to return with him to the cavern of the so-called “Sleeping Beauty,” and if at all possible, to employ his new discovery and bring her back to life. Thus, in the novel’s second section, the three men do indeed raise an expedition to the frozen continent, taking along with them the eccentric naturalist Archimedes Bukink, as well as the best sled-dog musher who they can find, Louis Louisiana, aka Nunatak. After many months at sea, and one genuine tragedy, the shore of Antarctica is at last arrived at, and after wintering in place for some months more, our narrator, Frontenac, Nunatak and four others make the trek of many hundreds of miles to reach the hidden valley, which Livingstone had named the Gardens of Paradise, as well as the cavern system in which resides the Sleeping Beauty. And as had been the case in Livingstone’s initial exploration, the body count during this second journey, unfortunately enough, turns out to be not a low one…

I am happy to report that Leahy’s style of writing, which this reader had found decidedly problematic in Draconda, shows a marked improvement here; surprising, since only four or five months separated Draconda’s sixth and final installment in the May/June/July 1924 Weird Tales from the first installment of The Living Death. This second novel is less meandering, more compact, more cleanly written. There is less of a dependence on the 10-cent words that Leahy used to impress his readers in the first novel, and when the unusual words do crop up here, they seem to be more necessary, and naturally introduced. Still, readers should prepare themselves for such doozies as “sastrugi,” “imprimis,” “cacography,” “perioeci,” “supererogatory,” “hypsometer,” “oulopholite,” “sinter,” “oneirocritic,” “acephalous” and “ocellated.” Downplayed here also is the reliance on those long, tedious info dumps that often brought Draconda to a screeching halt. And yet, there is one section in which our narrator plies us with endless instances of scientists having been proved wrong throughout history, but as if to apologize, McQuestion adds “I thought of these things and of many more, and then the captain broke the silence and my train (or jumble) of thought – for which, I have little doubt, you will be rather thankful”!

The Living Death functions as both a tale of exciting Antarctic adventure and a lost world/lost race tale. It is possibly indebted to H. Rider Haggard’s 1919 novel When the World Shook, in which a trio of explorers discovers a woman (and her father) on a South Pacific island, the two of them in a state of suspended animation after a period of 250,000 years. Leahy had already clearly demonstrated a fondness of Haggard in the Draconda novel, and the crystalline ice coffin that Sleeping Beauty reposes in does indeed remind one of the crystal coffins of Yva and Oro in the Haggard book. The Living Death is of course beholden to the daring exploits of the great Antarctic explorers, including Roald Amundsen (the Norwegian whose team was the first to reach the South Pole, in 1911), Englishmen Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton, and the Swede Otto Nordenskjold, all of whom are discussed in McQuestion’s narrative. And, it strikes me, Leahy’s novel also owes a debt of thanks to Edgar Allan Poe’s only full-length work, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), an Antarctic adventure that our heroes are shown reading in their snowbound tent.

McQuestion’s depiction of the hazardous trek that he and his fellows engage in is both realistically detailed and highly convincing; almost more exciting, indeed, than the book’s more fantastical segments. The men’s encounters with killer whales, blizzards, suddenly yawning crevasses, -40 degree F. conditions, et al. are indeed so very gripping that I’m beginning to wonder if I might enjoy reading the real deal one day … say, Amundsen’s 1912 account entitled The South Pole. Leahy peoples his novel with any number of likeable men, in both Livingstone’s first expedition and the second, and their sudden deaths are invariably sad and shocking, in an environment where calamity can strike at any moment. Any number of memorable sequences and set pieces are to be had here: the entirety of Livingstone’s early story; his sudden meeting with doom during the second expedition; the exploration of the fairyland cavern system in which Sleeping Beauty resides; the investigation of those tropical yet treacherous Gardens of Paradise; the discovery of the decapitating monster; and, of course, the reviving of the sleeper, once the men are safely back in Seattle. The sense of cosmic wonder that was so esteemed by fans of Radium Age and Golden Age sci-fi is much in evidence here, and indeed, many of the book’s outstanding mysteries – the nature of the green smoke in the hidden valley, the background of the half-dead human male who the men find in the underground cavern, the meaning of the word/words “Ah-cone-cawn-ga” that he keeps uttering, the harpy statues encountered – remain mysteries by the book’s end … and realistically so. I might add that this was not the last time that Leahy would set one of his tales in the Antarctic wilderness. His most famous piece, the short story entitled “In Amundsen’s Tent” (from the January 1928 Weird Tales, and to be found in volume 1 of the Sarnath Press releases), was also set there, and pitted its own doomed expedition against an adversary that was most likely extraterrestrial in origin; a wonderful companion piece to Leahy’s wholly winning novel here.

Or perhaps “wholly winning” is overstating matters a wee bit, as the novel does come with a few minor problems. Primary for this reader is the fact that what seems to be the book’s main focus and driving force – i.e., the awakening of a woman who is eons old – is ultimately given back-burner status. In a novel whose very title refers to Sleeping Beauty’s state of suspended animation, how odd to find her awakening taking place on the book’s penultimate page! And so, although we do learn her actual name, that is essentially all we ever do discover about her! Surely, another book could have been written by Leahy detailing the young woman’s history in an age long gone, but sadly, that sequel was never to be. So yes, the story of Sleeping Beauty herself is an unrealized and anticlimactic one, leaving us with a novel whose main strengths must be deemed the realistic Antarctic rigors and the lost-world nature of the hidden valley. The book also offers up one other problem/oddity: namely, when Frontenac mentions to our narrator his belief that the man named Rustad is a shirker and sure to cause problems in the future. The reader is thus primed to be on the lookout for this potential troublemaker, but strangely enough, Rustad is never mentioned again! It’s as if Leahy had forgotten all about him! Still, quibbles aside, I quite enjoyed The Living Death, even more so than Draconda, and give it a solid 4-star rating. It is the kind of novel that makes the reader recall and appreciate McQuestion’s remark after first listening to the astonishing narrative of Captain Livingstone: “No man ever told a stranger story”!

Anyway, so much for The Living Death. Now, as to Leahy’s third and final novel, the intriguingly titled Drome: This one, as had Draconda and those four short stories, made its initial appearance in the pages of Weird Tales magazine; in this case, as a 5-part serial in the January – May 1927 issues. In the first of those five issues, Drome received the front-cover treatment with a nicely faithful piece of art by one C. Barker Petrie, Jr. The novel would then go OOPs for 25 years, finally being reprinted in 1952 as a hardcover by the Fantasy Publishing Co., and with a fine piece of cover art by Leahy himself. (The author, after giving up writing in 1928, began painting as a hobby, it seems.) Drome would then go another 55 years in publishing limbo before Wildside Press came out with its own edition in 2007, and now we have available the Sarnath Press edition from 2024. For a Leahy work, this novel has enjoyed a surprisingly robust publishing history, at least as compared to his previous two!

Drome gives us an opening scene very reminiscent of the one to be found in The Living Death. Thus, our narrator, Bill Carter, visits the Seattle home of his scientist friend, Milton Rhodes, and the two are soon interrupted by the arrival of one James Scranton. (Leahy seems to have reined in his penchant for unlikely character names in this, his third novel … at least, as regards these three characters, anyway.) Rhodes enjoys a reputation as a man of science who is capable of “solving puzzles and mysteries, whether scientific, psychic, spooky or otherwise,” and on this particular day, Scranton, reading from his grandfather Charles’ journal, brings him a doozy. Back in 1858, Charles, we learn, had gone with two companions and an Indian guide to do a little exploring on Mt. Rainier, the nearby peak with an elevation of over 14,000 feet. The Indian had been attacked, in dense fog, by what had supposedly been a “demon” that was accompanied by a beautiful “angel.” And the next day, two more men in the party had been attacked and killed by the bat-winged demon, and the angelic woman had been heard to utter the word “drome,” whoever or whatever that might be. The mystery of these attacks had endured for decades, but what has now brought the younger Scranton to Rhodes’ home is the fact that, just a few days before, a young woman had been killed on the slopes of Mt. Rainier, who uttered the single word “drome” before she expired! And so, it would seem, the bat-winged demon has struck again, after a hiatus of some 60 years. Would Milton Rhodes care to investigate?

The very next day, thus, finds the scientist and our narrator on their way to Mt. Rainier, to look around the area where the murdered woman had been found. In a nearby crevasse, the two discover an entrance that leads farther underground … far, far underground, actually. After many days of traversing these unknown, downward-trending, subterranean ways, an immense cavern is finally reached, containing both a waterfall and a natural bridge of stone. And while attempting to cross this narrow way, our heroes are forced to fight and kill the demon that comes at them: a bat-winged, apelike creature of enormous strength and viciousness. This creature had been the pet of the beautiful blonde “angel” who stands at the bridge’s opposite end, and whose life they later save. It seems that the young woman’s name is Drorathusa (the most beautiful name that Rhodes had ever heard, he says), and that she is a resident of this underground realm. She is soon joined by an older man and woman – Narkus and Siris – and by two others, the young male Thumbra and the white-haired, teenage girl Delphis. The quintet conveys to Rhodes and Carter their desire to bring them back to their land of Drome, and so, the expedition begins in earnest.

Unfortunately, the seven soon become lost in the tortuous grottoes, caverns and labyrinths, and the scarcity of water turns into a very real problem. The demon creature, called a loopmuke by the Dromans, had possessed an unerring sense of direction, and without it to guide them, the way back is very difficult, to say the least. Our heroes are witness to any number of marvels, both geologic and living, during their steady descent. They discover a cavern containing an enormous dragon statue, encounter several monstrous predators, and cross a tropical jungle far beneath the surface before arriving in the vicinity of Drorathusa’s people, over 18,000 feet below sea level! And they even get to meet the Droman queen, Lepraylya, in her capital city of Nornawnla Prendella, as well as the head priest, Brendaldoombro … a singularly well-named individual, as it turns out, seeing that this bro does indeed intend to spell the doom of the two visitors from far up above!

Now, there are so many of these lost world/lost race novels that are set in subterranean realms that they practically constitute a subgenre unto themselves. In just the past few years, I have discussed here such examples as S. P. Meek’s The Drums of Tapajos (1930) and its sequel Troyana (1932), Charles W. Diffin’s Two Thousand Miles Below (1932), Richard Tooker’s Inland Deep (1936) and T. E. Grattan-Smith’s The Cave of a Thousand Columns (1938), in all of which strange civilizations and/or monstrous creatures had been encountered deep beneath the Earth’s surface. Drome fits very neatly into this group, and is surely indebted to the great granddaddy of the subgenre, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864). This reader could also not help recalling Rex Stout’s wonderful contribution to this literary niche, the 1912 masterpiece Under the Andes. But Leahy’s novel is of course not nearly as seminal as Verne’s, or as exciting, claustrophobic and truly harrowing as Stout’s. Some readers might also be reminded here of William Hope Hodgson’s chthonic vision entitled The Night Land (1912), what with its numerous, nightmarish monsters that go largely unseen in the underground murk. More on those in just a moment.

Drome, especially in its early sections atop and around Mt. Rainier, evinces the author’s great familiarity with the area in which he grew up and lived his entire life. Once his story heads beneath the mountain’s surface, he regales the reader with any number of imaginative touches, such as the drifting, self-generating light mists – like luminescent, floating clouds – that help illuminate portions of the underground realm, and the 35-segment centipedes that Rhodes discovers. Leahy was clearly a believer in the old dictate that the reader’s imagination can provide images more horrible than anything a writer could possibly depict, and so, as mentioned above, some of the more terrible monstrosities encountered here remain hidden by bushes, or glimpsed only vaguely in cavern depths. When the fearsome creature known to the Dromans as a gogrugron is shot at in a darkened grotto, all Rhodes and Carter can see is a pair of glowing eyes atop a long swaying neck, but the moment is a highly effective one nevertheless, trust me! Similarly, the mysteries regarding the light mists, and their tendency to eclipse themselves, are never clarified, all of which conduces to a sensation of awe in the reader. As in real life, not all natural mysteries lend themselves to easy solutions here! Another realistic touch comes when our two heroes find that it takes them many months to begin to understand and speak the Droman language. This reader has always found it very unbelievable when explorers in these lost-race affairs begin to communicate in the native tongue almost immediately.

As might be expected, any number of impressive scenes are to be had in Leahy’s novel: the fight with the vicious loopmuke atop that narrow bridge; the discovery of the 40-foot-high dragon statue, of which the Dromans themselves seem to know not a thing; our septet’s being stalked by, and narrowly killing, a predatory cat/reptile creature; the discovery of an arboreal octopus monstrosity that grabs its victims from above; and the meeting with the queen, Lepraylya. Still, the vast bulk of Leahy’s book consists of our heroes and their Droman friends traipsing through the underground ways and encountering countless wonders. In this book, the journey is all; the destination, something of an anticlimax. Indeed, our band does not even reach Drome’s centers of population until the book is 17 pages away from its conclusion! Still, the story is always atmospheric and suspenseful, and fortunately, both Rhodes and Carter prove to be likable companions, if a bit too prone to eggheaded philosophizing.

I must also report that in Drome, Leahy exhibits a regrettable return to the info dumping and the 10-cent words that had been such stumbling blocks in Draconda. Thus, at one point, Rhodes stops in his tracks and plies us with seemingly every bit of information then known as regards depth vs. atmospheric pressure. These dissertations of his can go on for pages at a time, and in the most unlikely situations. As for the unusual words this go-round, better have that unabridged dictionary on hand to tackle such lulus as “cavernicolous,” “manometer,” “deglutition,” “pharos,” “coleopterous,” “scolopendra,” “vibrissae,” “autochthonous” and “tachygrapher.” But perhaps my biggest problem with Drome is the fact that, in those final 17 pages, the plot suddenly becomes way too much like the one in Draconda, with one of our heroes falling in love with – and subsequently marrying – the queen, and with a nasty and scheming head priest cooking up trouble. No wonder S. T. Joshi remarks, when discussing this final section of Leahy’s third novel in his introduction to volume 1, “The scenario is largely identical to that of Draconda.”

Drome is also problematic in that it fails to address the matter of the “angel” seen by Grandfather Scranton back in 1858. Was it the much younger Drorathusa, which seems unlikely, with a younger loopmuke? Or, more likely, simply another beautiful Droman woman, with a similar “demon”? Leahy never mentions the matter. Also unexamined is the history of the Droman people, and the nature of the terrible vicinity called “Grawngrogar” that is alluded to and that Carter intends to explore at the book’s close. Surely, another full-length novel could have been written on these matters. The reader is certainly left wanting to know more, as had indeed been the case with The Living Death, but unfortunately, this tantalizing bit was all Leahy ever got around to giving us. And this ultimately puts us in mind of James Scranton’s initial description of the case: “…it is very probable that it will prove stranger than any mystery any man on this earth has ever known.” Or, as it turns out, any man or woman beneath this earth, as well! A highly respectable 3½ stars, thus, to this most entertaining, if hardly perfect, book.

So there you have it … a John Martin Leahy double feature of sorts, sure to make any reader wish that the author in question had decided to give the world many more of his unique visions. Sarnath Press is to be thanked for bringing back a relatively forgotten writer for a new generation of readers to discover and, hopefully, enjoy…