But Is It Worse Than Hitler?

Hiero's Journey, Chapter Three, continued:

For a chapter-by-chapter index to this series, click here.
(For the previous entry in this series, look here.) 

Hiero's deep “torpor,” and that of his companions, is apparently unnatural, for they sleep through the day and into the night. They only awaken when Hiero senses the approach of an enemy, the Dweller in the Mist, a humanoid clad in a white hooded cloak, whom Lanier tells us is a a product of the “ghastly cosmic forces unleashed by the Death” (65). The author reminds us again that he is writing what amounts to a fantasy novel with scientifictional trappings. Most conventional SF writers would shy away from attributing magical powers to something as scientifically explicable as a nuclear war. In Lanier's defense, one must admit that a strictly realistic post-nuclear adventure story would be one in which all of the characters were dead, and the departed, even if zombified, tend not to have the most interesting adventures. So there is that.

The Dweller in the Mist (DitM) is hardly a realistic adversary, but he, she, or it is certainly a dangerous one. Its eyes are dark pools of “ocherous evil” (66), or maybe “twin pools of lambent horror” (67),* and its motives best described as vampiric. The DitM hits Hiero with a complex psychic attack, sapping his willpower while at the same time filling him with a sense of well being, partially “sexual in nature” (66). The priest-warrior struggles within the great psychic net, warding off the DitM's “promise of unspeakable pleasures”** by reciting logarithm tables, which he memorized while in training at the Abbey. There you go, kids – Math can be useful! Hiero resists with sufficient intensity to make the Dweller pause, and then, while his adversary hesitates, Per Desteen uses his innate psychic abilities, sharpened by his recent fight with S'nerg (nearly forgotten by the audience, alas), to deliver what we might call a Psychic Eye-Poke. This surprises both the DitM and Hiero, but Our Man from Canada makes the most of his new ability, stunning the Dweller with a series of Psychic Head-Butts and smothering him/her/it within a mental web of his own. At last, the Dweller expires with an “awful mewling, twanging cry” (68) and dissolves into a puddle of black murk, additional proof that Hiero has defeated something truly eeevil.

Lanier follows the low-fantasy convention that evil is an innate property, reflected in an evil person's unattractive appearance. Evil people can thus only do evil things; it is, as the scorpion told the frog, in their nature. My readers will forgive me here if I find this treatment of the subject of eeevil unsatisfactory, if only because it eliminates the possibility of free will. The Dweller in the Mist certainly commits evil acts: it deceives its prey about its intentions, offering them the illusion of demonic sexytime while it sucks their souls, and then condemns their victims to "some joint serfdom of physical pain and soul suffering" (68). The author does not indicate, however, whether the DitM has much choice in the matter. Soul-sucking and enslavement may be essential to the creature's survival, in which case it is no more evil than a shark eating tourists or an adult polar bear hunting baby seals - or, for that matter, one of the "xenomorphs" in the Aliens movies impregnating a captured space marine. Perhaps, though, the Dweller in the Mist, like vampires in Terry Pratchett's fantasy novels, could forgo feeding on human prey and destroy only the souls of animals, like giant mutant frogs? or perhaps use only part of its power on its human victims, offering them only mildly "unspeakable pleasures" (light backrubs, perhaps) and condemning them only to a temporary serfdom of pain and soul suffering. If such choices were possible, then a DitM that preys only on humans and drains them completely would be making an evil choice, would be justifiably evil. Lanier doesn't provide us enough information to judge. As the novel stands, the only people who appear completely evil to me in this episode were the members of the Unclean Evil Mutant conspiracy, who lured the DitM to Hiero and his companions.

As for Klootz and Gorm: yes, they slept through the whole fight, again.  Not evil, just lazy.

Coming next: Hiero gets a girlfriend.

* Or “horrid spots of spectral light” (68). If Lanier had been married, something tells me he would have had trouble remembering the color of his wife's eyes.

** As everyone knows, however, Catholic priests are never attracted to "unspeakable pleasures" in the first place.