early 1990s, his recent work has appeared only at
increasing intervals.
Rohmer, Sax(Arthur Sarsfield Ward)
(1883–1959)
Sax Rohmer was the pseudonym used by Arthur
Sarsfield Ward, a prolific writer of thrillers and
weird fiction who is best known for the creation of
his superintelligent Chinese villain, Dr. Fu
Manchu, whose adventures often involve fantastic
elements ranging from superscience to the mysti-
cal. Fu Manchu first appeared in The Insidious Dr.
Fu Manchu(1913). He is a criminal mastermind
and head of the mysterious international criminal
organization known as the Si-Fan, which has more
members than the population of many countries.
His opponents are two British agents who often
seem to defeat him more by luck than intelligence.
There are 11 book-length adventures in the series,
ending with Emperor Fu Manchu(1959), in which
he employs giant insects, occult forces, assassins,
the revived dead, voodoo, immortality, hypnosis,
and other weapons, but always without success.
Although Rohmer is less well known for his
other thrillers, many of them involve Asian magic
or other occult themes. In The Quest of the Sacred
Slipper(1913) thugs armed with supernatural pow-
ers attempt to seize a slipper that once belonged to
Muhammad. A magical painting alters the person-
alities of people who observe it in The Yellow Claw
(1915), and a master magician uses a variety of
magical powers in the rambling but exciting Brood
of the Witch Queen(1918). The Dream Detective
(1920) is a collection of related stories about an
occult detective, several of which involve fantasy
plot devices, and The Haunting of Low Fennel
(1920) also contains some supernatural stories.
The Green Eyes of Bast(1920) is Rohmer’s best
novel outside the Fu Manchu series. The investiga-
tion of a series of mysterious murders reveals the ex-
istence of a nonhuman race that possesses occult
powers. They have become convinced that they are
superior to the human race and are entitled to sup-
plant it. Grey Face (1924) and She Who Sleeps
(1928), the latter making use of a revivified
mummy, are considerably less interesting, although
both have strong supernatural content. Rohmer’s
later work is almost exclusively about Fu Manchu
and emphasizes superscience rather than the occult.
Two recent collections have gathered most of his
better uncollected short weird fiction, The Secret of
Holm Peel and Other Strange Stories(1970) and The
Wrath of Fu Manchu(1973). His series about a fe-
male villain, Sumuru, is often mentioned as fantasy
but is not. Rohmer’s Asian villains were often imi-
tated in the pulp adventure magazines, but only Fu
Manchu has remained popular, featured in several
motion pictures and a short-lived television series.“The Room in the Tower”E. F. Benson
(1912)
This early classic horror tale opens with the author
attempting to talk the reader into accepting the fan-
tastic content by first assuring the reader that he, the
narrator, is a skeptic. It is not surprising, he asserts,
that we occasionally find our dreams repeated in re-
ality. Given the mundane content of most dreams
and the fact that they usually involve people we
know, it would be more surprising if that were not
the case. Having said that, however, the narrator re-
lates a recurring dream he has experienced since
childhood in which he finds himself a guest among
strangers and is told that he has been given the room
in the tower, a place he instinctively know holds a
hideous horror. As the dream continues to recur, he
remembers more details about the house and the
other occupants and notices as well that they seem
to age as the years pass, as though the dream were
really happening in some alternate existence.
As an adult he is part of a holiday party when
he finds himself at the very house of his dreams, al-
though its occupants are entirely different, friendly
and cheerful. Nevertheless, his uneasiness grows
when he is assigned to stay in the room in the
tower, a situation that makes him alternately curi-
ous and anxious. In that room he notices a portrait
of Julia Stone, the older woman who assigns him
that room in his dreams, a woman he instinctively
knows is tainted by some insidious evil. When he
and his host move the picture, they both find their
hands covered with blood, although neither has
suffered a wound.
The climax comes that night when the narra-
tor wakens to find the portrait back on the wall294 Rohmer, Sax