the night using two voices and refuses to allow
anyone to help him deal with the malignant
growths.
The newcomers are reluctant to become in-
volved until Etcham shows them evidence that
Stone had recently discovered pygmies, for he car-
ries a shrunken head that is too small to have been
made from a normal man. Intrigued, the new expe-
dition follows Etcham’s directions and finds the
man as described, but they also discover an even
more bizarre fact. The shrunken head is only one
of several that have sprouted from Stone’s body,
heads that until severed are animated and talka-
tive. Although the experience is obviously causing
him great pain, Stone implores them not to re-
move the most recent head. His death comes at
last when a diminutive pygmy is born from his own
flesh.
The grotesque images and surprise revelations
are less effective for contemporary readers, but the
ending must have come as a considerable shock to
those unprepared for such a twist when the story
was first published. “Lukundoo” holds up surpris-
ingly well today, despite the somewhat murky ex-
planation in the final paragraphs, which implies
that the curse was engineered by Stone’s ex-wife
rather than a disgruntled witch doctor.
Lumley, Brian(1937– )
Brian Lumley’s earliest fiction, which began ap-
pearing in the late 1960s, was heavily influenced
by H. P. LOVECRAFT, although over time Lumley
gradually altered the structure of the Cthulhu
Mythos so that humans had a better chance of
defeating the nearly godlike alien intelligences
Lovecraft had imagined. Most of the stories in
The Caller of the Black(1971) are in this mode, as
are his early novels. His second novel, The Bur-
rowers Beneath(1974), introduces the first ex-
tended adventure of Titus Crow, a psychic
detective who mixes arcane knowledge with overt
violence. Crow, who had also appeared in several
shorter pieces, returns to defend the Earth from
invasion in The Transition of Titus Crow(1975),
but his subsequent adventures, The Clock of
Dreams(1978), Spawns of the Winds(1978), and
In the Moons of Borea(1979), are more properly
science fiction. Lumley routinely mixed scientific
rationalizations into later novels, making them
difficult to categorize.
Lumley’s next sequence consisted of Psy-
chomech (1985), Psychosphere (1985), and Psy-
chamok(1986). A man endowed with superhuman
powers struggles to disrupt a villainous plot that is
aided by occult powers, a theme he used again in
Demogorgon (1987), this time pitting his hero
against direct satanic intervention. Lumley also
tried his hand, though less successfully, with heroic
fantasy in a sequence that includes Hero of Dreams
(1986), Ship of Dreams (1986), Mad Moon of
Dreams(1987), Elysia(1989), and Iced on Aran
(1990). In each volume David Hero travels
through one or more dreamlands, battling an evil
queen and her army of zombie warriors or facing
down other foes. The series is ostensibly linked to
The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath(1943) by
Lovecraft, but the connection is tenuous at best.
It was with Necroscope(1986) that Lumley
leaped into the foremost ranks of horror writers.
Harry Keogh is the Necroscope, that is, he can lit-
erally speak to the dead. He uses this talent in the
service of British Intelligence, but unfortunately
one of his communist counterparts has made con-
tact with a super vampire from another reality and
has become infected with the taint. Lumley’s vam-
pires, more properly vamphyri, are far more power-
ful and dangerous than those found in most other
horror fiction. In Vamphyri!(1988), the vampire
lord begins raising an army of his kind in prepara-
tion for seizing control of the Earth. Keogh discov-
ers that the Russians have opened a portal between
universes and pays an extended and unpleasant
visit to the vampire world in The Source(1989).
Lumley continued the sequence with Dead-
speak (1990) and Deadspawn(1991). Humanity
has supposedly driven out the alien vampires and
devastated their world as well, but some of the
creatures are masters of occult sorcery and have
not abandoned their quest to manipulate humans,
particularly within the Soviet Union, in order to
achieve their ends. Switching emphasis slightly,
Lumley then wrote a trilogy set solely within the
vampire universe, Blood Brothers(1992), The Last
Aerie(1993), and Bloodwars(1994). Harry Keogh
had two sons before his death, one of whom findsLumley, Brian 223