Name: Image of the Beast
Rating: 2 (1 reviews)

Philip José Farmer

"A love-murder is recorded as a home movie. It shows the transformation of a woman into a wolf."--p. [4] of cover.

Image of the Beast

Tim Pendry

Shall we start with a warning for those of a tender mental disposition? This has substantial sections of pretty hard core pornography, much of it of a very Sadean quality. So that's that! The crime that starts the tale is of exceptional nastiness and will have any male squirming in their chairs ... and the tantric covertings of alien creatures leave nothing to the imagination. But it is also a rather curious quasi-satire, mostly well written, on the American imagination. Put the sex to one side (hard though that is to do) and it might be seen as an unusual literary experiment in pulp. The book is divided into two broadly equal halves - two novellae - which mirror each other in multiple ways. As so often with Farmer, the cultural references come as thick and fast as his hero's 'jism'. The second half is weaker with some of Farmer's failings too obvious - dull autistic accounts of sets of events that do not need such detail - but it does continue the ironic theme and should be persevered with. What he is doing is pulling the pulp world of his literary peers into line as a science fiction story (though this is not clear until the second half) with a myth of sexual energy as space travel. The first half plays with motifs from Chandleresque private eye literature (the 'private dick'), Lovecraftian horror and the cult of the monster as envisaged by Universal Studios. In fact, Farmer has worked hard to make his universe, where vampires, werewolves, ghosts and warring aliens are real, as plausible as could be possible and does surprisingly well. The second half weaves in a science fiction fantasy of the Golden Age ... as if Gersback and Campbell were no longer sexually neutered nerds but had allowed sexual transgression into their repertoire. There is also a mirrored apocalyptic strand that speaks indirectly to the sociological SF of the period in which the book was written (1968) - polluted fog rules part one and floods and mud slides part 2. Do we take this book of sexual violence and perversion seriously? Half so. It was written for cash for a porn publisher but Farmer was too intense not to try to give the work some high camp meaning. Theodore Sturgeon rightly produced a quizzical short introduction and urges it not be dismissed for what it appears to be and perhaps he is right. The work stands as an unusual contribution to SF (and to pornography) but it does raise an interesting issue - the ability of science fiction and the horror genre to avoid sexuality at every turn. This is, of course, derivative of both the era (from the 1930s to 1950s) and of the audience, mostly young adolescents, but it is also a response to the Californian and maturing SF audience of the day. Farmer is about 50 when he writes this - observing the new sexual freedom as someone probably too late to benefit from it yet open-minded enough to deal with it. He had broken the taboo on sex in sex fiction in his mid-30s with the 'The Lovers' and influenced Heinlein. He was part of a maturing of the literary form that we now take for granted. Farmer picks up on the sexual theme and then adds an interesting twist by linking sex and violence to the 'energetics' of the physics of space opera and horror, not entirely successfully but suggestively. I suspect most readers would find this book too much to take - I can detach myself from literary horrors because I have a strong sense of the difference between reality and text but others may not. It is a curiosity that stays in the library but the theme possibly still awaits someone who can pull the transgressionary powers identified here into a narrative that is more scientific. All the 'greats' of science fiction and horror tend to evade overt sexuality because their transgressional and imaginative leaps are sexual evasions in any case. Their frisson lies in this quality. Farmer tries to make sex explicit and opens a door in the middle of the Californian sexual revolution, offers suggestive thoughts and horrors but he fails to 'clinch the deal'. The book is, in the end, yet another evasion, too arch, too high camp, too obvious.

Sarah Sammis

As cheesy as Manos Hands of Fate but in Los Angeles.

Image of the Beast

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