THE DEEP ONES: "Children of the Kingdom" by T. E. D. Klein

"Children of the Kingdom" by T. E. D. Klein

Discussion begins August 18, 2021.

First published in Dark Forces 1980



BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?43747

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

13 Short Horror Novels
Dark Gods

ONLINE VERSIONS

No online versions found to date.

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

No online audio versions found to date.

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._E._D._Klein
https://tinyurl.com/273w8euh
https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/aboutsf/episodes/2012-04-27T10_41_03-07_00
https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/25149/Tibbetts_Klein.pdf?seq...
https://tinyurl.com/m8purmjb

I've started rereading this in Dark Forces.

I also started it last night; this is a longer story than our usual.

Indeed - I fear I shan't finish it before discussion starts tomorrow.

Just a little thing, but a copy of "the 1959 Harper & Row edition of The Gospel According to Thomas" was in arm's reach as I was reading this story.

To me, this seemed like Klein's attempt to write an Arthur Machen "little people" story set in the urban US, albeit with a bit of a Lovecraftian twist. I thought he pulled it off pretty well. The expressions of (human) racial tension seemed authentic to the perspectives in the story and were important to the overall theme, although I'm sure they wouldn't be written that way today.

I really got the feeling for how terrifying a city blackout could be, inhuman atavisms notwithstanding. The 1977 one in the story has its own Wikipedia article, which observes: "On July 13, 2019, on the 42nd anniversary of the event, a Con Edison blackout occurred, affecting 73,000 people on Manhattan's West Side."

A thought: The "children" attacked Mrs. Rosenzweig because she was blind like them, and that made her attractive to them. Or were they not blind? Father Pistachio's legend says they were, but the narrator's encounter at the sewer grate (at the very end of the tale) seemed to involve visual recognition.

>5 paradoxosalpha:

This American Experience documentary about the 1977 blackout is worth tracking down.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/blackout/

Not having read the story, I'm trying to piece some things together: so, an urban blackout in a collection called Dark Forces, that deserves a nod.

Given the comments about blind Mrs Rosenzweig and (possibly) the children, is the title a reference to the adage, "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed is king" ? Certainly I wasn't thinking of that when reading the title itself.

The "kingdom" of the title is chiefly the one from the Gospel of Thomas: "the Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth, but men are blind and do not see it."

There's a reference to a reproduction of a painting The Children of the Kingdom by Rousseau (it hangs in the lobby of the Park West Manor), but I haven't managed to find an image of that.

This was a re-read for me. I managed to get a UK paperback of Dark Gods from AbeBooks a few years ago (the first British publication according to the back cover blurb. And, appropriately enough, given the nod to Arthur Machen in this story, published by Pan Books).

I was more uncomfortable with the “expressions of racial tension” this time round, although I recognise the work they do in setting the mood of urban paranoia and providing misdirection regarding the perpetrators of the attacks. A red herring, in mystery story terms.

There are, as I said, nods to Machen here: the “lost race” living hidden underground, the sign scratched on the wall, even their being “white people”. The notion of them being “on the move” is not present in Machen and does feel like something more Lovecraftian - the paranoia of an otherworldly or supernatural threat that no one else is aware of (and I did note that “Xo Tl’mi-go” (coincidentally? or fortuitously?) includes “Mi-Go”).

A while ago somebody asked about the ending of this story in another thread. The question was, basically, is the figure glimpsed in the sewer opening “just” one of the children, or is it a transfigured Father Pistachio? At the time I had recently re-read “The Novel of the Black Seal” while “Children of the Kingdom” had faded a bit in my memory. I flicked through it, to try to refresh my memory. I suggested that maybe the Father is the result of a previous assault by one of the “children” and like the boy Cradock in Machen’s “novel”, has inherited strange knowledge and maybe exhibits atavism (in the biological sense) - here ultimately transforming fully into one of them.

The problem is, on rereading the story properly, if that was what Ted Klein intended, it wasn’t really seeded earlier in the story and what’s more, the circled quotation from the Gospel of St Thomas suggests it’s contact {with the children} that effects the change: ‘Whoever feels the touch of my hand shall become as I am’… ‘“Está hecho.” It is done.’ But then, what about all the women attacked and impregnated by these things during the blackout. Perhaps the reader is supposed to think “what indeed”, and get to the end the story half a step ahead of a narrator as yet ignorant of a final horror.

I like the idea of the sewer lurker being the transformed Pistachio. It helps account for why it can see, and why it specifically recognizes the narrator.

>5 paradoxosalpha: and >10 housefulofpaper: I'm pretty sure this story would not get published as is today.

The Machen resemblance I hadn't considered. I suppose I was more struck by personal resonances. I've taken some late night bus rides in my time, and the experience is captured well at the beginning -- though, I hasten to add, I never arrived three blocks from home in an eerie and unrecognized setting. And that description of the looters lining up to loot stores was repeated in footage from last year at a Minneapolis Target store.

I also was puzzled by the ending. I took it to be Pistachio somehow transformed by the tapeworm men.

I thought the sudden bolt by the narrator to the laundry room a nice example of, as Lovecraft might say, his mind suddenly correlating all its contents.

The narrator seemed a deadened personality through most of the story. There's a scene where he sees a street fight, and it doesn't really faze him. Just another something to cast a wary eye on. Of course, given the depiction of the NYPD, it's not like he's going to bother calling them.

As to the mechanics of the tapeworm men reproducing without penises, well, I did wonder about them, but it was best Klein didn't go there.

Looking up the Ameghino Brothers, I see Klein sums their claims up fairly accurately.

I had no doubt that the creature in the sewer was the missing Father Pistachio, but I've always wondered why Klein chose to add the pile of pistachio shells. Seems too obvious.

I also wonder if that unnerving sewer grate sequence inspired a similar one found in a certain 1,138 page horror epic that came along just a few years later.

When I first read this story in 1980, I thought that it and Wagner's "Where the Summer Ends" were the two standouts in the very strong Dark Forces collection. They seemed to compliment each other nicely, and I've always considered them to be two classics of 20th century horror lit. Even better that they both still carry that strong 1970's horror feel.

>13 semdetenebre: I've always wondered why Klein chose to add the pile of pistachio shells. Seems too obvious.

He did it for thick-headed readers like me who have trouble getting the hint.

>10 housefulofpaper: I suggested that maybe the Father ... has inherited strange knowledge and maybe exhibits atavism (in the biological sense) - here ultimately transforming fully into one of them.

I think the way to split the difference, and to account for Pistachio's susceptibility to the atavism (to make it an actual atavism for him) is to observe that he is from Paraiso, "ground zero" of the conflict with the usurpadores--so that he has some of their taint deep in his genealogy, rather than just one generation back. Contact with them in New York is still the means by which his transformation is effected.

>14 paradoxosalpha:

:-D

If anyone missed the Washington Post review in the first tinyurl link up in #1, Providence After Dark and Other Writings is a fantastic, thick collection of non-fiction work written by Klein over the course of his career. Lots on HPL, on-ground reporting from the first World Fantasy Convention, stuff from his brief-yet-well-remembered tenure as editor of Twilight Zone Magazine, reviews, run-ins with other authors.... just tons of stuff likely to be of interest to members of the WT. It's also inexpensive and easily found on Amazon or the Hippocampus Press website, among other places.

10 Housefulofpaper - that was my question, on the 'Black Man with a Horn' thread, from the first time I was reading Dark Gods. I have just reread this story, and I think it is certainly an effective fusion of Lovecraft and Machen, with the added underground urban element of Robert Barbour Johnson's 'Far Below'.

I thought it was quite interesting to note that Father Pistachio's comments regarding how Spanish conquistadors viewed the Aztec's practices of "something like Christianity" (with examples) as a degeneration of 'true Christianity' very closely reflects a paragraph to the same effect (with similar specified examples) in a work by Joseph Campbell.

I agree that it is certainly unclear the extent to which the usurpers are blind, but on closer reading I find that Father Pistachio further says that "for them, is no more sunlight, no more day" - while he may interpreted this aspect of their story to literally mean they are blind, I think there is sufficient scope to interpret these words to mean that they were driven underground (qv. the very pale skin and, if the description of the helmet of the usurpers in Father Pistachio's book is accurate, very tiny eyes which may be related to extreme sensitivity to light). Father Pistachio may signify that he believes they are blind, but I think it is willing to assume that his knowledge may not be perfect or exact.

I think this is the strongest of the four stories contained in Dark Gods.

Would anyone venture a guess as to why one of the usurpers hanged the girl he had seduced (described early on in the story), rather than attempting to impregnate her as was done to so many others during the blackout?

I think 15 is also a good point, regarding the atavism and ‘Whoever feels the touch of my hand shall become as I am...’, and I think it is possible that this transformation takes place in stages, both for men and women, to the extent they are not immediately killed or, in the case of the women, impregnated by the usurpers.

Got around to finally finishing this today. Good story.

The usurpadores made me think of one of the few X-Files episodes I ever saw, which involved some sort of tapeworm-man. Wonder if this was an inspiration?

Incidentally, (Lovecraft's) deep ones seem positively chivalrous by comparison, only mating with humans who, more-or-less, consent.

Couldn't help but think of the blackouts that were a semi-regular part of my childhood. They were far less apocalyptic, though.