Writing popular fiction

can use all the motivations mentioned in Chapter One, except Duty, to involve the hero in occult or religious experimentation to get your plot moving: He loves a particular woman and wants to enchant her so she'll love him, and he thereby gets mixed up with the Dark Powers; or he wants to become rich and seeks Satanic help towards this end; he seeks a more horrible revenge on an enemy than society could ever take; his own world is not as he wants it, and either to preserve his emotional-mental state or to preserve his physical state, he deals with the Dark Powers; or he is simply curious, without realizing the dangers involved in consorting with demons (as in James Blish's
Black Easter)
, And, of course, as in
The Exorcist
or
Dracula
, he may find himself the victim of supernatural beings, without generating the situation himself.
    As for characterizing your supernatural villain, just remember that he must be deeply evil, that his every goal should be connected with death or pain or eternal damnation. He is motivated, always, by a supernatural drive, a lust for blood or death, that a man could never quite understand. He may, at times, rue his own fate—he may, on rare occasion, have a fleeting thought that he is trapped in a hellish role—but he can never disavow that role.

SWORD AND SORCERY
    The plot of a sword and sorcery novel invariably concerns a quest—at the order of the queen, king, sorcerer, or some-such—for jewels, wealth, magic totems, sacred relics, magic texts, a charmed locket or mystical artifact, or for a lovely and nubile girl kidnapped by evil, barbarian people. Subsequently, the hero engages in a long journey and/or chase, searching for the missing quantity, encountering beasts and magics that try to stop him. He usually finds what he wants. The form takes its name from the action of the story, which is nearly always generated by the clash between swords and sorcery—the hero preferring the more human weapon in his battle against inhuman forces that have magical powers.
    Like Lovecraft's work, sword and sorcery novels are always being reprinted—primarily in paperback—and enjoy a cyclical popularity boom that can widen the market considerably for several years at a time before the readership is satiated. Robert E. Howard's books about Conan the Barbarian—a muscular soldier of fortune, barbarian king, saviour of virgins, slayer of dragons, antagonist of sorcerers, and all-around superman—enjoyed enormous popularity beginning in the middle 1960's (
Conan, Conan of Cimmeria
,
Conan the Freebooter, Conan the Wanderer, Conan the Adventurer
, and so on). Michael Moorcock's novels about Elric, another swordsman, and Fritz Leiber's excellent series about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser have also won steady patronage from a large number of readers.
    The end-all and be-all of sword and sorcery is action. The delicious anticipation of horror in the dark fantasy is sacrificed for one explosive fight and chase sequence piled atop another. Whereas, in science fiction, the background is the most important element, the pace is the most vital thing about this sub-type of fantasy; it should be breakneck.
    Unfortunately, the bulk of sword and sorcery fiction is distinctly inferior, regardless of its color and verve. This is true, primarily, because too many writers forget that plot complications must be generated by a character's actions and not by one whim of Fate after another. Desperate to accelerate the pace, writers construct series of obstacles which they then propel the hero through, never realizing that the lack of cause and effect in the plotting eventually leads to boredom.
    This is the
right
way to establish the challenges in a hypothetical heroic quest: Your hero is stubborn, bullheaded but a likable fellow who won't quit until the job is done. He accepts an assignment from a White Magician to find the magician's daughter who has been kidnapped and carried off by a Black Magician, an evil sorcerer. When the hero reaches the borders of the warlock's kingdom, he receives a supernatural warning to stay away. Being the kind of man he is, he ignores the warning and plunges ahead. Now, when the warlock
dispatches legions of the living dead and countless other forces to kill the hero, the successive battles are due to cause and effect: the prime cause is the hero's personality.
    Too often, writers do not develop cause and effect, but confront their heroes with monsters and supernatural forces in a