Combat Monsters: Untold Tales of World War II, edited by Henry Herz: Review by Paul Di Filippo
Combat Monsters: Untold Tales of World War II, edited by Henry Herz (Blackstone 979-8874748432, trade paperback, 384pp, $18.99) February 2025
Henry Herz, we learn from the ancillary matter in the new original anthology Combat Monsters, has assembled six other anthologies, and yet I found myself unfamiliar with his name. The answer to my lamentable ignorance is that his prior books are intended for the Young Adult market — a genre over which I have lost all semblance of mental inventory, so manifold are its offerings. (Herz also has his prominent fiction-writing side, but even of that I was shamefully unaware.). In any case, this new book, the first of his aimed at adult readers, exhibits the proficiency he has attained from his curatorial track record. The collection’s premise is strong, its contributors varied, its stories uniformly good (with a few standouts) and its associational historical material comprehensive. Here’s hoping Herz focuses more of his time and talents on older readers.
The novum at work here is simple, and even perhaps widely familiar: the premise that the World War II era has a Secret History featuring occult phenomena. Touched on briefly in the coeval comic books of the 1940s, the trope took off like a scalded gryphon with Raiders of the Lost Ark. Since then, a solid handful of books and films have utilized the idea, with a franchise like Hellboy showing how intriguing it could be. Even a feature like James Gunn’s Creature Commandos, set in the present, has its roots in WWII.
It continues to amaze me that this seminal event, now over eighty years old, manages to exert such a strong allure over readers and writers who are several generations distant from that heroic and malign global catastrophe. The existence of the novel at the unsurpassable apex of the Occult WWII trend, Gravity’s Rainbow, is somewhat explainable by the fact that its author was a child during the war (Pynchon was born in 1937) and that the war was then only thirty years distant (GR appeared in 1973). But so long as 21st-century authors show interest and capacity to play fruitfully in this arena, I say we should welcome their innovations.
Let me see if I can step briefly through the stories, to indicate their variety. I should mention that all the stories are arranged chronologically (a great idea on Herz’s part) and are also “interstitial history.” In other words, they do not posit alternative timelines, but instead give us doings that occur in our timeline, but which got concealed and/or forgotten. Additionally, Herz offers a handy appendix outlining the real events behind each story.
Poems by Jane Yolen bookend the tales. Up front is “Wolf Remains”, which inserts a jab of lost romance into a werewolf scenario. Closing out the volume is “The Selkie’s Job”, whose clever rhymes highlight a Gorey-esque climax.
Mary Fan’s “The Night the Moon Burned” centers us in Japan-invaded China. Young civilian Weiyang, in the midst of battle, finds his life saved by a “qilin.” “Tall and proud, it emerged from the conflagration that had been a temple…its lone horn [glinting]…”
In bardic cadences, Eugen Bacon brings us to Africa in “Kinje’kitile and the Jintu”. Bazi, a local soldier allied with the British, must summon supernatural help to deal with overwhelming battlefield opponents. “It gulped everyone but them. The haze…dissipated, but a god-awful smell stayed wrapped around each man for days.”
A tentacled kraken is wakened by the ministrations of naïve soldier Oliver Lightoller in Jeff Edwards’s “The Fourth Man”. “It was a sinuous rope of living tissue. Snakelike muscles under a sheath of pale blubber.”
Peter Clines delivers “The Night Crew”, wherein the trading ship Sea Ghost reveals its undead sailors in a rousing encounter with a Nazi battleship. “One dropped down from the mast, trailing fog behind him, and landed on the deck like a man jumping off a high step.”
From Lee Murray comes “Breakout”. One of a handful of stories told at least partially from the Nazi POV, this suspenseful piece gives us the hunt for an escaped Nazi super serpent in the deserts of North Africa. “The thing was huge. A creature of legend, It swayed, its white belly glistening in the lamplight.” Very Conanesque!
In “Nachthexen”, by Bishop O’Connell, Vera Belik, Soviet flight navigator, finds herself assigned to an all-female squadron. Events soon prove that these women are not simple mortals. “We are vid’ma. We have many friends, and not all are of this world.”
Tori Eldridge shifts the scene to the South Pacific in “Gods of the Sea”. American sailor Nalu Keli’I finds himself adrift with another sailor, and their only hope for rescue is a Polynesian invocation. “The creature was so enormous and close that all Nalu could see were its spines and scales, sparkling like billions of faceted aquamarines.”
Borrowing—with permission—Roger Zelazny’s supernatural kallikantzaros hero from This Immortal, and capturing Zelazny’s voice as well, the highly accomplished Harry Turtledove deals with guerilla sabotage in “Gorgopotamos Bridge”. “Apparently the German had brought a river troll from the north to help them hold the bridge. It was taller than a man and wider than a man…and uglier [than me].”
Catherine Stine incorporates an anomalous but very welcome SF slant in “Grigoriy’s Army”. A Russian idiot savant and pacifistic farmer genetically engineers an army of intelligent bears to help around the farm, which the military now wants to enlist for warfare. “The beasts galloped with preternatural speed, almost flying toward their prey…He’d enhanced them with hawk and fox DNA…. Still, [Grigoriy] was astounded at their speed.”
One of my fave tales, along with the Turtledove, is Scott Sigler’s “Svart Hund”, which possesses a bit of cosmic horror. A team of commandos assigned to destroy the German research station attempting to craft an A-bomb receives help from an unlikely source: an old man carrying a mysterious box. “The old man pressed both hands against the box’s lid, which vibrated spasmodically, as if something inside was trying to force its way out.”
Gaby Triana, in “CS-13”, shows us doings in the Caribbean. Ensign Mario Delgado, helping with the hunt for an enemy sub, is shocked to discover that the tales of his ancient granny concerning denizens of the waves are true. “The creatures swarmed the submarine, slender feminine arms with human hands, elongated webbed fingers carrying ropes of seaweed and kelp.”
Our editor himself contributes a story: “Das Mammut”. Soviet troops in Siberia must face a giant Nazi mechanical war behemoth. (I was reminded of the Golden Age adventures of the Blackhawk team against the “War Wheel.”) “Trucks seemed like insects next to the Mammut.”
A Puerto Rican infantryman named Jorge finds himself in Salerno, Italy, in Ann Dávila Cardinal’s “Best Behave”. The author gives us the first really interpersonal, small-scale tale, as she recounts what happens to a marauding American soldier who trespasses on an elderly Italian woman whom Jorge has befriended. “[Jorge] stared wide-eyed into Williams’s rigid face as it rose, the big man’s feet leaving the ground…”
The story I rate most highly in this fine anthology is Jonathan Maberry’s “A Terrible Aspect”. It has a faint flavor of Poul Anderson’s classic Operation Chaos. In its depiction of a mysterious man and woman non-human teaming up to conquer a common enemy, there’s some great sexual tension and glamour. Maberry’s narrative voice is almost noirish. “He understood. He was old too. Far older than he looked. And time had left its marks on him.”
A Chinese-American brother and sister, safe in the USA, are torn apart by the brother’s instincts to use his magical powers to protect the homeland. Will his sister come around to his way of thinking? “Suze had never assumed a dragon’s form as easily or as contentedly as Nathaniel had.” Thus runs Andrea Tang’s “Guardian of the Burma Road”.
Another story enmeshed in the Nazi perspective is “Bound and Chained”, by Kevin Andrew Murphy. Its focus on Clothilde von Penzlin and her bibliophile’s fascination with a certain grimoire offers a pleasant change from battlefield doings. “The chains rattled again, the book swaying and swinging, as if to break free.”
In the swamps of Burma, a squad of Allied soldiers encounter what at first appears to be “simply” a monster croc. But then: “[A] bulge of pink flesh [roiled] up out of the creature’s throat. Then, all at once, eight twisting limbs burst out like streamers at a parade.” So goes “The Scenic Route”, by Jeremy Robinson.
Can a single man named Henry Fitzroy clear out all the Nazis singlehandedly, from within a besieged town in the Netherlands? Tanya Huff gives us the answer in “Apeldoorn”. “Henry let the Hunger rise. He caught the sergeant’s red-rimmed gaze and held it, ripping open his uniform to expose his throat…”
The book closes with a piece I’d rank among the standouts: “Bockscar”, by David Mack. On the plane with the A-bomb, heading towards Nagasaki, our hero contemplates a mutiny against a seeming war crime of using two A-bombs where one was enough. But his mind is changed when some news comes through. “A three-headed monstrosity [has risen] from Hiroshima Bay…”
* * *
It should be mentioned that all of these authors seem to have done tremendous research, which they convey gracefully. Places, climate and culture are nicely limned. And the specifics of weaponry and tactics receive the same attention towards verisimilitude.
Despite their varied and non-repeating characters and backgrounds, these stories do cohere into a kind of shared-world tapestry, exhibiting an organic feel of unity. The reader might imagine himself a seasoned newspaper correspondent, bopping around the globe from one hotspot to another, and meeting these uncanny creatures, accumulating notes for stories that the press will never dare to print.
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