SFTB 5.4: "Lizard Men of Los Angeles" by Lewis Shiner

“Lizard Men of Los Angeles” originally appeared as the cover story of the July 1999 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; the fun and lively art is by Kent Bash.

This installment of Stories from the Borderland marks only the third time Michael Bukowski and I have presented a Weird tale by a living author. The last was “Hippie Hat Brain Parasite” by William Gibson, and I am particularly proud of our work on that one. I dug deep for that piece, and during my research, I discovered that the first of the story’s only two publications, both relatively obscure, was in a 1983 fanzine called Modern Stories, published by Gibson’s fellow Cyberpunk[1] author Lewis Shiner. Thanks to another essential Cyberpunk author and The Outer Dark Symposium and Podcast guest, Marc Laidlaw, I was able to connect with Shiner, and he was so generous as to send me an original copy of Modern Stories.

During the process of writing the Gibson piece, I took Shiner’s own books down from my shelf, and after Michael Bukowski and I had posted the “Hippie Hat Brain Parasite” episode as Stories from the Borderland #17 in 2017, I reopened his Collected Stories (2009, Subterranean Press, introduction by Karen Joy Fowler) and asked myself whether his oeuvre might itself contain a story that would fit this project. As with many other science fiction authors we have presented here, one tale leapt out right away as Weird: a retro-pulp adventure by the title of “Lizard Men of Los Angeles” that originally appeared as the cover story of the July 1999 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction[2]. This novelette has yet to be reprinted outside of the three editions of Shiner’s Collected Stories, although Shiner himself has made it available online here, along with the bulk of his work, including one of my all-time favorite novels, Glimpses (1993), which won a World Fantasy Award the following year.

“Lizard Men of Los Angeles” is a distinctly pulpy outing, set in 1934 and incorporating none other than Aleister Crowley[3] as a secondary antagonist.3 Other less famous historical figures pin this story even more closely and uniquely to its time. In a note that follows his Collected Stories, Shiner explains that Joe R. Lansdale had originally approached him about submitting a story to a pulp-themed anthology, which Shiner initially resisted because he “didn’t write pulp stories.” But Lansdale persisted, and Shiner took some time to consider his enjoyment of such iconic pulp authors as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and H. P. Lovecraft. Eventually, a story took shape, but by the time it came to fruition, Lansdale had cancelled the anthology: thus, over to F&SF, and Shiner’s first (and only) cover story out of seven appearances in that magazine.

Map of underground tunnels of the lizard people, as advocated by George Warren Shufelt (pictured, below left), which appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times on January 29, 1934.

Now here’s the bonkers part: Shiner didn’t make up the lizard men of Los Angeles. They were a real thing back in the 1930s. No, cold-blooded bipedal reptiloids were not bopping about beneath the streets of L.A., but back then some people really claimed that they were, and other folks believed them. Shiner’s story is as much about this history as it is about the reptiloids themselves. The driving figure behind this gonzo modern myth was one George Warren Shufelt (1886–1957), who managed to get his ideas on the front page of the Los Angeles Times on January 29, 1934. Shufelt claimed to have invented a “radio x-ray” device, and to have mapped with it a series of tunnels beneath the city, a labyrinth that roughly formed the image of a giant reptile, if one is forgiving in one’s sense of pareidolia.

What’s more, according to Shufelt, these tunnels supposedly contained GOLD—specifically, golden tablets that explained the history of humanity, a purported narrative suspiciously similar to Joseph’s Smith’s “Golden plates” that allegedly provided the basis of the Book of Mormon. In fact, Shufelt’s “true-fiction” stories about the lizard men represent an important bridge between such older pseudo-histories of the Americas and the Shaver Mystery, an even more complex set of narratives than Shufelt’s (who was more cartographer than storyteller) about ancient civilizations living inside the earth. Installments of the Shaver Mystery began to appear in Amazing Stories and other magazines in 1943, written by Richard Sharpe Shaver (1907–1975), and promoted by the magazine’s editor, Ray(mond) Alfred Palmer (1910–1977). In retrospect, it is easy to see that Shaver suffered from some sort of mental illness, most likely a form of schizophrenia, but at the time, his tales of Atlanteans, Lemurians, and “Deros” (his proprietary and enduring contribution) captured some portion of the public imagination. Considering the explosion of outré conspiracy theories we have all seen since the spread of the Internet, including everything from an allegedly satanic blue horse statue in the Denver International Airport to the revival of flat-earthism and the rise of the sinister and barely comprehensible QAnon, with its roots in the unhinged rumors that led a deranged gunman to force his way into a family pizza restaurant in Washington, DC, on December 4, 2016, the wild stories and the secret messages that Shaver believed he could read written inside rocks seem almost innocent by comparison. The same goes for Shufelt’s tales of tunnels and gold and his elaborate maps.

Shiner includes Shufelt as a character in his story, although the mining engineer has died or disappeared prior to the events of the tale, the manner of his disappearance similar to that of the occultist Harley Warren in Lovecraft’s 1920 story “The Statement of Randolph Carter.” In real life, Shufelt lived until 1957, dying in North Hollywood after falling once more into obscurity.

Cairo employs hypnotic abilities in much the same way as Mandrake the Magician, whose comic strip by Lee Falk first appeared in 1934[4], the same year in which Shiner set “Lizard Men of Los Angeles.”

Outside of Crowley and Shufelt, however, the rest of Shiner’s cast is altogether fictional, especially the protagonists Johnny Cairo and Mrs. Lockhart: occult detectives, stage magicians, and members of a traveling vaudeville troupe. Cairo employs hypnotic abilities in much the same way as Mandrake the Magician, whose comic strip by Lee Falk first appeared in 1934[4], the same year in which Shiner set “Lizard Men of Los Angeles.” One can also look back a few years earlier to the first appearance of The Shadow in 1930, another character with hypnotic powers. Both Mandrake and The Shadow are recognized as among the very earliest superheroes, and Johnny Cairo clearly learned to gesture hypnotically via the same correspondence course that they did.

The story’s primary antagonist is starlet Veronica Fleming (Vera Rosenberg), whose father Emil hires Cairo and Lockhart to locate, believing that she has fallen in with Crowley’s crew of libertines. This part of the plot echoes the beginning of The Big Sleep, the 1939 debut novel by Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), and of its infamously convoluted 1944 film adaptation by Howard Hawks (1896–1977), starring Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957). The plot of The Big Sleep, novel and film, also provided the basis for the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski (1998), and Hawks later directed The Thing from Another World (1951), a film that will likely be familiar to most of our readers here at Stories from the Borderland, given that we discussed it, the story it was based on, and its several other adaptations, in our sixth installment.

Once Shiner has established this nexus of the occult and the hardboiled, including a duel of swords and poetry criticism between Cairo, Crowley, and the latter’s scimitar-wielding bodyguard, he takes us beneath the streets of Los Angeles to reveal the world of Shufelt’s fantasias, replete with tunnels, lizard men, golden tablets, and universal solvents. To be sure, Shufelt eventually revised his stories and claimed that the lizard men were not actually reptilians but an ancient race of lizard-worshipping humans, information that he claimed he acquired from a Hopi chief. Although the Hopi do have a Lizard Clan, neither the clan nor its traditions bear any resemblance to Shufelt’s bunkum.

As an archaeologist, I find all these pseudo-histories exceptionally problematic: Shaver, Shufelt, Joseph Smith, the Myth of the [White] Moundbuilders, Erich Von Däniken, Thor Heyerdahl, Barry Fell, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012). All those stories of Atlanteans, Lemurians, prehistoric trans-oceanic contacts, or ancient space gods are bullshit, with deep undercurrents of racism: the implicit message is always that “brown people couldn’t build monumental architecture.” But in “Lizard Men of Los Angeles,” Shiner only plays on Shufelt’s stories for fun, as obvious fiction, with no real investment in the questionable source material beyond its entertainment value. In another way, however, the problematic aspects of the source material have multiplied beyond anything Shiner might have imagined when he was writing this story and simply having a great time creating an homage to/satire of the pulps and their historical context. Moreover, the roots of some of these problems lie in the pulps themselves.

“The Shadow Kingdom,” the first Kull story by Robert E. Howard (Weird Tales, August 1929), may have featured the first reptilian conspiracy plotline.

In fact, Syracuse University political science professor Michael Barkun has suggested that the earliest appearance of a reptilian conspiracy theory actually came from author Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) in his novelette “The Shadow Kingdom,” published in Weird Tales in August 1929. “The Shadow Kingdom” was the first of Howard’s stories featuring Kull, his second-most famous recurring character. Howard most likely drew inspiration for this story—and for much of his worldbuilding—from the Theosophical writings of Madame Blavatsky (1831–1891). Although Howard never mentioned his serpent men again, other writers picked up on them and eventually made them part of the popular culture. One of their most memorable appearances—for me at least—was in “The Sentry,” the twentieth and final episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which aired on March 28, 1975 (hard to believe that show closed up shop nearly half a century ago—and that Shiner’s story marks almost the halfway point between then and now). In the Night Stalker episode, however, the lizard men make tunnels, but they make no effort to impersonate humans, which is the central theme of the contemporary conspiracy theories.

More recently, the idea of lizard people impersonating humans (which is nonexistent in “The Sentry” and minimal in “Lizard Men of Los Angeles”) cross-pollinated with the anti-Semitism long-prevalent on the far right, particularly in the aforementioned tangle of conspiracy theories known under the blanket name of QAnon. Although this is clearly not an association that Shiner intended in 1999—and I have discussed this with him specifically—the loathsome protoplasmic spread of QAnon and the new far right has absorbed all sorts of previously innocent cultural debris, including Pepe the Frog and upside-down OK hand signs, as Shiner himself pointed out in our emails. The sleep of reason breeds monsters[5] and we live in a time when such monsters run free.

The original movie poster for John Carpenter’s They Live (1988).

Unfortunately, the primary antagonist’s surname, “Rosenberg,” leads to another unintended complication. Although Shiner only identifies the Rosenbergs as immigrants, not Jewish, their surname suggests such an ethnicity. Mrs. Lockhart also asks Cairo near the end of the story, whether he is concerned “That cold-blooded, repugnant creatures might gain control of the film industry? How would we know the difference?” Although this line might seem to point to the all-too-common far-right assertion that “Jews control the media,” Shiner only intended it as a metaphorical sentiment on the cutthroat nature of the Hollywood film industry, similar to John Carpenter’s They Live (1988)—a film that the far right has also attempted to recontextualize and coopt into their same racist complex of conspiracy theories (see this 2017 article in The Guardian).

In a central work of philosophy’s Material Turn, archaeologist Ian Hodder wrote that “things stick to each other” (Entangled, 2012:4). In this case, over the course of 25 years, associations that Lewis Shiner never intended have accreted to a story that he wrote as entertainment and for personal enjoyment, as an amusing and mildly satirical homage to the prewar pulps. Perhaps these associations were inevitable, even if undesired: all of the three-initial authors that Shiner mentions in his notes to this story (ERB, HPL, and REH) have become posthumously synonymous with racist and anti-Semitic sentiments. This was not so much the case in 1999, however. Back then, their prejudices were less well-known and largely dismissed as the shortcomings of “men of their time.” The same practice was standard for Hemingway and many others, and their racism was written off as nothing more than background noise.

All that was back before 2016, when everything changed. How many science fiction authors anticipated the hard right shift our nation would make? Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood certainly did; Sinclair Lewis much earlier, although no evidence suggests he ever wrote or said precisely the quote so often attributed to him, and its genuine origin remains a mystery, apt as it remains.

Nevertheless, in “Lizard Men of Los Angeles,” Lewis Shiner offers his readers a bang-up neo-retro-pulp novelette based on one of the wilder ideas that actually circulated during the original pulp era and even reached the newspapers of that time. As a mélange of history, homage, tribute, and satire, Shiner’s tale is not the sort of spec-lit story intended to predict the future; instead, it presents an alternative past, much in the manner of the late, great Howard Waldrop (1946–2024). Yet one can hardly imagine even Jules Verne or H. G. Wells anticipating the current spread of extreme conspiracy theorists: anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, and those who claim that George Soros and other prominent Jewish Americans are “lizard people.” I suspect those authors would be especially disgusted by the current proliferation of moon-landing deniers, whose ranks include the prominent podcaster Joe Rogan.

“Lizard Men of Los Angeles” is a full-throttle eight-cylinder tribute to the pulps, and it draws our attention to the forgotten historical origins of the “lizard men” conspiracy theory. Although these ideas have taken on some genuinely repugnant associations in the quarter century since Shiner first published his story, he did not intend any of them; nor did he seek to expand on the personal prejudices of the authors whose work inspired him. The novelette does, however, illustrate how any homage to the pulps—let alone the pulps themselves—is potentially fraught in this regard, and it creates the necessity of a “teachable moment,” even though at heart, it’s simply a well-intentioned good-times romp in the sandbox of 1934, free from the open and explicit nastiness that has become part and parcel of American life. It even leaves the reader wanting more of the adventures of Johnny Cairo and Mrs. Lockhart—adventures which the story clearly implies wait to be told.

“Lizard Men of Los Angeles” was reprinted in Lewis Shiner’s Collected Stories (Subterranean, 2009).

That last statement is more than conjecture. At the behest of Joe R. Lansdale, and with his collaboration, Shiner actually assembled a seven-page proposal for Cairo & Lockhart as a prestige television show, and he was kind enough to share this with me during our correspondence. Shiner and Lansdale have even given us permission to quote from it below. The show would have contained all the major characters from the story, including Crowley, as well as Heinrich Himmler and other historical figures. The elevator pitch portion reads as follows:

“Stage magic, mythology, pulp fiction, and history collide in an action-adventure series that combines the thrills of the Indiana Jones movies with the mystery and weirdness of The X-Files and the paranoid suspense of the ’60s hit show The Invaders. Set in the mid-1930s, Cairo & Lockhart follows world-famous stage illusionist Johnny Cairo and his beautiful assistant, Myra Lockhart, on a journey that takes them not only to the farthest corners of this world, but also into the universe of the unexplained.” 

I suspect that one reason Cairo & Lockhart has not been picked up yet is because the Venn diagram overlap between Indiana Jones and The X-Files is already pretty broad (and the pitch has more than a little in common with the original Hellboy film [2004], which would have been in production around that time). Securing funding for a show that would have portrayed bankers as lizard people might also have presented problems.

Most significant in the context of the anti-Semitism question, however, is that Cairo’s stance toward Jewish people in the proposal is explicit and positive; he chooses to direct his operations against Nazi Germany specifically because he is “alarmed by Hitler’s threats to eradicate the Jews.” Moreover, his friends and allies would have included “Moishe Fetterman…a Hasidic Jew and a scholar of the Kabbalah.” Thus, the extended proposal clearly shows what side Cairo, Lockhart, Shiner, and Lansdale stand on in this regard, however ambiguous this might have been in the original novelette.

If all this appeals to you, cross your fingers, say a prayer, and light a candle to the “single web of relationships that binds everything in the universe together.” Although the chances for a live-action series have faded, Shiner and Lansdale are still pursuing the possibility of an animated version. This would have the additional advantage of reducing the special effects, another likely obstacle to a live-action production. Perhaps such a show would even offer the opportunity to undermine certain anti-Semitic and racist conspiracy theories.

Michael Bukowski’s drawing of one of Shiner’s lizard men is available for your viewing here.  Meanwhile, this episode leaves us with only one more in our fifth series of Stories from the Borderland. We plan to conclude next week with a clever tale by one of the more prominent woman authors who published in (but not exclusively in) Weird Tales itself. Is her work canonically “Weird”? The tale we will present certainly qualifies, but we will leave you, the reader, to decide about her status overall.

Notes:

[1]I use the term Cyberpunk in only the most general and demographic way, referring to authors of a certain time who shared certain interests, rather than as a tightly-knit artistic movement, which it was not. I am tempted to refer to them as the “Mirrorshades” authors, after the seminal, and sadly long-out-of-print 1986 anthology edited by Bruce Sterling, which includes stories by Gibson, Laidlaw, and Shiner and most (but not all) of the authors whose work loosely defined Cyberpunk while it was as much of a thing as it ever was.

[2]Shiner and I discussed how cover artist Kent Bash chose to portray Johnny Cairo and Mrs. Lockhart as part of a relatively quotidian period street scene. It’s a fun and lively cover, though not what one might expect. As it turns out, Shiner later had the opportunity to interview Bash, and discovered that the artist “is a freak for vintage cars. So he really didn’t care about Lizard Men or Lizard Queens—he was just excited to get to draw a bunch of 1930s autos . . . I’m pleased to have obliged him.” A visit to Bash’s website makes this automotive predilection clear.

[3]This is not so extraordinary, as “literary Crowleys” began to appear well before the time in which this story is set, beginning as far back as John Buchan's The Dancing Floor (1926), up to this year’s World Fantasy Award-nominated Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi. Shiner’s version of Crowley, along with his company of orgiastes, are ensconced in the David B. Gamble House in Pasadena, an architectural landmark designed by the celebrated firm of Greene and Greene. Gamble, who was rumored to be an occultist, was the son of Procter & Gamble founder James Gamble (1803-1891). Although Gamble and his wife had both passed away before the time of this story, members of their family still occupied the house in 1934.

[4]Falk’s cartoon drew heavily on the real-life illusionist Leon Mandrake, né Leon Giglio (1911-1993). In Issue 14 of the MAD comic (August 1954), “Manduck the Magician,” his assistant Lothar, and the Shadow conduct a magical battle by “gesturing hypnotically.”

[5]El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, Francisco Goya (1797-1799).