Frozen Hell
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- Publication Date: October 8, 2019
- Written by: John W. Campbell, Jr.
- Illustrated by: Bob Eggleton
- Page count: 158
Frozen Hell is a unique pick in my book collection - unique in that it's actually an earlier draft of a much more famous work. You've probably heard of it under its later title: Who Goes There?, which was the basis for films such as The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter's The Thing. The introduction of the book offers a little bit of backstory behind its existence. Essentially, when John W. Campbell, Jr. submitted this draft of the story to a magazine for publication, it was rejected. His editor felt that it was a good story, but it lacked characters and needed more of a punch. Campbell then revised his work, cutting off the first three and a half chapters and writing a new introductory sequence to get the reader to the horror of the story at a quicker pace. This draft remained hidden away in an archive for decades until it was finally discovered in 2018. Who Goes There? is a classic in the genre of pulp science fiction / horror, and this prototype version gives some great insight into how it evolved into a more effective work.
The biggest difference between this book and its later form is how it gets to the main action of its story. While Who Goes There? begins with its cast of Antarctic researchers having already discovered the horrific shape-shifting alien, Frozen Hell spends its first three chapters showing how they found it in the first place. These events are described in exposition form in the revised version, but they're shown in full detail here. This part of the book feels a lot more like an adventure story, showing a bit of the researchers' daily lives and featuring some vivid descriptions of the harsh and frigid environment around them. The more slow-burn introduction paves the way to a great tonal clash once they discover the alien, as once it thaws out, the story completely flips from thrilling and exciting to ever-escalating fear and paranoia. However, it is fairly obvious why Campbell chose to delete this part of the book. Many of the characters here do feel weak in terms of unique traits or development, and aside from their names and occupations, they all feel very similar to each other. They also have a tendency to speak in chunks of exposition dialogue, either describing what Antarctic weather is like or explaining how their scientific instruments work. There's even a part where the character of McReady tells a colleague of a dream they had, and it's just incredibly obvious foreshadowing for the events that are about to unfold. It's easy to see why he chose to condense these events into one chapter's worth of explanation in the final form, but even that was a massive dump of exposition for that story. Whether you choose to go with the full version of events or the truncated version, both stories sync up in the fourth chapter when the alien escapes from its encasing of ice.
For the remainder of the book, it plays out in more or less the exact same way Who Goes There? does. All of the events that were made famous in the film adaptations are present here; the alien hiding amongst the pack of dogs, the blood tests to determine whether or not someone is human, characters losing their minds and getting isolated from the others, and so on. The alien encounter scenes are written in a very fast-paced way, and the sudden increase of violence is given more impact after several chapters' worth of buildup. The film adaptations may show how scary it is to have a shape-shifting alien around you and not being able to identify it, but this book expands on that idea just a little bit. There is one scene where the alien is said to have gone into hiding amongst the researchers' cattle, and as the characters are theorizing how its body chemistry works, one person pitches the idea of it breaking itself down enough to be able to mimic the milk that comes out of a cow. The idea of drinking a glass of milk that is actually a shape-shifter waiting to transform you from the inside out is absolutely horrifying, and it's thoughts like this that send the characters into an ever-worsening spiral of paranoia. Near the end, the researchers are at the point where they're prepared to kill anyone who has the slightest chance of being an alien, even ganging up on one imitation and ripping it apart with their bare hands. When this story was written in 1937, it must have been one of the most nail-biting tales ever featured in the pages of pulp fiction, and it remains just as effective all these decades later.
Whether you're a fan of its film adaptations or pulp science fiction in general, Frozen Hell is well worth reading. It may be rough around the edges with its exposition dialogue and the occasional uncorrected misspelling / misuse of punctuation, but it's not too often that readers get a chance to experience a famous story before it was trimmed and edited into its perfected form. Whether you choose to go with the expanded version or the shorter and punchier one, the thick tension and visceral imagery at the heart of the story is some of the best of its genre.