HIDDEN WORLD Volume 3: THE SHAVER MYSTERY - THERE IS A CAVERN WORLD

Congratulations! You have in hand a work that contains the only novel by Richard S. Shaver that was never released to the public in any popular, mass market, publication. Mandark was serialized in Chester S. Geir's The Shaver Mystery Magazine and published in complete form in Raymond A. Palmer's THE HIDDEN WORLD, both of which were small press, limited circulation journals available only to die-hard fans of The Shaver Mystery.

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Excerpt:

Mandark was Shaver's first effort at fictionalizing his personal discovery of "The Caves" and his initiation into the subterranean world of the Dero and the Tero. Like his last novel The Dream Makers (Fantastic Stories, July, 1958) Mandark is in some aspects autobiographical and is an essential key to understanding Shaver and his 'Mystery'. Why was Mandark never published in Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, or Other Worlds-when over twenty-five other Shaver stories and novels graced (Shaver's critics would say 'disgraced) their pages?

Because it was too controversial, even in the context of the Shaver Mystery! Rumor had it that when Mandark was submitted to Ziff-Davis one of the secretaries started to read it and was so shocked that she became physically ill. If you consider that the story features a giant black cave-baby who grows up to be 'Yahveh' and begins his telepathic instructions to the baby Jesus while he is in the Virgin Mary's womb you have an idea of why the novel never enjoyed a popular publication.

But Shaver's Biblical extrapolations in Mandark didn't end there. He went on to re-run the Samson and Delilah story, delivering his black Elder-Godling Samson (Yahveh) into the clutches of a seductive, satanic and sadistic Dero princess who devised an endless series of high-tech tortures and super-scientific agonies that would have delighted the Marquis de Sade if he had had the imagination to envision them.

All this was reason enough to exclude the novel from the popular media, however, for serious students of the Shaver Mystery this was a good thing. With Mandark we not only have Shaver 'in the raw', we have an original description of Shaver's pre-history of the Elder Gods from outer space, the origin of planet Earth and the beginning of the human race that has not been redefined and reworked by Raymond A. Palmer. "Rap" said as much in his editorial introducing the novel in HIDDEN WORLD ---"just as Shaver originally wrote it."

For people who like their alternative mythologies to fit together without contradictions or multiple choices Mandark will present some problems. Old Shaver fans (myself included) grew up on The Mystery the way Ray Palmer wanted it to develop. Palmer launched his own version at the outset by rewriting a 10,000 word essay by Shaver (A Warning to Future Man) into a 36,000 word novel I Remember Lemuria!

(Amazing Stories, March, 1945 and HW no. 1, Spring, 1961) Basically the Palmer-Shaver scenario was this: the Elder Gods came to Earth when the sun was young and healthy and sending out beneficial rays, but then the aging sun went "dis" and detrimental radiation began to affect all life on Earth. Most Elder Gods decided to leave the planet but others created a vast network of artificial caverns to escape the radiation. All this took place over 12,000 years ago. By the time civilization rose on the surface, the cave-dwellers had suffered from the radiation they had tried to escape and had mutated into a race of troglodytes roughly divided into two camps: the Dero and the Tero.

The Dero were at best evil pranksters and at worst homicidal maniacs. The Tero were nice folks but very secretive and suspicious. They had to be. The Dero outnumbered them and all underground dwellers had access to ancient ray machines that could read minds at great distances, launch deadly rays and even bring people to heights of sexual ecstasy. In Mandark Shaver's muse and succubus is a blind Tero girl called Nydia who is his stim-lover and telaug teacher. (If these terms are new to you then you are new to The Shaver Mystery, and Mandark is a good place to start.)