Reaching Outward and Falling Inward

In Angela Yuriko Smith's poem "Lost Generations," the people of the title are flying through outer space, their mission to populate the galaxy. They come to grief when they fall into a black hole. They and the greater humanity they represent reach outward: this is a mission of hope and positive purpose. They are to be progenitors of a new star people.

Contrast this with the despair and negative purpose of the three previous fictional works by men, "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson, "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan, and "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell. In Mr. Wilson's story, his title character, Dwight Bonneville, has encountered an outer abyss. In reaching outward, though, he has gained the means by which to prevent his fellow men from doing the same. He enforces the quarantine of Earth, imposed by "Our Owner." He heads off "the mission of Man" as in Angelo Yuriko Smith's poem. Bonneville is at cross purposes with her "lost generations."

In "Night Fishing" and "A Ghost Story for Christmas," the lead characters fall inward into their own abysses. There isn't any reaching outward at all, or if there is, their reaching is thwarted by their own inward purposes. Both men are more or less in despair, separated from themselves, from God, and from the rest of humanity. Instead of in an outward star, they have black holes within themselves.

There may be autism in Mr. Cornell's lead character. There may be solipsism behind Mr. Kiernan's. I have written about the worm ouroboros, or uroboros, as Camille Paglia spells it. Ouroboros is solipsistic. It completely encloses itself and is wrapped up in itself. The image of ouroboros is of a snake swallowing its own tail, like the hoop snake of folklore, or Friedrich August Kekulé's dream of the benzene molecule. (That's Kekulé, not Kukla, and Kukla is the clown, not the dragon.)

So ouroboros takes the form of an open circle. In the middle is a hole, a void. The solipsistic person is also a self-enclosing circle. Inside of him there may very well be a void. A two-dimensional representation of a black hole, the star that swallows Ms. Smith's "lost generations," is also circular. Although it's called a hole, it isn't really a hole. It's not nothing actually but everything, all swallowed up and smashed together. In the movie The Black Hole (1979), the star of the title is actually a hole, the entrance to what we would now call a wormhole. Inside that hole, the surviving characters have a diabolical vision in the form of the red robot Maximilian swallowing up and encasing his master Reinhardt. At the end of the wormhole there is a bright light, as in a near-death experience. The characters fly through a chrystaline Gothic archway to reach it and emerge, reborn, on the other side.

Information does not escape from a black hole. We know nothing of what lies inside. In contrast, a black hole knows everything of what lies outside of itself, for everything falls into its limitless mass. Nonetheless, you could say that, because it is completely enclosed on itself and wrapped up in itself, a black hole is a solipsistic star. It is the star of its own show. Its favorite movie is The Black Hole, which is about itself.

As I said before, "Lost Generations" by Angela Yuriko Smith stands apart from the stories by men so far in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. Their visions of cosmic horror are more or less the same, a combination of Fort and Nietzsche, an inward kind of horror of ownership and abysses. Hers is outward, with no Nietzsche or Fort in sight, the cosmos itself, in the form of the black hole, being the source of that horror.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Lost Generations" by Angela Yuriko Smith

Angela Yuriko Smith was born on November 21, 1968, in Madisonville, Kentucky. She is a journalist, author, editor, poet, teacher of creative writing at Northwest Florida State College, and publisher of Space and Time magazine. In 2023, she had a book published, its title, Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror. Her co-editor was Lee Murray, about whom I wrote on August 13, 2020. Ms. Smith, I think, has an admirable list of activities, occupations, and accomplishments. Her birthday just passed, so I would like to say Happy Belated Birthday to her.

Angela Yuriko Smith has a poem in Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue. It's called "Lost Generations," and it takes up two pages in a large typeface with the image of a star field in the background.

"Lost Generations" is in eleven stanzas of three lines each. These are haiku-like tercets, and they are centered on the page such that they have the general appearance of the double helix of the DNA molecule. The acronym DNA appears in the poem, in fact, in the third stanza. So there are three lines per stanza, five and seven syllables per line (mostly, and possibly ideally), and eleven stanzas all together. These are prime numbers, four out of the first five in fact. Where is the missing two? In the pairs of "Adams and Eves" on board the intergenerational spaceship of which she writes, I guess. Or are they the paired, twisted, and intertwined ladders of the DNA helix? And does the use of these prime numbers signify anything?

In the first tercet in "Lost Generations" there is the word Hyades. That makes me think of Robert W. Chambers, who wrote of "the songs that the Hyades shall sing" and "the mystery of the Hyades" in his collection The King in Yellow. In the fifth, the eyes of the awakening voyagers are described as "shining in the abyss." And in the last, there is darkness, for the voyagers are swallowed by a black hole before they can fulfill their mission. So there is abyss and there is darkness and blackness. The people who go into the black hole are the lost generations of the title, a phrase that recalls the men and women who were born during the decade in which The King in Yellow was published, a generation that included, oddly enough, H.P. Lovecraft. This is a different kind of cosmic horror, and I think we can be grateful for that in this issue. 

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson-Part Three

We associate the image of Dionysus with that of Pan, the piper. Pan appears in an early work of cosmic and pagan horror, The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen (1894). There is madness and despair in that story, just as there is madness and despair in The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and the short story "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson. This madness and despair, as well as murder, horror, and death, are brought on by seeing and hearing things that are supposed to be beyond human ken, by peering into abysses, and by close encounters with Chaos, the Void, and Evil itself, incarnate. There is piping in Lovecraft, too. It is associated with his god Azathoth, the so-called daemon-sultan who is seated at the center of "Ultimate Chaos."

In The Great God Pan, there are many strange and terrible events. One of these is a bizarre and horrifying transformation undergone by a woman, among other things of woman into man. The passage describing this transformation is too long to give here. You will find it in Chapter VIII, The Fragments.* People who believe the human body can be altered in its fundamental form should read this passage and recognize the kind of horrors they're trying to bring into our world. In the story of Genesis, read from around the Moon on Christmas Eve 1968 by the Apollo Eight astronauts, God said, "Let there be light." The creation of life follows. In this scene of transformation from Machen's story, there is "the negation of light." That negation is followed by death.

There is in The Great God Pan a reference to Nodens, "the god of the Great Deep or Abyss."** Abysses are elsewhere in Machen's story. So is void:

"[. . . ] the voice of articulate-speaking men echo in the waste void that bounds our thought."

Articulate and intelligible speech, then, pushes back the bounds of the void, just as God spoke his Word, thereby banishing it. Word is positive and creative. Being atheists and probably many of them nihilists, authors of and believers in cosmic horror want instead for us to be bound ever more closely by the void, for it to encroach upon us until we are annihilated. They want, I suspect, Creation to contract and Chaos to reign. The language of the Void, then, is gibberish to us. If we translate it into our language, we go mad, or we lose the will to live. Remember that in the essay preceding his story, Mr. Wilson describes cosmic horror as a genre in which "Chaos reigns." (p. 49)

The Great God Pan has been, I think, an inspiration for much weird fiction and horror fiction, from the works of the devout, such as William Peter Blatty, to those of the skeptical, such as H.P. Lovecraft. F. Paul Wilson mentions The Exorcist and Lovecraft in his essay "Abrahamic vs. Cosmic Horror." He also writes that The Great God Pan "can be rightly viewed as a paradigm of cosmic horror." (p. 49) He seems to have looked to that paradigm in writing his own story. So did the other authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue look to The Great God Pan as well? Or did they consult with Mr. Wilson before they began?

* * *

One more thing: In The Great God Pan, there are the names Helen and Mrs. Beaumont. Another Helen is in the Iliad, just as Dwight Bonneville's given name is originally from Ancient Greece and refers to Dionysus. As for his surname, it echoes Mrs. Beaumont's, for Bonneville means "good town," while Beaumont means "beautiful mountain."

-----

*The description of that final transformation makes me think of a similar scene near the end of The Thing, John Carpenter's film adaptation of John W. Campbell's story.

**There is also this, from a letter quoted in the story: "I am like a traveller who has peered over an abyss, and has drawn back in terror." Is this the source of the title of Francisco Tignini's story "The Traveler"? Dwight Bonneville in "The Last Bonneville" could say the same thing except that he has embraced the abyss instead of being terrified by it.

* * *

I think "The Last Bonneville" is the best story, or the most enjoyable, so far in the Cosmic Horror Issue. Part of that is because of its humor and its tone. Also, we don't have to get ourselves wrapped up in an author who seems wrapped up in himself. Mr. Wilson's story moves, whereas the others are more nearly static. That's what happens when you put Americans into their cars. I guess I should point out that Mr. Wilson is an American, whereas Paul Cornell is British, and Caitlín R. Kiernan, though now an American, was born in Ireland.

* * *

Finally, a couple of things that are wrong. One has to do with the story, in which the authorial voice duplicates in some places the voice of the driver De Groot. We need only one subjective voice. The other is in the Wikipedia entry on F. Paul Wilson, in which he is first described as a "medical doctor," then as a "Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine." It's not his fault or the fault of Weird Tales magazine that there is a lack of precision in his Wikipedia biography. I will point out, though, that the practice of osteopathic medicine grew out of osteopathy, which was just another in a long line of nineteenth-century pseudosciences, some of which still plague us. Can't we be done with pseudosciences, especially when it comes to the practice of medicine? Can't we be done with the lies, hoaxes, and propaganda, the money-grubbing and status-seeking, most of all the Mengele-level experimentation and butchery of what is supposed to be prevention, treatment, cure, and care of the human body and the human soul?

* * *

One last question in regards to "The Last Bonneville": who is in Nevada?

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley 

"The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson-Part Two

In "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson, a crazy guy named Bonneville is picked up on the road by a rocket scientist named Felix De Groot. Bonneville tells De Groot that he was on board the Apollo Eight spacecraft . . .

On his trip around the Moon, Bonneville spoke in tongues, in the language of the Void. (There is speaking in tongues in "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan as well.) What he said was recorded back at NASA. What he said drove men insane. He has a recording of his gibberish with him. His interlocutor asks to listen. Upon listening, De Groot, too, loses his mind--or his will to live--and crashes his car against an abutment in a fiery, orange ball. So, like the unnamed narrator in "Night Fishing," Bonneville is in possession of something from the Void, and when he exposes others to it, they meet their end in one way or another. These things happen when you open the wrong object or objects: your ears, a book, a box, a door, a gate, a package . . .

And that brings up a connection to Robert W. Chambers, for readers of "The King in Yellow" also lose their minds or their will to live after reading it. It also brings up a connection to H.P. Lovecraft, for the same thing happens to his characters when they read the Necronomicon. And it brings up a connection to Orson Welles' radio play The War of the Worlds, from eighty-six years and a month ago, for there are supposed to have been people who became hysterical and even threatened to kill themselves upon listening to it.

* * *

In Genesis (from which the Apollo Eight astronauts read on Christmas Eve 1968), God speaks and the Universe comes into existence. His Word is positive and creative. In stories of cosmic horror, though, words are negative and destructive. They bring an awareness or visions of the Void, or Chaos, the abyssal darkness that preceded Cosmos. 

God's Word establishes order and is intelligible to us. The words of the Void or Chaos are unintelligible, though. They are gibberish. They bring about disorder and insanity. So is it even possible for Word and Chaos to exist in the same Universe? Is this what the atheistic and materialistic authors of cosmic horror are trying to do, to speak word into Chaos instead of into Creation or Cosmos? Do they imagine, then, that they have a kind of inverse Godlike power? Are they not then engaged in a self-contradiction, an impossibility, an absurdity?

Maybe the proper construction or dichotomy is:

God speaks his Word into Creation, or Cosmos, and there is order.

Those who are against God utter their gibberish into the Void, or Chaos, and there is disorder and madness.

Or maybe it's the other way around:

The Void speaks its gibberish into us, thus making us mad--and annihilating us.

Men are not God. We create after him, because of him, in emulation of him, but we can't create something that can't be created. We can't bring non-existence into existence. We can't bring back something banished by God. The Void has been voided. Creation is here to stay.

But I guess we can play at the Void in our storytelling and our art, and that can be fun and entertaining, I guess, for as long as we keep it that way.

To be concluded . . .

Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Happy Thanksgiving!

 Happy Thanksgiving

from Tellers of Weird Tales!

Wild West Weekly, November 26, 1930. The cover artist is unknown. I have this image from a blog called Rough Edges, conducted by James Reasoner. He got it from The FictionMags Index, which is the work of Phil Stephenson-Payne. Thanks to both.

2024 Terence E. Hanley

"The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson-Part One

Francis Paul Wilson was born on May 17, 1946, in Jersey City, New Jersey. He is a writer of science fiction, horror, and weird fiction. He has also worked in television, and some of his works have been adapted to that medium and the medium of film. His novel The Keep, from 1981, was adapted for theatrical release in 1983. It was also adapted to a board game and a role-playing game. In 2006, Mr. Wilson wrote the script for a comic book adaptation. Jonathan Maberry, current editor of Weird Tales, used Mr. Wilson's character Repairman Jack in his own series novel Cave 13, published in 2023. So there is still the same pattern: the authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue are friends of the editor, they are involved in TV and movies, and they write for comic books.

* * *

The short story "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson follows his essay "Abrahamic vs. Cosmic Horror." There is a full-page illustration enclosing the main title followed by six solid pages of text. Thank goodness for some solid content.

I have been writing about brandnames used in fiction. Now here comes one driving right into the title of Mr. Wilson's story. That's okay, I think. America is a country of cars and roads. If we could translate that word--America--it might mean "a nation of people on the road, on the move." Many of our cultural works have been about cars and driving and being on the road. I won't list any. You'll think of plenty on your own. I'll just add that I had a chance to buy a Bonneville once. I wish I had done it.

"The Last Bonneville" is a third-person narrative. That seems to me significant, for the two other major works so far in this issue, "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell and "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan, are told in the first person and are, I think, somewhat autobiographical. Remember that the worm ouroboros, inverted and turned in upon itself, is rolling through the Cosmic Horror Issue. This story is told from a different point of view.

There are more brandnames and proper nouns in "The Last Bonneville," just as in previous stories: Maserati Ghibli, Elon Musk (a maker of both cars and rockets), Apollo Eight and its three astronauts, Borman, Lovell, and Anders. Two Kennedys, a Nixon, and another victim of an assassin's bullet, Martin Luther King. (Two out of the four of them sent men to the Moon. One of them went to the mountaintop.) There will be more. There will also be several meta-references. In other words, "The Last Bonneville" does not stand alone in its storytelling.

There are two characters in "The Last Bonneville." One is Felix De Groot, who drives a Maserati and works as a rocket scientist, an occupation that approaches that of the physicist in "Night Fishing." The other is a crazy guy named Bonneville who drives a Bonneville. DeGroot picks up Bonneville on the road. They talk as De Groot drives.

(Felix De Groot by the way means "happy" and "the great." He's about to be taken down a few notches in both categories. Bonneville's first name is Dwight, which is a pagan name referring to the pagan god Dionysus. His given name connects him to the Ancient Greek origins of science fiction, if Jack Williamson is right about these things. It also connects him to the chaotic aspect of the Dionysian. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the dichotomy between Apollonian order and Dionysian chaos. You are about to read another reference to Apollo, in three . . . two . . . one . . .)

Bonneville claims to have gone around the Moon on Apollo Eight. He is evidently an atheist. He calls it "ignorant and anti-science" to believe in God and the Creation. (The other day on this blog I was called ignorant by an anonymous believer in an anti-science belief system. Anonymous might be an atheist. He certainly believes that human beings can be gods and that we can create ourselves. He and his co-religionists should leave well enough alone and let God do his stuff.) While the other astronauts were reading from the Book of Genesis for all the world to hear--it was Christmastime after all--Bonneville

"stared in the other direction at all that empty space out there. At the Void. And not only did the Void stare back, it spoke to me--or at least something within the Void spoke." (p. 53)

So here they are again in Mr. Wilson's story: the Void and the allusion to Nietzsche.

Bonneville was going to blow up Apollo because he thought we should be quarantined on Earth (not realizing, I guess, that the idea of a quarantined Earth came from a thoroughgoing believer in God, C.S. Lewis). But the Void told him there isn't any reason to keep the people of Earth quarantined: "We were to be contained--not because we were a disease, as I thought, but because we were playthings." Whose playthings? Those of "Our Owner." (p. 53)

And now Charles Fort makes his return appearance, after his first in "Night Fishing." Nietzsche and Fort, together again at last.

Like "A Ghost Story for Christmas," there is a Christmastime theme. And like "Night Fishing," "The Last Bonneville" is a pretty full story, even if it's pretty short. There is talk of the Fermi Paradox, the Drake Equation, the "Wow!" Signal, the BLC-1 Signal. Brandnames come back, but the author makes a mistake by calling a Bonneville an Olds. It's actually a Pontiac. There is also mention of AirPods, an Apple product. Do these authors get kickbacks for dropping names in their stories? If he's waiting for a check from Pontiac, Mr. Wilson shouldn't hold his breath.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Cosmic vs. Abrahamic Horror" by F. Paul Wilson

"Cosmic vs. Abrahamic Horror" by F. Paul Wilson is the third and last essay in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. The text of Mr. Wilson's essay is a little less than two and a half pages long. There are two illustrations. One is a half-page, main-title illustration showing a man (wearing a blue turban), a woman, and a crying boy in a Renaissance-like tableau. The man and woman have tentacled faces. The spot drawing at the end of the essay also shows tentacles. Again, we were supposed to have something new in Weird Tales #367. Tentacles have been in genre fiction since at least The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, published in 1897 and 1898.

Mr. Wilson's essay is the best of the three in this issue. Unlike the first, it's not a list. Unlike the second, it's not written in an academic tone, nor does it use academic-type language. There are lots of names and proper nouns in his essay, but that's as it should be, for Mr. Wilson is exploring history, culture, and so on.

I think Mr. Wilson gets pretty well to the essence of weird fiction, a sub-genre that could be included in Abrahamic horror. He writes: "Abrahamic sensibilities involve an orderly cosmos ruled by a provident Creator who watches over the domain he created because He cares." (p. 46) In that ordered cosmos there are laws. To break them is to transgress. F. Paul Wilson writes that vengeance and retribution are brought down upon transgressors. I have used the word punishment, but I think we're talking about the same thing.

I have also written that in weird fiction there is a crossing over of some kind. The literal meaning of the word transgress is "step across, step over, or go beyond." In his essay, Mr. Wilson writes of the typical Abrahamic horror story plot: "You have transgressed by wandering into a territory claimed by another and so a toll must be exacted." (p. 47) That's essentially the plot of the weird tale.

F. Paul Wilson brings up Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist and the intrusion of evil into the world. "Why is it intruding? To corrupt us via doubt and fear so we'll abandon the Creator. But again, why? Simple: because we matter." He continues in the following paragraph: "And there beats the heart of Abrahamic horror: Humanity matters." In contrast, he writes that cosmic horror does not "recognize any value in your humanity." (p. 47) I guess you could say that in cosmic horror, because it is materialistic, humanity is matter.

Neither of the authors in the first two essays in Weird Tales #367 defines cosmic horror very well, if at all. F. Paul Wilson does, though, and you wonder why we needed the other two:

• "Cosmic horror paints a portrait of human insignificance." (p. 49)

• "Chaos reigns." (p. 49)

• "Abrahamic horror is spiritual; cosmic horror is materialistic" (p. 49)

And this is why, I think, there is so much appeal in cosmic horror to its readers and writers, for they are or appear to be nonbelievers. They think of themselves and their existence--of all human existence--as meaningless and without hope. And being nonbelievers, they are and must needs be materialists. I don't know about you, but I would not want to shrink my mind that way. I would rather keep it open and expansive. By the way, the three bulleted quotes above are in the exact middle of the Cosmic Horror Issue. On the opposite page is an advertisement. So maybe we should be call this the Cosmic-Commercial Horror Issue.

Mr. Wilson mentions what he calls "the hoariest and most familiar horror clichés." (p. 47) Another word for these is tropes, and they are on full display even in fiction that is supposed to be new and brave and fierce. He also indicts about half of the works so far in this issue with this simple statement: "The scholar who ventures too close to the abyss or opens a passage to the Other Side and pays a hideous price are a dime a dozen," (p. 49), for in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, there are the following stories:

• "The City in the Sea" by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, in which a scholar ventures too close . . .

• "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, in which an atheist/materialist and possibly autistic TV watcher ventures too close . . .

• "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan, in which an unnamed physicist, serial killer, and probably also atheist (as is the author of the story) ventures too close . . .

Yeah, a dime a dozen. I wonder how the other authors represented here feel about F. Paul Wilson's statement, for it's more or less a prediction of how they would fall short in writing stories that were supposed to be different and new.

To open his essay, Mr. Wilson refers to "this Catholic boy who discovered cosmic horror at age thirteen [. . .]." (p. 46) He was that boy of course. I don't know where he stands now as far as his beliefs go. That's none of my business. I'll just point out that Mike Mignola was also raised Catholic.

In his closing, F. Paul Wilson addresses the conflict of his title, writing, "Both approaches have their place, and the Abrahamic will go on as long as there are those who believe, just as its antithesis will persist as long as there are those who don't." (p. 49)

I think that means forever.

I'll close my essay by suggesting that F. Paul Wilson's idea of Abrahamic versus Cosmic horror could be related to Jack Williamson's idea of Egyptian-Hebraic versus Classically Greek stories of Dystopia and Utopia, which gave us, respectively, weird fiction (among other things) and science fiction (also among other things).

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley