There are fifteen written works in Weird Tales #367, nine short stories, three essays, and three poems. (The table of contents lists "The Forest Gate" by Samantha Underhill as fiction but it is in verse form and is obviously a poem.) These fifteen works were written by fifteen authors. One story, "The City in the Sea," has two co-authors, Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola. One author, F. Paul Wilson, contributed two works, an essay and a short story.
Of the fifteen authors in Weird Tales #367, ten are men and five are women. All three poems were written by women, so of twelve works in prose, ten are by men, including all three essays and seven out of nine short stories. I'll have more the authors in a while.
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In reading their works and reading about the authors represented in Weird Tales #367, I find there to be a lot of emphasis on awards, as well as on the authors' accomplishments, if you can call them that, outside the act of writing itself. The writing and storytelling seem to have become secondary to the penumbrae, if you can call them that, of writing and storytelling. Another word for all of this might be meta. There is in fact a lot of meta, not only in this issue of Weird Tales, not only in genre fiction or in fiction as a whole, but in all of the world, or at least wherever there are smartphones and Internet connections.
The authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue seem to be watching themselves as they think and write. They also write about watching themselves as they think and write. In their fictional works and in their biographies--or I guess we should call them resumés, better yet, curricula vitae--there are lots of meta-references, self-references, self-consciousness, namedropping, invocations of long-dead authors, naming and claiming of genres and sub-genres--call it branding--and mentions of brandnames. A lot of this is basically product placement, which is, truth be told, an offense against art, and all of it works against art. We don't want product placement. We don't want commercials. We want the part that happens between the commercials.
In Weird Tales #367, the branding and product placement begin on the cover. It's the Cosmic Horror Issue after all, cosmic horror being less the name of a genre or sub-genre than it is a brandname, in other words, a word representing a commodity. Inside, we find it again in the very first work, the editor's introductory essay in "The Eyrie." ("The Eyrie" used to be for readers. Significantly, it has been appropriated for the exclusive use of the editor. Readers seem to have become relegated to some lower status in all of this. The purpose of the magazine instead seems to be to serve the publisher, the editor, and its contributors.) Even the advertisements are self-referential, or meta. You won't see an ad for a truss or a gun or anything about the Rosicrucians. Not that we want to. But all you can buy now from inside the pages of Weird Tales are books, magazines, and other merchandise that are about Weird Tales and its many genres and sub-genres. Again, meta. Maybe that's what the illustration on the last page is about, in which case, it, too, is meta, or actually doubly meta.
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I have noticed how much emphasis there has been in recent years on the naming and claiming of genres and sub-genres. Again, this emphasis is on the penumbrae of writing instead of on the writing itself. It's another kind of self-consciousness, self-reference, and a needless distraction. Just write your story. Engage yourself in crafting your bit of fiction. Leave the analysis and the critique to someone else. (I guess in this Internet age everything is do-it-yourself.) Besides that, why would any writer want to narrow himself or herself down into some small category? Instead of: "I'm a writer of dark-underground-alt-fantasy and gotho-cosmic horror," why not just say: "I'm a writer"? Instead of thinking about where you are in the great chain of being, just be what you are, which is a human being, and write what you're going to write, which is a story.
This emphasis on genres and sub-genres is in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, in the works themselves as well as, seemingly, in the minds of their authors before they even sat down to write. They all want us to know in which genres and sub-genres they work and in which they're most interested. They also want us to know who are their favorite authors. Those authors are or were of course also genre authors. In every generation, then, there appears to be a stepping down. This has been going on in comic books for decades. Instead of looking outside their own fields and forms, too many creators these days remain inside and their horizons shrink and shrink as the years go by. As genres and sub-genres proliferate, there will naturally be more shrinking, all of it within evermore shrinking fields and forms. At some point every creator seems likely to become a point--and then wink out.
The proliferation of genres and sub-genres is a topic that has been on my mind for a long time now. I'm still planning to write about it, but that's still something for the indefinite future. In any case, the emphasis on genres and sub-genres is curious to me. It indicates, I think, something not very positive or healthy. You could fairly say that the naming and claiming of genres and sub-genres is a kind of branding, in which case art and literature become commodified, actually within themselves rather than outside of themselves. It all becomes just another kind of meta.
In regards to everybody's favorite authors from the past: instead of being themselves, too many authors (artists, too) try to be someone else who came before them, whom they admire, and who is, unfortunately, long dead. Too many authors and editors keep trying to milk a dead cow. They work in what are by now some pretty tired conventions and they employ some very old tropes, which is really just a nice word--a hoity-toity kind of word--for clichés. One of the first lessons in English composition and creative writing is to avoid clichés. Even if you call them tropes, they're still clichés. So avoid them.
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Again, there is an extreme interest in, emphasis on, and reference to the author, his or her life, biography, experience, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and interests. Again, meta. One of the things that has happened in our culture is that we have moved away from real things to talk of "the narrative." We have inserted this "narrative" and its teller between ourselves and what is really happening in the world so that "the narrative" and the teller become the story rather than the story itself being the story. How many news headlines have you read in which the emphasis is on the telling of the facts instead of on the facts themselves (if there are even facts involved in most stories these days)? I find this odd, jarring, and off-putting. Very often it's just click-bait, and it's at work in fiction just as it is in the real world. The business of the storyteller is to tell a story, not to tell us about himself or herself, or about what brand of camping gear or camera his or her characters use, or what TV shows they like to watch. Yes, that happens in the Cosmic Horror Issue. The storyteller should also not go meta on us unless it serves a good and compelling purpose. The French Lieutenant's Woman--good. Most other examples--not so good. And no one ever should use the term "the text" when referring to a story, or "the canon" when discussing a body of work. Like I've said before, anyone who uses the word canon should be shot out of one--after an -n- has been inserted in the middle of it of course.
So the worldview and the language of media and academia (narrative, trope, text, canon) has entered into genre fiction, just as it has in every other field, but the larger issue is the insertion of an intermediary between one person and another, between the person and the thing, the world, or the experience. My guess is that this is an artifact of digital phenomena in our lives, for one of the essential facts of the digital realm is that, within it we are not in fact connected but separated--separated from each other, from life and experience, from the world, and even from ourselves. There isn't any better example of this than to watch a person as he watches what is happening right there in front of him not with his naked eyes but through his phone.
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Another thing I noticed in reading about the authors in Weird Tales #367 is that a lot of them are involved in movies, television, and/or comic books. In fact, the cover story is about a comic book character, Mike Mignola's Hellboy, which is a first for the magazine I think. That's a development. Whether it's good or bad is up to you to decide. Anyway, there's nothing wrong with scriptwriters writing stories in prose. The same kinds of writers wrote for Weird Tales from the 1920s or '30s onward. One thing to know here is that a writer can now earn a lot more writing in one of those forms than he or she can writing for a story magazine that can only have a vanishingly small readership. You can't blame them for doing so. But it seems as though many of the stories in Weird Tales #367 were drawn from writers who work in movies, television, and comic books rather than from authors who deal strictly or mostly in prose. Make of that what you will. Maybe writing for Weird Tales has become a prestige thing or a vanity project rather than anything else. Maybe these are authors with whom the editor has a personal or professional relationship and he turned to them when he needed some content, or he wanted to add a cachet to his publication, or the authors approached him because they wanted to boost their own careers. To put it another way, I suspect that few if any of the authors submitted their unsolicited work to the magazine. Maybe there's a slush pile at Weird Tales, but I doubt that very much if anything ever leaves that pile. It just gets taller and slushier. Or maybe only the poetry came from unsolicited submissions and everything else made it into print in some other way.
All of this has implications when you consider the pretty scant content of the Cosmic Horror Issue. Is this all the editor could find for publication in his magazine? On all of this vast continent are there only these few people whose work is available for printing in a story magazine? Couldn't the editor find anyone or anything else? Or did he simply not go looking?
As for the content itself, again, it's scant. It doesn't cost any more to print one thousand words on a page than it does to print five hundred. Why skimp? I don't know, but then we're not allowed to know. Anyway, what you will find in these pages has so obviously--and I guess unashamedly--been expanded to fill 96 pages, but to what purpose exactly? It's like a college term paper with everything made slightly larger, all to stretch eight or nine pages of content into the required ten. Except that nothing is gained here by doing so, and quite a bit is actually lost. Anyway, if you don't have enough content to fill your magazine, just go out and find more. It's there. It's got to be there. (Or maybe not. Yikes!) And you don't even need very much more content. After all, Weird Tales appears only once or twice a year. If you can't fill 150 to 200 pages with content every year, that's an indication of a real problem. Maybe there's a supply chain issue. (Imagine Weird Tales, the Supply Chain Issue: 100 blank pages.)
As recently as the 1990s and early 2000s, Weird Tales and other genre magazines were published on a frequent and regular schedule and they were chockfull of content. So what happened? I guess the Internet and social media happened. Smart phones, scrolling, and texting happened. Computer games, video games, video websites, streaming, podcasts, Marvel movies, 500 channels, and on and on happened. In other words, electronic screens happened, I guess, and the printed word stopped happening. So maybe we shouldn't be so hard on editors and publishers after all. If we're descending into Idiocracy, they're descending with us. It isn't their fault if there are only a few people still writing good prose. It's not their fault if no one reads anything on paper anymore. But I don't believe there are only a few people out there writing good prose. I think something else is at work here, but I don't know what it is.
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Of the fifteen authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue, nine are American or I presume them to be American, meaning, they were born in the United States rather than simply living here now. Three authors are British, one Irish, one Canadian, and one, Francesco Tignini, unknown. Maybe he's an American, too. The British or British-oid (i.e., Canadian) content is obvious in these stories, even if it's just in the spellings of certain words, for example "colour" and "odour" instead of "color" and odor." But again, only nine or ten authors are American. Nine or ten out of a country of nearly 350 million.
At least two of the authors are atheists or agnostics, and there is materialism as an implicit or explicit worldview in some of the stories. That shouldn't come as any surprise. After all, this is the Cosmic Horror Issue. If the Cosmos is essentially a place of horror, or at least of indifference to human existence and the human condition, then that doesn't leave much room for a loving and caring God. He has been pushed out. Actually he hasn't been pushed out. We have simply retracted, like a worm into its hole. Anyway, I think it's okay to posit or assume that kind of thing in your storytelling. After all, to read a story is to immerse oneself, for a time, in alternate worlds and alternate lives, even if they're not very pleasant. We get our scare or our thrill while reading and then relief upon our return. This is true even in mainstream literature. But what dreary lives people who believe these things must live in the real world. What else is the purpose of art except to drill closer to the truth? To look for the treasure and discard the dross? Anyway again, it's worth noting that one of the authors, Paul Cornell, is married to a vicar. I don't know what are his beliefs. Maybe his honey-do list has just one word on it: Believe.
At least six of the authors were born in the 1960s. At least one, the editor Jonathan Maberry, was born in the 1950s. (He has worked in comic books, too.) And three, F. Paul Wilson, Ramsey Campbell, and Nancy Kilpatrick, were born in the 1940s, all in 1946 in fact, the first year of the Baby Boom. (Three of our last five presidents were born in that year, too. Maybe the successes of this cohort, such as they are in some cases, are due to their having reached the age of seven before electronic screens held too much sway in our culture and society.) I don't know the birth years of five of the authors, but I assume them all to be younger and not quite established yet. If any of them would like to write to me, I would be happy to hear from them and to write about them in this space if that's possible.
Out of all of this analysis, I think the most significant issues to be: first, the meta-referential and self-referential viewpoint of the author in which the emphasis is moved away from the story and towards its penumbrae, or what we might call metadata. And, second, the dearth of content in this issue of Weird Tales in particular, more generally and by implication, the seeming lack of writing talent in America, which used to support a lively, fecund, prosperous, and widespread culture of books, literature, reading, and literacy. Being an artist, I sometimes kid my writer friends that they're a dime a dozen. But maybe their value has gone up as their numbers have gone down, if in fact their numbers have gone down. But that's only if good, literary writing is still in demand: a questionable proposition. Maybe Weird Tales is from another culture and has had its day. Or maybe it can still survive but should be in other hands, or at least handled in a different way where it is.
Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley
