Summer & Fall Reading

I read this summer Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base by Anne Jacobsen (2011; 2012). It's an interesting and pretty thorough history but not always very well written, especially in regards to airplanes and aviation. Anyway, the author asserts that the supposed crashdown at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 involved a Soviet flying saucer built using captured Nazi technology and mutated Mini-Me pilots, all without providing any evidence at all. Her description of Bob Lazar's account of seeing flying saucers and dead or injured pilots at Area 51 led me to believe that a similar scene in The Shape of Water (2017) was inspired by Mr. Lazar's supposed experience. So one fiction from another.

In September I read Ghosts, edited by Grant Overton and published in 1927 by Funk & Wagnall's. "The Two Drovers" by Sir Walter Scott tells of a most terrible event in the lives of two former friends. "Kari Aasen in Heaven" by Johan Bojer is a beautiful and charming fantasy. And "A Source of Irritation," a story of the Great War by Stacy Aumonier, is very funny. "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving is in Ghosts as well. Reading that story got me started on thinking and writing about H.P. Lovecraft, the Hudson River, and other recent topics.

In October I read A Fan's Notes: A Fictional Memoir by Frederick Exley (1968). The late Mr. Exley gave us another view of the Hudson River. Reading his book led me to write about still more topics during this past month (November-December 2025).

Also in October, I read The Negotiator by Frederick Forsyth (1989). I afterwards found out that Mr. Forsyth died earlier this year. I wrote about him and Martin Cruz Smith on November 10, 2025. They are two of the writers we lost in 2025.

Not long ago, I found a paperback book called Soviet Science Fiction, edited by Isaac Asimov and published in 1962 by Collier Books. I read it in October. There are six stories in its pages. All are good and reveal a different kind of sensibility than what you will find in western science fiction. If I had to name a favorite, it would be "Infra Draconis" by G. Gurevich (1917-1998), who was born in the month following the abdication of the Russian tsar. It made me think a little of Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977).

In October I read The Computer Connection by Alfred Bester (1976). As with his earlier novels, this one is experimental, only more so. To meet the zeitgeist of the 1970s, it's also a little trippy. Bester mentioned Richard Nixon several times in his book. There's nothing wrong with that, but authors who include people and events of their day risk seeing their works becoming quickly dated. People of today, driven insane by their contemplations of our current president, should remember that. Their rants will not play well in the future and may prove incomprehensible to readers and viewers of the future. That's especially true of science fiction that is set in the future, for no one fifty or a hundred years from now is going to care or think about or talk about Nixon or Trump or almost anybody else from the past. They may not even know who those people are. In short, don't make your fiction outdated in the moment that you create it.

Anyway, there is a creature in The Computer Connection--I forget its name--that can be to added to The Internet Ooze, Blobs, Jellies, & Slime Database. In a book of extremely rapid-fire ideas and extrapolations, I found the earliest instance that I can remember of one fictional character addressing another as "dude," also the first instance of one character saying to another, "Wait for it, wait for it." I haven't seen the most recent Mission: Impossible movie, but reading a plot summary makes me think that there are similarities between it and Bester's novel, specifically in the attempt to evade the scrutiny of an otherwise all-seeing computer intelligence. But then we saw the same kind of thing in Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970).

In October I started to read Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith (Ballantine Books, 1975). I didn't get very far: I had read too much science fiction and reading another such novel seemed to be even more too-much. So I turned to another type of story. (See below.) But in reading the first pages of Norstrilia, I came upon some of the the same kinds of themes (or yearnings) that I had found in The Computer Connection, namely: a) Immortality; and b) Mental telepathy or psychic powers. There is a lot of both in science fiction. They seem to be the twin desires or fantasies of an awful lot of science fiction authors. Mental telepathy or psychic powers are a subject of almost no appeal and no interest to me. As soon as I come across them in one book I begin to think about reading another. But if I think not about myself and my own tastes and instead about what writers tell us about themselves in the subjects that interest them and about which they write, then these things become more interesting and revealing. Thinking about them offers the reader the opportunity to explore ideas and gain insights into science fiction and its various authors. For example, an interest in mental telepathy or psychic powers would appear to be closely tied to the science-fictional concept of the superior man, or superman, so common in the 1930s, rampant in the 1940s, and continuing into the decades that followed. I imagine that some science fiction authors feel themselves superior to ordinary humans, a feeling that probably comes from a sneaking suspicion that they are in fact the opposite. One thing that science fiction authors don't seem to realize is that if we could read each other's minds, writing would necessarily come to an end. Why should I read what you write if I can simply see it in its original? Why wade through things conveyed by the imperfect medium of language when we can draw directly from the source? Put another way, if there were mind-reading, then that would make an end to storytelling and reading. (Even if mind-reading were possible, the mind cannot be read like words on a printed page. There actually wouldn't be any "reading" at all, but a kind of immersion in the mind-state of another person.) As for immortality, we all might seek it, but the only way open to us would seem to require the existence of God and a promised afterlife. (The idea of uploading our minds into a forever-android or -computer is both ridiculous and sophomoric.) That's probably too much for most science fiction authors, however, for men and women of this type are ultimately science-minded and science-oriented. Contemplation of God and an afterlife is probably too icky for writers of this type.

So instead of reading Norstrilia, I turned to a crime and detective novel, The Screaming Mimi by Fredric Brown (1949). That was a good choice for me. Brown's novel is closer in time and space than is Norstrilia, closer also in terms of its culture and setting (i.e., 1940s Chicago). It's more immediate and familiar than is a science fiction novel. Norstrilia and stories like it are too distant, too remote (it's set 25,000 years in the future on a far-distant planet), and, frankly, too much of the author's own personal fantasy. The Screaming Mimi, on the other hand, takes place in the real world, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. (We should admit, however, that even hardboiled detective novels are fantasies.) I would add that The Screaming Mimi and stories like it are ultimately more human, even if some of its plot points, moreover its climax, are somewhat mechanical or not entirely plausible. (Mechanical, that is, as the word relates to the mechanics of storytelling.) By the way, there is a lot of drinking in The Screaming Mimi. And I mean a lot of drinking. Brown seems to have known whereof he wrote.

In November I read Time of the Great Freeze by Robert Silverberg (1964). We're probably not allowed to read books like this one because it's not about global warming but instead about global cooling. I know, heresy. I'm surprised Montag the fireman hasn't come around to burn my copy into ashes, but then that would send more world-ending carbon into the atmosphere. Anyway, I read it and enjoyed it (despite the fact that there isn't even one woman in sight). It's really a boy's adventure book except that it's set in the future. Towards the end, men in aircraft arrive to save the day. That makes me think of the events in the middle sequence of the film Things to Come (1936).

In November I read A Walk Out of the World by Ruth Nichols (1960), with nice illustrations by Trina Schart Hyman. Ruth Nichols was still a teenager when she wrote her first book. I found it to be a pure, gentle, innocent, and beautiful fantasy. It was almost certainly inspired by the Chronicles of Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. The climax is refreshing. This is a woman's version of the end of a conflict versus that of a man.

Finally, I started reading McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (2003) in November. I find Stephen King's and Michael Crichton's stories to be two of the poorest in the book so far. The late Mr. Crichton's is very nearly pointless and gratuitous in the extreme. Elmore Leonard's is the best so far--and by a long shot, no pun intended--but then I have heard he was a good writer. And now I find that Elmore Leonard was born in 1925. I have written this year (and recently) about other people born in 1925, including Flannery O'Connor, Jack Matthews, Lou Feck, June Lockhart, Alec Penstone, and a man named Floyd, whom I saw in October at a Veterans Administration clinic in distant Appalachia.

There is in Thrilling Tales a story with needless product placement (Lego, UPS, etc.) by Dan Shaon. So now we know that such a practice goes back at least as far as 2003. I'll keep railing against it wherever I find it. The book opens with an old-fashioned adventure story, written in the naturalistic tradition, about a hunt for a Megalodon. It's a self-aware story, though, and includes an inside joke/insider information in its mention of Bernard Heuvelmans. That one is by Jim Shepard. Finally for now, there is an elephant story by Glen David Gold, one to go along with another, "Hoity-Toity" by A. Belayev, in Soviet Science Fiction. These would make the beginnings of an anthology, or, if you will allow it, an elephanthology.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

The Monsters of Progress

In science fiction and some sub-genres of fantasy, monsters are external and their invasions come from without. Invasions can be of the old-fashioned type: monsters arrive at our doors or upon our shores like Mongol hordes or ravaging Vikings. Aliens from other planets, other lands, crossing vast oceans of space, arrive in their ships upon the shores of Earth. They mean to take over and subdue us, or to take everything we have, including our lives.

A more effective invasion, though, is an invasion from within. The alien Cthulhu invades the psyche of the sensitive artist Henry Anthony Wilcox of Providence, Rhode Island. For the duration of the Cthulhu crisis, Wilcox is taken over. He is no longer himself. Likewise, the alien ovipositor in Alien (1979), acting as an organism separate from the egg-laying alien queen, invades the very body of a crewman from Earth. He, then, is also taken over, but the invasion of his body is a physical one and not at all psychic. He is like a caterpillar to a parasitic wasp. As with the patient in Frederick Exley's fictional memoir, A Fan's Notes (1968), both men, Wilcox and the luckless crewman, have fallen victim to a "debbil" inside them. Worse still are the alien invaders that do not merely possess the human body or psyche but that actually supplant the human person within his own body or identity. He is wiped away while they advance. Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

Invasions from without are science-fictional. Science fiction is in one sense the fiction of science, science being a development of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Science doesn't account for the supernatural, of course, and not much, if at all, for anything non-material. If it can't be measured, quantified, tested, or observed, science is not interested and might even say it doesn't exist. If there are any debbils inside of us, they must come from the outside, or else something inside of us--our tissues or cells, more likely our chemicals and molecules--has gone terribly wrong. Those things can be fixed by scientific means. If you're off, it's only because the chemical soup inside you has too much of one ingredient or too little of another. If we put your chemicals back into balance, you will be yourself again. You will be perfect and happy, which is really what you are in your essential being and self. In short, all problems have material or physical solutions. That was of course the promise of science. Science would make for a better and more perfect world. In other words, through applications of science, technology, medicine, and so on, there would be progress.

In weird fiction and some other sub-genres of fantasy, the past is still alive and intrudes upon the present. Although there are sometimes external monsters in these sub-genres, science is often of little use, for it doesn't admit to the possibility of the non-material or supernatural. It cannot address the problem, let alone solve it. Progress is an illusion in weird fiction and related sub-genres. Very often, the monsters of traditional fiction (if we can call it that in opposition to science fiction) live within. They may come from without, but in moving in and taking over the human body and soul, they enter into a ready-made habitat. In our fall from grace and our cultivation of sin, corruption, depravity, and impurity, we carve out places in our hearts for the arrival of the debbil. We build it and he comes.

In preparing to write this, I have read a little about the idea of progress. One article I read traces the modern concept of progress to Francis Bacon (1561-1626). (Bacon is Progress.) I'm not a philosopher and know nothing about Bacon. My thoughts were going in another direction, namely, towards Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and the idea that human beings are good and pure but that we are corrupted by an imperfect society. If Rousseau was the originator of that idea, then he would seem to have been saying that our debbils are not internal but are in fact external. Monsters are placed inside of us by the motile ovipositor of the society in which we live. If we can perfect society, then the debbil can be exorcised and man can be made perfectly happy again. That's what progress is all about: a return to a perfect state.

So my hypostulatin' in all of this is towards the idea that the monsters of progress are external and that they came from the outside for as long as science and science-mindedness were viewed as the wave of the future. In other words, for as long as science fiction was strong and pervasive, the threat of the monster emanated from somewhere outside of our pure selves. (Remember that the stereotypical--and flat--science fiction hero is perfect and without flaw.) Before there was science and science fiction, though, the monster threatened from within, from the weak and corrupted human heart. Call it a heart of darkness. And now that science and science fiction are not pervasive and seem to have weakened greatly, the monster--that black mental patient's debbil--emanates from within. "The horror, the horror" is not out there but in here. But then that's where tradition has always placed it, I think. And poor Ichabod Crane may have been simply the victim of an elaborate prank.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

More Views of the Hudson River-Part Six

Frederick Exley was born in Watertown, New York, in 1929. His birthplace isn't anywhere near the Hudson River. Instead, Exley had views of the river and its valley and towns while being institutionalized for alcoholism and mental illness during the 1950s. His struggles and experiences gave him much of the material for A Fan's Notes, his "fictional memoir" published in 1968.

Exley was the fan of his title, for he was obsessed with the New York Giants, especially with Frank Gifford, who had been a student and star athlete at the University of Southern California during Exley's attendance there in 1950-1952. The Giants aren't having much of a season this year, but Gifford gave fans a lot to cheer about in the 1950s. Both men left USC in 1952. Gifford soared. Exley on the other hand crashed. It was only with the writing (and success) of his novel that Exley began coming back. Kurt Vonnegut and James Dickey praised A Fan's Notes. Newsday called it "the best novel written in the English language since The Great Gatsby." Maybe Newsday was primed to make the comparison by references and allusions to F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel in Exley's own. These include the following passage:

     In the afternoons I lay face up on a water mattress and watched the compact white clouds run down the sky, or face down looking into the blue-green water--chlorinated and temulent to the smell--of the mail-order, children's swimming pool on which I floated. (Vintage Books, 1988, p. 368)

One difference is that Gatsby died afloat in his swimming pool, whereas Exley lived.

Exley mentioned other authors and books in A Fan's Notes. These include Washington Irving, George Orwell and 1984, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter. He didn't mention H.P. Lovecraft, but there are comparisons there, too. Like Lovecraft, Exley suffered from self-imposed malnutrition, his due to alcoholism. In describing his institutionalization, Exley wrote: "We had failed our families by our inability to function properly in society (as good a definition of insanity as any)." (p. 75; italics in the original) Although Lovecraft was never institutionalized, I think he also suffered from the same inability. And now I find in rereading page 75 of my Vintage edition that Exley used a phrase also used in Lovecraft: "they told us terrifying stories of the indignities that would be heaped upon us down there." Compare that to two uses of the same phrase in "The Call of Cthulhu":

When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith.

And

The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. 

Depths and descent are themes in both works. In A Fan's Notes, the descent is more psychological than physical, even if the quote from above refers to a descent into a lower part of the hospital.

There are horrors in Exley's fictionalized memoir. Many of these have to do with how psychiatric patients were treated in the 1950s and early '60s, including by insulin shock treatment. There is another type of horror, too . . .

Joseph Conrad isn't in A Fan's Notes, either. Earlier this year, I wrote about Conrad and his novella Heart of Darkness (1899). The most famous line from that story is of course Marlow's last words: "The horror! The horror!" In my Dell edition of Heart of Darkness, a previous owner underlined different passages and made notes in the margins. One bit of that person's marginalia reads:

". . . is horror, horror out there or in here?"

And this is where my insight, if it is one, arrives.

In "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," the horror or terror is external to the person. Ichabod Crane is normal and stable. Although Irving's narrator leaves open the possibility that Ichabod was finally terrified by a supernatural occurrence, the more likely explanation is that Brom Bones is the one to have put a scare into him by masquerading, Scooby-Doo style, as the Headless Horseman.

In "The Call of Cthulhu" (Weird Tales, Feb. 1928), the horror is also external in the form of Cthulhu himself, and to a lesser extent in his worshippers and acolytes. But the horror is also internal for some people, including the artist Henry Anthony Wilcox of Providence, Rhode Island. In late March and early April, coinciding with the worldwide Cthulhu crisis, Wilcox is possessed as if he were overcome by a terrible hallucinatory fever. He isn't himself. Others in the story suffer from psychological torments and fears as well. They have in a sense internalized an external horror. It occurs to me now that maybe their author in his own life externalized internal horrors.

Thirty years or more after that, Exley, while in the hospital, encounters another psychiatric patient, who tells him "that there was a man within him, pestering him, allowing him no peace." The man asks him to listen at his diaphragm, "the exact location of the man." Exley listens, hearing nothing. Nonetheless, he asks his interlocutor what the man is saying. "'He say he the debbil,'" is the reply, "'an' he gwoan kill me.'" (p. 73)

There is more on the man with the devil inside him (on pages following page 73--these show Exley's far different view of race in America than what Lovecraft expressed) and a further explication of the black man's--and Exley's--problem. The point is that, in a novel of a No-Longer-Romantic America, one of the postwar period and the 1960s, "the horror, the horror," was already internalized. There were external horrors to be sure--insulin shock treatment was one--but in the time between 1819-1820 when Irving's story was published and 1968 when Exley's first saw print, horror became internalized. The human heart--a heart often of darkness--became the source of the world's horrors instead of some externality. Joseph Conrad must have recognized that (during Freud's first decade as a published author), and so the migration of horror from external to internal sources had already commenced by then. Lovecraft recognized it in his own writings of the 1910s to the 1930s. And in an episode of his own first novel, Frederick Exley seems to have confirmed it.

I have mentioned Freud here because Exley did, too. He writes: "In the modern and enlightened sunshine of Freud, in this Anacreontic milieu where we were all going to be absolved of guilt and its ensuing remorse, Hawthorne had seemed to me irrelevant and spurious." (p. 367) But Exley returned to Hawthorne, learned a new appreciation of him, and even "developed a crush" on him. Conrad may or may not have been a romantic author (or "Romantic Realist" as Ruth M. Stauffer put it in a study from 1922; he was certainly conservative), but maybe he followed an older example, disregarding science and "progress" in favor of a traditional understanding of the human heart. That confuses things a little, and maybe mine is no insight after all. Maybe a discovery that horrors are internal rather than external is simply a return to tradition. If that's true, then maybe external horrors are left as artifacts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our monsters and ghosts were and are from within.

* * *

Another of the authors mentioned in A Fan's Notes was Harlan Hatcher (1898-1998), with whom Exley had taken a course at USC. Exley mentioned him in relation to Ernest Hemingway and the days both men spent in Paris during the 1920s. (According to Exley, Hatcher did not know Hemingway. He only knew of him. See pp. 128-129.) I recognized Hatcher's name, for in late summer I had read from The Ohio Guide, compiled by Harlan Hatcher and published in 1940. Hatcher was born in Ironton, Ohio, and taught at Ohio State University but became president of football rival University of Michigan. I'm always fascinated by these nexi and coincidences, even when they don't signify anything greater than themselves or have any occult meaning. Anyway, this is the first of these final notes on my series on Washington Irving, H.P. Lovecraft, and the Hudson River, all of which are personal rather than external. They are in here rather than out there.

A Fan's Notes is not the kind of book you should read when you have slipped through the cracks of the world. I didn't know that when I began reading it during my five-weeks-and-a-day. I read it anyway. Sometimes it dragged and sometimes not. I got through it and I'm glad I read it, even if I don't have as high opinion of it as the writers of the cover blurbs. Chapter 6 is entitled "Who? Who? Who is Mr. Blue?" I was reading that chapter in my tent, by flashlight, when I heard a barred owl call, "Who? Who? Who?" Then it flew away, and I heard two owls exchanging their more recognizable call, "Who cooks for you?" Another thing you should know about barred owls: they sometimes begin their calling with the most terrible and ghastly of screams.

Finally, Frederick Exley married on October 31, 1959, exactly sixty-six years before my drive on Halloween night, 2025, which ended my five-weeks-and-a-day. I drove under a half moon that night, the same fraction that inspired the name of Henry Hudson's ship, Halve Maen, or Half Moon, on which he and his crew sailed up the Hudson River in 1609.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

More Views of the Hudson River-Part Five

Like I said, I did not set out on a reading program about the Hudson River as it appears in literature. Instead, I began thinking about the subjects of this series simply by reading the stories in a small volume called Ghosts, edited by Grant Overton and published in 1927. I found Ghosts at a garage sale this summer, along with a booklet about George Rogers Clark's victory at Vincennes in 1779, also published in the 1920s. That's a story every fourth-grader in Indiana learns in history class--and remembers thereafter if only because of the account of Clark and his men wading through miles of the flooded Wabash River bottom in the winter of 1779. Next year will mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of our country. I hope to write about that at the same time that I write about Weird Tales in 1926, which was, of course, the American sesquicentennial year. I'm not sure that I will find very much to write about in regards to Weird Tales in the year of our sesquicentennial, but I'll at least give it a try.

* * *

I enjoyed many of the stories in Ghosts, even if not all are actually ghost stories. The first is "The Red Room" by H.G. Wells (1896). It's a somewhat weak story, but then Wells was a materialist, I think, and not very convincing as a believer in ghosts, which is what would have been required of him if he was going to write successfully a story like this one. The last story is "Quality" by John Galsworthy (1912). If there is a ghost in Galsworthy's story, he is only a human ghost. "Quality," as well as "The Man Without a Country" by Edward Everett Hale (1863), would seem out of place in a volume like this one, the difference being that I enjoyed Hale's story but didn't think very much of Galsworthy's.

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving (1819, 1820) is the second story in Ghosts. Right away, as I was reading it, I was struck by the similarity of stories by H.P. Lovecraft to "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." More specifically, I noticed a similar kind of setting and the establishment of a sense of place. I quoted earlier in this series from "The Dunwich Horror" (Weird Tales, Apr. 1929). Although I wrote a note to myself about "The Colour Out of Space" (Amazing Stories, Sept. 1927), I didn't mention it or quote from it in this space. I'll make up for that now:

West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentler slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.

     The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for the imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night. It must be this which keeps the foreigners away, for old Ammi Pierce has never told them of anything he recalls from the strange days. Ammi, whose head has been a little queer for years, is the only one who still remains, or who ever talks of the strange days; and he dares to do this because his house is so near the open fields and the travelled roads around Arkham.

     There was once a road over the hills and through the valleys, that ran straight where the blasted heath is now; but people ceased to use it and a new road was laid curving far toward the south. Traces of the old one can still be found amidst the weeds of a returning wilderness, and some of them will doubtless linger even when half the hollows are flooded for the new reservoir. Then the dark woods will be cut down and the blasted heath will slumber far below blue waters whose surface will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange days will be one with the deep's secrets; one with the hidden lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.

Compare that to similar passages in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "The Dunwich Horror."

I went in one direction in my series comparing Lovecraft to Irving's hero Ichabod Crane. All the while, I was preparing to write in another direction, for not long after reading Ghosts, I came upon a book, entirely by accident, that includes other views of the Hudson River. That book is A Fan's Notes: A Fictional Memoir by Frederick Exley (1929-1992). A Fan's Notes was published in 1968. I read it in the Vintage Books edition of twenty years after.

Now, at last, I have arrived at the last two views of the Hudson River about which I will write in this series. First, from page 81 of A Fan's Notes:

     That hospital (the word is frightfully harsh) was lovely. Its buildings--château-like houses--commanded a high, green hill, and its shrubbed, carpet-like lawns ran sweepingly down between ancient, verdant trees. It was spring then, the spring just preceding my autumn commitment to Avalon Valley; and the azure sky seemed always mottled with sailing, billowing clouds, which, when we turned our eyes heavenward, seemed to caress and cool our faces. Beneath us in the valley, deep blue and turgid and heart-stopping, was the Hudson River.

Second, from page 129:

With the top down on the Mercedes and the chillness of the season cutting our faces a fierce pink, we shot through the autumn-lemon hills of Putnam County, and across the snakelike mountain roads into that valley. Beyond the river, its waters flat blue and cold now, rose the mountains, rose just as Irving had said they did, now purple, now russet, now shrouded in mist. I especially liked the antiquated towns where the the old limestone houses sat flush with the streets beneath the fall trees. Looking at them, one thought of cavernous hearths opening onto great, smoldering logs, of huge copper kettles, of the odor of things baking, of family reunions, of rooted people with a sense of the past, warm, loyal, dignified people who endured in a kind of unending autumn--I could not, and cannot, imagine that valley save in autumn.

Like Ichabod Crane, Frederick Exley was a teacher. He seems to have been well read, and he made references and allusions to other authors and books, mostly American, including, as in the second passage above, Washington Irving. A Fan's Notes is something of a horror story. I'll have more on that next time. (The hospital mentioned in the first passage was a mental hospital.) But Exley's approach in describing settings is similar to Irving's and not at all like Lovecraft's, for Lovecraft wanted to let us know that he was writing of terrible places and terrible events. Irving and Exley actually liked the places and people of which they wrote.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

More Views of the Hudson River-Part Four

North of the Bronx is the Tappan Zee, a wide place in the Hudson River with a combination American Indian-Dutch name. Tarrytown is on the east side of the Tappan Zee. Washington Irving wrote about the Tappan Zee and Tarry Town, as he called it, in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." His description below could be the caption to a painting by an artist of the Hudson River School:

The wide bosom of the Tappan Zee lay motionless and glassy, excepting that here and there a gentle undulation waved and prolonged the blue shadow of the distant mountain. A few amber clouds floated in the sky, without a breath of air to move them. The horizon was of a fine golden tint, changing gradually into a pure apple green, and from that into the deep blue of the mid-heaven. A slanting ray lingered on the woody crests of the precipices that overhung some parts of the river, giving greater depth to the dark gray and purple of their rocky sides. A sloop was loitering in the distance, dropping slowly down with the tide, her sail hanging uselessly against the mast; and as the reflection of the sky gleamed along the still water, it seemed as if the vessel was suspended in the air.

According to Wikipedia, Frederik Pohl (1919-2013) lived in the area of the Tappan Zee while he was writing his novel Gateway (1997). He mentioned that body of water in his book, calling it the Tappan Sea and letting us know that his protagonist, Robinette Broadhead, has an apartment overlooking it.

C.L. Moore (1911-1987) and Henry Kuttner (1915-1958) lived at Hastings-on-Hudson, which is also on the Tappan Zee, in the 1940s. Both wrote for Weird Tales in the 1930s. Others who were born in or lived in the Hudson River valley included:

• Edith de Garis (ca. 1874-1950) of Waterford and Albany

• Louis B. Capron (1891-1971) of Menands, Colonie

• Henry del Campo (1899-1961) of Schodack

• P. Schuyler Miller (1912-1974) of Troy

In addition, the unknown author W.H. Holmes, who wrote "The Weaving Shadows" (Weird Tales, Mar. 1923), was almost certainly from from the Hudson River valley.

Lamont Buchanan (1919-2015) and Jean Milligan Buchanan (1919-2004) lived in Manhattan, though closer to the East River than to the Hudson. He was the associate editor of Weird Tales from November 1942 until September 1949. Jean Milligan, his wife after 1952, is supposed to have been the pseudonymous author Allison V. Harding. I have my doubts about that idea, but that's something for other days, some of which are in the past. In any case, Jean Milligan Buchanan lived at the end of her life at a nursing home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in fact just three blocks north of Edgar Allan Poe Street and within view of the Hudson River.

Finally, I wrote about my uncle, who studied English at the State University of New York at Albany in the 1960s. One of the subjects of his studies was Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), who was not an author of the Hudson River valley but instead of a valley to the south, that of the Delaware River.

Next: A View of the Hudson River from the 1960s.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

More Views of the Hudson River-Part Three

In this centennial year of The New Yorker and The Great Gatsby, I have been writing about New York, its islands, its rivers, its cities, and its towns. Washington Irving (1783-1859) famously wrote about those places, too. (I'm not claiming the fame, only the writing.) And for the past three weeks I have been writing about the Hudson River and places along its banks and in its valley. Other authors of American literature have lived in and written about the Hudson River and its valley. They include some early authors and some late:

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) wrote about the wilds of New York in his novel The Pioneers, or The Sources of the Susquehanna; a Descriptive Tale (1823). There is a long passage about scenery along the Hudson River in Chapter XXVI well worth reading.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1830-1831. He lived on Manhattan Island, at the Brennan farmhouse in 1844-1845 and in the Bronx in 1846-1847. There is an Edgar Allan Poe Street in Manhattan, close to the Hudson River, and Poe is known to have taken in views of the river on his writer's walks and rambles. I found an article about Poe and New York. Click on the following title, author's name, and date to read it: "Edgar Allan Poe Won’t be Forgotten on West 84th Street--Nevermore" by Allison Moon on the website West Side Rag, July 19, 2022; updated on July 20, 2022. I also learned that Poe's story "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842) was based on the case of Mary Cecilia Rogers, whose body was found in the Hudson River off Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1841.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was a New Englander, but he understood the spell of the Hudson. In an article "Gorgeous Hudson River Valley" (The Saturday Evening Post, Apr. 17, 2014), author Edward Readicker-Henderson wrote: "When Nathaniel Hawthorne went up the Hudson on his way to Niagara in 1835, he said he'd been putting it off because he didn't want 'to exchange the pleasures of hope for those of memory.'" Mr. Readicker-Henderson's article is about the Hudson River School of artists, about whom I have written nothing at all. But if you would like a view of the Hudson River of two centuries past, then you should have a look at their work.

Herman Melville (1819-1891) was born in New York City and lived in his childhood in Albany. The Hudson River is mentioned twice in his epic novel Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851). There is more about Melville in "Melville Ashore" by Edward Tick in the New York Times, August 17, 1986. Again, click to find and read it.

Like Melville, Henry James (1843-1916) was born in New York and spent part of his childhood in Albany. Charles Fort (1874-1932) was born in Albany of Dutch ancestry. He lived with his wife in the Bronx, and that's where he died. Stories by Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne were in Weird Tales magazine. Stories and ideas inspired by Charles Fort were also in its pages.

To be continued . . .

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

More Views of the Hudson River-Part Two

I have a book here next to me called The Hudson: A History, written by Tom Lewis and published in 2005. I had it offered for sale but took it back once I started reading and thinking about the Hudson River. I confess that this was not a pre-planned program of reading. I simply started by reading "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving (1819, 1820), immediately making a connection, at least in my own imagination, to stories by H.P. Lovecraft, thence, more tenuously, to The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925). A recent commenter, Baron Greystone, called this an experiment. That's as good a description as any. I liken what I have been doing in this series to the compare-and-contrast-type paper we all wrote in English composition class all those years ago.

Not all of what I have written here works very well, but enough of it does, I think, to make my point or points. The first is that H.P. Lovecraft followed in Washington Irving's example in effectively and concretely establishing a setting and a sense of place in his fiction. More particularly, his approach and some of his imagery in "The Dunwich Horror" (Weird Tales, Apr. 1929) are very close to Irving's in his story of a century before. Second is the effect that encountering the Hudson River has had on the writer's and artist's imagination. I soon found another writer's view of the Hudson quite by accident. That writer also referred to other writers and other books, including The Great Gatsby. Reading his book led me to what I think might be an insight--for myself if for no one else--regarding the literature of terror and horror in America. I'll soon write about him and his book, as well as this insight, but first are some other views of the Hudson.

Reading through The Hudson: A History by Tom Lewis has led me to thinking and reading about other authors. First is this quote from the works of Washington Irving, describing his first trip upriver:

Of all the scenery of the Hudson, the Kaatskill Mountains had the most witching effect on my boyish imagination. Never shall I forget the effect upon me of my first view of them, predominating over a wide extent of country--part wild, woody and rugged; part softened away into all the graces of cultivation. As we slowly floated along, I lay on the deck and watched them through a long summer's day, undergoing a thousand mutations under the magical effects of atmosphere; sometimes seeming to approach; at other times to recede; now almost melting into hazy distance, now burnished by the setting sun, until in the evening they printed themselves against the glowing sky in the deep purple of an Italian landscape.

Irving's reference to "an Italian landscape" is unnecessary, I think. It even works against the author's purpose in that he was an American author setting out, though he may not have known it very well, as a pioneer in an individual and independent American literature. Besides that, scenes in nature and the real world don't look like landscapes. It's actually the other way around.

In his book, Mr. Lewis left out "the Kaatskill Mountains." I found the full quote in a book called The Hudson: Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention by Wallace Bruce, a "Centennial Edition" published by Bryant Union Company of New York in 1907. The "centennial" part of that was of the first voyage of the world's first commercial steam-powered vessel, the North River Steamboat, later called the Clermont. Invented by Robert Fulton (1765-1815), the ship began steaming along the Hudson River between New York City and Albany in 1807.

Fulton was well connected to all kinds of people, including Joel Barlow (1754-1812). Barlow is connected to the place where I had my 2005 book The Hudson available for purchase, namely, Gallipolis, Ohio. The French City of Gallipolis has its connections to Ohio author Jack Matthews (1925-2013), who also had a strong sense of place. The late Mr. Matthews was born a century ago and died twelve years ago last month. Although I saw him several times, I never met him or spoke to him, and I greatly regret that.

Just so you know, Jack Matthews also wrote about H.P. Lovecraft. Just so you know, among his novels was Beyond the Bridge (1970), which has as its background the collapse of the Silver Bridge over another of our great rivers, the Ohio. That tragic event took place fifty-eight years ago this month, on December 15, 1967, when the cars and trucks of workers, commuters, and Christmas shoppers fell into the river from the bridge connecting--until it didn't anymore--Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Kanauga, Ohio, just north of Gallipolis. Finally, just so you know, some people connect the Silver Bridge disaster to the supposed curse of Cornstalk and the supposed creature known as Mothman.

Washington Irving is of course quoted again and again in the 1907 book The Hudson. So is another author named Irving. She was Minna Irving (1864-1940), who was born Minnie Odell and who contributed a poem to Weird Tales magazine, "Sea-Wind," published in August 1937. She was born in Tarrytown, New York, and her mother's maiden name was Van Tassel, so her connections to Washington Irving and Irving's work would seem strong, even if she lived by a borrowed name.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley