Four Men-Part One

Two figures cast their long shadows over the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. They are of course Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. But it seems to me that there is more of Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Fort than Poe or Lovecraft in Weird Tales #367. From Nietzsche comes the theme and imagery of staring into voids and abysses. From Fort comes the idea that we are merely the property of superior beings from outer space. I think there is very little if anything of Robert W. Chambers in this issue, even if his name is mentioned first.

• In "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, a man stays at home at Christmastime to watch TV. (Fun fun.) Among the shows he watches is Quatermass, a British TV serial from 1979. As I understand it, the premise of the show is that people on Earth are being harvested by aliens for their protein. Human beings, then, are essentially cattle, in other words, property. (Cattle is from the same root word as chattel, i.e., the Latin capitale, meaning "property.") This is the Fortean aspect of Mr. Cornell's story. Now the Nietzschean aspect:

The door opens. He's opened it inward. And he's just looking at darkness. Just space. (p. 24)

I take that to be an oblique reference to a quote from Nietzsche:

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. (From Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, Chapter 4, No. 146) (1886)

• The reference to Nietzsche is more direct in "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan:

I stare at the box, and I imagine it stares back at me. (p. 38)

The reference to Fort is also more direct:

I think we're fished for. (p. 38)

It's also kind of indirect in that those italicized words refer to Edmond Hamilton's overtly Fortean story "The Space Visitors," from 1930.

• In "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson, the title character says that on his trip to the Moon, he:

"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)

Here's the Fortean concept to go with the foregoing Nietzschean one:

"We were to be contained--not because we were a disease, as I thought, but because we were playthings."

Whose playthings? According to Bonneville, those of "Our Owner." (p. 53) So, again, we're property.

There is an alien presence in "The Traveler" by Francisco Tignini, "Mozaika" by Nancy Kilpatrick, and "Laid to Rest" by Tim Lebbon, while the void appears right in the title of Carol Gyzander's story "Call of the Void -- L'appel du Vide." I can't say that any of these stories has both a Nietzschean and a Fortean aspect.

As for the other two stories, "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story" by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, and "Concerto in Five Movements" by Ramsey Campbell, Poe and Lovecraft have a more prominent place in the former, while Mr. Campbell's story is the most Lovecraftian of all. And if cosmic horror is a synonym of Lovecraftian horror, then "Concerto in Five Movements" is perhaps closer than any to the concept of cosmic horror.

The title of this little essay is "Four Men," but I have written about only two of the four. The other two will come along in part two of this series.

To be continued . . . 

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Robert W. Chambers & Lost Lands

One sub-sub-genre of fantasy and adventure fiction is the tale of lost cities, lost lands, and lost continents. Sometimes those places that are lost are sunken cities and submerged continents. Atlantis is a lost continent, lost in time and lost beneath the sea. You could say that Cthulhu's sunken island crypt is a lost land, too. In the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023), the cover story, "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story," by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, refers to Edgar Allan Poe's "City in the Sea," also to several other lost lands, continents, and islands. And this is where I would like to write about Robert W. Chambers again.

In Robert W. Chambers' collection The King in Yellow, first published in 1895, there is a story called "The Demoiselle D'Ys." This story is not within the King in Yellow series that opens the book, even if there is a character named Hastur in the story. Nor is it exactly in the Paris series that closes Chambers' collection. It actually sets itself apart from those two series. "The Demoiselle D'Ys" is a fantasy. It draws from the legend of Ys or Kêr-Is, a seaside city in Brittany that became disastrously inundated. Ys, then, is a city in the sea, a lost land, a drowned place.

The Demoiselle D'Ys of the title is lost, too, but lost in time rather than in space. Chambers' version of her story is a familiar one in which a man of our own world encounters a lovely and mysterious woman, either in the past, out of the past, or from some other fantasy land. Usually, but not always, she becomes lost to him. In Dian of the Lost Land by Edison Marshall (1935) there is an example of the woman who is not lost. Rather, the man becomes lost with her by giving up on his own world and remaining with her in hers. Maybe when Chambers returned to the United States in 1894 or so, he felt like he had lost a magical or mystical world, that of France, where he had studied art for some time.

Unlike Philip, the protagonist in "The Demoiselle D'Ys," Chambers fetched back a woman from his lost land. Her name was Elsie Vaughn Moller. She was born in Paris on March 22, 1881. The two were married on July 11 or 12, 1898, in Washington, D.C., when he was thirty-three and she was just seventeen. They had a son together, Robert Husted Chambers, also called Robert Edward Stuart (possibly also Stewart) Chambers (1899-1955). The younger Chambers' parents both died in the 1930s, Robert on December 16, 1933, Elsie on November 3, 1939, an unhappy decade for the Chambers family and for the Europe of their past. I have a feeling that the Chambers were unhappy anyway.

Robert Husted Chambers was a writer, too. He had four stories now listed in The FictionMags Index, these published from 1920 to 1934. Some of his stories were collected in a book, John Tom Alligator and Others, published in 1937. He does not seem to have had a very happy life. He was married at least three times and had at least one other engagement broken. He served in the U.S. Army during World War I and World War II, finally attaining the rank of captain, but he was discharged with a medical condition. He died fairly young, at age fifty-five, seventy years ago last month. He appears to have died without issue, and so Robert W. Chambers doesn't have any direct descendants. There may still be Chambers descendants, though, the progeny of his brother, architect Walter Boughton Chambers (1866-1945), with whom Chambers had studied in Europe.

Next: Four Men.

"La Cathedrale engloutie" ("The Drowned Cathedral"), a woodcut by M.C. Escher based on one of Claude Debussy's Préludes and before that on the legend of the lost city Ys.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Robert W. Chambers & the Language of Cosmic Horror

Robert W. Chambers' name is the first to appear in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (#367, published in 2023). This is in "The Eyrie," which used to be a letters column but has become simply a place for the editor to write about whatever pleases him. If you have ever read Chambers' book The King in Yellow (1895), you might recognize aspects of cosmic horror in its pages. I believe it to be there anyway. Chambers' early take on cosmic horror has been an inspiration for other writers in this now popular sub-sub-genre of fiction. I'm not sure that his take exists in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, though. The authors in that issue seem to have gone down a different road, actually two parallel roads laid down a long time ago by Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Fort. There are two prevailing themes, too. One, from the former, has to do with peering into voids. The other, from the latter, has to do with our existence as mere property of higher and more advanced intelligences. Both are pessimistic or negative, even somewhat nihilistic. Both can be applied in the writing of cosmic horror stories.

If you have read Weird Tales #367, you might have noticed the appearance and reappearance of the words void and abyss. If this were Pee-Wee's Playhouse and those were the secret words, there would have been a lot of screaming. There must be, I think, lots of different aspects of cosmic horror, or different ways of writing about it. The authors in that issue seem to have limited themselves pretty badly, though. So were they required to apply certain narrow interpretations of that term by the editor, or were they free to look into their own interpretations and simply settled on more or less the same across the board? I don't know. Either way, I don't think things went very well. Writers of genre fiction are supposed to let their imaginations roam. The writers in the Cosmic Horror Issue seem to have kept theirs pent up.

The words void and abyss are not in The King in Yellow. There is no cosmos, cosmic, universe, galaxy, or galactic either. Chaos appears, but it's used in conventional ways (x2). There is mention of stars, but most of these are in the first half of the book, black stars being a recurring phrase (x4).

Following are two passages that come close to the language of cosmic horror but don't quite get there. From "The Street of the First Shell":

"And through the smoke pall the lightning of the cannon played, while from time to time a rift above showed a fathomless black vault set with stars."

From "The Yellow Sign":

With eyes starting from my head I peered into the darkness, but when he came into the room I did not see him. It was only when I felt him envelope me in his cold soft grasp that I cried out and struggled with deadly fury, but my hands were useless and he tore the onyx clasp from my coat and struck me full in the face. Then, as I fell, I heard Tessie's soft cry and her spirit fled: and even while falling I longed to follow her, for I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now.

I think what happened here is that Chambers wrote too early in the history of weird fiction or genre fiction and, much more broadly, too early in--or before--the modern era. Although there were lots of scientific discoveries regarding astronomy and physics in his time, Albert Einstein's postulations of special and general relativity were still in the future, as was Edwin Hubble's discovery, more or less, of a greater universe outside our own galaxy. (Hubble's discovery was reported in November 1924 when the first issue of the revived Weird Tales was on the newsstand. He presented it in person on January 1, 1925, or one hundred years ago last month. So 2024 or 2025, depending on how you look at it, is the centenary of our awareness of the universe.) Also still in the future were modern art, modern music, modern poetry and fiction, the terrible disasters of World War I and the Russian Revolution, and a proliferation of isms that grew out of and fed into these many developments. A popular writer of the late nineteenth century could have looked upon human existence from a cosmic perspective, but I'm not sure he could have seen very far, nor would he have had necessarily the background or experience to write what is, very often--too often--nihilistic fiction. Cosmic horror need not be nihilistic, but in the hands of too many of the authors in Weird Tales #367, that proved to be the case. We could have had something different, something with more imagination, insight, vigor. We could even have had a taste of Chambers-style cosmic horror and his fin-de-siècle ennui and decadence. But that wasn't to be, I guess, and I wonder why.

Next: More on Robert W. Chambers.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Tellers of Weird Tales in The New Yorker

The first issue of The New Yorker was dated February 21, 1925, one hundred years ago today. Unlike Weird Tales, The New Yorker has been published continuously since its inception. Also unlike Weird Tales, The New Yorker is a general interest magazine. It is and was a slick magazine, too, whereas Weird Tales was a pulp magazine for about as long as pulp magazines lasted. (Weird Tales switched to the digest format in 1953.) Even so, over the years, The New Yorker has published stories by authors of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Some of them seldom if ever touched the pulps. They include Shirley Jackson, John Collier, Margaret Atwood, and Joyce Carol Oates. Others were actual contributors to Weird Tales, including Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and cartoonist Gahan Wilson. The New Yorker has written on these pulp genres and their authors, including an article on Robert A. Heinlein in the issue of July 1, 1974. It even had a Science Fiction Issue dated June 4 & 11, 2012, which included a story by Ray Bradbury, who died on June 5, I guess at the time the magazine was available on the newsstand and in the library. There have been lots of flying saucers, aliens, monsters, ghosts, and witches on the cover of the magazine and of course macabre cartoons inside, most famously by Charles Addams. Anyway, there may have been other tellers of weird tales in The New Yorker, but I won't go searching for them. If anyone makes such a search and cares to share his or her results, I'll be here. Just drop me a line.

Happy 100th Anniversary to The New Yorker!

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Shakespeare in "The Eyrie"

Sometimes there was verse in "The Eyrie." The authors of that verse aren't credited in bibliographies. I can understand why. But for the sake of completeness, and for the sake of not missing out on things that might prove interesting and edifying, maybe we need a list of the authors of verse who appeared in "The Eyrie."

William Shakespeare wasn't the first, but his name came up in the February issue of 1925, one hundred years ago this month. That was part of an ongoing discussion on horror and what some readers called "necrophilia" in the pages of the magazine. Following is an excerpt from "The Eyrie." Farnsworth Wright's was almost certainly the editorial voice. (Boldface is added.)

(The quote begins:)

We recently attended a performance of "Romeo and Juliet"; and as we heard Jane Cowl deliver Juliet's speech before she takes the poison, we realized that the same speech, if published in a WEIRD TALES story, would be denounced by some of our indignant readers (not many, but surely by some) as "gruesome", "shocking", "offensive". A few of our good friends would undoubtedly write letters asking us why we so offended against good taste as to draw such a "disgusting" picture of Juliet awaking at midnight in the vault,

"Where, for these many hundred years, the bones

Of all my buried ancestors are packed;

Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,

Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say,

At some hours of the night spirits resort: --

Alack, alack! is it not like that I,

So early waking--what with loathsome smells,

And shrieks like mandrakes' torn out of the earth,

That living mortals, hearing them, run mad --

Oh, if I wake, shall I not lie distraught,

Environed with all these hideous fears.

And madly play with my forefathers' joints,

And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud?

And in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone,

As with a club, dash out my desperate brains?"

But there will be no indignant letters, because we have quoted this from the thousand-souled Shakespeare. And what about "Hamlet", with the stage strewn with dead bodies in the last act? And the ghost of "the blood-boltered Banquo" at Macbeth's banquet? And that gruesome scene where Macbeth washes his hands of the murdered Duncan's blood:

"What hands are these ? Ha! they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather 
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red."

We fear Shakespeare would fare quite badly at the hands of some of our readers. And the gentle Poe, who is still America's favorite author, and growing in popularity year by year (although the man himself died poor and neglected seventy-five years ago) -- how would Poe fare if he were writing today? Hardly better than he fared during his life. But the weird tales of that great master remain as a precious heritage to the whole world.

Considering the present unceasing popularity of the works of this great master of weird literature, we have no fear for the future of WEIRD TALES so long as the magazine remains weird.

(End of quote.)

And now here we are one hundred years later and Weird Tales (such as it is) is still being published.

(By the way, Jane Cowl played Juliet in performances in various places in Illinois in 1923-1924. In November 1924, she was at the Garrick Theatre in Chicago. Maybe that was when and where Farnsworth Wright saw her perform.)

Romeo and Juliet, Act V Scene III: Juliet Wakes in the Vault to Find Romeo Dead by G. Goldberg.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Louise Garwood (1900-1980)

Poet, Author, Newspaper Feature Writer, Teacher
Born January 29, 1900, Houston, Texas
Died March 21, 1980, Seton Medical Center, Austin, Texas

Louise Ford Garwood had an admirable career as a poet, author, journalist, and teacher. She was born on January 29, 1900, in Houston, Texas. Her parents were Judge Hiram Morgan Garwood (1864-1930) and Hettie Page (Love) Garwood (1867-1918). Louise Garwood attended Columbia University, although I'm not sure she graduated from there. In late 1923, she won the Florence Sterling Prize from the Poetry Society of Texas for her poem "Dusty Shoes." She also won second place in the competition for the Alamo Prize for "A Joy Forever." In addition to writing poems and short stories, Louise covered the Broadway stage for newspapers in Texas. She also wrote syndicated newspaper feature articles for Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA). Later on, she wrote for the Houston Press.

Here are some of Louise Garwood's credits:

• "The Miniature," a poem in the Corsicana Daily Sun, December 16, 1922.

• "Do You Know Your Library?" in the Houston Post, May 20, 1923.

• "Mrs. Lovett Warns Against Superficial View of Paris Life" in the Houston Post, June 24, 1923.

• "The 'Makers' of Writers" in the Houston Post, October 7, 1923, which mentions Harry Kniffin, who also contributed to Weird Tales.

• "Rainbow Tears," a poem set to music by Wilson Fraser and published in 1925.

• A syndicated feature article on philanthropist Anne Morgan, 1927 (NEA).

• A syndicated feature article from November 1928 on the play Machinal, written by Sophie Treadwell, based on the Ruth Snyder-Albert Gray murder case, and featuring Zita Johann (1904-1993), who went on to star in The Mummy (1932). The execution of Ruth Snyder in the electric chair was photographed surreptitiously. That photograph became famous.

• "Bond," a poem in Cupid’s Diary, September 4 1929.

• "Reality," a poem syndicated in 1929.

Louise Garwood wrote two short stories and three poems published in Weird Tales from 1925 to 1931. Her story "Fayrian," from one hundred years ago this month, is a poetic fantasy of murder and suicide.

Louise traveled to Argentina with her brother in 1931. Louise also taught dramatic art at the LaSalle School of Music, Dramatic Art and Dancing, in South Bend, Indiana, circa 1933-1934. By 1950, she was hospitalized at San Antonio State Hospital, a Kirkbride Plan hospital for the insane. She lived for another three decades and died on March 21, 1980, at Seton Medical Center in Austin, Texas. She was eighty years old.

Louise Garwood's Stories & Poems in Weird Tales
"Fayrian" (short story, Feb. 1925)
"Candle-Light" (short story, Nov. 1925)
"Ghosts" (poem, July 1926)
"The Living" (poem, Sept. 1929)
"Ghost" (poem, Dec. 1931)

Further Reading
None known.

Louise Garwood (1900-1980), a passport photograph from 1922.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Lawrence on Dostoevsky

Here is a quote for all authors, aspiring, beginning, well established, and otherwise, including those writing in Weird Tales:

"As far as I'm concerned, in proportion as a man gets more profoundly and personally interested in himself, so does my interest in him wane."

--from "On Dostoievsky and Rozanov" by D.H. Lawrence (1936)