"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan-Part One

Caitlín R. Kiernan was born on May 26, 1964, in Dublin, Ireland, and came to the United States as a child with his mother and sister. I believe his is an assumed name. That's okay. There have been lots of tellers of weird tales with pseudonyms, adopted names, or assumed names. Last week I heard from the son of Robert Spencer Carr (1909-1994), who let me know that his father's name at birth was Theodore Bonifield. I used that knowledge to update my biography of him. So the truth has come out more than one hundred years after Carr's birth. We're probably not allowed to know Mr. Kiernan's real name. There is supposed to be truth in art. Artists, though, are human beings, and human beings keep secrets, sometimes for all of their lives.

Mr. Kiernan is a writer, publisher, paleontologist, and onetime musician. His credits include novels, short stories, comic book scripts, and at least one screenplay. His first published short story was in 1995 and his first published novel in 1998. Mr. Kiernan lives and works in Alabama. I believe he also lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Although he's still living, his papers are deposited at the John Hay Library at Brown University. If authors' papers are stored in that library alphabetically (I doubt that they are), then Mr. Kiernan's can't be very far away from those of H.P. Lovecraft. Anyway, the author is another comic book and movie person, but his credits are mostly in prose form. Good for him. He's pretty prolific, too, so double good for him.

Caitlín R. Kiernan's story in Weird Tales #367 is called "Night Fishing." It's nine pages long, plus a full-page, illustrated title page. This is the most psychologically and thematically complex of all of the stories so far in the Cosmic Horror Issue. It's probably the best in stylistic terms, too. I especially like an image from his story: "patient as a spider." "Night Fishing" is also the first to refer overtly to the two main themes or images I have identified in this issue. More on that in a while.

Like "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, "Night Fishing" begins with a meta image on its title page. In Mr. Cornell's story, that meta image is a picture of a television set showing on its screen an image of John Mills in the British TV serial Quatermass, broadcast in 1979. (Thanks to reader Mike Harwood for identifying the source and the actor.) In Mr. Kiernan's story, the meta image is a picture of an office with a picture on the wall, an image of the painting "Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth (1948). So the illustration is a picture of a picture. We as readers, then, are looking at a picture of a picture of a woman looking at a house. Could there be in the house a picture on a wall? And in that picture could there be another picture, or even a picture of a picture?

(Actually, the illustration on the title page is a printed image made from an image engraved on a printer's plate and then transferred to a roller--assuming the magazine was printed by an offset process--of an original digital image that does not exist in the real world, showing a picture of an image of a woman looking at the image of a house. In other words, we are at remove after remove from any real, original, physical thing.)

"Night Fishing" is about a troubled man who is undergoing psychiatric treatment. Or is it merely psychological treatment? I have already written about some lack of precision in Weird Tales #367. In "Night Fishing," the narrator lets us know in his first sentence that he's going to a psychiatrist (pg. 33, col. 1). A while later, the psychiatrist is now a psychologist (pg. 33, col. 2). Then he goes back to being a psychiatrist again. There's an important difference to be made between the two, as a psychiatrist is a medical doctor who may treat his or her patients using drugs. In other words, psychiatry takes what could be interpreted as a materialistic approach to problems that may not be materialistic after all. I forgot to mention that Caitlín R. Kiernan is an atheist. And I forgot to mention that his narrator is a physicist.

There are lots of brandnames and a lot of product placement in "Night Fishing." Taco Bell, Coleman, Old Crow and Jack Daniels, Mason jars, Craftsman, Crayola crayons, Xanax, Case knife, TV Guide, Hershey's. There are other proper nouns, too: Snuffy Smith, Red Angus bulls, Sunset Boulevard, Mandelbrot set, Alabaman place names, Schrödinger and Heisenberg, Eisenhower, the King James Bible. Some of that is okay. Some of it makes for concrete detail and lends verisimilitude to a story. But to come across, as you read, a brandname in every few sentences or paragraphs in a story of just nine pages becomes a distraction. It points to something larger going on.

So why do they do it?

Why do writers of today so easily turn to using brandnames in their works? I guess it's a kind of conditioning. They grew up in a consumerist culture, and it all comes naturally to them. They think in terms of what they can buy, or what they might buy one day. In this culture, we are, every day, bombarded with commercial messages. Our favorite names are brandnames. Again and again in the comments section of this blog, I have asked readers to refrain from mentioning where they have bought this thing or that. If you're going to talk about a book, talk about the book, not about where you bought it. Sadly, even fans of fiction and readers of literature are commercially minded. I guess, too, that if your life is largely emptied out of real, human things, you have only commercial products with which to share your thoughts, your feelings, and your days. You develop relationships with them and they become your friends and lovers. Maybe that's one of the reasons that hoarding has become such a problem in our society. People objectify other people and humanize material things. We have it all backwards.

Many people, especially on the left, complain about materialism--commercial materialism--without understanding that to be of the left--Marxist, socialist, generically progressive--is to be, necessarily, a materialist. Erich Fromm, one of the Frankfurt School, was of the left. And yet in his book The Art of Loving (1956), he diagnosed a problem in which people see each other as material objects rather than as real human beings (a real human being being not material but non-material). In seeking after love, we commodify each other. We engage in decision-making as if we were in the marketplace. This is especially pronounced in a liberal, i.e., capitalist society. (This is obviously a Marxian critique. And now I wonder if there is product placement in the work of China Miéville, a known--and whiny--Marxist.) So maybe there is a similar kind of commodification carried out by the artists in our society, a commodification not only within and of their works but also of themselves. Commercial products have become an object of art, equal in importance perhaps to feelings, meaning, relationships, and so on, the original and true currency in the making of art. (Yes, I see the irony here in using the word currency.) And so writers in Weird Tales and elsewhere are like children watching Saturday morning cartoons, focused on the commercials and the brandnames as much as on their favorite shows. What's next as an epigraph? A jingle? A slogan?

But at least Caitlín R. Kiernan knows that there is a bird called a mockingbird and a snake called a water snake. Authors can name every brand of TV show, movie, comic book, and video game they have ever consumed, but they don't know the difference between a bass and a basswood. They should work on that.

To be continued . . .

Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

What Is Cosmic Horror?

Weird Tales #367, from 2023, is a themed issue. The theme is cosmic horror. I'm not sure that a themed issue is a good idea. What happens if you as a reader don't like the theme? Well, you go elsewhere for your reading, and your money follows you. That was one of the really good things about the original Weird Tales: no matter what your tastes were when it came to weird fiction, fantasy, or even science fiction, you would probably find something you liked in every issue.

There has been a proliferation of genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres in genre fiction. It's pretty ridiculous actually. I'm not sure why there should be such proliferation except that I think everybody is trying to be extraordinary. Democracy has its discontents. People ask themselves, if we're all equal, how am I to stand out from everybody else? How am I to show myself to be above others? One way of doing it, I guess, is to make yourself extraordinary within a subset or sub-subset of our larger society and culture, even if you have to invent that subset or sub-subset for yourself. The other day, I wrote about an interview that one contributor to the Cosmic Horror Issue conducted with another. In his introductory paragraph to that interview, Nicholas Diak wrote of "The Forest Gate" by Samantha Underhill: "Using cosmic horror and existential dread poetic styles, this poem . . ." and so on. So I guess cosmic horror and existential dread are poetic styles and the proliferation extends into not only genres but also forms and styles. I have used the word proliferation here. Actually I think it's a balkanization of culture, more accurately an atomization. People working in culture are in pursuit of the infinitesimal, for if you can divide culture finely enough, then you can be extraordinary within your own self-created infinitesimal. If your world is your navel, then you can easily occupy your whole world. You can be within it the greatest of anything and everything you can think of.

So what is cosmic horror? Well I'll let you know that my title is a trick. I don't know what it is. But then I didn't invent the thing. I'm not sure that it even exists. The other day, I pointed out that cosmos and chaos are opposites. Cosmos is order. It is the universe. It's where we live and it's a place governed by laws. Although there is emptiness in the universe, the emptiness is not what counts. The important parts lie among the emptiness. If time is what keeps everything from happening all at once (a quote attributed to Ray Cummings), then emptiness--space--is what keeps everything from happening all in the same place.

Chaos is cosmos' opposite. It is disorder, confusion, emptiness. The Online Etymology Dictionary explains its meaning as "gaping void; empty, immeasurable space." The original Greek word, khaos, means "abyss." Those two words, void and abyss, appear again and again in the Cosmic Horror Issue. That was my point in suggesting that cosmic horror should probably be called chaotic horror, for the horror appears to be in encounters with or contemplation of the void or the abyss. Alternatively, this invented, theoretical, or critical (versus natural, organic, or evolved) sub-sub-genre could be called abyssal horror or voidal horror. There isn't any such word as voidal, I guess, but if we can invent one thing, we can invent another.

I have a copy of Otto Struve's Elementary Astronomy, published in 1959 and reprinted in 1961. Struve's book is brimming with black-and-white photographs of immense galaxies and countless stars. In the first page of text, there are numbers representing immense quantities: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the observable universe, a like number of cubic inches of almost empty space in the Milky Way galaxy. That's a lot of zeroes, kept from emptiness or void by an initial non-zero integer. More such numbers appear on the next page. These, then, are cosmic scales, cosmic here having mathematical value but being empty of any value judgments, or at least any outright negative value judgments. Dr. Struve was a dispassionate scientist after all. Even though they are cosmic, we can still write about things of this scale. Otto Struve did it in his textbook. Other authors have done it in their fiction. I should add that zero represents nothing. The numeral looks like a hole, an opening, a gaping maw.

I guess cosmic horror is an expression or a feeling of horror that arises from apprehending or contemplating the cosmic scale of the universe. Maybe it's not the cosmos itself that gives rise to this feeling, though. Again, cosmos is order. Chaos is its opposite. In the biblical story of the creation of the universe, what we call cosmos was preceded by chaos, emptiness, a void:

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep

or:

the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep

or:

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

(Genesis 1:2)

We live in an atheistic and nihilistic age. Maybe the horror that some people feel in their contemplation of the universe is the horror not of cosmos but of the void that preceded it. In intervening and in his act of creation, God put an end to chaos. The void, which was non-existence, is now doubly non-existent. There cannot be a void if there is cosmos. But people don't believe in God any longer. I suspect that many if not most of the authors and poets who contributed to the Cosmic Horror Issue are non-believers, if not atheists, materialists, nihilists, or even anti-natalists, as Thomas Ligotti (not a contributor to this issue) so famously (or infamously) is. And so if there is not God to keep back the void--if it can poke through wherever he is not on watch--then horror might emerge and erupt and engulf. If you don't believe in God, then maybe you must fear the void.

In his first paragraph of Elementary Astronomy, Dr. Struve wrote that the word astronomy is from two Greek words, the first, obviously, for "star," the second, significantly, for "law." To fear or to feel horror at the great scale of the universe in terms of both space and time is, I think, off the mark. It is to ignore the fundamental order and lawfulness of the universe. There are people who feel small or insignificant, their lives essentially meaningless, when they they think about the immensity of the universe. Why should that be? They're having, I think, an inappropriate response. I would say that their response is actually self-centered, possibly tipping into a kind of solipsism. If you feel this way, you need to get over yourself. If you think these things, you're actually putting yourself at the center of the universe in that you're thinking about the effect the universe has on you and that your feeling this way is somehow significant, that it is indicative of something that is out there instead of in here. Or maybe you're trying to make of yourself the universe, or vice versa.

Carl Sagan had a better view of it, I think. He saw us as the products--perhaps the end-products--of an orderly universe. "We are star stuff," he famously said in his series Cosmos. The stars have existed so that we might also exist and grow to contemplate them, ourselves, and the cosmos in which we live. We are the mind and consciousness of the cosmos. He gloried in the immensity and magnificence of that great structure, process, and more after which he named his show. I still remember a montage from Cosmos over which exultant music, composed by Beethoven, played, a montage of us, made from star stuff, formed from the dust of stars, set about our tasks of living, thinking, loving, and creating.

At the end of his novel Contact, Dr. Sagan indicated that the universe is actually designed, a curious conclusion for an atheist. And though he might have been an atheist, he was obviously not a nihilist, nor was he negative, depressed, anxious, or fearful in his contemplation of the universe. He could hardly have studied it and accomplished what he did if he had felt those kinds of feelings. In that he was wise. Those who are horrified by the cosmos are, I think, unwise.

I suspect that cosmic horror is actually not based on anything especially serious or meaningful. As Nicholas Diak wrote in his essay, it's actually something done for fun. We like thrills. We like to be scared. Especially when we return from reading, return to what is safe and sure. I think it best to look at it this way, that cosmic horror in storytelling is done for fun. Unfortunately, most of the works in the Cosmic Horror Issue are pretty limited in their approach to cosmic horror. Again, there seem to be two main themes or images in these pages: the void or the abyss, and the alien presence. If there is a cosmos through which chaos occasionally breaks through, and if there is actually a genre of cosmic horror, then the possibilities for telling stories within that genre would seem vast, theoretically endless. Why limit ourselves? Why have the authors of cosmic horror so limited themselves? Maybe it's because we as a culture--and the creators of our culture in particular--have run out of ideas. And maybe we have run out of skills, too, and so we accomplish almost nothing of note.

Now comes the really fun part in all of this, for opposite cosmic horror is cosmic insight, cosmic happiness, cosmic transcendence. Richard Matheson, a teller of weird tales, wrote the screenplay for The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). In the end, that film shows itself as a vehicle for an uplifting, even exultant, philosophical and theological conclusion. Here are the final words spoken by the title character (with my own paragraphing of a transcript of the narration):

I was continuing to shrink, to become . . . What? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world?

So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.

I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens, the universe, worlds beyond number. God's silver tapestry spread across the night.

And in that moment I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of Man's own limited dimension. I had presumed upon Nature. That existence begins and ends is Man's conception, not Nature's.

And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away and in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something too.

Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too.

To God, there is no zero.

I still exist.

"My fears melted away," he says. "To God, there is no zero." Those, I think, are proper responses as we contemplate the cosmos. And I should point out that The Incredible Shrinking Man closes with swelling music played over photographs of the stars and galaxies, just as in Otto Struve's book, which is full of so many zeroes, all of them made from nothing into something by God's word and law.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"The Forest Gate" by Samantha Underhill

"The Forest Gate" by Samantha Underhill is the first poem in Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue. This work is included under the heading of fiction in the table of contents, but it's clearly a poem. So what happened here? A mistake? Or is this another example of a lack of precision in word and meaning so common in our century?

Samantha Underhill was, by her own account, born in Appalachia. She is a poet, author, educator, researcher, voice actress, and audio reader and narrator. Her poetry collection Sadness of the Siren appeared in 2022. The forward is by Jonathan Maberry, editor of Weird Tales. So it looks like Ms. Underhill is another insider. I don't detect any TV or comic book work in her resumé, but it could be there nonetheless. She has done audio work related to the Lord of the Rings. That's fitting, I would say, for someone named Underhill.

"The Forest Gate" is a somewhat long poem of twelve stanzas of four lines each, plus a closing couplet. The lines are long, and the rhyme scheme AABB. It is printed using a large typeface and has a dark, apocalyptic, illustrative background, similar to an American-Romantic painting of the early nineteenth century. The whole thing takes up four pages in this issue, more, really, than what is needed. But as I have indicated, the content in Weird Tales #367 is thin and there's a lot of padding in its pages. Abysses and voids appear on many of them and there seems to have been a lot of effort put into stretching this thing to 96 in all.

I like this poem and its lush, vivid imagery. I like that it's a change of pace in the Cosmic Horror Issue, not only for its form but also because it stands alone and is separate from all other works. It exists in a world all its own, a dark, fantastic, dream-like world. This is high fantasy, I guess, or a Poesque work. Maybe after all it's related to the image of Poe's city in the sea. And now I notice the expression "[s]tar-spawned nightmares" and start to think that H.P. Lovecraft is lurking on its edges as well. The mood is different in "The Forest Gate" than what has come before. This is a poem of course, but it's also the work of the distaff side of humanity. I guess I wouldn't expect anything less than difference.

Ms. Underhill touches on the two main themes or images I have detected in the Cosmic Horror Issue. There are of course the dark parts and the cosmic parts. The poem is dark and the word cosmos appears more than once here. But those aren't the two I mean. Actually, the first of the two themes or images I have mentioned and about which I'll write more is of the abyss or the void. Samantha Underhill writes of a "shimmering void" and "the unlimitable void of space," also the aforementioned "[s]tar-spawned nightmares of the abysses of night." Towards the end, the narrator is "[s]wallowed by the abyss." If there is imagery here similar to that found in "The City in the Sea" by Edgar Allan Poe, then I would like to point out that the word void also is in that poem.

Abyss and void, void and abyss. If this were Pee Wee Herman's Playhouse and these were the secret words of the day, we would all be screaming really loudly--a lot in this issue.

The abyss or the void seems to be tied up with cosmic horror. I'm not sure why that is. Cosmos is from a Greek word meaning "order." The origins and meaning of the word are why Carl Sagan chose it as the title of his 1980s television series. In contrast, abyss refers to "depths of the earth or sea; primordial chaos," according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. I have added the emphasis to the word chaos here because its meaning is essentially the opposite of cosmos. Chaos--disorder, emptiness, or confusion--came first. Then there was Cosmos, which is where we live. Maybe the correct term for this ill-defined sub-genre or sub-sub-genre should be chaotic horror. Remember here that Lovecraft's god Azathoth--perhaps his supreme god--rules from a "black throne at the centre of Chaos." Look for the sea and for depths in Poe's aforementioned poem.

As for void--I would say that the void and the abyss are far more closely related to each other as words or concepts, and so they can stay together I think.

The second theme or image I have detected is what Samantha Underhill alludes to as "some monstrous alien race." She doesn't develop that idea in her poem. That's not what this is about. But there will be more on this theme and image in the next few works in the Cosmic Horror Issue. And connected to these two themes and images--the void and alien races--will be two real-life historical-literary figures, one for each. You have seen their names before in this blog. There are even labels for them appearing on the right on your screen. But that will be only after a while.

There isn't any meta-content or self-references or insider information in "The Forest Gate" as far as I can tell. If you're looking for that kind of thing, go to "Piercing the Veil of Reality: Cosmic Horror Stories in Weird Tales #367," a series of interviews carried out by Nicholas Diak, a contributor to Weird Tales #367, and posted on his website. The date was April 26, 2023. In addition to interviewing Samantha Underhill, Mr. Diak interviewed Angela Yuriko Smith and Carol Gyzander, who also contributed to this issue. There's another image in mythology and fantasy that comes to mind as I discover these things, that of the worm ouroboros, which swallows its own tail.

Before leaving Mr. Diak's website, I thought I would quote a blurb from therein:

A century later, even after a few turbulent decades, Weird Tales is still regarded with prestige and as a premiere publisher of pulp stories, including the cosmic horror genre it pioneered. 

He posted that on April 26, 2023, in other words during the centennial of Weird Tales. So at some point, someone connected with the magazine realized that this was an anniversary year. I'm glad to know that. And I would agree that Weird Tales still carries with it a cachet, although that was earned in the first third (or maybe only quarter) of its hundred years. (What used to be a magazine has turned into a brand and a commodity.) I'm still not sure about cosmic horror, though--whether it's actually a thing or not.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell

"A Ghost Story for Christmas" is the second story in Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue (2023). The author is Paul Cornell, who has written for comic books and television. He is also a writer of novels, short stories, and non-fiction. Among his books are TV tie-in novels. The pattern still holds, then: the contributors to this issue of Weird Tales are TV and comic book people--at least so far. To write original prose fiction seems secondary to them.

Mr. Cornell was born in Chippenham, England, in 1967. He is married to a vicar of the Church of England. That fact will come into play in a while.

"A Ghost Story for Christmas" is six and a half pages long with lots of breaks. Each of these breaks is denoted with the image of a small tentacled creature in black and white. I guess it's a representation of Cthulhu. The title page makes a seventh page, but not of text. Instead, there is a full-color illustration showing an old-fashioned tube TV against the wall of a house. The TV picture is of a man. I guess he's from a real-life TV show, possibly a British show. Already, then, there is a meta-reference in Mr. Cornell's story, actually two. The first has to do with showing a scene from a (presumably) real-life TV show. The second has to do with showing a picture of a picture. There will be more of that on the title page of the next short story in this issue.

Paul Cornell's story is set in the present day. The setting is obviously England, for their are Britishisms in his prose: mum, tat, charity shop, telly. The story is told in the present tense. That can keep things interesting sometimes. The protagonist is home alone for Christmas. His wife and his autistic son have gone to her family's place for the holiday. He stays home to watch TV. And then the brandnames, names of commercial products, and meta-references begin: Orson Welles' Great Mysteries, "the Sky box" (whatever that is), Blu-ray disks, Whatever Happened to Jack and Jill (I think he means What Became of Jack and Jill?, a British horror movie from 1972), and A Ghost Story for Christmas, a British TV show that ran from 1971 to 1978. So, like "The City in the Sea," "A Ghost Story for Christmas" takes its title from another work and refers to another work, actually more than one.

Is this what "cosmic horror" means? Do authors of today find inspiration for their fictions in those dreamt up by others before them? Are they capable of thinking up anything on their own, anything that exists independently of all other works? I thought we were supposed to have something new.

The naming continues: Whistle and I'll Come to You, a British film from 1968, and Diary of a Madman with Vincent Price (1963). The protagonist thinks of how things are in fiction, and how fiction is different from real life. (The author, then, is writing a bit of fiction about a fictional character who thinks about the difference between fiction and real life, without realizing that he doesn't live in the real world but instead inside of a fictional world. No wonder the illustration on the title page is a picture of a picture of a fictional work written by a real-life author.) He thinks of M.R. James. He mentions the Navigator, a pub, I guess, where he drinks a pint of Parky (whatever that is). Jane Austen comes up.

On his way home, the protagonist stops in front of his house. It looks curious. Wrong. "Is it something to do with how it's placed against the stars?" he wonders. "How can the stars be wrong?" Well, I don't know how the stars can be wrong, but we know what happens when they are right: Cthulhu returns. And maybe the man's second question here is an allusion to Lovecraft.

"A Ghost Story for Christmas" is about nostalgia, family, dreams, the past--people who are gone, either from home or entirely from our lives on this earth. The protagonist has a dream in which he opens a door inside of his house: "He's opened it inward. And he's just looking at darkness. Just space. This is now frightening. Very frightening." Here, then, is the first of two recurring images or themes in the Cosmic Horror Issue. I see "darkness" and "[j]ust space" as just another way of saying "the abyss" or "the void." We'll see these words again.

More naming, more references: M.R. James again and Scrooge; Quatermass, starring John Mills (1979). Then the second theme, but only a hint: "There's something out there that only cares about humans as something to be harvested across time, like fields of crops before the scythe." Evidently this theme is in Quatermass, but the protagonist here senses it in the fictional real-life that he lives, contemplating a real-life fiction featuring a fictional character played by a real-life actor.

And now it occurs to me that maybe authors of today write about watching television because that's the only experience they have. Life experience, I mean. Writers are instructed to write what they know. Well what if all you know is what it's like to sit in front of the television for endless hours? What if there is nothing else in their lives? And what if the darkness, emptiness, and void they see before them is simply the darkening of the picture tube when the TV is turned off or the night's programming ends? It shrinks to a point of light . . . and then it's gone. All black. (Boomers and Gen X know what this means.) If all you have is TV, what a disaster it must be--a true living horror--for it to cease. How sad. How small.

In his nighttime walking back from the pub, the man stops to talk to a female vicar. Is this the author's real-life wife, cast into fiction? Is the man in this story the author casting himself into it? She invites him into the church, for this is Christmas Eve and Midnight Mass is about to begin. "I'm not a believer," he says. And yet he feels guilt. He wants her to judge him. (A sickness of today: the guilt of the unbeliever that goes on unrelieved, his sins unforgiven, redemption and salvation denied him because he doesn't believe. How easy it would be to begin to believe and to set off on a path to something better--instead of to face the horror, in the words of Archibald MacLeish, of nothing, nothing, nothing at all.)

The man watches The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971). He dreams again. He's looking for a key to the door to nothing. The author uses a twenty-first-century inanity: "He interrogates her desk anyway." Emphasis added. (I guess if a table can have a ghost, as in Weird Tales, February 1928, a person can interrogate a desk.) In his dream, the man pulls off the mask of a frightening figure that approaches him. Is this now an allusion to The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers?

A final question raised by this story, in my mind at least: is the protagonist autistic like his son? Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote, "Hell is other people." Has horror been reduced to an autistic shrinking from love, feeling, human experience, and connection with other people? Maybe so if you're an unbeliever. After all, an atheist is necessarily a materialist (at least in the West). All feelings and emotions, including horror, must then have material explanations. There can be nothing else. We don't have human or existential or spiritual problems. We simply lack a diagnosis.

"A Ghost for Christmas" is kind of a twenty-first-century reenactment of "A Christmas Carol." It's a horror story, a chronicle of a nightmarish few days in the life of an unbeliever separated--by choice--from his family. Evidently he would rather watch television. Yes, this is the twenty-first century and a story for our time.

The protagonist is presented with two good choices in "A Ghost Story for Christmas": his fictional wife offers him a Christmas with her family; his real-life wife, in the person of the fictional vicar, invites him into church. He refuses both and experiences something terrifying in their place. But in the end, he gets to have it both ways. His punishment for his transgressions--denying life, denying faith--is mild and fleeting, and his choices are evidently affirmed as being the right ones after all. So can this really be considered weird fiction?

"La trahison des images"--"The Treachery of Images"--by René Magritte (1929).

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"When the Stars Are Right" by Nicholas Diak

The second feature in Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue (2023), is an essay called "When the Stars Are Right: The Weird Tales Origins of Cosmic Horror" by Nicholas Diak. Mr. Diak has an advanced degree from the University of Washington. Presumably he is an American. He is a writer and scholar interested in movies, music, comic books, and horror fiction, including the works of H.P. Lovecraft. His interests, then, match up with those of the other contributors to this issue. It looks like Weird Tales #367 is still, with this essay, the work of insiders. Mr. Diak has his own website. You can reach it by clicking here.

"When the Stars Are Right" is an essay of six pages all together. This includes a full-page illustration on the title page, four reproductions of Weird Tales covers from the 1920s through the 1940s, and a half-page illustration of tentacles at the end. That illustration is essentially filler. An enlarged part of it is used as the backdrop for the title page. Tentacles as a shorthand image representing weird fiction have become a cliché or, to use an academic kind of word, a trope. I wonder if we can all resolve to end it, to write and create new things and put some of the old ones (maybe some of those Old Ones, too) behind us. After all, new is the promise of the first essay in the Cosmic Horror Issue, editor Jonathan Maberry's brief introduction in "The Eyrie."

Nicholas Diak's essay begins with an epigraph. This is the second to appear in Weird Tales #367. The first is from Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The City in the Sea." The second is from H.P. Lovecraft's poem "Nemesis," from Weird Tales, April 1924, or one hundred and a half years ago.

Mr. Diak's essay is scholarly or academic in its structure and tone. For example:

     This article aims to celebrate cosmic horror by showcasing its unique attributes: genre staples, meta and self-referential qualities, repudiation of reality, its sense of awe, and finally its delightfulness. (p. 15)

So maybe at last we have a definition of cosmic horror. Even so, I'm not sure that it's quite complete. Also, I see three different things mixed up in that sentence. First are things from outside the story itself, namely "genre staples" and "meta and self-referential qualities." I take "genre staples" to be just another term for conventions, tropes, or clichés. I have been writing about those qualities of what is called cosmic horror already in this series. I have also written about meta-references and self-references.

Next are things that are part of the story itself or that exist within the story as part of its plot, theme, mood, and so on, namely "repudiation of reality" and a "sense of awe." I think these attributes extend into weird fiction and fantasy fiction as a whole. A sense of unreality, even if it is fleeting, is an essential part of weird fiction, I think. So is a sense of awe. Awe is a feeling we have all experienced (I hope) as we gaze into the night sky, in other words, into the cosmos. I'm not sure that anyone has ever felt horror in so gazing. Maybe I'm wrong. I think it would take a sick person to have that kind of feeling in contemplating the stars.

Finally, there is the "delightfulness" of cosmic horror. Mr. Diak explains what he means later in his essay when he calls cosmic horror fun to read. I won't argue with that. I'll just point out that fun is a reaction of the reader. And so we have preparations made by the author in the first pair of attributes, the story as a kind of sealed container of the second pair, and the reader's reaction in the last single attribute.

There are lots of names of authors in Mr. Diak's essay, including a list in the first paragraph. That list includes the name of another contributor to the Cosmic Horror Issue. If an essay can have a meta-reference or self-reference, then this is it. Mr. Maberry is also mentioned here, towards the end. I think we'll have to take Nicholas Diak's word for it that Weird Tales is enjoying a period of "current prosperity." Count me skeptical. Otherwise I don't see these names as examples of name-dropping or listing. You already know how I feel about those kinds of things.

I'll admit that I like reading non-fiction about science fiction, weird fiction, and fantasy. I like to see a mind at work. I like history and criticism that have behind them a thesis rather than just as chronicles of events. That's why I can say that Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler is an exciting book. So I'm predisposed to liking a well thought-out essay. Unfortunately, the space here is too limited, and I'm still not sure we have a very good--or at least a very thorough yet concise--definition of cosmic horror as a sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of fantasy fiction.

In his essay, Nicholas Diak looks at stories by Lovecraft as well as by Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, C. Hall Thompson, and Clark Ashton Smith. I was surprised to find Thompson's name in this essay. As far as I can tell, he has seldom been talked about in the company of the other authors mentioned here. In 2019, I wrote a series on C. Hall Thompson. You can access the first part of what I wrote by clicking here. I have at least one more part to write in that series, based on information I did not have in 2019. I hope to get to that soon.

Like I said, there is a scholarly and academic tone and academic-type language, too, in "The Stars Are Right." For example, there is in the first paragraph the use of the passive voice, one of the scourges of academic writing. The author calls "The Call of the Cthulhu" a "text" instead of what it is, which is a story. The phrases "cosmic horror texts" and "cosmic horror canon" appear on the last page of the essay, also the word "tropes." It's good to notice and point out the use of tropes or clichés in any kind of storytelling. Those things are probably okay in storytelling for children. They should probably be left out of it for adults. "Text" and "canon" are pretty horrible words, though. My advice to any scholar is to throw them away. They're not texts, they're stories. And the only real canon I know of is in the Catholic Church.

* * *

Nemesis
by H. P. Lovecraft

     Thro' the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
          Past the wan-moon'd abysses of night,
     I have liv'd o'er my lives without number,
          I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

     I have whirl'd with the earth at the dawning,
          When the sky was a vaporous flame;
     I have seen the dark universe yawning,
          Where the black planets roll without aim;
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

     I had drifted o'er seas without ending,
          Under sinister grey-clouded skies
     That the many-fork'd lightning is rending,
          That resound with hysterical cries;
With the moans of invisible daemons that out of the green waters rise.

     I have plung'd like a deer thro' the arches
          Of the hoary primordial grove,
     Where the oaks feel the presence that marches
          And stalks on where no spirit dares rove;
And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers thro' dead branches above.

     I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains
          That rise barren and bleak from the plain,
     I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains
          That ooze down to the marsh and the main;
And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things I care not to gaze on again.

     I have scann'd the vast ivy-clad palace,
          I have trod its untenanted hall,
     Where the moon writhing up from the valleys
          Shews the tapestried things on the wall;
Strange figures discordantly woven, which I cannot endure to recall.

     I have peer'd from the casement in wonder
          At the mouldering meadows around,
     At the many-roof'd village laid under
          The curse of a grave-girdled ground;
And from rows of white urn-carven marble I listen intently for sound.

     I have haunted the tombs of the ages,
          I have flown on the pinions of fear
     Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages,
          Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:
And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

     I was old when the Pharaohs first mounted
          The jewel-deck'd throne by the Nile;
     I was old in those epochs uncounted
          When I, and I only, was vile;
And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.

     Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,
          And great is the reach of its doom;
     Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,
          Nor can respite be found in the tomb:
Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.

     Thro' the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
          Past the wan-moon'd abysses of night,
     I have liv'd o'er my lives without number,
          I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

* * *

In his poem, Lovecraft used the word abyss. That word and a similar word or idea--void--will come up again in this series. It seems to me that there are two common and I guess connected ideas behind the stories in the Cosmic Horror Issue, the abyss or the void being one of them. Also, note Lovecraft's allusion to "the far Arctic isle." Was he referring to Hyperborea? Or to Ultima Thule? Are these two imaginary places related somehow?

In reading about Ultima Thule, I came across Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Dream-Land," from 1844. I see some similarities between "Dream-Land" and "Nemesis." Note the archaic contractions in both, also the use of such words as "tarns" and "ghoul" or "Ghouls," and again the reference or allusion to Ultima Thule. Remember, too, that Lovecraft wrote a story called "The Colour Out of Space." Did he get his title from Poe's phrase "Out of SPACE--Out of Time"?

* * *

Dream-Land
by Edgar Allan Poe

By a route obscure and lonely,   
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,   
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly   
From an ultimate dim Thule--
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
       Out of SPACE--Out of TIME.

Bottomless vales and boundless floods,   
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,   
With forms that no man can discover   
For the tears that drip all over;   
Mountains toppling evermore   
Into seas without a shore;   
Seas that restlessly aspire,   
Surging, unto skies of fire;   
Lakes that endlessly outspread   
Their lone waters--lone and dead,--
Their still waters--still and chilly   
With the snows of the lolling lily.

By the lakes that thus outspread
Their lone waters, lone and dead,--
Their sad waters, sad and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily,--
By the mountains--near the river   
Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever,--  
By the grey woods,--by the swamp   
Where the toad and the newt encamp,--   
By the dismal tarns and pools
   Where dwell the Ghouls,--   
By each spot the most unholy--   
In each nook most melancholy,--   
There the traveller meets, aghast,   
Sheeted Memories of the Past--   
Shrouded forms that start and sigh   
As they pass the wanderer by--   
White-robed forms of friends long given,   
In agony, to the Earth--and Heaven.

For the heart whose woes are legion   
'T is a peaceful, soothing region--   
For the spirit that walks in shadow   
'T is--oh, 't is an Eldorado!
But the traveller, travelling through it,   
May not--dare not openly view it;   
Never its mysteries are exposed   
To the weak human eye unclosed;   
So wills its King, who hath forbid   
The uplifting of the fring'd lid;   
And thus the sad Soul that here passes   
Beholds it but through darkened glasses.

By a route obscure and lonely,   
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,   
I have wandered home but newly   
From this ultimate dim Thule.

* * *

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

175 Years Ago

It's October, the month that ends on Halloween Night and in which Edgar Allan Poe died. He died in a suitably mysterious, curious, and tragic way. That unhappy event occurred 175 years ago, at five o'clock in the morning on October 7, 1849. More precisely, it was 175 years and 17.5 days ago as I post this. The word or words for a 175th anniversary are ridiculous, so I won't use any of them here. And there's no reason to celebrate such a sad and somber event. But we can at least observe it.

I have been writing about Poe and anniversaries and Weird Tales. It's strange to think that fewer years separated the death of Poe from the beginnings of the magazine than separate us from those same beginnings. I'll note that on October 6, 2024, the day before the 175th anniversary, the Baltimore Ravens, the only sports team that I know of named for a literary work, won their game against the Cincinnati Bengals, 41 to 38 in OT--October-time.

We miss you, Edgar Allan Poe.

Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"The City in the Sea" by Christopher Golden & Mike Mignola-Part Three

The self-references and meta-references continue:

We get a little of Hellboy's backstory in "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story." One sentence stands out to me:

And there had been countless hours reading pulp magazines and comic books on the floor of Professor Bruttenholm's office, or his study at home. [Emphasis added.] (p. 6, col. 2)

I think that sentence describes not Hellboy so much as many of the authors represented in this issue, as well as the editor who recruited them and whatever number of readers Weird Tales #367 might have had in its year (or less) in print. Things in their experience that are left out of Hellboy's are countless hours of watching TV and playing video games. If there is a stepping-down in our culture, it has reached a point where people learn about storytelling not by reading or even watching stories unfold on screen but by playing video games.

* * *

Decades and decades ago, a large part of American literature became not only by writers but, to the point, about writers and for writers. A good example of this is Larry McMurtry's All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, from 1972, a novel by a novelist about a novelist writing a novel, and in which most of the action in the novel takes place in the head of the novelist McMurtry as he writes about his fictional novelist. In other words, it's not set authentically in a fictionalized real world but inauthentically inside a real-world novelist's head. In one sentence, the fictional novelist gets in his car, and in practically the next, he arrives at his destination hundreds of miles away. Didn't anything happen in the in-between? Didn't he do any living or thinking or seeing on his trip? Or did Scotty just beam him to where he was going inside of his car? Actually it was the real-world novelist who did this because he needed his fictional novelist to get from one place to the next as quickly as possible and without event. Things happen this way in novels, less often in real life. I like better what happens in The Charisma Campaigns by Jack Matthews, also from 1972, in which a short car trip--and the protagonist's story--is badly interrupted and the novel takes a drastic turn towards the end. This is more true to life. Matthews' protagonist, by the way, is a used car salesman, even if he writes imaginary newspaper headlines in his head. I guess that makes them literally headlines.

Anyway again, the same thing can be said now of genre fiction, at least in the case of Weird Tales #367. It's one thing to write about writing, writers, and stories in an essay in "The Eyrie." That's what essays are for. (I have just done a little name-dropping myself.) It's quite another to say that your main character reads pulp magazines and comic books and then write your story as if that's all you yourself have ever read, Edgar Allan Poe notwithstanding. Like I said, one thing missing from Hellboy's upbringing is countless hours of watching TV shows and playing video games. Poor Hellboy. Don't worry, though. Authors, editors, readers, and fans of today have more than made up for what he missed, and it all shows in what they create, what they prefer to watch and read, and how they spend their time.

* * *

In addition to Poe, there are references in "The City in the Sea" to:

• Lemuria, a pseudoscientific, pseudo-historical, or pseudo-religious appropriation by Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophists of a previously hypothesized lost continent.

• Pangea, a supercontinent of the distant past, in other words, another lost continent.

• Hyperborea, a place in ancient Greek myth and another that has been appropriated by esoteric thinkers and writers. It isn't supposed to have been a continent (I don't think), but it was and is lost.

• Mu, a mythical lost continent that also has a place in esoteric thought.

• Vril, a type of energy and an overt fiction created by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, taken to be nonfictional by some people who can be described pretty well, I think, as crackpots. Writing like Vril is real drags down your story, I think. If your characters have a brain in their heads, they should know that Vril and things like it are not real, that they exist in the real world only as crackpot ideas and hoaxes.

• Thoth, an ancient Egyptian god used in twentieth- and twenty first-century popular culture. His name is inside of Lovecraft's name for his god Yog-Sothoth and his own name for what is called "the Cthulhu Mythos," that is, Yog-Sothothery.

That's a list. Not a very long one, but still a list. It reminds me of the listing that August Derleth did in The Lurker at the Threshold (1946).

As you can see, some of these references are to cities or civilizations situated on island continents or surrounded by seas, just as in Poe's original poem "The City in the Sea." You could call all of this background information. Alternatively, you could call it name-dropping, a series of meta-references, or a lot of inside information. The problem is that all of these words and concepts have been used and overused to a point where they don't mean very much, if anything, any more. Their use could be an attempt to invoke something larger and more powerful than themselves, or to evoke thoughts and feelings in the reader. Words do of course have that kind of power. But these words have lost their power and their mystique. We don't need grimoires and dusty, buckled tomes at hand in order to read about obscure and esoteric subjects. We all have access to Wikipedia now. The mystique is gone. The balloon has been deflated. And all of it is old, so old, after we were promised new things.

* * *

I don't think name-dropping (or listing) works very well in fiction. When I read something like this:

On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. 

it doesn't mean much to me. (At least the artist's names are euphonic.) I guess those names are supposed to provide a kind of shorthand imagery. They are supposed to move us, or to hint at some esoteric, inside information held by the author in all of his erudition. But what if we are unfamiliar with the artists and their work? I think a better use of the author's limited word count would have been to tell us what he wanted us to envision or imagine rather than relying on name-dropping for his effect. The quote by the way is from "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft, from Weird Tales, February 1928.

* * *

There are also in "The City in the Sea" indirect references or similarities to other works of weird fiction or fantasy, including She, A History of Adventure by H. Rider Haggard (1887); "The Girl in the Gem," a Brak the Barbarian story by John Jakes, first in Fantastic Stories of Imagination (Jan. 1965); and "Claimed!" by Francis Stevens in Argosy (three-part serial, March 6-20, 1920). As for the statuette, it reminds me of the Maltese Falcon, which also arrives wrapped as a package. Or maybe it's like the weird obelisk on the cover of the Led Zeppelin album Presence. If they keep gazing at it, those nice people on the cover are going to be transported to that awful City in the Sea.

* * *

You might think that I don't like "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story." Sorry for sounding cranky and complainy. It's actually a story one can enjoy, I think, with a good setup and some vivid imagery. The prose is good and clean, meaning unencumbered and not clunky (there is at least one vulgarity, though), which is often a wonder in our world of today. And I didn't pick up on any twenty-first century inanities. Thank God. I think "The City in the Sea" suffers, though, from being unsustained or not fully developed. It moves too quickly from one thing to the next and then back again without much of an explanation of why they're happening and what it could all mean. But I'm not sure that's the fault of the authors. That lack of full development appears to be a feature of Weird Tales #367. I'm not sure why there couldn't have been more content in this issue. There's room for it, but the whole thing seems to have been cut short for some reason. Also, we know that because Hellboy is a series character, nothing extremely bad or life-changing can happen to him. He has to come through his experience unscathed, with all of his sanity points still on the board and ready for his next adventure.

Finally, being a comic book artist myself, I can't complain about reading a prose story about a comic book character. This kind of thing can actually work. (I have done it myself. I hope it can work.) See for example The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker by Otto Binder, from 1967. It's not great literature, but it works. On the other hand, it has to be handled and developed in just the right way. The appearance of a comic book character in Weird Tales is something new, even if the character is not and the type of story in which he appears is not, even if the inspiration for the story is more than 175 years old. Finally, finally, I'm not sure that a comic book story, which is what this is, should take the lead over real prose fiction that does not resort or refer to any other work or form but instead stands alone.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley