Friday, February 7, 2025

Ooze & Abysses

I have been writing for a long time now about Weird Tales in its first year and in its 100th. Weird Tales began in March 1923 with a story called "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud. In its current incarnation, the magazine observed its 100th anniversary in 2023. In a series called "Origins of Ooze," from March 2023, I wrote about the concepts of primordial ooze, primordial slime, and primordial soup. These are supposed to be scientific concepts, but they're actually closer to pseudoscience, hoaxes, and frauds. Like overpopulation, though, ooze and slime escaped from the confines of genre literature and got into the general consciousness. And like overpopulation, people in the general public accepted it and internalized it.

Not long ago, I reread Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney (1984; Vintage Books, 1987). One of the interesting things about this book is that it was written in the second person. The only other fictional work I can think of written in the second person is Ralph Milne Farley's short story "The House of Ecstasy," originally in Weird Tales in April 1938. Bright Lights, Big City is also written in the present tense, so it's close to unique in two ways. (Two-nique?) Getting back to ooze and slime, here's a brief quote: "The woman looks at you as if you were something that had just crawled out of the ocean trailing ooze and slime." (p. 13) It doesn't seem to me that that was a random choice of words: writers seem to have heard of ooze and slime and it has stuck in their brains.

The imagery in the 100th anniversary issue of Weird Tales has to do with voids and abysses. I have tried to bring into my discussion of that issue, its authors, and its lead characters the image of the worm that swallows its own tail. The other evening I finished reading The Doomsters by Ross Macdonald (1958; Knopf, 1979). That book doesn't start off very well, but it finishes with some power. Here is a passage regarding a human inner darkness or void:

     His eyes were still burning with fierce and unquenched light. I thought it was a light that burned from darkness, a blind arrogance masking fear and despair. Behind his shifting masks, I caught a glimpse of the unknown dispossessed, the hungry operator who sat in Grantland's central darkness and manipulated the shadow play of his life. I struck at the shape in the darkness. (p. 163)

I guess you could say that Dr. Grantland has a heart of darkness. (And again we have a medical doctor who is dark or empty inside.) On its last page, the image of the worm ouroboros shows up: "The circuit of guilty time was too much like a snake with its tale in its mouth, consuming itself." (p. 200) The title, by the way, is from Thomas Hardy's poem "To an Unborn Pauper Child" and these lines:

Sleep the long sleep:
The Doomsters heap
Travails and teens around us here . . . ,

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Heart of Darkness-Part Six

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a tale, an old form of which the weird tale is also an example. Heart of Darkness and weird tales have things in common, one of which is the use of intelligible speech as a way of separating men from beasts, civilized men from savages or degenerate men, and men from beings or entities that come from voids before creation or beyond our own normal experiences of space and time. We speak words. They speak gibberish. Kurtz is a man of words, and yet he presided "at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites." (Dell, p. 88) And as Kurtz is carried to the boat that will take him away from his jungle realm, the people over whom he has ruled gather to protest:

"[T]hey shouted periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language; and the deep murmurs of the crowd, interrupted suddenly, were like the responses of some satanic litany." (p. 111)

Here are some passages from "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft on gibberish, unintelligible words, ancient and cryptic rites, and things difficult, if not impossible, to inscribe, copy, or render into any modern tongue:

This bore regular fruit, for after the first interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during which he related startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters "Cthulhu" and "R'lyeh."

* * *

The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles.

* * *

Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how.

* * *

Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.

* * *

I did not forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and beliefs.

* * * 

Lovecraft read and admired Conrad. I wonder if he could have drawn some of his own imagery and themes from Conrad's novels and stories. Lovecraft supposedly didn't read H. Rider Haggard until 1926, and then, perhaps, only Haggard's most well-known romance, She. I wonder who could have described in fiction the interior of Africa before Conrad and Haggard. And I wonder what influence there might have been on later tellers of weird tales other than those two men.

* * *

There is an old thread of messages and comments on the website SF Chronicles (here) regarding Lovecraft and Conrad. In a letter, Lovecraft wrote:

He [Conrad] feels and expresses as few authors can the prodigious and inhuman tides of a blind, bland universe; at heart indifferent to mankind, but purposefully malignant if measured by the narrow and empirical standard of human teleology. 

That sounds like cosmic horror to me. But I'm not sure that the horror in Heart of Darkness is cosmic. I could be wrong. I invite opinions and comments. In any case, it seems to me that the authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023) have conflated their own interior psychological, existential, and spiritual horrors with outer, cosmic horrors. They seem to be saying that the source of their feelings of horror is the immense cosmos rather than their own shrunken, misshapen, neglected, or abused hearts, minds, and souls. In the quote above, Lovecraft referred to a blind universe. I think the blindness is actually in the person who believes the universe to be a cause for horror rather than of feelings of awe and wonder. The authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue seem to be inviting us to join them in their feelings, thereby affirming and validating them. I will say no thank you.

* * *

I have one more quote from Heart of Darkness. At the end, Marlow goes to visit Kurtz's fiancée. He lies to her, a lie to comfort her. He remembers that as he departed her company, "It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head." (Dell, p. 124) When I read that, I was reminded of "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe, the conclusion of which reads:

From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure, of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened--there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind-- the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight--my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder--there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters--and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the "House of Usher."

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Monday, February 3, 2025

Heart of Darkness-Part Five

Kurtz is mysterious, just as Africa is mysterious. Marlow penetrates into both mysteries. The title of Joseph Conrad's novella first appears in Marlow's description of his journey upriver: "We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness." (Dell, p. 69) In addition to traveling into the interior of tropical Africa, Marlow and his men travel back in time, thereby encountering, perhaps, something of what Kurtz refers to when he cries, "The horror! The horror!":

"We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign--and no memories." (pp. 69-70)

Nietzsche warned us not to peer into the abyss. Characters (and presumably authors) in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (#367, from 2023) fail to heed that warning. But their abysses are within themselves rather than outward in the cosmos. They are empty inside. Inside themselves they have created and nursed and cultivated voids. Kurtz is empty inside, too, and comes from a kind of void. Marlow calls him a "wraith from the back of Nowhere." (p. 88) Referring to human heads on posts outside his abode, Marlow says:

"They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him--some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last--only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude--and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core . . . ." (p. 99; emphasis added, ellipses in the original)

Marlow's assessment is echoed in Caitlín R. Kiernan's short story "Night Fishing," when the narrator says: "That night on the lake, it saw my face [. . . .] It saw something wrong with my soul. It saw an easy mark." So is that an allusion or reference to Heart of Darkness? Or is it a case of one author arriving independently at the same kind of conclusion as another?

In my Dell edition of Heart of Darkness, a previous owner underlined different passages and made notes in the margins. This person's marginalia on the passage above reads:

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

A perceptive question and one that gets to an issue with Weird Tales #367, namely that the horror that many of its characters experience is not actually cosmic because it isn't "out there" but "in here." Their horror is about themselves and their own self-made voids. I would add that their inner voids are not very interesting. Kurtz's problems are more so. Kurtz is obviously the greater man. But in the end, maybe Kurtz, to match his small stature, is also a small man. He need not have descended into Nowhere or dived into his inner emptiness.

(Remember that the meaning of the word utopia is "nowhere" and that Samuel Butler had written a book called Erewhon, its title an anagram for nowhere, published in 1872. Remember the Beatles song "Nowhere Man," too.)

Later on Marlow says of Kurtz:

"But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad. I had--for my sins, I suppose--to go through the ordeal of looking into it myself. No eloquence could have been so withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity. He struggled with himself, too. I saw it--I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself." (p. 111)

Like the characters in the Cosmic Horror Issue--or they are like he is--Kurtz is a man without faith.

I have one more image of Kurtz, who now lies on his deathbed. Marlow remembers:

"His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines." (p. 114)

Kurtz has fallen into an abyss--is it a Nietzschean abyss?--and Marlow peers in after him. Marlow backs away from the abyss, but for Kurtz it's too late. And then Kurtz cries his last words: "'The horror! The horror!'" (p. 114)

To be concluded . . . 

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad was first in Blackwood's Magazine No. 1000, a "Special Double Number" published one hundred twenty-six years ago this month, in February 1899, the last February of the nineteenth century. The magazine is also called Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Sunday, February 2, 2025

Heart of Darkness-Part Four

Kurtz would seem an enigma. Despite all of his words--the great flow of his words, written and spoken, issuing from his heart of darkness--he remains a mystery. His last words--"The horror! The horror!"--are ambiguous. Just what is it that he finds horrific? He would seem a psychopathic god, a forerunner to and prediction of the totalitarian rulers of the twentieth century, set to commence less than a year after part one of Heart of Darkness was published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in February 1899.

Like those future rulers, Kurtz writes and speaks at great length and with great eloquence. Marlow reads from his writings, remembering:

"But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. [. . .] 'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' etc. etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbound eloquence--of words--of burning noble words." (Dell, pp. 88-89)

And like the eloquence and burning intensity and power of twentieth-century totalitarian oratory, Kurtz's "pamphlet" ends with a call to action: "'Exterminate all the brutes!'" As Eric Hoffer observed in his book The True Believer, in every mass-movement revolution the man of words or ideas is succeeded by the man of action--and that's where the mass murder and mass extermination begin. Kurtz, sickly, weak, small in stature, a big fish inhabiting a small pond, is here the man of words but he is unable to carry out fully his prescribed actions. Instead death carries him away.

Kurtz's resorting to "will" made me think of another nineteenth-century author, one who may also have had Polish blood. Before Joseph Conrad wrote, so did Friedrich Nietzsche, specifically on what he called the "will to power." Conrad would seem to have been aware of the writings of Nietzsche. Maybe Kurtz is a kind of Nietzschean hero. Maybe his dissolution replays that of Nietzsche before him.

Nietzsche rears his head in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023) in the form of his warning not to peer into the abyss. So are there abysses--and cosmic horror--in Heart of Darkness? That question comes next in this series.

To be continued . . .

Heart of Darkness & The Secret Sharer in a Signet edition. This is the edition that we read a long, long time ago in one of my English classes. I wish I still had it. Anyway, that's a representation of Kurtz on the cover. He looks harmless enough and not at all diabolical, unlike a real-life bearded and baldheaded totalitarian from the century following his. 

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Saturday, February 1, 2025

Heart of Darkness-Part Three

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a tale within a tale. It reads like a weird tale, with feelings of foreboding and menace and atmospheres of darkness and the unknown. It has deeper meaning, but it can also be read as a simple adventure story. Heart of Darkness could easily have been in a pulp magazine or a men's magazine of the 1910s through the 1960s. Originally published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in February 1899, one hundred twenty-six years ago this month, Conrad's novella may have made just one more magazine appearance, in The Golden Book Magazine of January through April 1933. (Thanks to The FictionMags Index.)

The teller of the tale within a tale is the seaman Marlow. He journeys first to the Continent to secure his position with a company doing business in Africa. In the company offices, he has an eerie encounter with two silent women. There are only two of them and they are knitters rather than weavers, but they remind me of the Fates, or of their Norse counterparts, one of whom is Wyrd.

I have a collection of books now from a neighbor who died. I'll have more to tell on that shortly. One of these books, which I received just this week, after I had begun writing about Conrad, is Jeffrey Meyers' biography of the writer from 1991. In reading Heart of Darkness, I detected in its pages a possible awareness of what we now call science fiction. On page 28 of Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Mr. Meyers described some of his subject's early reading: "books on distant voyages and exotic exploration," adding, "Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, and adventure novels by Captain Marryat and Fenimore Cooper inspired him to become a sailor." (Boldface added.) There isn't an entry on Jules Verne in the index, but in Heart of Darkness, Marlow recounts that at the outset of his journey to Africa "I felt as though, instead of going to the centre of a continent, I were about to set off for the centre of the earth." (Dell, p. 39) Later in his career, while on shore, Conrad "read extensively in English and French literature." (Meyers, p. 53). It seems almost certain that he would have read Verne. I can only assume that in using the phrase "the centre of the earth," Conrad was referring to Verne's romance of 1864 and 1867.

Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells were acquaintances, though not friends. Conrad first encountered Wells through Wells' early science fiction novels. Ford Madox Ford introduced them in 1899. Conrad called Wells "a very original writer, romancier du fantastique, with [. . .] an astonishing imagination." (Meyers, p. 151) In Heart of Darkness, Marlow, in thinking about the dark heart of Africa, remembers "a Scotch sailmaker who was certain, dead sure there were people in Mars." (Dell, p. 58) He goes on. Again, Conrad seems to have been alluding to the science fiction of his time, specifically to Wells. There is one more possible allusion, or maybe this is an example of Conrad's own science-fictional imagination at work, for in remembering his upriver trip, Marlow says: "We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet." (Dell, p. 69)

Less than a century before, Americans had begun their own explorations into the heart of a continent. But the literature of American exploration and journeying westward is romantic rather than science-fictional: our explorations predated fiction based in science and technology and instead rested within the romantic period of the early to mid nineteenth century. The only science-fictional Western that springs to mind is The Valley of Gwangi, from 1969, which came well after the fact. It's interesting, though, to find what sound like metafictional allusions to science fiction within a literary work of the late 1800s, a work that has such affinities to adventure fiction and weird fiction, two genres older than science fiction. Remember, too, that there were pulp genres drawn from works of this type, including jungle adventures and South Seas adventures.

To be continued . . .


Here is an interesting juxtaposition of images related to Joseph Conrad and his South Seas fiction, above, a paperback cover of An Outcast of the Islands, and below, a movie poster or lobby card of the movie version. In any relationship, sometimes the man is in the superior position and sometimes the woman.

Update (Feb. 2, 2025): The actress who played the native girl in Outcast of the Islands is Kerima, née Miriam Charrière. She was born on February 10, 1925, in Toulouse, France. According to the Internet, she is still living. In a week and a day she will be one hundred years old.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Heart of Darkness-Part Two

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899) can be read simply as an adventure story, even if there is more to it than that. Like much of the best literature, it can be read at more than one level. Good genre fiction works that way, too. Merely sensational things are soon forgotten. Things of substance and quality stick.

In Conrad's novella, a seaman named Marlow, beginning in England, sets off for the Continent to secure work, then journeys to the west coast of Africa to carry out his assignment. He soon finds that he is to repair a boat, then to take it upriver to a remote place where a mysterious and intriguing figure named Kurtz resides and appears to reign. Conrad spent nearly twenty years of his life as a seaman. Those years included a monthlong trip up the Congo River and other trips across the world. Many of his works are about men and ships at sea.

Again, not everyone can be Joseph Conrad, nor can everyone be Herman Melville or Jack London, who also went to sea, or Ernest Hemingway or James Jones, who went to war. But a writer ought to be able to draw from some other experience besides reading comic books, watching TV shows, and playing video games, which is how many of the authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales seem to have spent their lives. Their characters follow their lead. Too many of them seem wrapped up in themselves. The lead characters in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" and "Night Fishing" are prime examples. Kurtz is one wrapped up in himself, too--everything to which he refers is his--but Marlow recognizes him as a great man. And he is (possibly), though great in a terrible way. One difference between Kurtz and too many of the characters in the Cosmic Horror Issue (their authors, too) is that he has gone somewhere and done something. They apparently have not. They have remained where they are, wrapped up in themselves, turned inward upon themselves like the worm uroboros. The old saying is that a man wrapped up in himself makes a small package. That is too evident in the pages of Weird Tales #367 and apparently, too, in the lives of its contributors. There are exceptions, but perhaps only barely. I will add that you don't have to look into your own navel and pick at your own little scabs--you don't have to examine your self-made inner voids when there is a whole world out there brimming with mystery and adventure. Even if you are bound to a place and a way of life, you might still turn loose your imagination and let it wander freely in the larger world. Good authors do that.

* * *

Another problem with the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales is that it is shamelessly, perhaps thoughtlessly, commercial. Its authors place the names of commercial products in their stories as if they had been paid to do so. In contrast, there is only one brandname in Heart of Darkness, Martini-Henry, the name of a rifle. That's a concrete detail. It's not product placement. In general, I think using the names of weapons, cars, cigarettes, and alcoholic drinks is probably okay in a work of fiction. The list of acceptable brandnames used after that must be, I think, pretty short, especially in a short story.

Joseph Conrad was conservative in an old-fashioned sense, meaning that he was aristocratic, perhaps reactionary, certainly skeptical of progress, and suspicious of liberal values. People seem to have forgotten that what they call capitalism is a liberal rather than a conservative institution. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow shows his disdain for commercialism and the relentless chasing after money that he witnesses in Africa. Most of the commercial products in his tale are cheap and lousy, or useless, like the pieces of brass wire used to pay African natives. There is one exception: ivory.

"The word 'ivory' rang in the air [Marlow remembers], was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from a corpse." (Dell, 1960, p. 53)

That "imbecile rapacity" is seemingly everywhere in our world of today--even in the pages of fiction. That's just how it is, I guess. We are all human and so necessarily broken, warped, and twisted, at least in our worst moments and by our worst instincts. Art is supposed to rise above these things, though, and when an author of fiction uses a half-dozen or more brandnames in as many pages of his or her story, you can't help but smell the whiff of the commercial corpse. People have forgotten God, yet still they pray to the golden calf of money and material objects. And not just material objects but specific commercial objects, in other words products with brandnames. Many of those branded products have become not material at all--they are called services instead--yet still have the same taint and whiff of the commercial corpse. And now human beings seem to want to transform themselves into branded products, to make of themselves mere objects, to objectify and commodify themselves, a recipe, I should point out, for disquiet and unhappiness in the self-objectifying person. (As my philosophy professor, Mr. Pedtke, pointed out a long time ago, we are not things.) Anyway, I think that authors should cease with the product placement and the thoughtless and shameless deployment of brandnames. And editors should make sure that they do. Let fiction be art rather than advertisement.

To be continued . . .

The Heart of Darkness in a Signet edition, date and cover artist unknown. I have altered this low-resolution image from one I found on line. Whatever you do, don't take this as a true representation of the original book cover. (I wish people would scan their images instead of taking pictures of them.)

This cover illustration is misleading. It doesn't really represent a scene from inside, at least in Heart of Darkness. But when I saw it, I thought of King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard (1885), especially the character Foulata. Once I thought of Rider Haggard's book, I considered the possibility that Heart of Darkness is a kind of inversion of King Solomon's Mines, that it is a story set in a more nearly real world rather than in a fantasy world. Even if that's a worthwhile interpretation, we should remember that H. Rider Haggard lived in Africa, too, and would have had no illusions about the place or its peoples, including its European peoples.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Monday, January 27, 2025

Heart of Darkness-Part One

In thinking and writing about the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023), my thoughts went pretty soon to Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Published first as a three-part serial in Blackwood's Magazine (Feb.-Mar.-Apr., 1899), Heart of Darkness first appeared in a hardbound edition in November 1902. Even if you haven't read Conrad's novella of an upriver trip made in colonial Africa, you probably know its most famous line of dialogue, Kurtz's last words: "The horror! The horror!" That line and the greater theme of Heart of Darkness are what led me from cosmic horror to Kurtz's horror.

Not everyone can be Joseph Conrad. In fact, only Conrad was Conrad. But it would do for aspiring authors to read as widely as possible and to learn whatever lessons they can by doing so. One of the things lacking in the Cosmic Horror Issue is substance, or weight. As I wrote before, that issue is pretty thin in terms of its content. Some of its stories are very thin. But there is real substance in Heart of Darkness. Although it isn't heavy, it has weight. It's also very well written and stylistically polished. The opening, in which a cruising yawl called the Nellie, bearing five men, comes to rest in the sea-reach of the river Thames, is beautifully done and almost perfect in its depiction of a scene to which I have never been witness and probably never will be. But in reading I was almost there, and so might you be, too.

Heart of Darkness is a tale. It's very much like a weird tale in its structure, theme, plot, and atmosphere. Or maybe the weird tale is like this and other tales in that they are all told in a certain way. This tale is actually a tale within a tale. Marlow is one of the men aboard the Nellie. He tells his tale to the others, including the narrator. You could call this a framing device. It's also in the club-story format, even if the telling isn't done in a club setting. I have a yellowing copy of the Laurel Conrad edition published by Dell in 1960 (cover below). The cover art is by Richard Powers, who created so many science fiction and fantasy covers. On page 32 is the phrase "tellers of tales." The word weird appears four times, twice in describing incantations. There is presaging of weird fiction in the Heart of Darkness, especially of the tales of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard

Many authors of dark fantasy and other dark sub-genres love their darkness. Marlow's first words are of darkness and of the depths of time. His tale begins in its telling on a river to the sea. The tale itself is about a trip in the opposite direction and on a different continent, from the ocean into the inner darkness of the title. But there was once darkness where the five men have come to in their boat, for this, too, was once the home of what Marlow calls savages. And civilized men--Romans--once came here in their ships, just as Europeans had done and were doing in Africa in his time. Marlow points out to the men hearing his tale, "But darkness was here yesterday." (p. 30) His awareness of time isn't quite cosmic, but it is at least historic, prehistoric, atavistic. Marlow speaks of that long-ago time and place:

"They [the Romans] were men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps he [a Roman] was cheered by keeping his eye on a chance of promotion to the fleet at Ravenna by and by, if he had good friends in Rome and survived the awful climate. Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga--perhaps too much dice, you know--coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him--all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate."

Darkness--journeying away from civilization and into mystery, savagery, and isolation--fascination with what awaits and what lies along the way--the witnessing of abominations--encounters with the incomprehensible--these are some of the same subjects of weird fiction.

To be continued . . .

Note: I accidentally posted this and the following entry earlier this month. Now I will pick up with them and this series again. I hope you don't mind waiting for their return.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley