Gothic Topics & Flannery O'Connor

I have next to me a collection of essays on Flannery O'Connor from a series called Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom and published by Chelsea House in 1986. I would like to write about a couple of things from this book. I also have the cover to show, partly because it includes a picture of an automobile being driven by the Devil.

In "Rural Gothic" by Ronald Schleifer, the author writes: "The Gothic romance [. . .] seeks extremes." Flannery O'Connor herself wrote: "[I]t is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially." Thus, the author of Gothic works exposes or subjects her characters to extremes, of violence, depravity, evil, grotesqueness, etc., so as to get to essences.

Mr. Schleifer continues: 

The Gothic romance, when it is serious, seeks essences; it seeks origins--both its own and its characters'. [. . .] Origins are always supernatural; they are always beyond what can be known in a rational, logical way. [. . .] Origins are always what O'Connor calls "mystery," the manifestation and apprehension of the Sacred within quotidian reality.

I would add that even in the weird tale that sets itself apart from the capital-S Sacred, there are sacred things, that is, supernatural things that stand above and outside of the ordinary and that evoke feelings of awe, mystery, wonder, and terror.

     The Gothic novel [Mr. Schleifer writes] presents precisely the need to discover origins [. . .]. The Gothic is a haunted literature [. . .], and what haunts it [. . .] is some supernatural origin, some inhuman silence, forces beyond the self-sufficiency of the daylight self.

I presume that to mean that, in contrast, the realistic novel does not concern itself with origins and that the novelistic self is self-sufficient or self-enclosed. If all of that is true, and if a fictional character is in search of his origins, then maybe the work in which he carries out his quest is more nearly Gothic and Romantic than it is realistic or novelistic. If that's the case, then Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (1932) is quite obviously a Gothic work, and that is how it is classed. The quotations above are from pages 82 and 83.

* * *

I have just one quotation from "The Visionary Art of Flannery O'Connor" by Joyce Carol Oates. This quotation is applicable in ways that are broader than just for Ms. Oates' purposes within her essay. I have considered it in particular in regards to the recent case of an African-British academic at the University of Cambridge who was exploited by his employers and who presumably killed himself out of shame, disgrace, or humiliation once he was exposed as a liar and plagiarizer. There is a scandal in all of this, but the people who have pointed out and reported on the scandal are not in any way guilty, and the deceased is not the worst actor in his own scandal:

What is difficult, perhaps, is to see how the humanitarian impulse--when it is not spiritual--is an egoistic activity. O'Connor's imagination is like Dostoevsky's: politically reactionary, but spiritually fierce, combative, revolutionary. If the liberal, atheistic, man-centered society of modern times is dedicated to manipulating others in order to "save" them, to transform them into flattering images of their own egos, then there is no love involved--there is no true merging of selves [this presumably referring to the idea that "everything that rises must converge"], but only a manipulative aggression. (p. 46)

That deceased academic didn't know what he was walking into when he joined the university faculty. The university took him in, chewed him up in its exercise of "a manipulative aggression," and spat him back out again. It never cared about him. It only cared about itself, and he paid the price for that. They got to check a box and lost nothing. He lost everything and checked out of this life. The greatest tragedy, for the living, is that he left behind a wife and two children.

* * *

In one of these two essays, I came across a literary term that I had never encountered before. It's called the "pathetic fallacy." It's not as common as it used to be, but the pathetic fallacy is probably still in use. I would consider the pathetic fallacy to be a literary offense, for this world is not a Walt Disney cartoon. Flowers don't dance and sing under a smiling sun. Angry black clouds with furrowed brows do not puff up their cheeks and blow. Non-living things do not have feelings or emotions. They don't sympathize with or reflect the feelings of any character. They don't represent anything but themselves, least of all our own feelings and emotions. They don't take action. They are not in favor of or against any person or thing. By extension (maybe this is my corollary), animals are not evil. They are not forces nor instruments of punishment or retribution. Animals have their imperatives. Those imperatives do not include us. To them we may very well be obstacles to what they're trying to accomplish. We are merely objects in their environment. However, I recall the mountainous Watchers in William Hope Hodgson's brilliant and terribly flawed post-apocalyptic fantasy The Night Land (1912), and I realize that the pathetic fallacy can be disposed of if the imagination of the author is sufficiently great and the non-living thing is brought to horrifying life.

Harold Bloom's caption reads: "Flannery O'Connor looms ironically over the vehicle, driven by a Southern version of the Devil himself, in which, near the conclusion of The Violent Bear It Away, young Tarwater the prophet has just been carried away to his ordeal." Illustration by Robert C. Morris.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

More on Regions & Gothics

An Indiana Gothic?

Even before my entry from the other day went up, I found what I think might be an Indiana Gothic. I have been doing some research on Jennings County, Indiana, the only Jennings County in America. It was named for our first governor, Jonathan Jennings (1784-1834). In my research I came across a book that I haven't read by an author everyone in Indiana has heard of. I would like to read this book now to see if it really could be a Gothic story, or at least have some Gothic elements.

Jennings County is the birthplace of author Jessamyn West (1902-1984). She was born in the county seat of Vernon, which is situated inside of a loop in the Muscatatuck River. That river has cut deeply into the local landscape: there are bluffs and very steep slopes along much of its length. On July 11, 1863, John Hunt Morgan and his raiders threatened Vernon, but they were put off by local militiamen and a small force of Union troops occupying those bluffs and slopes above the river. There wasn't any battle at Vernon as there had been at Corydon two days before. Morgan and his men retreated without any losses.

Jessamyn West wrote The Friendly Persuasion, a collection of interrelated short stories published in 1945. There was a film adaptation of her first book. It was released in 1956 as Friendly Persuasion. In the movie version, there is a battle at the river when Morgan's Raiders try to cross. We in Indiana know that to be a historical inaccuracy, but then there are lots of historical inaccuracies in movies. Anyone who has been along the Muscatatuck River knows, too, that it looks nothing like what is shown in the film. Hollywood movies are full of geographical inaccuracies as well.

Jessamyn West's first novel is called The Witch Diggers. It was published in 1951 and is also set in the author's native place except that Jennings County is fictionalized as Rock County. Like I said, I haven't read this book, but in reading reviews and descriptions of it, I have the impression that there are some dark, violent, grotesque, and possibly fanatic people and events in its pages, possibly including in the title characters, who dig innumerable holes in the ground looking for truth buried by the devil. It's hard to imagine a seemingly gentle soul and writer like Jessamyn West writing anything tinged with Gothics, but you never know. By the way, the witch diggers were based on real people of Jennings County of the nineteenth century.

Kentucky & Ohio Regionalists?

In thinking about American regionalism, I have also thought of some possible regionalists still living or recently departed. We think of regionalism as being a thing of the past, but there are probably still regionalist authors. One who has come to mind is Wendell Berry, who was born ninety-two years ago this month in Henry County, Kentucky. I think you could call Mr. Berry a regionalist, but he might also be called a state-alist (my new, awkward, and totally unpleasing word, in aesthetic terms) or localist, for he writes about Kentucky, moreover a specific place in Kentucky. Most recently, he published a novel called Marce Catlett (2025). I read a little about it last year and I thought, good for him. We need more of this hard work, dedication, and writerly devotion in American letters. Bobbie Ann Mason (b. 1940) is another Kentucky author who writes about the people and places of her native state.

Before Wendell Berry and Bobbie Ann Mason in Kentucky there was Jesse Stuart (1906-1984). And now I wonder if Hollis Summers (1916-1987), a Kentuckian, and Jack Matthews (1925-2013), an Ohioan, also wrote as localists, state-alists, or regionalists. I have read several of the late Mr. Matthews' books and many of his short stories, and I have found that many of them are about Columbus, where he was born; southeastern Ohio, where he lived, worked, taught, and went looking for rare books; or the area of Gallipolis, "the French City" where his father was born. (I believe Jack Matthews fictionalized Middleport, located upriver, as Brackenport in his late novel The Gambler's Nephew, published in 2011.) Earlier this year, I found some old newspapers at a secondhand shop across two rivers in Point Pleasant. I was pleased to find what I believe to be a picture of his father in a Gallipolis newspaper from the early 1940s. I'll close by writing that Jack Matthews and Hollis Summers were at Ohio University at the same time. What a time that must have been. But it has come to a close, as has this entry.

Happy Birthday to Wendell Berry.

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Regional Gothic-Part Two

There is supposed to have been a Southern Gothic, but are there or have there been other regional Gothics? I don't know.

What got me started down this path is finding a novel originally published in 1968 and issued in a paperback edition in 1969. Entitled Expensive People, it's by Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938), and the edition that I have is the Fawcett Crest Books edition from 1970, with good cover art by an unknown artist. The whole package--illustration, design, typeface, graphics, everything--beats the heck out of what is being published now. My advice to readers and book lovers everywhere is to secure these books now before they are gone forever.

The cover of Expensive People is good, but it's also inaccurate. For one, the woman is not a blonde. In fact (or fiction), she has dark hair. For another, I don't picture the boy as being that together or that good-looking. He's actually pretty messed up. The thing that actually got me to read this novel, though, is the cover blurb. It reads:

A TALE OF GOTHIC HORROR

One of the problems with everything that is called Gothic is that there isn't any fixed or sure definition of "Gothic." I'm pretty sure, though, that Expensive People is not "a tale of Gothic horror." On the other hand, we have become inured to things that were horrifying in 1968.

Expensive People is a good and very well-written book. Put it into the category of stories about horrible mothers. It actually has something in common with crime and detective novels of mid-century. Like a detective story, it is centered around a kind of femme fatale, and it is one in which an assumed identity is exposed at the end. I won't give anything away.

Published in 1968, Expensive People looked far into the future, to now in fact when troubled boys and young men go around shooting people. The first sentence in the book is a confessional: "I was a child murderer." It's also shocking and sensationalistic. I think that was the intent. Despite the subject matter, Expensive People is a very funny book, and Ms. Oates writes well in the voice of a boy and young man.

I have one quotation from Ms. Oates' novel, an insight that will go far in its service to us as human beings . . .

The narrator, named Richard, is taking an entrance examination for a fancy Eastern school. (I capitalize "Eastern" because I want people to capitalize "Midwestern.") The proctor is named Farrel:

He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.

      Shall I be so blunt? The obvious beginning, yes. Nada [Richard's mother] brought me here, Dean Nash led me to it, but for some reason it was Farrel, that small and indeed insignificant man, who made me realize a dizzying truth about human beings: they don't care.

     No, they don't care, and it means something irreparable to know that. Not just to be told it casually, or to be shouted down by a playmate, "Drop dead, will you?" No, I mean knowing it, feeling it, tasting it with all of your insides. (p. 47)

No, they don't care, and we all have to realize that.

Expensive People is set in the East, and it has all of the trappings and features of an Eastern. (If there are Westerns, why not Easterns?) If it's a Gothic tale, then it must be an example of Eastern Gothic. And if there is an Eastern Gothic, then there must be other regional Gothics.

By the way, there is a yellow Cadillac early in the pages of Expensive People. It's yellow and it's a Cadillac for a reason.

Late last year I wrote about the Hudson River, and so I perked up this year when I read a phrase, "Hudson Gothic," in an online review of When All Men Wore Hats: Susan Cheever on the Stories of John Cheever (2025). The review is called "The Father Behind the Fiction," and it's by Rand Richards Cooper. Mr. Cooper's article is on the website ARC, dated April 16, 2026, and is found by clicking here. That phrase, "Hudson Gothic," refers to John Cheever's short story "The Hartleys," from 1949, in which there is "drunken despair and recrimination," "horror," and "the gruesome death" of a seven-year-old girl. I'll mention Susan Cheever outside of her title so that I can put her name in boldface.

I was encouraged to read that phrase, "Hudson Gothic." I guess I'm not the only one who senses the presence of other regional Gothics.

My third piece of reading is from this summer when I read Peyton Place by Grace Metalious (1956). I'm probably the only person in America who has read Peyton Place during the past thirty years. That's okay. It's good to know what all of the hubbub was about more than twice that long ago. Anyway, Peyton Place is not an especially good book. It drags for many, many chapters before picking up some speed towards the middle or end of Book One. The climactic part of Book Two actually has real power and is probably the most well-written part of the novel. There are three shocking events set against the backdrop of a drought summer and a raging forest fire: first, a crazy woman whose husband was forced to leave town after raping his stepdaughter hangs herself in her employer's house, in the closet of the teenaged girl who stands in for the authoress; next, an old woman dies in her rocking chair on the back porch of her house while watching through a gap in the hedge as her neighbors have sex in the yard, all of this witnessed by a boy in hiding only a few feet away (before making his escape, he strangles her leashed cat; the whole sequence reminds me of one in Light in August by William Faulkner [1932] in which a young Joe Christmas hides behind a screen and squeezes stolen toothpaste into his mouth as a man and a woman make love on the other side); and finally, at a carnival held while the wooded hills burn, another teenaged girl, a friend of the first, gets caught in the machinery of a carnival ride and has her arm ripped off, her friends trying to save her by grabbing the hand that is no longer attached to her body. That third event sounds sensationalistic, if not exploitative, but it is actually sober and very affecting for the sensitive reader. One day the sudden, wholly unexpected, and instantaneous catastrophe will befall all of us.

I thought that the girl had been chopped up and killed by the machinery. I was so relieved to find out in Book Three that she had survived and had even borne a baby. She was happy. If becoming attached to fictional characters is the measure of a good book, then I guess that says something about Peyton Place and Grace Metalious' writing. Anyway, set in a small town in New Hampshire, Peyton Place must be considered a Gothic novel, at least in part and if there is such a thing, and so it, too, must fall into the category of Eastern Gothic. (There is even a gloomy and deserted castle.) Maybe we should start building lists of Eastern and other regional Gothics, that is to say Gothics that are not in the genres of weird fiction, supernatural horror, fantasy, or the girl-meets-house type of Gothic romance.

This two-part series is the first of my Gothic topics for the next week or two. Stay tuned. Or not.

In this semi-quincentennial of America, I have another quotation from Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates. This one is for the writers of America, too, but don't be discouraged, O you hopeful and aspirational scribes:

. . . and one sign [. . .] caught my attention: a very American-looking man holding aloft a can of beer, with a puzzled expression, the caption being, Read a beer can tonight. Do you think I could have made up something so marvelous myself? Never, never! America outdoes all its writers, even its amateur writers! (pp. 75-76)

America outdoes all its writers. Knowing that--and I believe it's true--should give all of us great hope and cause to go on writing and recording what we can.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Regional Gothic-Part One

In the spring of 1935, Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945), a Southern author, spoke and wrote of what she called "Southern Gothic." She may very well have been the originator of that term. It seems to me to be a loose one. Sometimes I think every Southern author of the twentieth century was considered to be in that category, certainly William Faulkner (1897-1962), Carson McCullers (1917-1967), and Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). In his vast study, Love and Death in the American Novel (Dell/Delta, revised edition, 1966), Leslie Fiedler wrote:

[. . . ] the American novel is pre-eminently a novel of terror (p. 26)

and:

It is the Gothic form that has been most fruitful in the hands of our best writers [. . .]. (p. 28)

In other words, in essence, American literature, or the mainstream of American literature, is Gothic according to Dr. Fiedler.

It used to be that American literature was, at least in part, regional. There were of course Southern authors, but there were also New England authors (Sarah Orne Jewett), Midwestern authors, also called authors of the Middle Border (Hamlin Garland), Chicago authors (James T. Farrell), Northwestern authors (Nard Jones), and many others. I'm sure there were Western regional authors who were not the authors of Westerns, too. Ivan Doig and Wallace Stegner come to mind, even if they were from a later era. August Derleth (1909-1971), a teller of weird tales, was a regional author of the upper Midwest, specifically his home state of Wisconsin. Regionalism was also in American art of the early to mid twentieth century.

I don't know how true that is today, I mean about regionalism in American literature. In this age in which a uniform gray sludge has come to overlay the land, I'm not sure there is such a thing as any regional author or regional novel. One exception might be the Eastern author, who writes the Eastern writer's novel, which is a novel written by an Eastern writer, about an Eastern writer, for a readership of Eastern writers, published by an Eastern publishing house, and reviewed by Eastern writers sitting in Eastern coffeehouses, drinking Eastern coffee, and nibbling on Eastern muffins or scones. These are sometimes good, for example, many of John Irving's novels. Very often they are dreary, for a person can read only so much about summer camps, prep schools, suburbs, beach houses, university campuses, and the agonies of the upper middle class.

So if the Gothic novel (or romance) is the pre-eminent form in American literature, and American literature was once regional, then does that mean that there were other categories of Gothics? There was supposedly a Southern Gothic. Were there also an Eastern Gothic, a Midwestern Gothic, and a Western Gothic at the very least? (Richard Brautigan, a Western author, actually wrote a novel called The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, published in 1974.) In weird fiction that was certainly true. H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an exemplar of Northeastern or New England Gothic. Maybe Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) was his counterpart in Texas or the West. If I knew more about Carl Jacobi (1908-1997) and his tales of the Rentharpian Hills, I could say that he wrote weird/Gothic tales of the Upper Midwest. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about him or them, even though I have read an account of his career, Lost in the Rentharpian Hills: Spanning the Decades with Carl Jacobi by R. Dixon Smith (1985). That book, like so many books by fans, is basically a list or a catalog of facts and lacks any analysis or critical examination of the author's work. I was disappointed when I read it. Maybe I'll have to write myself about the late Mr. Jacobi and his oeuvre.

I'm from Indiana. Now here I am trying to think of an Indiana Gothic. Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) lived and worked in Indiana before the Civil War, but he's not really closely associated with the Hoosier State, although some of his tales are set on the American frontier of his youth. Other well-known authors of Indiana--Booth Tarkington (1869-1946), Jessamyn West (1902-1984), Gene Stratton Porter (1863-1924), Ross Lockridge, Jr. (1914-1948)--wrote in the mainstream. Indiana, after all, is a conservative place and its people tend towards conservatism and the mainstream. Maybe because of that, Indiana authors are often forgotten and their books set aside, unless they are made into movies, for example The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Friendly Persuasion (1956), The Girl of the Limberlost (1934, 1945), and Raintree County (1957). Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007) was also from Indiana, but he began his writing career in a science fiction era, and so he doesn't appear to have been much of a Gothicist. Besides that, he turned into an Eastern writer and doesn't seem to have written much about his native state.

In Indiana, Gothics are more often, or exclusively, real-life phenomena, for example, the activities of the serial killer Belle Gunness (1880s-early 1900s), the murder of Howard Pitezel by H.H. Holmes (1894), the murder of Madge Oberholtzer by D.C. Stephenson (1925), the torture and murder of Sylvia Likens (1965), the Hollandsburg Massacre (1977), the Burger Chef Murders (1978), and the legend of the House of Blue Lights (1960s). The Pitezel and Oberholzter cases took place in Irvington where we grew up (there are still large, Gothic houses in that neighborhood), while the Sylvia Likens case happened a dozen or so blocks to the west. The Hollandsburg Massacre and the Burger Chef Murders happened when we were children. Along with the Speedway bombings and the Tony Kiritsis hostage-taking, they helped to make Indiana a scary place in the 1970s. And let's not forget that Charles Manson and Jim Jones also called Indiana home at one time or another.

And now I wonder whether Gothic horrors are simply the flipside of a staid, conservative, and traditional lifestyle and culture. What lies under the surface of the supposedly stable and respectable man, woman, or household?

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Agon Again, or, The Bonnevilles of Literature

If you remember high school English class, you might remember the concept of conflict in fiction, and you might remember that there are four basic types of conflict:

Man against man

Man against nature

Man against society

Man against himself

It used to be that there were just three, I think. Man against himself was added sometime later, maybe in the 1950s when there was a new kind of fiction beginning to develop. Maybe that new kind of fiction was based in part on Freudian psychology. Anyway, we have our words protagonist and antagonist. We recognize that the protagonist is on the positive side of the conflict or struggle and that the antagonist is on the negative side. The protagonist is the hero. He or she is the character with whom you identify. You're on his side and you root for him. The antagonist is against the protagonist. Your hope is that he will be defeated. In most stories, it's easy to tell which is which, who wears the white hat and who the black. I'll add that the idea of conflict in a story is predicated on the idea that there is a protagonist, in other words, a positive character or figure.

At the heart of these two words is agon. I think we're more familiar with protagonist and antagonist than we are with agon. Agon seems to have a narrower and more specialized meaning. It doesn't mean just "conflict." It has an older meaning based in Classical Greek drama. That's my understanding anyway. For today at least, I'll think of agon as being the central conflict of a story.

In weird fiction, the conflict is usually between man and nature. At its extreme, it is against super-nature, i.e., supernatural, preternatural, fantastic, or super-scientific forces, even if the "science" is an impossible kind of science. For example, Cthulhu is not a supernatural monster. He is instead a super-scientific one. He's an alien from another planet, and he came here by super-scientific means. Our conflict with Cthulhu is one of man against nature, for he exists as a physical being in a physical universe. He's like a super-sized, interstellar Moby-Dick. He reminds me of Leviathan.

In "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," his first story in Weird Tales (Mar.-Apr. 1923), Otis Adelbert Kline expressed an insight that there isn't actually anything supernatural because there isn't anything that is above God. God reigns at the pinnacle of nature. All things are below him. With that being the case, the conflicts of man against nature, man against the supernatural, man against fate, man against God, and maybe even man against himself are all rolled into one. We are, after all, part of nature and of God's creation. When we fight against ourselves, we fight against our own nature, i.e., nature. As for the supposed conflict of man against technology, I think that might be lumped in with man against man or man against society, for technology is of our own invention and is made for own purposes. It is a tool that we use. If someone is trying to kill you with a shovel (a work of technology), your conflict is not with the shovel. It's with the man. In other words, man against technology is a science-fictional conflict. These are not perfect categories.

In science fiction, the conflict is more varied than it is in weird fiction, but then science fiction is a much broader genre than is weird fiction. Again, the science-fictional conflict is usually man against man or man against society. If one of the purposes of science fiction is to serve as a satire of society, for example, in stories of dystopia, then maybe a very large portion of science fiction involves a conflict of man against society.

In "Four Car Stories-Part Two," I wrote:

It used to be that hero was synonymous with protagonist, but as we have seen, a story does not need a hero in order to function. In a story of a different type, Dwight Bonneville would be not the protagonist but the antagonist. We would recognize him as a villain. But if there isn't any hero, how can there be a villain in opposition to him? And if the hero is absent and the villain becomes the protagonist, what is the agon? There isn't any conflict within Bonneville. He is a man of conviction. He has his obsession. His conflict isn't with the men he hunts. Being weak and without conviction themselves, they go easily to the slaughter. Theoretically, his struggle (or one of his struggles) is against a society that wants to stop him from spreading death and destruction. But where is that society? Nowhere to be found. He goes on with his mission with nothing to stand in his way. He is active, competent, and efficient. And what are we to do as readers? Identify with him? Root for him? What reader would?

In writing that, I hadn't considered the possibility that there is another type of conflict, what you might call a meta-conflict:

Man against the reader

In this conflict, the man--a character who acts as the protagonist--resides within the story, but there is no one there to oppose him. There isn't any conflict, and he lacks an antagonist. His essential conflict is with the reader, if the reader is willing to take up the struggle. If man against the reader is a type of conflict, then that conflict extends outside of the work. A character like Dwight Bonneville, within his milieu of the story, is an affront to us as readers. His actions are criminal and transgressive, his beliefs morally offensive and intolerable. He isn't out to negate just the fictional rocket scientists of the world. He's out to negate all of us. But if there isn't anyone within the story to stand against him, then only the reader can fill that role.

Again, the Bonneville-type character is an antagonist in a story that lacks a protagonist, and so his role as antagonist dissipates, as does the whole concept of conflict. He's not a hero, unless he is his own hero with his own cause, but he is also not really a protagonist because he isn't a positive character and there isn't any conflict within the story. The only conflict is between us as readers and the Dwight Bonnevilles of literature--again, as long as we are willing to take up that struggle. If we are indifferent to the Bonnevilles of literature, or if we agree with them and support them in their cause, then there also isn't any conflict, except with other readers who possess some moral sense. And if that happens, then the conflict moves completely outside of the work and into the real world where it becomes a conflict between those who share in Dwight Bonneville's goal and those who stand at some higher level of morality. In this example of reader versus reader, the author serves as a neutral party: he sets up an experiment by which his readers are tested against each other, or against some moral absolute. Some will pass the test, while others will fail, but there is no keeping score, except in the reader's own heart. I feel certain that there are readers who are content to remain as moral monsters even after they read about Dwight Bonneville, at least three other of the "protagonists" in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, or characters like them. One of the reasons I feel this way is that there are authors who seem to be moral monsters. Either that or they are stupid, ignorant, or unserious, or they are simply chasing after money, status, and approval by following their readers instead of taking on the obligations incumbent upon the artist as a leader in matters of taste.

So in the example of "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson, there will be readers who are cool with atheism, nihilism, murder, despair, destruction, and so on. There will be others who are not. The first group is affirmed in its beliefs by Bonneville's words and actions. He destroys because the world and humanity deserve to be destroyed. That's how they like it. They would like to read more of his adventures. If there were a Dwight Bonneville t-shirt, they would wear it. Readers on the opposite side of things may be outraged by what he and his fans and followers do and think and believe, but hopefully they are moved in their reading of a story like this one. Hopefully they are not discouraged. Hopefully they keep the faith and don't fall into despair like Bonneville's rocket-scientist victims. They should tell themselves what the dying Captain Lawrence said to Oliver Hazard Perry: "Don't give up the ship." In this case, maybe the ship is our whole civilization, which was built, after all (to mix metaphors) upon the rock of faith and holds that place by a continuance of faith. Once that goes, the ship of civilization will be wrecked upon the rocks like how Felix De Groot wrecks his car against a concrete abutment along the highway. To switch metaphors from the ship to the automobile of civilization, we could very well be modockin down the freeway of self-destruction. We should not want that. We should want to live.

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Four Car Stories-Part Four

In "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror" by Alex Gaby (The Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 14, 1956, reprinted ten years later in 52 Miles to Terror and Other Stories of the Road), a man named Biff, driving on a lonely road in the American West, is tormented by the unseen driver of a red hotrod. The driver of the hotrod is anonymous. The threat seems embodied in the vehicle itself. In Gaby's story, the man is not alone. He has his wife and his daughter in the car with him. The driver of the hotrod is also not alone. His passenger is as unspeaking and anonymous as he is. Both drive unnamed cars. We can assume the first is a conservative, family-type car, although it does okay in a drag race. Maybe the second is a souped-up Ford. Anyway, all of that reminds me of the story "Duel" by teller of weird tales Richard Matheson, which was published in Playboy in April 1971 and adapted to film later that year by Steven Spielberg from Matheson's script. We watched Duel on television when we were kids. Only much later did I read the story.

In the film version of Duel, the driver of the truck is anonymous, unspeaking, faceless, and almost unseen. The truck seems to be disembodied and to act on its own. It seems itself to be the menace and the threat, or maybe the driver is simply an extension of the truck. When we watched Duel, I had a sense that the truck and driver were together a supernatural force. I don't think there's anything in the movie to dispel that sense. But then in any encounter with an inexplicable evil, we are perhaps also in an encounter with the supernatural.

In Duel the movie, the protagonist, named, significantly, Mann, drives a red, late-model Plymouth Valiant. (The model name sounds like the epithet of a knight, a hero. Look for a Plymouth Valiant in the story behind "Vehicle" by the Ides of March, from 1970.) The truck is a 1957 Peterbilt 281. The vehicles, especially the truck, become almost like characters. In "Duel" the story, neither vehicle is identified. It might have been a better story if they had been. It might have helped us visualize the duel or joust that takes place. In film, cars and trucks can't be generic. They have to be identifiable products. In prose, you can write "car" and "truck" and that can work, at least as a bare minimum.

"Duel" the story seems to me overwrought, somewhat repetitive, probably padded for length. The atmosphere of menace and suspense seems partly artificial to me. The writing style is pulpish. As I remember it, Duel the movie is more streamlined and economical. There are of course no thoughts and not much dialogue. (There are long periods of silence in No Country for Old Men [2007], too.) Prose can be inward, whereas film is mostly outward. Beyond that, Duel was made by a 23-year-old director who grew up on movies rather than reading prose. And it is very suspenseful.

In "Duel," there is a wreck at the end, but the driver Mann seems somewhat passive. The wreck is partly by accident. In Duel, there is also a wreck at the end, but Mann, played by Dennis Weaver, brings that about. He is the agent of his own salvation. In that way, he's like Biff in "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror." Both men are triumphant in the end, for they have vanquished their tormenters. Both are the heroes and the protagonists of their own stories. The drivers of the other vehicles--or the vehicles themselves--are the obvious antagonists. In Duel the movie, though, the situation is more extreme, the threat and menace more dire, the antagonist actually evil as far as we can tell, partly because his motivation remains unknown and unexplained. Duel might count as a weird tale. It might also be a conte cruel except that it ends in relief and release.

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Richard Matheson based his story on an experience he had while driving with his friend Jerry Sohl on a California road. The date was November 22, 1963. John F. Kennedy was  assassinated on that day in Dallas. He was our only president killed while riding in an automobile, a Lincoln Continental, named for our first president to die by violence. C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley also died that day. Their deaths were of course overshadowed by the assassination of the American president.

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The last of the four car stories in this series is The Hitcher, released in 1986. In that movie, C. Thomas Howell's character, named Jim Halsey, is driving a red Cadillac Seville across West Texas when he runs into the title character, a man named John Ryder, played by Rutger Hauer. An hour or more of suspense and terrible menace, evil, violence, and gore follows. The writer of the original story, Eric Red, was inspired by the song "Riders on the Storm" by the Doors and its lyric "there's a killer on the road." The character name "John Ryder" lets us know that that's what he does--he rides. By the way, Eric Red also wrecked his car. A strange story.

As in the three previous stories I have written about in this series, The Hitcher takes place on the road, in the American West, when one driver encounters another.* In "The Last Bonneville," the first driver is not the protagonist. He in fact falls victim to the second. In the other three, the first driver is the protagonist, and he has a clear antagonist. I don't know that Richard Matheson ever read "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror." He didn't have to. He had personal experience from which to draw in writing his story. Film critic Gene Siskel may have detected a subsequent influence when he wrote that The Hitcher is "a thinly veiled but more gruesome ripoff of Steven Spielberg's 'Duel.'" I can't say one way or another. But there are similarities among these three stories, written before the twentieth century came to an end. "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson is significantly different. It's a story of the twenty-first in which there aren't any heroes and evil drives through the world, seemingly unimpeded, with the top down and the driver whooping it up as he puts the miles and leaves the bodies in a trail behind him.

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*I have written that "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror" takes place in the West. It's actually on the approach to Waco, which is in central Texas. We just don't know in which direction the driver is going. In any case, if you drive across Texas from east to west, you will begin in places that are almost indistinguishable from the East and make your way into places that are very clearly in the West. Just where is the transition? Somewhere in central Texas, I guess, where it turns from green to brown.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Four Car Stories-Part Three

"The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson is a car and driving story that reaches its climax as a man crashes his car into an abutment along a desert highway. That man, named Felix De Groot, is not the hero or protagonist of this story. He is in fact the tormented. His tormenter lives on, unscathed, part of his mission accomplished. He drives away, next stop Nevada, to continue in his mission of spreading despair, death, and destruction.

I finished reading the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales in January 2024. Later that year I found a Scholastic book called 52 Miles to Terror and Other Stories of the Road, edited by Ruth Christopher Carlsen and G. Robert Carlsen, and published in 1966. The cover story is "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror" by Alex Gaby. It was originally in The Saturday Evening Post, in the issue of January 14, 1956. "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror" was adapted to film as Hot Rods to Hell, released in 1967, but by then the original concept might have become obsolete, for in the 1960s, teenagers were no longer villains, no longer the punks or duck-tailed greasers or juvenile delinquents of the 1950s. Instead, by 1967, young people were the main subjects and probably the main consumers of American popular culture. In reading "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror," I was reminded of "The Last Bonneville." These two stories, published nearly seventy years apart, have their parallels and their divergences. In a small way, they show how things have changed in our society and culture since the 1950s.

Like F. Paul Wilson's story, "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror" is about a driving and being on the road in the American West. Biff and Paula are on their way to see Aunt Mildred and her husband and family in Waco, Texas. In the back seat is their ten-year-old daughter Ruth. We don't know what kind of car they're driving. They call it "Steady Nellie," as if it were a horse, as if this were 1900 instead of midcentury. This is the 1950s, and they're a family. Their story is in The Saturday Evening Post, a popular, conservative, general-interest, slick magazine. On the other side of things are two teenagers in a bright red hotrod. They represent youth and new things, which might be cause for apprehension and fear.

Biff isn't exactly a hero--you'll have that if your name is Biff--but he is the protagonist in this story. The two unnamed teenagers in their unnamed red hotrod are the antagonists, the tormenters of Biff and his family. Biff is foolish in provoking them: he gets in a drag race with them in a small Texas town along the way. They win. He catches up and upbraids them at a last-chance gas station. After that, there are sixty miles of straight, empty road ahead of Biff and his passengers. Or it's empty until the red hotrod catches up. And then the torment and menace begin. Racing, dangerous road games, and games of chicken ensue. Finally, Biff tricks his tormenters with a complicated scheme that results in their wrecking their car against the concrete balustrade of a small bridge over a drainage ditch. When I read that, my mind went back to the story I had read ten months before.

Again, Biff isn't a hero exactly. He's too foolish and immature for that. And his tormenters aren't exactly villains. There's a "Hey, you kids, get off my lawn" quality to this story. Biff's tormenters are really just two teenaged boys, too immature to understand the seriousness of what they're doing. (Their mistake is in thinking that they're up against another teenaged driver and that he shares in their values and interests, that he wants to play their game. It doesn't help that Biff, tapping into his own immaturity, instigates the whole thing by taking them up on the invitation to drag race on a city street.) But Biff saves his family from a situation (that he helped create) and so maybe he is heroic after all. He is also cunning and competent. His scheme works. And in the end, out of charity, he offers to deliver the two anonymous teenagers--they go unnamed, in fact they don't even speak--to the nearest town.

In "The Last Bonneville," there isn't any Biff, for there isn't any hero and no one is saved from any menace. In "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror," there isn't really any villain in the end, just two teenaged boys trying to have what they call fun. At the climax of both stories, a car is wrecked against a concrete structure along the road. In "The Last Bonneville," it is the tormenter, not the tormented, who comes away unscathed. In "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror," it is the tormenters who are stopped. In Alex Gaby's story, there is a scheme. It works, and the menace is ended. Biff and his family drive on, and we can be sure of a happy ending. What a story they will have for Aunt Mildred and the gang in Waco. In F. Paul Wilson's story, there is also a scheme. It works, too, and the menace continues. Like Biff, Dwight Bonneville is cunning and competent. It's on to Nevada for him. Who will die there?*

In "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror," Biff's family car is something of a character. They call it--her--"Old Nellie." Even so, we know who Old Nellie's passengers are. They're the real characters in the story. The passengers of the red hotrod, however, are almost unseen. They are unspeaking and anonymous. The threat and the menace are almost disembodied from human characters and are instead embodied in the car itself. (Cars have bodies, too. And is the hotrod red because it is somehow diabolical?) In Gaby's story, the red hotrod becomes the character, the antagonist, the threat. What do the hot-rodders call their car? We don't know, but it seems almost certain to have a name. Finally, after the crash and after the torment is gone, Biff the hero, such as he is, has mastery over the hotrod and the two teenagers. The whole situation reminds me of a third car story . . .

Next: Duel

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*The movie No Country for Old Men (2007), another story of the road and the American West, ends with a car crash, too. The killer doesn't come away unscathed. Nonetheless, he comes away, and we can be sure that the killing will go on.

52 Miles to Terror (1966), with cover art by Mort Künstler (1927-2025), one of the most aptly named artists ever. I can't tell what kind of car that is. Is it a Chevy? Could it be a Corvair? Anyway, there is only one story in this collection that might be considered a weird story, and no science fiction stories at all, even if the souped-up jeep in Bill Mauldin's story is a work of near super-technology. The almost weird-fictional story is "Hearse of the Speedway" by Peter Granger, originally in Esquire in September 1936.

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley