"Laid to Rest" by Tim Lebbon

"Laid to Rest" by Tim Lebbon is the only outright science fiction story in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. It takes up nearly eight pages of text, plus a full-page, illustrated main title page and a snippet of that illustration in the interior. Mr. Lebbon is British. He was born on July 28, 1969, in London, England. The date was propitious for a future author of science fiction stories, for only a week before he was born, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. Although he writes novels and short stories, Tim Lebbon is like nearly every other author in this issue of Weird Tales in that he has written works tied to movies and television series, and his own works have gone back the other way by being adapted to the screen. That kind of work probably explains why his story reads like a screenplay. It also must explain the presence of some of what I call twenty-first century inanities in "Laid to Rest."

I might as well get those out of the way. They include: "over time" and lines of dialogue, "Talk to me" and "Here, now!" There isn't any "Let's do this" or "I got this," but there easily could have been. There are also vulgar exclamations that stand in for actual dialogue. These things are done so that a writer can appear edgy and with it and even transgressive, I guess. Mr. Lebbon uses span as the past tense of spin. I have learned that this is an archaic but generally acceptable form. More than one of his characters uses the first-person future tense shall instead of the more informal will. Mr. Lebbon also goes back and forth between the present and past tenses. So there is a mix of styles, tones, tenses. I found only one misused word, comprised, but that's a tough one for a lot of people.

The narrator of this story is Jon, a scientifically minded and analytic technician on another planet where some terraformers have discovered a dozen large ancient alien structures, like immense eggs in the carton of the planet's surface. Jon investigates, accompanied by the voice and spirit of his departed lover, Maria, who was, in contrast to him, artistic, emotional, and spiritual. This is an almost clichéd dichotomy, especially in genre fiction, but it also reflects real life. I think it can stand, especially when the analytic male has as his goal a desire to be more like his artistic lover, as Jon does in this story. I'm not sure that he gets there, though.

Jon enters one of the structures and hears Maria's voice. She tells him about the terrible place in which she has found herself and urges him to leave, warning that he will be noticed. He does leave, in fact, but remembers how close she was to him, even though she was also far away. Is she alive? Or is she a ghost communicating with him from beyond? And now that I think about it, I think that "Laid to Rest" can be interpreted as a spiritualist/spiritualism-type of story, with the alien structures as a kind of medium or Ouija board, allowing contact and communication with the dearly departed. One hundred years ago, we had séances, mediums, ectoplasm, and automatic writing in Weird Tales. Maybe now those things have come back but in a scientified (my invented word) way.

Significantly, Jon is a nonbeliever, an atheist, I guess. So how does he explain his contact with Maria? Maybe the structures are a kind of transportation device, and he has come close to her, or she to him, wherever she might be in the universe, through them. As for any change there might be in his belief system, well, we just don't know, or I don't anyway. Materialists change in weird fiction. Maybe they don't so much in science fiction. On the other hand, Paul Cornell's lead character in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" clings stubbornly to his non-belief and seems to be unchanged by his terrifying Christmastime experience, unlike Ebenezer Scrooge, who seems to be his original and who has a change of heart, like the Grinch, or Saul on the road to Damascus, in his encounter with the supernatural. Jon doesn't seem to be changed, either, by his experience. He actually comes up with a materialistic explanation for it, and so he is not forced to change, and his belief system is not threatened.

A main character who doesn't change or grow over the course of a story can't be a very likable or sympathetic one, especially when he is given every chance. What is the point of a man's story or journey if it isn't to change or grow, to learn a lesson or become a better person? But then if the author himself doesn't give his character a chance, whose fault is that exactly? Maybe it's the author himself who refuses growth. If he won't change, how can his character? Anyway, the essential message from Maria, from beyond, stays with Jon. They are the last words in the story. They are printed in italics, the way so many last words are in weird fiction, but the italics here have a different purpose.*

Pyramids appeared on the cover of the first-anniversary issue of Weird Tales in 1924. Mention of Howard Carter and his discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922 appear in the 100th, in "Laid to Rest." That makes a nice symmetry or the closing of a circle, I think. The cosmic horror in "Laid to Rest" has to do with an implied alien presence. Not all alien presences are Fortean in origin of course, but when you detect an alien presence in a story, you might start to think of the man behind the adjective. But again, Maria's warning is like that of the spirit of the dead person speaking from beyond the grave. Jon's entry into one of the alien structures is like a descent into a tomb. And the alien presence is a science-fantasy kind of presence, like Cthulhu or one of H.P. Lovecraft's other material aliens that embody supernatural horror.

Talk of a supposed curse on Howard Carter and his crew are also in this story. Charles Fort wrote about things like that, too (Robert Ripley was like the newspaper comics version of Fort), but any well-read person should know that there was no such curse, just as there was never any such real thing as Vril, as in the first story to appear in this issue. Authors should learn to differentiate between genuine mysteries and things that are not mysterious at all and might actually be hoaxes.

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*Maria's communication with Jon makes me think of the situation in Frederik Pohl's novel Gateway (1977). It's as if the character Klara in Gateway (a character I think is supposed to represent Pohl's ex-wife, Judith Merril) is able to communicate with Robinette from her decades-long descent into a black hole, except that Maria's message is one of love and caring, even if, like Klara, she is lost forever. I would hate to be Robinette on the other end of the line if Klara were talking. Or maybe she would actually understand and forgive him, and so no need for a robot psychiatrist.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Inkblot Succubus" by Nicole Sixx

"Inkblot Succubus" by Nicole Sixx is a one-page poem with a red-and-black illustration of an inkblot in the background. The black inkblot looks like a cross-section of a brain. Ms. Sixx's lines of verse are centered on the page, and so they are as symmetrical as their subject. There is imagery in this work of rot and decay, murder, too. In the lines: "I take a drag/The drag takes me," there is a faint echo of the famous Nietzsche quote:

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."

We haven't had either Nietzsche or Fort for a while in the Cosmic Horror Issue, but with the appearance of the unexplained lights in the sky in "Mozaika"--is there an extraterrestrial invasion going on?--and the echo of Nietzsche here, maybe those two men haven't gone far from the thoughts of these two women. As for cosmic horror, this poem seems to be of the "Hell is other people" variety.

Nicole Sixx is a writer who has worked in the movie business, so again there is a movie-and-TV connection with the authors in this issue of Weird Tales. In 2022, she had a book or "book" of poetry published called Slow Burn. Before that she had a book of short stories with a vulgar title. You can look for that one on your own, as I do my best to avoid words like that on my blog.

Ms. Sixx's name is misspelled in the table of contents as Nicola Sixx. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database calls her Nikki Sixx, but I'm pretty sure she's not the bassist for Mötley Crüe. It sounds like she needs someone out there making corrections for her and to better represent herself in the world.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Mozaika" by Nancy Kilpatrick

Though born in Philadelphia (on May 6, 1946), Nancy Kilpatrick is considered a Canadian author. She has written short stories, novels, and non-fiction. Among her books are tie-ins to the Friday the 13th movie series. She also writes under the name Amarantha Knight. She lives in Canada and teaches short story writing at the George Brown College of Applied Arts and Technology in Toronto. Her story "Mozaika" takes up six and a half pages in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. There is also a full-page main title page with an illustration, one that is used again to fill the last half page of the story.

There isn't any product placement in "Mozaika." That's a relief. The story is set in the present or near future. It's about a woman named Myrna and her attempts to assemble a mosaic as the larger world falls apart outside of her tiny house on its remote half-acre lot. Myrna lives alone, in the boondocks, mostly cut off from the world. That's how she wants it to be. In her isolation, she is like the main characters in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" and "Night Fishing." Unlike those two men, though, she stays in. They go out. Her tiny house is her safe place until it isn't anymore.

Myrna is an artist. Her work on her mosaic is a creative act, an attempt to bring order into the universe and to counteract decline and decay. There is imagery in this story of the forces that oppose her. In a "contusious" sky she sees countless lights. What are they? What do they represent? (If this story were happening now we could say they are drones.) Her grout is "necrotic black." She wipes her tiles with a chamois "like a caring parent tending a child's wound." The only other living characters in her story are her overbearing mother and her sister. As living characters, they only talk on the phone from three hours away. "Mozaika" is almost completely about Myrna and her very detailed work on her mosaic.

Something is going on in the outer world. Living in isolation and working on her art, Myrna is unaware. But her mother tells her that people are dying all over . . . and that they're coming back. Neighbors die. Her sister's baby and husband die, then the sister herself and the mother, too. All of them show up at her door, and they want in. They are like zombies. Like the wider world and humanity in the grip of history, they are in a state of decay, or "decline and fall," as she remembers a departed friend saying. Her work has been to counteract all of that. In that she fails. The creative act, an attempt to emulate God and to impose order against chaos, fails. And what is the horror, the cosmic horror? Entropy, which is horrifying enough in all of its implications.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Concerto in Five Movements" by Ramsey Campbell-Part Two

There are cellphones in the world of today, and so they must also be in fiction. Many writers don't know how to handle this fact, but Ramsey Campbell does, at least in his story "Concerto in Five Movements." Instead of going to ancient libraries and consulting dusty tomes, his character Claudia carries out her researches in the comfort of her own home, or on the bus, with all of the world's knowledge (except for the source of the Lovecraft epigraph) in the palm of her hand. Mr. Campbell is also good in writing about music, which is not an easy thing to do.

On the opposite end of technology in this story are a pair of "prehistoric monoliths known as Adam and Eve," so again there is Lovecraftian content in "Concerto in Five Movements." More follows: the singing of "solo themes in an unknown language"; visions of strange "asymmetrical" and "out of proportion" landscapes; dark forests, copses, mountains, caves; a fictional author of the occult, Gahariet le Bon, and a grimoire, the Book of Daoloth; a very oblique allusion to "The Rats in the Walls" by Lovecraft; and words such as shamble, pallid, gibbous, foetal, and so on.

The cosmic horror in this story comes from a legend among some Medieval cultists that they could summon an entity that had arisen in the infancy of the cosmos, in other words at--or was it before?--God's act of creation. There are references or allusions to Adam and Eve, Calvary and the Crucifixion, to God and Christmas, but no one in this story seems to be much of a believer in God or Jesus Christ. Maybe they would rather spell it cruci-fiction. Ramsey Campbell himself is supposed to be an atheist. It's no wonder, then, that these people feel horror when contemplating the universe. This weekend we will have the last full moon of the year and an occurrence of the Geminid meteor shower. For any reasonable person--for any fully human person with a soul, a heart, and a mind--there can be only awe and wonder and feelings of great mystery in contemplation and witness of this vast, beautiful, wonderful universe. Horror is, I think, an inappropriate response, as is the cosmic loneliness so often expressed by astronomers.

An old god returns in "Concerto in Five Movements" to lure away children and to destroy not just a concert hall full of musicians but also any random member or members of humanity as it afterwards wanders loose upon the earth. Mention of "solo themes in an unknown language" makes me think of Lovecraftian gibberish, or gibberish as the language of the void. Reference to the origins of this old god in the infancy of the cosmos makes me think of the void as that which preceded and was banished by God's initial creative act. Somehow this old god survived, though, or, like Cthulhu, it lay sleeping until being revived or resurrected by occult forces. Only Claudia in her sensitivity seems to be aware of its return. On the other hand, she is the only survivor of the disaster at the concert hall. By the way, one of the movements of the title is "Tanz der Geburt Gottes"--"Dance of the birth of gods."

There appears to be a vast pun in "Concerto in Five Movements." A cult can be called a movement, as can, of course, a division in a musical work. The composer in the story is named Keppel. I wonder if his name is a play on that of Johannes Keppler, who, as it so happens, further developed the concept of musica universalis, or the music of the spheres, which "regards proportions in the movements of celestial bodies." (Quoted from Wikipedia, emphasis added.) Note that in Ramsey Campbell's story, there are descriptions of the moon as "asymmetrical" and of a moonlit copse as "out of proportion." There appears to be, then, a contrast made between the ordered and proportionate music of the spheres, and the asymmetrical and disproportionate music of the world inhabited by that nameless old god originating in the early universe.

There may be significance in names. Keppler refers to a maker of cloaks or hoods. It comes from the old German word kappe, "cloak," which still exists in Danish. Kappe is no doubt a cognate of our word cape. The name of the composer Keppel would seem to indicate, then, a diminutive form, in other words, a small cloak. His is a small cloak, while the nameless god from the beginning of the universe wears a large one, for in the story Claudia dreams "of a shape cloaked by clouds above a wooded hill." This is a "colossus restless with anticipation," a phrase that makes me think of Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," which closes with these two lines:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

There is in "The Second Coming" a description: "A shape with lion body and the head of a man," in other words, a sphinx. Enkidu, from the Epic of Gilgamesh, may also part man and part beast, a chimera. Claudia has a similarly named friend, Ekondu. Their names are practically anagrams. Finally, there is reason to believe that Yeats was inspired by Shelley in his composition of "The Second Coming," and so that long-ago British Romantic poet shows himself again in this two-part series on Ramsey Campbell and his story for Weird Tales.

There is far more involved in this concept of the music of the spheres. I'll let you look into that on your own. I'll point out, though, that the phrase "the music of the spheres" is in "The Horror of the Museum" written by Hazel Heald and revised or ghostwritten by H.P. Lovecraft:

     He wished that his senses were not so preternaturally keen. Something in the darkness and stillness seemed to have sharpened them, so that they responded to faint intimations hardly strong enough to be called true impressions. His ears seemed at times to catch a faint, elusive susurrus which could not quite be identified with the nocturnal hum of the squalid streets outside, and he thought of vague, irrelevant things like the music of the spheres and the unknown, inaccessible life of alien dimensions pressing on our own. 

In this, Hazel's and Lovecraft's character Rogers is like Claudia, or vice versa. Both are like the sensitive artists in other works by Lovecraft, too, including "The Call of Cthulhu." The next paragraph after the one describing Claudia's dream begins with Finley the conductor's announcement of the movement "Tanz der Geburt Gottes." As for Claudia, her name means "lame" or "crippled." In other words, she cannot dance: she cannot take full part in the concerto in five movements, each of which is in the form of a dance. Maybe that's what saves her, that and her sensitivity to disturbances in the proper order of things.

"The Horror in the Museum" was published in Weird Tales in July 1933, or ninety years before the Cosmic Horror Issue of the magazine--if you can call them the same magazine. That's a really big if. "Concerto in Five Movements" is the most Lovecraftian of the stories so far in this issue and one of the least Nietzschean or Fortean. In fact it's not Nietzschean or Fortean at all as far as I can tell. Ramsey Campbell may be immune to the influence of Charles Fort.

Updated on December 16, 2024.
Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley 

"Concerto in Five Movements" by Ramsey Campbell-Part One

"Concerto in Five Movements" by Ramsey Campbell takes up nearly eight pages of text, plus a full-page illustration on the main-title page. There is also a small illustration in the interior of the story. This one seems out of place in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales in that it was not created by the artist who did all or most of the others. This small interior illustration is of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It also appears to be very old and probably in the public domain.

There is an epigraph at the beginning of "Concerto in Five Movements." This is the third in the Cosmic Horror Issue and the second from H.P. Lovecraft. I carried out an online search for the text of this epigraph but did not find it. Maybe it's from an unpublished work. The closest thing I found to it is actually from Percy Shelley's poem "Adonais," specifically in the forty-fourth stanza, in which these two lines appear:

And death is a low mist which cannot blot

            The brightness it may veil.

The epigraph used in Mr. Campbell's story:

"The lighter the legend, the darker the truths it may veil; & the most innocent tale told to children may disguise dread secrets."

You could almost break that sentence in prose into lines of verse. In any case, there is significance in the epigraph considering the events of the story, also the inclusion of an image of the Pied Piper. There may also be significance considering Ramsey Campbell's signing of a letter four years ago in support of transgenderism, which is, as we know, very much about grooming and recruiting children into its numbers by giving them puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, most especially by cutting off their breasts and genitals in a ghastly and horrifying attempt to change them into the other sex.

You could consider transgenderism an "innocent tale" that disguises "dread secrets." It's worth noting that, this week, Mr. Campbell's native country indefinitely banned puberty blockers for children. Health Secretary Wes Streeting called the use of the drugs "a scandal." I should point out that transgenderism is also a movement, thought not in the same sense of the word Mr. Campbell uses in his title. However, like the Pied Piper with his music and his piping, transgenderists lead children to tragedy and grief. In "Concerto in Five Movements," the Pied Piper is in fact referred to as "a recruiter."

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Ramsey Campbell is the most well-known and accomplished of the authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue. He was born on January 4, 1946, in Liverpool, England. That was the same year in which F. Paul Wilson was born. I don't think it any mere coincidence that the two best stories in this issue were written by men born in the 1940s. I'm from a later generation, and I have to say that there is something largely missing in creators of our generations. We just don't seem to have what it takes, and I don't have an explanation for that. One possibility is that those born in the 1940s grew up with little exposure during their formative years to television. Maybe Newton Minow was right when he called television "a vast wasteland."

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"Concerto in Five Movements" is set in the present day, presumably in England. There are proper nouns in the story, but no product placement. That's refreshing and perhaps reflective of a lack of early exposure to television on the part of the author. These nouns are the names of composers and places and other cultural things. In fact, Mr. Campbell's story is cultured, a welcome relief from one story in particular in this issue, which is, unfortunately, practically dreck and too much influenced by television.

The main character in the story is a cellist named Claudia. In addition to being a musician, she is an investigator of sorts. The subjects of her investigations are the legend of the Pied Piper and a musical work about the Piper composed by a man named Keppel, whom I presume to be fictional. She finds that "[o]ne commentator maintained the musician [the Pied Piper] had belonged to a cult that had led the children deep into the forest to use them in a secret rite of sacrifice," thus a Lovecraftian undertone arises in the story. But I can't help noticing a parallel with transgenderism, too, which is also a cult and which also leads children away for purposes of sacrificing them. It's not their hearts that are cut out, though.

Claudia has a friend named Ekondu, an African name with a favorable connotation. I couldn't help but think of the pre-Christian name Enkidu when I read it, though. Maybe allusions to the non-Christian world or to pre-Christian times is part of Ramsey Campbell's purpose.

To be concluded . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley 

Reaching Outward and Falling Inward

In Angela Yuriko Smith's poem "Lost Generations," the people of the title are flying through outer space, their mission to populate the galaxy. They come to grief when they fall into a black hole. They and the greater humanity they represent reach outward: this is a mission of hope and positive purpose. They are to be progenitors of a new star people.

Contrast this with the despair and negative purpose of the three previous fictional works by men, "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson, "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan, and "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell. In Mr. Wilson's story, his title character, Dwight Bonneville, has encountered an outer abyss. In reaching outward, though, he has gained the means by which to prevent his fellow men from doing the same. He enforces the quarantine of Earth, imposed by "Our Owner." He heads off "the mission of Man" as in Angelo Yuriko Smith's poem. Bonneville is at cross purposes with her "lost generations."

In "Night Fishing" and "A Ghost Story for Christmas," the lead characters fall inward into their own abysses. There isn't any reaching outward at all, or if there is, their reaching is thwarted by their own inward purposes. Both men are more or less in despair, separated from themselves, from God, and from the rest of humanity. Instead of in an outward star, they have black holes within themselves.

There may be autism in Mr. Cornell's lead character. There may be solipsism behind Mr. Kiernan's. I have written about the worm ouroboros, or uroboros, as Camille Paglia spells it. Ouroboros is solipsistic. It completely encloses itself and is wrapped up in itself. The image of ouroboros is of a snake swallowing its own tail, like the hoop snake of folklore, or Friedrich August Kekulé's dream of the benzene molecule. (That's Kekulé, not Kukla, and Kukla is the clown, not the dragon.)

So ouroboros takes the form of an open circle. In the middle is a hole, a void. The solipsistic person is also a self-enclosing circle. Inside of him there may very well be a void. A two-dimensional representation of a black hole, the star that swallows Ms. Smith's "lost generations," is also circular. Although it's called a hole, it isn't really a hole. It's not nothing actually but everything, all swallowed up and smashed together. In the movie The Black Hole (1979), the star of the title is actually a hole, the entrance to what we would now call a wormhole. Inside that hole, the surviving characters have a diabolical vision in the form of the red robot Maximilian swallowing up and encasing his master Reinhardt. At the end of the wormhole there is a bright light, as in a near-death experience. The characters fly through a chrystaline Gothic archway to reach it and emerge, reborn, on the other side.

Information does not escape from a black hole. We know nothing of what lies inside. In contrast, a black hole knows everything of what lies outside of itself, for everything falls into its limitless mass. Nonetheless, you could say that, because it is completely enclosed on itself and wrapped up in itself, a black hole is a solipsistic star. It is the star of its own show. Its favorite movie is The Black Hole, which is about itself.

As I said before, "Lost Generations" by Angela Yuriko Smith stands apart from the stories by men so far in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. Their visions of cosmic horror are more or less the same, a combination of Fort and Nietzsche, an inward kind of horror of ownership and abysses. Hers is outward, with no Nietzsche or Fort in sight, the cosmos itself, in the form of the black hole, being the source of that horror.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Lost Generations" by Angela Yuriko Smith

Angela Yuriko Smith was born on November 21, 1968, in Madisonville, Kentucky. She is a journalist, author, editor, poet, teacher of creative writing at Northwest Florida State College, and publisher of Space and Time magazine. In 2023, she had a book published, its title, Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror. Her co-editor was Lee Murray, about whom I wrote on August 13, 2020. Ms. Smith, I think, has an admirable list of activities, occupations, and accomplishments. Her birthday just passed, so I would like to say Happy Belated Birthday to her.

Angela Yuriko Smith has a poem in Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue. It's called "Lost Generations," and it takes up two pages in a large typeface with the image of a star field in the background.

"Lost Generations" is in eleven stanzas of three lines each. These are haiku-like tercets, and they are centered on the page such that they have the general appearance of the double helix of the DNA molecule. The acronym DNA appears in the poem, in fact, in the third stanza. So there are three lines per stanza, five and seven syllables per line (mostly, and possibly ideally), and eleven stanzas all together. These are prime numbers, four out of the first five in fact. Where is the missing two? In the pairs of "Adams and Eves" on board the intergenerational spaceship of which she writes, I guess. Or are they the paired, twisted, and intertwined ladders of the DNA helix? And does the use of these prime numbers signify anything?

In the first tercet in "Lost Generations" there is the word Hyades. That makes me think of Robert W. Chambers, who wrote of "the songs that the Hyades shall sing" and "the mystery of the Hyades" in his collection The King in Yellow. In the fifth, the eyes of the awakening voyagers are described as "shining in the abyss." And in the last, there is darkness, for the voyagers are swallowed by a black hole before they can fulfill their mission. So there is abyss and there is darkness and blackness. The people who go into the black hole are the lost generations of the title, a phrase that recalls the men and women who were born during the decade in which The King in Yellow was published, a generation that included, oddly enough, H.P. Lovecraft. This is a different kind of cosmic horror, and I think we can be grateful for that in this issue. 

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson-Part Three

We associate the image of Dionysus with that of Pan, the piper. Pan appears in an early work of cosmic and pagan horror, The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen (1894). There is madness and despair in that story, just as there is madness and despair in The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and the short story "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson. This madness and despair, as well as murder, horror, and death, are brought on by seeing and hearing things that are supposed to be beyond human ken, by peering into abysses, and by close encounters with Chaos, the Void, and Evil itself, incarnate. There is piping in Lovecraft, too. It is associated with his god Azathoth, the so-called daemon-sultan who is seated at the center of "Ultimate Chaos."

In The Great God Pan, there are many strange and terrible events. One of these is a bizarre and horrifying transformation undergone by a woman, among other things of woman into man. The passage describing this transformation is too long to give here. You will find it in Chapter VIII, The Fragments.* People who believe the human body can be altered in its fundamental form should read this passage and recognize the kind of horrors they're trying to bring into our world. In the story of Genesis, read from around the Moon on Christmas Eve 1968 by the Apollo Eight astronauts, God said, "Let there be light." The creation of life follows. In this scene of transformation from Machen's story, there is "the negation of light." That negation is followed by death.

There is in The Great God Pan a reference to Nodens, "the god of the Great Deep or Abyss."** Abysses are elsewhere in Machen's story. So is void:

"[. . . ] the voice of articulate-speaking men echo in the waste void that bounds our thought."

Articulate and intelligible speech, then, pushes back the bounds of the void, just as God spoke his Word, thereby banishing it. Word is positive and creative. Being atheists and probably many of them nihilists, authors of and believers in cosmic horror want instead for us to be bound ever more closely by the void, for it to encroach upon us until we are annihilated. They want, I suspect, Creation to contract and Chaos to reign. The language of the Void, then, is gibberish to us. If we translate it into our language, we go mad, or we lose the will to live. Remember that in the essay preceding his story, Mr. Wilson describes cosmic horror as a genre in which "Chaos reigns." (p. 49)

The Great God Pan has been, I think, an inspiration for much weird fiction and horror fiction, from the works of the devout, such as William Peter Blatty, to those of the skeptical, such as H.P. Lovecraft. F. Paul Wilson mentions The Exorcist and Lovecraft in his essay "Abrahamic vs. Cosmic Horror." He also writes that The Great God Pan "can be rightly viewed as a paradigm of cosmic horror." (p. 49) He seems to have looked to that paradigm in writing his own story. So did the other authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue look to The Great God Pan as well? Or did they consult with Mr. Wilson before they began?

* * *

One more thing: In The Great God Pan, there are the names Helen and Mrs. Beaumont. Another Helen is in the Iliad, just as Dwight Bonneville's given name is originally from Ancient Greece and refers to Dionysus. As for his surname, it echoes Mrs. Beaumont's, for Bonneville means "good town," while Beaumont means "beautiful mountain."

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*The description of that final transformation makes me think of a similar scene near the end of The Thing, John Carpenter's film adaptation of John W. Campbell's story.

**There is also this, from a letter quoted in the story: "I am like a traveller who has peered over an abyss, and has drawn back in terror." Is this the source of the title of Francisco Tignini's story "The Traveler"? Dwight Bonneville in "The Last Bonneville" could say the same thing except that he has embraced the abyss instead of being terrified by it.

* * *

I think "The Last Bonneville" is the best story, or the most enjoyable, so far in the Cosmic Horror Issue. Part of that is because of its humor and its tone. Also, we don't have to get ourselves wrapped up in an author who seems wrapped up in himself. Mr. Wilson's story moves, whereas the others are more nearly static. That's what happens when you put Americans into their cars. I guess I should point out that Mr. Wilson is an American, whereas Paul Cornell is British, and Caitlín R. Kiernan, though now an American, was born in Ireland.

* * *

Finally, a couple of things that are wrong. One has to do with the story, in which the authorial voice duplicates in some places the voice of the driver De Groot. We need only one subjective voice. The other is in the Wikipedia entry on F. Paul Wilson, in which he is first described as a "medical doctor," then as a "Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine." It's not his fault or the fault of Weird Tales magazine that there is a lack of precision in his Wikipedia biography. I will point out, though, that the practice of osteopathic medicine grew out of osteopathy, which was just another in a long line of nineteenth-century pseudosciences, some of which still plague us. Can't we be done with pseudosciences, especially when it comes to the practice of medicine? Can't we be done with the lies, hoaxes, and propaganda, the money-grubbing and status-seeking, most of all the Mengele-level experimentation and butchery of what is supposed to be prevention, treatment, cure, and care of the human body and the human soul?

* * *

One last question in regards to "The Last Bonneville": who is in Nevada?

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley 

"The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson-Part Two

In "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson, a crazy guy named Bonneville is picked up on the road by a rocket scientist named Felix De Groot. Bonneville tells De Groot that he was on board the Apollo Eight spacecraft . . .

On his trip around the Moon, Bonneville spoke in tongues, in the language of the Void. (There is speaking in tongues in "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan as well.) What he said was recorded back at NASA. What he said drove men insane. He has a recording of his gibberish with him. His interlocutor asks to listen. Upon listening, De Groot, too, loses his mind--or his will to live--and crashes his car against an abutment in a fiery, orange ball. So, like the unnamed narrator in "Night Fishing," Bonneville is in possession of something from the Void, and when he exposes others to it, they meet their end in one way or another. These things happen when you open the wrong object or objects: your ears, a book, a box, a door, a gate, a package . . .

And that brings up a connection to Robert W. Chambers, for readers of "The King in Yellow" also lose their minds or their will to live after reading it. It also brings up a connection to H.P. Lovecraft, for the same thing happens to his characters when they read the Necronomicon. And it brings up a connection to Orson Welles' radio play The War of the Worlds, from eighty-six years and a month ago, for there are supposed to have been people who became hysterical and even threatened to kill themselves upon listening to it.

* * *

In Genesis (from which the Apollo Eight astronauts read on Christmas Eve 1968), God speaks and the Universe comes into existence. His Word is positive and creative. In stories of cosmic horror, though, words are negative and destructive. They bring an awareness or visions of the Void, or Chaos, the abyssal darkness that preceded Cosmos. 

God's Word establishes order and is intelligible to us. The words of the Void or Chaos are unintelligible, though. They are gibberish. They bring about disorder and insanity. So is it even possible for Word and Chaos to exist in the same Universe? Is this what the atheistic and materialistic authors of cosmic horror are trying to do, to speak word into Chaos instead of into Creation or Cosmos? Do they imagine, then, that they have a kind of inverse Godlike power? Are they not then engaged in a self-contradiction, an impossibility, an absurdity?

Maybe the proper construction or dichotomy is:

God speaks his Word into Creation, or Cosmos, and there is order.

Those who are against God utter their gibberish into the Void, or Chaos, and there is disorder and madness.

Or maybe it's the other way around:

The Void speaks its gibberish into us, thus making us mad--and annihilating us.

Men are not God. We create after him, because of him, in emulation of him, but we can't create something that can't be created. We can't bring non-existence into existence. We can't bring back something banished by God. The Void has been voided. Creation is here to stay.

But I guess we can play at the Void in our storytelling and our art, and that can be fun and entertaining, I guess, for as long as we keep it that way.

To be concluded . . .

Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Happy Thanksgiving!

 Happy Thanksgiving

from Tellers of Weird Tales!

Wild West Weekly, November 26, 1930. The cover artist is unknown. I have this image from a blog called Rough Edges, conducted by James Reasoner. He got it from The FictionMags Index, which is the work of Phil Stephenson-Payne. Thanks to both.

2024 Terence E. Hanley

"The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson-Part One

Francis Paul Wilson was born on May 17, 1946, in Jersey City, New Jersey. He is a writer of science fiction, horror, and weird fiction. He has also worked in television, and some of his works have been adapted to that medium and the medium of film. His novel The Keep, from 1981, was adapted for theatrical release in 1983. It was also adapted to a board game and a role-playing game. In 2006, Mr. Wilson wrote the script for a comic book adaptation. Jonathan Maberry, current editor of Weird Tales, used Mr. Wilson's character Repairman Jack in his own series novel Cave 13, published in 2023. So there is still the same pattern: the authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue are friends of the editor, they are involved in TV and movies, and they write for comic books.

* * *

The short story "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson follows his essay "Abrahamic vs. Cosmic Horror." There is a full-page illustration enclosing the main title followed by six solid pages of text. Thank goodness for some solid content.

I have been writing about brandnames used in fiction. Now here comes one driving right into the title of Mr. Wilson's story. That's okay, I think. America is a country of cars and roads. If we could translate that word--America--it might mean "a nation of people on the road, on the move." Many of our cultural works have been about cars and driving and being on the road. I won't list any. You'll think of plenty on your own. I'll just add that I had a chance to buy a Bonneville once. I wish I had done it.

"The Last Bonneville" is a third-person narrative. That seems to me significant, for the two other major works so far in this issue, "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell and "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan, are told in the first person and are, I think, somewhat autobiographical. Remember that the worm ouroboros, inverted and turned in upon itself, is rolling through the Cosmic Horror Issue. This story is told from a different point of view.

There are more brandnames and proper nouns in "The Last Bonneville," just as in previous stories: Maserati Ghibli, Elon Musk (a maker of both cars and rockets), Apollo Eight and its three astronauts, Borman, Lovell, and Anders. Two Kennedys, a Nixon, and another victim of an assassin's bullet, Martin Luther King. (Two out of the four of them sent men to the Moon. One of them went to the mountaintop.) There will be more. There will also be several meta-references. In other words, "The Last Bonneville" does not stand alone in its storytelling.

There are two characters in "The Last Bonneville." One is Felix De Groot, who drives a Maserati and works as a rocket scientist, an occupation that approaches that of the physicist in "Night Fishing." The other is a crazy guy named Bonneville who drives a Bonneville. DeGroot picks up Bonneville on the road. They talk as De Groot drives.

(Felix De Groot by the way means "happy" and "the great." He's about to be taken down a few notches in both categories. Bonneville's first name is Dwight, which is a pagan name referring to the pagan god Dionysus. His given name connects him to the Ancient Greek origins of science fiction, if Jack Williamson is right about these things. It also connects him to the chaotic aspect of the Dionysian. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the dichotomy between Apollonian order and Dionysian chaos. You are about to read another reference to Apollo, in three . . . two . . . one . . .)

Bonneville claims to have gone around the Moon on Apollo Eight. He is evidently an atheist. He calls it "ignorant and anti-science" to believe in God and the Creation. (The other day on this blog I was called ignorant by an anonymous believer in an anti-science belief system. Anonymous might be an atheist. He certainly believes that human beings can be gods and that we can create ourselves. He and his co-religionists should leave well enough alone and let God do his stuff.) While the other astronauts were reading from the Book of Genesis for all the world to hear--it was Christmastime after all--Bonneville

"stared in the other direction at all that empty space out there. At the Void. And not only did the Void stare back, it spoke to me--or at least something within the Void spoke." (p. 53)

So here they are again in Mr. Wilson's story: the Void and the allusion to Nietzsche.

Bonneville was going to blow up Apollo because he thought we should be quarantined on Earth (not realizing, I guess, that the idea of a quarantined Earth came from a thoroughgoing believer in God, C.S. Lewis). But the Void told him there isn't any reason to keep the people of Earth quarantined: "We were to be contained--not because we were a disease, as I thought, but because we were playthings." Whose playthings? Those of "Our Owner." (p. 53)

And now Charles Fort makes his return appearance, after his first in "Night Fishing." Nietzsche and Fort, together again at last.

Like "A Ghost Story for Christmas," there is a Christmastime theme. And like "Night Fishing," "The Last Bonneville" is a pretty full story, even if it's pretty short. There is talk of the Fermi Paradox, the Drake Equation, the "Wow!" Signal, the BLC-1 Signal. Brandnames come back, but the author makes a mistake by calling a Bonneville an Olds. It's actually a Pontiac. There is also mention of AirPods, an Apple product. Do these authors get kickbacks for dropping names in their stories? If he's waiting for a check from Pontiac, Mr. Wilson shouldn't hold his breath.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Cosmic vs. Abrahamic Horror" by F. Paul Wilson

"Cosmic vs. Abrahamic Horror" by F. Paul Wilson is the third and last essay in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. The text of Mr. Wilson's essay is a little less than two and a half pages long. There are two illustrations. One is a half-page, main-title illustration showing a man (wearing a blue turban), a woman, and a crying boy in a Renaissance-like tableau. The man and woman have tentacled faces. The spot drawing at the end of the essay also shows tentacles. Again, we were supposed to have something new in Weird Tales #367. Tentacles have been in genre fiction since at least The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, published in 1897 and 1898.

Mr. Wilson's essay is the best of the three in this issue. Unlike the first, it's not a list. Unlike the second, it's not written in an academic tone, nor does it use academic-type language. There are lots of names and proper nouns in his essay, but that's as it should be, for Mr. Wilson is exploring history, culture, and so on.

I think Mr. Wilson gets pretty well to the essence of weird fiction, a sub-genre that could be included in Abrahamic horror. He writes: "Abrahamic sensibilities involve an orderly cosmos ruled by a provident Creator who watches over the domain he created because He cares." (p. 46) In that ordered cosmos there are laws. To break them is to transgress. F. Paul Wilson writes that vengeance and retribution are brought down upon transgressors. I have used the word punishment, but I think we're talking about the same thing.

I have also written that in weird fiction there is a crossing over of some kind. The literal meaning of the word transgress is "step across, step over, or go beyond." In his essay, Mr. Wilson writes of the typical Abrahamic horror story plot: "You have transgressed by wandering into a territory claimed by another and so a toll must be exacted." (p. 47) That's essentially the plot of the weird tale.

F. Paul Wilson brings up Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist and the intrusion of evil into the world. "Why is it intruding? To corrupt us via doubt and fear so we'll abandon the Creator. But again, why? Simple: because we matter." He continues in the following paragraph: "And there beats the heart of Abrahamic horror: Humanity matters." In contrast, he writes that cosmic horror does not "recognize any value in your humanity." (p. 47) I guess you could say that in cosmic horror, because it is materialistic, humanity is matter.

Neither of the authors in the first two essays in Weird Tales #367 defines cosmic horror very well, if at all. F. Paul Wilson does, though, and you wonder why we needed the other two:

• "Cosmic horror paints a portrait of human insignificance." (p. 49)

• "Chaos reigns." (p. 49)

• "Abrahamic horror is spiritual; cosmic horror is materialistic" (p. 49)

And this is why, I think, there is so much appeal in cosmic horror to its readers and writers, for they are or appear to be nonbelievers. They think of themselves and their existence--of all human existence--as meaningless and without hope. And being nonbelievers, they are and must needs be materialists. I don't know about you, but I would not want to shrink my mind that way. I would rather keep it open and expansive. By the way, the three bulleted quotes above are in the exact middle of the Cosmic Horror Issue. On the opposite page is an advertisement. So maybe we should be call this the Cosmic-Commercial Horror Issue.

Mr. Wilson mentions what he calls "the hoariest and most familiar horror clichés." (p. 47) Another word for these is tropes, and they are on full display even in fiction that is supposed to be new and brave and fierce. He also indicts about half of the works so far in this issue with this simple statement: "The scholar who ventures too close to the abyss or opens a passage to the Other Side and pays a hideous price are a dime a dozen," (p. 49), for in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, there are the following stories:

• "The City in the Sea" by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, in which a scholar ventures too close . . .

• "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, in which an atheist/materialist and possibly autistic TV watcher ventures too close . . .

• "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan, in which an unnamed physicist, serial killer, and probably also atheist (as is the author of the story) ventures too close . . .

Yeah, a dime a dozen. I wonder how the other authors represented here feel about F. Paul Wilson's statement, for it's more or less a prediction of how they would fall short in writing stories that were supposed to be different and new.

To open his essay, Mr. Wilson refers to "this Catholic boy who discovered cosmic horror at age thirteen [. . .]." (p. 46) He was that boy of course. I don't know where he stands now as far as his beliefs go. That's none of my business. I'll just point out that Mike Mignola was also raised Catholic.

In his closing, F. Paul Wilson addresses the conflict of his title, writing, "Both approaches have their place, and the Abrahamic will go on as long as there are those who believe, just as its antithesis will persist as long as there are those who don't." (p. 49)

I think that means forever.

I'll close my essay by suggesting that F. Paul Wilson's idea of Abrahamic versus Cosmic horror could be related to Jack Williamson's idea of Egyptian-Hebraic versus Classically Greek stories of Dystopia and Utopia, which gave us, respectively, weird fiction (among other things) and science fiction (also among other things).

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"The Traveler" by Francesco Tignini

At just two pages of text, "The Traveler" by Francesco Tignini is the shortest story in Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue. There are three illustrations accompanying the story, a full-page illustration taking up the main title page, and two half-page illustrations after that. There are also eight breaks, signified by little black Cthulhus or mean-faced tentacled aliens. The whole thing makes for some pretty thin content.

Francesco Tignini is presumably the same person who has worked in television and movies as an assistant director, production assistant, unit production manager, producer, and actor. He has a page on the social media website Goodreads. As I write, on November 16, 2024, he is reading books by Jonathan Maberry, the current editor of Weird Tales magazine. (Maybe they're working on a TV project together.) So the pattern still holds: Francesco Tignini works in TV and movies and is not primarily an author of works in prose, and he is a friend of the editor, in other words, an insider. H.P. Lovecraft famously wrote a story called "The Outsider." As an outsider, would he have been welcome in the current Weird Tales?

"The Traveler" is an alien abduction story. It has just about all of the most worn-out tropes of that type: A man is driving alone at night on a back road. His trip is interrupted. He sees bright lights in the sky or on the ground. Leaving his car, he comes upon the typical gray alien. Although the alien has come here from another star system by some incredibly advanced technology, his spacecraft has broken down and he's trying to repair it like Goober on The Andy Griffith Show. Rendered unconscious, the man is taken aboard the alien craft. There he undergoes an examination. We have seen and read all of this before. Some of it was in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers in 1956. Most of it was in the supposedly true accounts of Betty and Barney Hill. It was also in a tale told by scoutmaster Sonny DesVergers in 1952. (He was a Florida Man, maybe one of the first.) There was another account, more well known than DesVergers'. That one involved Travis Walton. We were promised new things in "The Eyrie." There is a slight twist at the end of Mr. Tignini's story, but there is really nothing new here. I have a sense that the editor and his authors think that we as readers don't know anything about fiction, literature, art, history, storytelling, or popular culture, that we have never seen or heard any of these things before. If that's what's happening, I think it's kind of insulting.

The only name dropped in "The Traveler" is that of Chuck Berry. (Well, him and Bigfoot.) This is done, I guess, so that we know that the author is cool and with it. He mixes his tenses. I don't know why. He also has a pretty limited vocabulary. The F-word is one of his favorites. He uses it six times, I think, in two pages of text. This is almost his whole description of the alien craft: "a f--king spaceship." Wow. Way to write. There are other vulgarities, too. And there is at least one seeming anachronism: the man's car is equipped with both an airbag and a pushbutton cigarette lighter, and he carries a cellphone. But this is what TV people do: they think we don't notice their anachronisms, mistakes, inconsistencies, plot holes, ignorance, lack of research, etc. As for cosmic horror content, there is in this story the alien presence but not much of the void or abyss. The narrator looks towards the road and sees: "Nothing. Darkness." He looks towards the forest. What does he see? "Nothing. Darkness."

I guess it pays to be an insider and a friend of the editor.

It's hard for me to believe that the editor couldn't find a better story from the countless number of writers populating this vast continent, or even from the slush pile that must surely still exist in the files of Weird Tales. I'll close by saying that among the duties of an editor is to maintain high quality in the magazine under his charge. If that high quality is not maintained, we really shouldn't blame the authors. Instead the blame must fall on the editor.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

This Worm Ouroboros

The other day I mentioned the symbolic worm ouroboros in reference to Weird Tales #367 and its authors. That symbol has meant different things to different people. My use is after Camille Paglia in her book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990; Vintage, 1991), in which she called it a serpent and spelled it uroboros. She quoted Erich Neumann in reference to uroboros: "the serpent which at once bears, begets, and devours." (p. 88) That can work for my purposes, but it's not quite what I was looking for.

Here's a longer quote:

To find one's life sensational is to be aroused by oneself. [. . .] Gwendolen [from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde] reading her diary is lost in autoerotic skopophilia, titillation of the eye. If books can corrupt, and we know from Dorian Gray that they can, then one can be corrupted by one's own diary. To be corrupted by oneself is sexually solipsistic [. . .]. Gwendolen is an uroboros of amorous self-study, an Art Nouveau serpent devouring itself. (p. 540)

Remember that "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan is told in the first person, like a diary. Remember, too, that the narrator (diarist) opens a box (book) so that the viewer (reader) might be corrupted.

In thinking about these things, the story "'All You Zombies --'" by Robert A. Heinlein has come into my head again and again. If you haven't read it, you should. It may be the most solipsistic story ever written. As Camille Paglia pointed out, circular ouroboros is solipsistic as are so many people in our world.* In his story, Heinlein foresaw something of our current situation. It's nice to see the concept of solipsism in someone else's thinking on these things. But now I find in rereading parts of Sexual Personae that solipsism and related phenomena, including the subject of today's essay, are ancient, if not prehistoric in their origins. They are also pagan and shamanistic, thus, it becomes apparent, the story "Teoquitla the Golden" by Ramòn de las Cuevas, also known as Mark R. Harrington, who would have encountered phenomena like these in his work as an anthropologist. His story of changing sexes was in Weird Tales in November 1924, one hundred years ago this month.

(*In Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein [1963], the hero tricks the ogre Igli into swallowing himself, and--poof!--he's gone into nowhere. If only he were here with us, Igli could warn the worm ouroboros of the dangers of autophagy at the organismic level.)

Camille Paglia's thoughts on the character Gwendolen gets closer to my idea than the first quote above. This idea is that uroboros is turned inward upon itself and devours itself--inverted, curled like an embryo, self-centered, self-absorbed, it makes of itself its whole world. The image I have of these authors is that they are tagmata in the body of the worm, if not many of them the worm itself.

A third quote is too obscene to reproduce (no pun intended) here. You will find it on page 587. It's in reference to an episode in Moby Dick by Herman Melville. It's obscene but also obscenely funny, in its original and in Ms. Paglia's reference to it. That quote also gets to what I'm talking about in reference to the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. I hate to say it, but that one might be closest of all.

Worm, by the way, is from the Old English wurm or wyrm, meaning "serpent, snake, dragon, reptile." The Indo-European root is the same as for the word weird or wyrd: "to bend."

* * *

In his introductory essay in "The Eyrie," editor Jonathan Maberry mentioned the names of several dozen authors, including Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and China Miéville. Poor Jeff VanderMeer. He got left out. But we should remember that in 2012, he had a tussle with the current publisher, John Harlacher, and the previous editor, Marvin Kaye. Maybe things haven't settled down just yet, even after the death of Mr. Kaye in 2021. We should remember, too, that Mr. VanderMeer wants us to move past Lovecraft, whereas Weird Tales #367 is essentially a Lovecraft issue.

Essayist Nicholas Diak is in Weird Tales #367. Near the end of his contribution, he wrote:

In 2023 Weird Tales celebrates its centennial. The periodical has seen cycles of inactivity and resurrection (not dead, but dreaming), but also high-water marks from the stewardship of unflappable editors, including its current prosperity under Jonathan Maberry. (p. 19)

On his own website, Mr. Diak posted interviews with three other contributors to the Cosmic Horror Issue, three of the five women in fact. They are Angela Yuriko Smith, Samantha Underhill, and Carol Gyzander. Jonathan Maberry wrote the introduction to Samantha Underhill's poetry collection Sadness of the Siren, issued in 2022. Carol Gyzander appeared with Mr. Maberry at Philcon, held in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, on November 17-19, 2023. Angela Yuriko Smith co-edited a collection called Worlds of Light and Darkness (2021). In its pages is a story by Jonathan Maberry.

Speaking of introductions, Jeff VanderMeer, who is married to Ann VanderMeer, former editor of Weird Tales, wrote a not very interesting foreword for Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti (Penguin, 2015). (Mr. Ligotti is far more interesting and erudite.) In his forward, Mr. VanderMeer mentioned Mr. Kiernan, but only in passing. The former covered the latter in depth in an interview conducted in 2012. In a response to a comment on that online interview, Jeff VanderMeer wrote: "I totally agree, Craig. She [sic] is one of my favorite, favorite writers because her [sic] work shows progression and she [sic] isn’t content to stick with just one thing." 

Sic, sic, sic.

In that same interview, Caitlín R. Kiernan appears to have expressed admiration for the work of Thomas Ligotti. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Mr. Kiernan does in fact admire Mr. Ligotti. They both appear to come from the same kind of place and to write the same kind of story, although I confess I have read only one by the former author and only four or five by the latter. Also in that interview, Mr. Kiernan called China Miéville "brilliant." Jeff VanderMeer has also interviewed Mr. Miéville. No word on what Mr. Miéville thinks of Mr. Kiernan. Can anyone find the missing tagma for this self-swallowing worm?

In 2005, Caitlín R. Kiernan published a short story collection called To Charles Fort, With Love. (We knew from just one story, "Night Fishing," that Mr. Kiernan is a reader of Charles Fort.) The author of the afterword in that book, entitled "A Certain Inexplicability," is Ramsey Campbell. Mr. Campbell also wrote an introduction to the first edition of Mr. Ligotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer, published in 1985.

In September 2020, Ramsey Campbell attached his signature to a lie. The lie is part of a letter drawn up by British authors Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Daisy Johnson. You can read the letter and the names of its signatories by clicking here. The letter is tacitly against J.K. Rowling, a woman who has shown herself to be fearless in the face of the most hateful verbal attacks made by followers of a harmful, destructive, and oppressive belief system afoot in our world. She is a woman in the only sense of the word. They call her by a derogatory term, a slur: trans-exclusionary radical feminist, or TERF. That letter, signed by 200 small people plus Ramsey Campbell (we have to admit he has stature), was in response to a previous letter in support of Ms. Rowling, this one signed by 58 writers, actors, musicians, and artists. As usual, cowards outnumber the courageous, and liars the speakers of truth. You can read the initial letter, signed by the courageous 58, by clicking here.

J.K. Rowling writes genre fiction, including short works. I have a feeling, though, that if she were to stoop to approach Weird Tales with a submission, the people behind the magazine--and who inhabit the larger world of contemporary weird fiction--would tell her to go away. She would not be wanted, for she speaks the truth and many of them traffic in lies, one lie in particular.

In this I say thank God for China Miéville. At least his leftism and progressivism are still class-based instead of sex-and-gender-based. At least Marxism is a product of the mind.

George Orwell famously said, "In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act." Progressives like to think of themselves as bravely ushering in new worlds. They are actually counterrevolutionaries who want to take us backward to that pagan and shamanistic fog of circling and turning years that preceded the onset of history. J.K. Rowling and people like her are the true revolutionaries, for they believe in freedom, reason, and civilization.

To paraphrase a recent presidential campaign, the current and recent Weird Tales appears to  be about they and them. You can decide for yourself who they are and to whom them refers.** You could begin with lists and names appearing in the Cosmic Horror Issue. The original Weird Tales--thirty-one years' worth, from 1923 to 1954--was about you--about us, the readers. Remember what Farnsworth Wright wrote in 1925 in "The Eyrie," the column that in its original form and for its original purpose was a readers' column:

Weird Tales belongs to the readers.

(**Robert A. Heinlein wrote another solipsistic story called "They," published in Unknown Fantasy Fiction in April 1941.)

* * *

I have been writing a lot about the meanings of words. Thank you to the Online Etymology Dictionary for so much fascinating information. I began in that because it's really interesting. After a while, though, it became something else, something really important, and I'll tell you why. If we as writers, readers, speakers, and listeners are to understand each other and communicate with each other, we must agree on the meanings of words. If those meanings break down, then understanding and communication break down, too.

Words and language do not belong to any one person or group of people. They are our common property. No one shall claim ownership of them, and no one shall forbid others from using any word in its proper sense. Nor shall anyone alter the meanings or uses of words, unilaterally or for his own purposes. Each of us has rights, but no one's rights extend into the lives of others. There are rules in every language. Call them law. To misuse words, damage them, vandalize them, do violence to them is to break the law we all must respect if we are to go on. These things are an offense against us all.

There has been a lot of lawbreaking, damage, vandalism, and violence done to our language. This is especially true of a single word: woman. Woman means just one thing. It doesn't mean more than one thing, nor does it mean whatever you want it to mean. One thing, one fixed meaning, one kind of person--woman--to the exclusion of all who are not women. Those who seek to change the meaning of the word seek to silence women, erase women, cancel women, take from women; to deprive them of their rights, their privacy, their safety, their security, their prerogatives and their exclusive privileges as women; to deprive them also of their being and experience as women; to invade the country of womanhood, take it over, subdue it, punish, enslave, or imprison all of its inhabitants, and steal or wipe away everything that was theirs and theirs alone. These invaders and usurpers should be ashamed of themselves, but they know no shame. They will go on hurting people and destroying things by their lies and beliefs and by their system. I think and I hope that the election just past in America has broken the wave of this hateful and destructive belief system. But systems without any built-in limits will never relent. We will always have to remain vigilant.

Next: An Alien Abduction.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Reactions to "Teoquitla the Golden" by Ramòn de las Cuevas

"Teoquitla the Golden" by Ramòn de las Cuevas (Mark R. Harrington) was the cover story for the November 1924 issue of Weird Tales. The issue of January 1925 was the first in which readers had a chance to respond to that issue and its stories. Before printing their responses in the revived letters column, called "The Eyrie," the new editor, Farnsworth Wright, provided some answers to his question about what kind of stories Weird Tales should print. Should they be horror stories or something else? The readers would have their say.

Reader W.S. Charles of Pendleton, Oregon, wrote: "I herewith put in my oar against 'horror stories,' particularly that class that are somber and in the main vicious, beyond the realm of reason." By "beyond the realm of reason," I think he meant "unreasonably" or "extremely." Too bad W.S. Charles and people like him (or her) are not around today to make their demands. I think we would have better and more enjoyable stories, as well as a higher level of art and accomplishment in weird fiction, if they were. Instead we have writers indulging in their sickness for the sake of themselves, their sick friends, and their sick readers.

Farnsworth Wright took the measure of the readers in 1924-1925, responding:

Well, readers, we are going to keep the magazine weird, but NOT disgusting. The votes for the necrophilic tales were so few that we are satisfied you want us to keep the magazine clean. Stories of the [Edgar Allan] Poe type -- scary stories -- spooky stories -- mystic and occult fiction -- thrilling mysteries -- bizarre crime stories -- all these will find place in Weird Tales, but those of you who want tales of blood-drinking and cannibalism will have to make your opinion register a great deal more strongly than you have yet done before we let down the bars to this type of stories [sic]. We repeat here what we have said before: Weird Tales belongs to you, the readers, and we will be guided by your wishes.

That last part bears repeating (and condensing):

Weird Tales belongs to the readers.

Authors, editors, publishers, and critics of today would never allow that, though. Never. For to allow Weird Tales and weird fiction in general to belong to the readers would make of all of this a democratic instead of an elitist thing. They would have to give up control and open up their clique. And as we have seen in election after election, democracy is intolerable to self-anointed elites, for if the people are allowed their say, they will inevitably choose things the elites must hate.

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Also in November 1924, Farnsworth Wright instituted a voting process among readers for their favorite stories in every issue. The first winner was "The Brain in the Jar" by Norman Elwood Hammerstrom (Hamerstrom). Second place went to "Teoquitla the Golden." In the issue of January 1925, Lieutenant Arthur J. Burks wrote to say: "Ramón de las Cuevas is a writing hombre." (Sometimes the accent mark went one way and sometimes the other.) I like that compliment. Having served in the Caribbean, Burks recognized the meaning behind the pseudonym, continuing: "Also keep 'Ramón of the Caves' busy--he knows his stuff! His description of the old beggar woman took me bodily back to the West Indies. In any case my vote for the best story goes to him." In the March 1925 issue, Cecil Fuller of Tulare, California, asked for a second story by Ramón de las Cuevas. Alas, this was not to be.

In its May issue of 1925, Weird Tales observed (obliquely) its second anniversary. Among the letters in "The Eyrie" was one from an anonymous correspondent in Moscow, Idaho, in which he criticized what he termed "impossibilities":

"Just one instance: Teoquitla the Golden was very clever and entertaining, but the permutation of sex described is a biological impossibility. Let me qualify that. Sex has apparently been changed experimentally in certain lower animals; varying degrees of change from female to male are known to take place in cattle (the freemartin phenomenon), and possibly may also occur in other mammals. But the important point is this: such changes can only take place during the embryonic stage of development. After that, they are impossible. Any biologist will tell you that. Of course, fiction of the weird sort is not intended to stick to scientific facts, although realism in any story will be enhanced if the scientific basis is properly regarded. Still, Teoquitla the Golden was clever."

What was true at the beginning of time was also true in 1924 and is still true today: sex in human beings cannot be changed from one to the other. (Yes, there are only two.) A man cannot be a woman and a woman cannot be a man. There are those of us who like to think of history as being a positive progression and people of the past as being primitive, while we are naturally more advanced. But at least in 1924, someone in small-town Idaho knew and wrote the truth. He could have been a grade school dropout, a factory worker, farmhand, or common laborer, and he would still have been smarter and more sensible than so many people of today, including politicians, pundits, commentators, physicians, surgeons, teachers, librarians, college professors and administrators, journalists, authors, artists, and people in entertainment, sports, and the media. The worst of them are vicious, hateful, violent, aggressive, destructive. They wish to carry out--and do--the kind of necrophilic and cannibalistic horrors that readers in 1924 objected to. Worse yet, they wish to do these things to children. And the best of them? Dupes--people too weak in will and in the mind to think for themselves or to stand up for the truth. They are people who have fallen for lies, believe lies, and tell lies, even if it means women and children are harmed in the process. And they're always so sure they're smarter and better than those of us who speak and act on the truth. They are always so sure they're morally and intellectually superior to us. Shame on them all. If there are forces in history, surely the most powerful of these is divine in its origins. This force is expressed directly through truth, fact, unalterable reality, and immutable law, and their most horrible ideas will surely fall before it.

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One thing the anonymous letter-writer here might have missed by a little is that weird fiction need not be scientific, for weird fiction is the fiction of weird. Science fiction is the fiction of science. In reading weird fiction, we seek a departure from strict realism and into weird realms. The whole point in "Teoquitla the Golden" is that it's a story in which Weird has her way. A man who was a hater of a woman meets his weird in being transformed into and living as a woman.

In looking for a candidate writer of that letter in Weird Tales regarding Teoquitla and science, I have come upon Dr. Carl DeWitt Garby (1890 or 1892-1928), lifelong friend of then unpublished but soon-to-be renowned science fiction author E.E. "Doc" Smith (1890-1965). Smith and Garby were roommates at the University of Idaho in Moscow. Both graduated in 1914. Like Smith, Garby was a fan of science fiction. Garby's wife, Lee Hawkins Garby (1890-1957), was, too. She collaborated with Doc Smith on his famed serial, then novel, The Skylark of Space (1928). All three lived and worked in Washington, D.C. Poor Dr. Garby died while quite young, presumably in that city. I can't say that Dr. Garby was the author of that letter to "The Eyrie"--I don't know about the timeline exactly. Could he have been in Moscow in 1924? Or could his friend Doc Smith have been the writer? The world, I guess, will never know.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley