"A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"When the Stars Are Right" by Nicholas Diak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Nemesis
by H. P. Lovecraft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

* * *

Dream-Land
by Edgar Allan Poe

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

175 Years Ago

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

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

We miss you, Edgar Allan Poe.

Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

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

The self-references and meta-references continue:

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

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

The authors of "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story" were obviously inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and his works, but they have also drawn from other sources. You will encounter here some very familiar conventions of gothic fiction and weird fiction: the title character arrives at a creaky and dusty old house where something mysterious has happened, and so on. You could call these things tropes or clichés and no one could or should argue with you. Many of these conventions or tropes are indirect, harmless, and not too bothersome or distracting. You might even find them comforting. Conventions and tropes are, after all, an appeal to the child in the reader to whom one reads a story or shows a video, the child who says "Read it again" or "Play it again" after it is finished. Children--and maybe all of us--want what is familiar to us. Repetition is comforting. Like a prayer, a chant, or a mantra, it soothes us and relieves us of our fear and anxiety. Again and again, the story turns out the same. Again and again, all will be well in the end.

But there are also some self-references and meta-references in "The City in the Sea" that are more distracting, and some that are a stepping-down, too. They make it so the story can't stand on its own. The main character is the most obvious example of this lack of stand-alone ability. Hellboy has been in prose before, but he is really just a comic book character. If you want to fully understand this story, you have to know something more about him and his universe, going back decades in another form. Related to that, "The City in the Sea" will never be anthologized because it's basically an issue of a comic book or an episode of a TV series. It uses and relies on what has gone before and what will be used again in future stories. The character and his universe are the important parts, the story itself less so. And what is really at stake here? Hellboy will go on. He has to. He has to appear in the next episode just as if nothing happened in this one.

* * *

On their surface, self-references and meta-references begin in "The City in the Sea" with Poe, but they actually begin on the cover, on the title page, and in the subtitle, for that is where you will find Hellboy. Hellboy is of course the creation of an artist and a fictional character, but he is also a branded product. Don't ask who or what he is. You're supposed to know already. You're supposed to have that inside information in your possession before you begin. If you don't, you won't get much of an explanation inside. You'll have to look elsewhere for what's missing from your experience as a consumer of the pop-cultural products of twenty first-century America. Or twentieth actually, because Hellboy is really that old. Should I point out that Hellboy is as old now as Weird Tales was in 1954 when it reached its end after thirty-one years in print? This after we were promised something new in "The Eyrie." 

* * * 

Again, in addition to being an artistic creation, Hellboy is a recognized brandname and a successful commercial product. That's the dream of every artist, I guess, to create something that proves itself a moneymaker. I wouldn't object if one of my creations took off that way. Anyway, you could say that Weird Tales #367 is just another venue for Hellboy, in addition to those that include comic books, movies, animated cartoons, video games, and I'm sure other kinds of media and merchandise. And you could say that in addition to being branded Cosmic Horror, this issue is branded Hellboy. So a double brand. That's okay I guess. If you're the publisher or editor, you should take into account the readers' tastes and give them what they want or what you think they want. You should also give them things they don't yet know they want. After all, what precedent was there for Lovecraftian horror before there were horror stories written by Lovecraft? Anyway, if you look at things from the publisher's and editor's points of view, this all makes sense, for why take a chance with an unknown quantity when you can use a brandname that has already proved itself a mover of merchandise?

In any case, there is an implication here that these self-references, meta-references, inside information, and use of brands and brandnames are meant for insiders. If you're an outsider, well, too bad for you. Remember that Lovecraft wrote a story called "The Outsider," one that will forever appeal to people who feel themselves to be like his eponymous character. Weird Tales in its original incarnation had the same kind of appeal, and it had broad appeal, too, not only across this great country but also in Canada, Great Britain, and other places far from its big-city American home. That appeal also went from top to bottom, from bankers, composers, theater directors, medical doctors, and university staff and faculty; to teachers, archaeologists, anthropologists, actors, writers, and psychologists; to military men, industrial workers, farmhands, dwellers in shacks, and schoolchildren. Maybe people like these are no longer the target readership. That would be a shame if it were true. Maybe the Cosmic Horror Issue should have been called instead the Insider Issue.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

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

Born in Berkeley, California, in 1960, Mike Mignola is a comic book artist and writer. He has also worked as an illustrator, designer, and artist in the movie business. His co-author on "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story," Christopher Golden, was born in 1967 in Massachusetts. He is a novelist, editor, and scriptwriter for animated cartoons, comic books, and at least one movie, a Hellboy movie in fact. Among his credits are TV tie-in books and prose adaptations of comic book characters. Mike Mignola is one of his co-authors. So is Tim Lebbon, who also has a story in Weird Tales #367. Already we can see a pattern developing in the Cosmic Horror Issue.

The cover illustration for Weird Tales #367, dated 2022, is by Mike Mignola. The same drawing is in the interior as a full-page illustration on the title page of the story. There are also pieces of it used more or less as spot drawings or filler, and so it does triple duty. Although there have been comic book-like covers before in Weird Tales, I think this is the first that is overtly in that style and that features a comic book character. As far as I know, this is also the first story ever in Weird Tales adapted from a comic book. So already there are new things here, but only to Weird Tales, for Hellboy has been in comic books since 1993. He has also been in movies, animated cartoons, and video games. Maybe these are firsts, too: Hellboy may be the first character from each of these media or forms to appear in the magazine. On the other hand, all are just adaptations from Hellboy's original comic book appearances. Maybe we can expect to see soon a story in Weird Tales adapted directly from a TV show or movie with no other origins and no stops in between.

The inside information in "The City in the Sea" begins with the main character himself. If you have never read Hellboy comic books or seen him on screen, you might not know who or what he is and you probably know nothing at all about his origins or purpose. There isn't even a very good description of him in his own story. If you want to know what he looks like, see the illustration. In this way, Hellboy continues to work as a comic book character in that, in this story, the words and pictures must be taken together if we are to understand fully what's going on. The good thing in reading it is that you can get by without knowing very much about the main character. That's partly because the authors carefully observe the conventions and employ the trappings of genre fiction in their storytelling. The character may be unknown to you, but you have seen everything else here before. Maybe we can call this institutional weird fiction.

There is in "The City in the Sea" a mystery. A man is missing, an old scholar who lives in an old house in an old town somewhere in America at some indeterminate time in the past or present. He has a lone housekeeper, who explains that he has vanished after having received a mysterious package. It's clear that Hellboy is an investigator, like Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin and hundreds of other detectives--occult or not--born since then. He finds that the package contains a statuette of a woman. In gazing upon it, Hellboy is transported into an otherworldly vision or experience, an encounter with the missing man, who has preceded him on his journey, and what he calls the Black Goddess, alive but dealing death in the city of the title. There is narration of other, strange times and places, of vast, mysterious, and possibly menacing realms. This is a kind of crossing-over that is almost diagnostic of weird fiction, except that Hellboy is already a supernatural being. There really isn't any crossing-over. He has seen and experienced things like this before. An encounter with the supernatural can mean very little to him, nor can it have much effect. "The City in the Sea" isn't a very long story, and so Hellboy returns soon enough to the real world, alone, to where he was sitting in the old man's study. He may have gained some kind of knowledge or insight, but as proof of the lack of effect upon him, his final thought is of his hunger: he has his eye on a diner down the street.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"The City in the Sea" & Edgar Allan Poe

Weird Tales #367 (2023) is a themed issue. The theme is cosmic horror, with the sub-theme being the 100th anniversary of Weird Tales. These two themes kind of go together. H.P. Lovecraft was not in the first issue of March 1923, but Weird Tales is associated with him more closely than with any other of its authors. Lovecraft wrote a particular kind of weird fiction. People call it Lovecraftian horror, also cosmic horror. Lovecraft, or shadows of Lovecraft, hang over this issue and over weird fiction in general, even unto today. If you're going to observe a centennial in 2023 and you want people to join in, you might as well return to form and go with some name recognition--and with what you believe will bring in the dough, if anything in print will bring in the dough these days.

The cover story and lead story in Weird Tales #367 is "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story" by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola. "The City in the Sea" has its Lovecraftian elements, but the foundation of the story is in a poem entitled "The City in the Sea," written by Edgar Allan Poe and published in its final form in 1845. The story in Weird Tales begins with an excerpt from the poem. That excerpt serves as an epigraph. Poe used epigraphs in many of his own stories. So right away we have a story with its title taken from Poe, that begins with an epigraph by Poe, and that has the use of an epigraph as in Poe. The story also describes a city like that described by Poe in a poem that can well be described as apocalyptic in its vision. In beginning with Poe, the Cosmic Horror Issue goes back even further than a century and the beginnings of Weird Tales. It actually taps into the early years of American literature and the apocalyptic vision that has been with us and in us since our own origins on these shores and in these forests, both bright and dark. By the way, "The City in the Sea" was loosely adapted to film in City Under the Sea, directed by Jacques Tourneur, starring Vincent Price, and released in 1965.

Poe is in the introductory essay in the Cosmic Horror Issue, too, specifically, in a brief discussion of his only novel-length work, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, from 1838 (which has meta content or meta origins of its own). Poe was also in the first year of Weird Tales, and his spirit in all of the years in between. As we know, Lovecraft was inspired by Poe. In his first letter to "The Eyrie," published 101 years ago last month, Lovecraft wrote: "My models are invariably the older writers, especially Poe, who has been my favorite literary figure since early childhood." And it was almost certainly for a nineteenth-century hardbound collection by Poe that Weird Tales was named. It's fitting, I guess, that the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales would begin with Poe and with meta-references and inside information about him and his literary offspring.

To be continued . . .

"The City in the Sea"

by Edgar Allan Poe

(Illustration by Edmund Dulac, 1912)

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers and tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy Heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free—
Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol's diamond eye—
Not the gayly-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass—
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea—
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave—there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide—
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow—
The hours are breathing faint and low—
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.

* * *

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales #367-The Eyrie

The first installment of "The Eyrie" appeared in the first issue of Weird Tales, published in March 1923. It began as a way for the editor--then Edwin Baird--to communicate with readers and for them to communicate with him, and with each other. For decades the magazine recognized that it would live or die by its readers. It respected its readers, invited them to write, published what they wrote, weighed their tastes and choices, asked their opinions, and invited them to submit their own works for possible publication. H.P. Lovecraft was among the authors who had a letter in "The Eyrie" before he had a story in what was then and for a long time afterwards rightly called "The Unique Magazine."

There is an installment of "The Eyrie" in Weird Tales #367, ostensibly published one hundred years and two months later, in May 2023. There aren't any letters or excerpts from letters. This installment is for the editor alone. He is Philadelphia-born Jonathan Maberry, who, in addition to being an author, is involved in television and comic books. He has also written movie and TV tie-in books. His essay is entitled "Cosmic Horror and Weird Tales Go Hand-in-Tentacle." It's 23 column-inches long, or a little more than 1-1/3 pages. About 3-1/2 column-inches, or about 15 percent of the total length, is a list of authors. As I have written before, lists are not writing. Anyone can make a list. Even AI can make a list. At their best, which isn't very good, lists are filler. At their worst, they're namedropping. Either way, they're not very useful, although a name-dropper at least does us the service of letting us know what kind of person he is (or may be).

I think we should all admit that Lovecraft himself was something of a name-dropper. He wrote a signature story called "The Outsider," but his namedropping appears to have been an attempt to show himself as an insider, as someone with some special inside knowledge, and because of that, perhaps some special status. I think he was insecure or lacking in self-esteem in his personal life. Maybe these were ways of building himself up. In any case, there are lots of inside jokes and self-references in his work, as well as in the works of his circle. Some of that is okay. A lot of it is too cute or even annoying. So maybe Lovecraft made the beginnings of self-references and meta-references in weird fiction, in which case the weird fiction of today is simply a continuation of Lovecraft, even if some people are still trying to move past him.

Most of Mr. Maberry's essay is a discussion of what is called cosmic horror. (Wikipedia has an entry on that term, the Online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction apparently does not.) At least we have that. He uses three variations on his term, "dark fiction," "dark cosmicism," and "dark, weird fiction." Writers, editors, and critics of weird fiction today love their dark.

I commented the other day on the emphasis in genre fiction on the naming and claiming of genres and sub-genres. That continues here. These genres and sub-genres are not very often defined very well, and there is little if any literary theory, analysis, or criticism behind them. The naming seems to be the important part, and because of that, the names of genres and sub-genres have become more or less brands. Call it genrefication. And because they have been divided so finely--that process continues apace--they confine themselves to ever-smaller niches within the marketplace. The authors, editors, and critics involved in genre fiction have taken to trading in brandnames the way an advertising agency trades in the names of commercial products and services. The resulting branded products--genres and sub-genres of fiction--are placed on a shelf for our consideration, all lined up next to each other and each with a slightly different list of ingredients than the next. Anyway, I hope you like dark, because there's a lot of that. To use one of Lovecraft's favorite words, such a fascination with dark seems puerile to me.

The long-dead authors behind these genres and sub-genres have also become brandnames. Lovecraft is chief among them, but there are others. (Maybe lists of authors double as lists of ingredients. Or maybe lists of descriptors--"dark," "dark weird," "new weird," "dark fantasy"--let us know the ingredients of each branded product.) Robert W. Chambers has been added to the list of brandname authors in recent years. He and Lovecraft are in fact the first two brandname authors mentioned in Mr. Maberry's essay. Edgar Allan Poe comes next, but Poe seems to me to be an author so prominent and so significant in our literature that he defies branding, even if we have at hand the word Poesque. (Blogger doesn't like it though.) Poe has been commercialized, of course. That happened especially in the early 1960s with Roger Corman's several Poesque films, one of which, The Haunted Palace (1963), is actually Lovecraftian in origin.

It's worth noting here that Jonathan Maberry writes that Lovecraft "namechecked" Chambers, that he "borrowed" from Poe, and that he "leaned into Poe's use of a 'Gainex ending'." (p. 2) (According to the website TV Tropes, the term is actually "Gainax ending.") So again, maybe all of these meta-references began with Lovecraft. Those who continue with them today may be working further in what are called "tropes," which are so common in weird fiction, especially in Lovecraftian fiction. (See the previous parenthetical statement regarding tropes. Mr. Maberry uses the word trope in his essay by the way.) They may also be continuing and compounding some of Lovecraft's literary offenses, which are, we should also admit, manifold.

One "trope" that has become one of the tropiest of tropes is the use of tentacles in weird fiction. There are tentacles on the front cover, in Mr. Maberry's title, in several illustrations and advertisements inside, and, in miniature, at every break in prose in the interior. Tentacles return on the cover of the most recent issue of Weird Tales, the Occult Detective Issue, published in 2024, apparently only as a digital rather than an analog product. That's a shame. I'd like to have an issue in print and have no use for a digital version. Anyway, tentacles have become kind of tiresome, I think. What's next, tentacled zombies?

There are what I call 21st-century inanities in the Cosmic Horror Issue. The first of these, I think, is "leaned into." It appears in this introductory essay. There will be more. Be ready to block them out if you can. There are also misspellings, misused words, improper tenses, and inconsistencies in Weird Tales #367. It used to be that these were typographical errors, but there's no such thing as a typesetter anymore. Or more accurately, in this digital/Internet age the author is his or her own typesetter. There isn't any linotype operator standing between him and the printed page. (Remember, everything now is do-it-yourself.) If he or she gets it wrong, it's up to the proofreader or editor to catch the error. If it isn't caught, that is in the end the fault of the editor. And every editor should know that he or she should show his or her work to another editor before putting it into print. That way errors--such as the misused word "therefor" (p. 3, col. 1)--are caught and corrected before they can start any trouble.

Like I said, there is namedropping or the use of brandnames in "The Eyrie." That includes the titles of several movies. As I pointed out last time, many of the authors in this issue have worked in movies and television in one capacity or another. I have made a point before that the first generations of weird-fictional authors were formed before there were movies. They had a certain sensibility that must have been pretty well wiped out once people--especially young people, budding authors--could see stories projected onto the silver screen rather than simply read them on paper. That same kind of thing happened again once television arrived in American homes in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It probably happened again when people began playing video games and computer games. Maybe this is another kind of stepping down. And now I think that what has been done can probably never be undone. We will never go back to the written word as the formative influence upon young writers. (Reading is active. Watching is more nearly passive.) And so writers of certain generations have come to think in cinematic terms--perhaps more accurately in series-TV terms--when they are imagining and writing their fictions. The dream of every one of them is no doubt to have his or her creations adapted to screen. Once that happens, he can put the drudgery, anonymity, and penury of prose-writing behind him. Like the Beverly Hillbillies, she can look forward to living in a land of swimming pools and movie stars.

And now it occurs to me that there are two kinds of screens involved in all of this, actually four. These are the analog movie screen (which is not electronic), the analog TV screen, the digital TV screen, both of which are electronic, and the digital movie screen, which is basically, I think, just a giant digital/electronic TV screen. If analog forms and media are closer to reality, thus closer to us, than are any digital/electronic equivalents, then old-fashioned movies, committed to film and projected onto a screen strictly by analog processes, stand alone here. And maybe that's why they are so powerful in our imaginations and why film--pioneered in this country and having reached many of its greatest pinnacles here--is one of the truly great new art forms, possibly the only one. In France, it was the Seventh Art. In America, it is or was, according to Gilbert Seldes, one of the seven lively arts. By the way, his book of that title was first published one hundred years ago as I write this.

(And now I see as I look at a list of movies released in 1924 that Jew-hatred was a subject then, just as it is now--this very week in fact--and that there were then, as there are now, people who wish to see Jews expelled from the company of non-Jews, "company" being sometimes a euphemism for "the earth." If you want to know what I'm talking about, read for yourself about the 1924 Austrian film Die Stadt ohne Juden--The City Without Jews. Understand, too, that this film is Utopian, or Dystopian, depending on whether you find yourself on the sharp or blunt end of the bayonet.)

And so movies have a place in the introductory essay of this story magazine of 2023. You can decide for yourself whether that's appropriate. (Mr. Maberry mentions moviemaker George Romero in his essay. He has also written a book with George Romero. That sounds like product placement or a subliminal/commercial message to me. In either case, it's meta.) Like I said, every genre author born after a certain year no doubt has as his or her most fervent wish to write for the electronic screen. Failing that, he or she wants to break into comic books, which are or have become a poor man's kind of filmmaking. We shouldn't discount at all the writer's drive to build himself up, to improve her status. The writer of real personal power and confidence is probably a rarity. (Wallace Stegner might have been one.) If writers of prose can have their works adapted to movies, TV, or comic books, or if they can work in those forms as scriptwriters, directors, producers, and so on, then they can earn for themselves the esteem, better yet the envy, of their fellows. They can leave the slums and garrets of prose-writing behind them. Just like anybody else, writers need to pay their bills, but you can't put a dollar figure on social climbing and the simple ego-boost that comes from improved status.

(We should remember here that movies and comic strips are very closely related in their history and development and that they were born at about the same time, that is, in about 1895-1896. Pulp magazines are also from that period. This is one of the reasons why I call the period 1895-1896 the birth years of popular culture in America. The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers, was also published in 1895, and so maybe cosmic horror as a sub-genre, or sub-sub-genre, is of the same vintage.)

I wrote about the possible motivations and the possible process behind Weird Tales #367. Now, with "The Eyrie," we have at least a partial answer. Jonathan Maberry writes:

     I invited a bunch of my outside-the box writer friends to bring new thought, new interpretations, new invention to their original works. (p. 3)

I'm not sure that I see much that is new in this issue. There's actually a lot that is old, conventional, and tropey. A lot of people who live inside of boxes like to think of themselves as living outside. I guess that helps them feel better about themselves. But at least we can see now that Weird Tales #367 is, more or less, a vanity project or a creation of a sort of clique. Their box is actually a sandbox. Some, though not all, of the authors in this issue are inside of it, I think. It must be cramped in there. To use the metaphor in a different way, it looks as though Mr. Maberry reached into the box of his friends and pulled out some of their stories, which are really nothing new under the sun, or not much anyway. (I'll have more on possible new things, such as they are, later in this series.) There are other writers in this country and abroad, people who truly are--I think and I hope--living and writing outside of boxes. Can we read their work? Can Weird Tales be for the rest of us, too? Or is it only for people in the box?

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales #367-Analysis, Part Two

There are fifteen written works in Weird Tales #367, nine short stories, three essays, and three poems. (The table of contents lists "The Forest Gate" by Samantha Underhill as fiction but it is in verse form and is obviously a poem.) These fifteen works were written by fifteen authors. One story, "The City in the Sea," has two co-authors, Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola. One author, F. Paul Wilson, contributed two works, an essay and a short story.

Of the fifteen authors in Weird Tales #367, ten are men and five are women. All three poems were written by women, so of twelve works in prose, ten are by men, including all three essays and seven out of nine short stories. I'll have more the authors in a while.

* * *

In reading their works and reading about the authors represented in Weird Tales #367, I find there to be a lot of emphasis on awards, as well as on the authors' accomplishments, if you can call them that, outside the act of writing itself. The writing and storytelling seem to have become secondary to the penumbrae, if you can call them that, of writing and storytelling. Another word for all of this might be meta. There is in fact a lot of meta, not only in this issue of Weird Tales, not only in genre fiction or in fiction as a whole, but in all of the world, or at least wherever there are smartphones and Internet connections.

The authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue seem to be watching themselves as they think and write. They also write about watching themselves as they think and write. In their fictional works and in their biographies--or I guess we should call them resumés, better yet, curricula vitae--there are lots of meta-references, self-references, self-consciousness, namedropping, invocations of long-dead authors, naming and claiming of genres and sub-genres--call it branding--and mentions of brandnames. A lot of this is basically product placement, which is, truth be told, an offense against art, and all of it works against art. We don't want product placement. We don't want commercials. We want the part that happens between the commercials.

In Weird Tales #367, the branding and product placement begin on the cover. It's the Cosmic Horror Issue after all, cosmic horror being less the name of a genre or sub-genre than it is a brandname, in other words, a word representing a commodity. Inside, we find it again in the very first work, the editor's introductory essay in "The Eyrie." ("The Eyrie" used to be for readers. Significantly, it has been appropriated for the exclusive use of the editor. Readers seem to have become relegated to some lower status in all of this. The purpose of the magazine instead seems to be to serve the publisher, the editor, and its contributors.) Even the advertisements are self-referential, or meta. You won't see an ad for a truss or a gun or anything about the Rosicrucians. Not that we want to. But all you can buy now from inside the pages of Weird Tales are books, magazines, and other merchandise that are about Weird Tales and its many genres and sub-genres. Again, meta. Maybe that's what the illustration on the last page is about, in which case, it, too, is meta, or actually doubly meta.

* * *

I have noticed how much emphasis there has been in recent years on the naming and claiming of genres and sub-genres. Again, this emphasis is on the penumbrae of writing instead of on the writing itself. It's another kind of self-consciousness, self-reference, and a needless distraction. Just write your story. Engage yourself in crafting your bit of fiction. Leave the analysis and the critique to someone else. (I guess in this Internet age everything is do-it-yourself.) Besides that, why would any writer want to narrow himself or herself down into some small category? Instead of: "I'm a writer of dark-underground-alt-fantasy and gotho-cosmic horror," why not just say: "I'm a writer"? Instead of thinking about where you are in the great chain of being, just be what you are, which is a human being, and write what you're going to write, which is a story.

This emphasis on genres and sub-genres is in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, in the works themselves as well as, seemingly, in the minds of their authors before they even sat down to write. They all want us to know in which genres and sub-genres they work and in which they're most interested. They also want us to know who are their favorite authors. Those authors are or were of course also genre authors. In every generation, then, there appears to be a stepping down. This has been going on in comic books for decades. Instead of looking outside their own fields and forms, too many creators these days remain inside and their horizons shrink and shrink as the years go by. As genres and sub-genres proliferate, there will naturally be more shrinking, all of it within evermore shrinking fields and forms. At some point every creator seems likely to become a point--and then wink out.

The proliferation of genres and sub-genres is a topic that has been on my mind for a long time now. I'm still planning to write about it, but that's still something for the indefinite future. In any case, the emphasis on genres and sub-genres is curious to me. It indicates, I think, something not very positive or healthy. You could fairly say that the naming and claiming of genres and sub-genres is a kind of branding, in which case art and literature become commodified, actually within themselves rather than outside of themselves. It all becomes just another kind of meta. 

In regards to everybody's favorite authors from the past: instead of being themselves, too many authors (artists, too) try to be someone else who came before them, whom they admire, and who is, unfortunately, long dead. Too many authors and editors keep trying to milk a dead cow. They work in what are by now some pretty tired conventions and they employ some very old tropes, which is really just a nice word--a hoity-toity kind of word--for clichés. One of the first lessons in English composition and creative writing is to avoid clichés. Even if you call them tropes, they're still clichés. So avoid them.

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Again, there is an extreme interest in, emphasis on, and reference to the author, his or her life, biography, experience, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and interests. Again, meta. One of the things that has happened in our culture is that we have moved away from real things to talk of "the narrative." We have inserted this "narrative" and its teller between ourselves and what is really happening in the world so that "the narrative" and the teller become the story rather than the story itself being the story. How many news headlines have you read in which the emphasis is on the telling of the facts instead of on the facts themselves (if there are even facts involved in most stories these days)? I find this odd, jarring, and off-putting. Very often it's just click-bait, and it's at work in fiction just as it is in the real world. The business of the storyteller is to tell a story, not to tell us about himself or herself, or about what brand of camping gear or camera his or her characters use, or what TV shows they like to watch. Yes, that happens in the Cosmic Horror Issue. The storyteller should also not go meta on us unless it serves a good and compelling purpose. The French Lieutenant's Woman--good. Most other examples--not so good. And no one ever should use the term "the text" when referring to a story, or "the canon" when discussing a body of work. Like I've said before, anyone who uses the word canon should be shot out of one--after an -n- has been inserted in the middle of it of course.

So the worldview and the language of media and academia (narrative, trope, text, canon) has entered into genre fiction, just as it has in every other field, but the larger issue is the insertion of an intermediary between one person and another, between the person and the thing, the world, or the experience. My guess is that this is an artifact of digital phenomena in our lives, for one of the essential facts of the digital realm is that, within it we are not in fact connected but separated--separated from each other, from life and experience, from the world, and even from ourselves. There isn't any better example of this than to watch a person as he watches what is happening right there in front of him not with his naked eyes but through his phone.

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Another thing I noticed in reading about the authors in Weird Tales #367 is that a lot of them are involved in movies, television, and/or comic books. In fact, the cover story is about a comic book character, Mike Mignola's Hellboy, which is a first for the magazine I think. That's a development. Whether it's good or bad is up to you to decide. Anyway, there's nothing wrong with scriptwriters writing stories in prose. The same kinds of writers wrote for Weird Tales from the 1920s or '30s onward. One thing to know here is that a writer can now earn a lot more writing in one of those forms than he or she can writing for a story magazine that can only have a vanishingly small readership. You can't blame them for doing so. But it seems as though many of the stories in Weird Tales #367 were drawn from writers who work in movies, television, and comic books rather than from authors who deal strictly or mostly in prose. Make of that what you will. Maybe writing for Weird Tales has become a prestige thing or a vanity project rather than anything else. Maybe these are authors with whom the editor has a personal or professional relationship and he turned to them when he needed some content, or he wanted to add a cachet to his publication, or the authors approached him because they wanted to boost their own careers. To put it another way, I suspect that few if any of the authors submitted their unsolicited work to the magazine. Maybe there's a slush pile at Weird Tales, but I doubt that very much if anything ever leaves that pile. It just gets taller and slushier. Or maybe only the poetry came from unsolicited submissions and everything else made it into print in some other way.

All of this has implications when you consider the pretty scant content of the Cosmic Horror Issue. Is this all the editor could find for publication in his magazine? On all of this vast continent are there only these few people whose work is available for printing in a story magazine? Couldn't the editor find anyone or anything else? Or did he simply not go looking?

As for the content itself, again, it's scant. It doesn't cost any more to print one thousand words on a page than it does to print five hundred. Why skimp? I don't know, but then we're not allowed to know. Anyway, what you will find in these pages has so obviously--and I guess unashamedly--been expanded to fill 96 pages, but to what purpose exactly? It's like a college term paper with everything made slightly larger, all to stretch eight or nine pages of content into the required ten. Except that nothing is gained here by doing so, and quite a bit is actually lost. Anyway, if you don't have enough content to fill your magazine, just go out and find more. It's there. It's got to be there. (Or maybe not. Yikes!) And you don't even need very much more content. After all, Weird Tales appears only once or twice a year. If you can't fill 150 to 200 pages with content every year, that's an indication of a real problem. Maybe there's a supply chain issue. (Imagine Weird Tales, the Supply Chain Issue: 100 blank pages.)

As recently as the 1990s and early 2000s, Weird Tales and other genre magazines were published on a frequent and regular schedule and they were chockfull of content. So what happened? I guess the Internet and social media happened. Smart phones, scrolling, and texting happened. Computer games, video games, video websites, streaming, podcasts, Marvel movies, 500 channels, and on and on happened. In other words, electronic screens happened, I guess, and the printed word stopped happening. So maybe we shouldn't be so hard on editors and publishers after all. If we're descending into Idiocracy, they're descending with us. It isn't their fault if there are only a few people still writing good prose. It's not their fault if no one reads anything on paper anymore. But I don't believe there are only a few people out there writing good prose. I think something else is at work here, but I don't know what it is.

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Of the fifteen authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue, nine are American or I presume them to be American, meaning, they were born in the United States rather than simply living here now. Three authors are British, one Irish, one Canadian, and one, Francesco Tignini, unknown. Maybe he's an American, too. The British or British-oid (i.e., Canadian) content is obvious in these stories, even if it's just in the spellings of certain words, for example "colour" and "odour" instead of "color" and odor." But again, only nine or ten authors are American. Nine or ten out of a country of nearly 350 million.

At least two of the authors are atheists or agnostics, and there is materialism as an implicit or explicit worldview in some of the stories. That shouldn't come as any surprise. After all, this is the Cosmic Horror Issue. If the Cosmos is essentially a place of horror, or at least of indifference to human existence and the human condition, then that doesn't leave much room for a loving and caring God. He has been pushed out. Actually he hasn't been pushed out. We have simply retracted, like a worm into its hole. Anyway, I think it's okay to posit or assume that kind of thing in your storytelling. After all, to read a story is to immerse oneself, for a time, in alternate worlds and alternate lives, even if they're not very pleasant. We get our scare or our thrill while reading and then relief upon our return. This is true even in mainstream literature. But what dreary lives people who believe these things must live in the real world. What else is the purpose of art except to drill closer to the truth? To look for the treasure and discard the dross? Anyway again, it's worth noting that one of the authors, Paul Cornell, is married to a vicar. I don't know what are his beliefs. Maybe his honey-do list has just one word on it: Believe.

At least six of the authors were born in the 1960s. At least one, the editor Jonathan Maberry, was born in the 1950s. (He has worked in comic books, too.) And three, F. Paul Wilson, Ramsey Campbell, and Nancy Kilpatrick, were born in the 1940s, all in 1946 in fact, the first year of the Baby Boom. (Three of our last five presidents were born in that year, too. Maybe the successes of this cohort, such as they are in some cases, are due to their having reached the age of seven before electronic screens held too much sway in our culture and society.) I don't know the birth years of five of the authors, but I assume them all to be younger and not quite established yet. If any of them would like to write to me, I would be happy to hear from them and to write about them in this space if that's possible.

Out of all of this analysis, I think the most significant issues to be: first, the meta-referential and self-referential viewpoint of the author in which the emphasis is moved away from the story and towards its penumbrae, or what we might call metadata. And, second, the dearth of content in this issue of Weird Tales in particular, more generally and by implication, the seeming lack of writing talent in America, which used to support a lively, fecund, prosperous, and widespread culture of books, literature, reading, and literacy. Being an artist, I sometimes kid my writer friends that they're a dime a dozen. But maybe their value has gone up as their numbers have gone down, if in fact their numbers have gone down. But that's only if good, literary writing is still in demand: a questionable proposition. Maybe Weird Tales is from another culture and has had its day. Or maybe it can still survive but should be in other hands, or at least handled in a different way where it is.

Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley