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
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