"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan-Part Four

I speculated the other day on the possible motivations of writers who use brandnames and product placement in their fiction. I'm not sure that I have an answer to the question of why they do it, but I have another possible explanation. Commercial products, commercial services, and brandnames are obviously on their minds. Actually, I think that what these writers do is unconscious, and so it's not so much on their minds as in them. They have been so steeped in commercialism and consumerism all of their lives that it probably comes naturally for them to throw around these labels and names. This is their natural vocabulary and their natural habit.

My alternate explanation for product placement and the use of brandnames is that these writers and so many like them are signaling their virtue. This isn't a moral or intellectual kind of virtue signaling. They are actually signaling their commercial virtue. It's a display of a kind of street cred. They're basically showing that they're hip and cool and with it. They know what the good stuff is, they know where and how to buy it, and they want you to know that they know. They have the means and the apps, the subscriptions and the accounts, the access and the cash to get it all. To them, I guess, this is a kind of skill, a display of taste, an indication of their superior status, or a status at least equal to yours. They're with it. They're keeping up. They're putting themselves on display. At its base, this kind of thing probably comes from pressures to conform. People who do it want to fit in and be accepted. They want to sit at the cool table, even though they will never be able to sit at the cool table because that was in high school and we're not in high school any more.

Anyone trying to be cool should know that cool isn't trying. Cool is.

Here's Langston Hughes' poem "Motto," first collected in book form in 1951:

Motto
By Langston Hughes

I play it cool
And dig all jive
That's the reason
I stay alive.

My motto,
As I live and learn,
            is:
Dig And Be Dug
In Return.

-----

That's cool.

* * *

"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan is not a pleasant story. The author, I think, claims not to write horror stories, but this is one. The horror has to do with the narrator himself and what he has inside him. He carries that horror around with him. He exposes others to it. And in one way or another, they are destroyed by it. Or apparently they are destroyed, maybe murdered, but still ruined and their souls wiped away by exposure to his abysses and voids. If you read this story only at its surface--as if you were floating on the surface of a lake sprinkled with the reflections of stars--you would believe that the abyss is external to the narrator. But if you peer into its darkest depths, you might see that the abyss is inside him. I have a feeling that the author knows abysses like these. I think we have to acknowledge that there is some autobiographical content here. So is he Edgar Allan Poe, exploring very human and very dark depths? Or is he acting as his own psychologist, examining his own torments, exploring his own abysses through his art?

So a third question for today: did the author of this story put himself into it (the way he inserted various commercial products in its pages)? And if he did, is he represented only in the narrator? Or is the boy at the end also a representation of himself? In the story, the narrator says that a thing need not be just one thing. It can actually be more than one. I take that as an artist's statement. Maybe the murderer and the murdered--the exploiter and the exploited, the recruiter and the recruited, the groomer and the groomed--are both the same person, separated only by time. (Remember that the psychiatrist asks if the thing in the lake has followed him through time, from his childhood to now.) What was done to him, he will do to others, another inversion of a biblical idea.

In reading the stories of Poe, I'm not convinced that he was like or sympathized with his darkest and most depraved characters. He may have understood the darker side of life and the dark depths of the human soul, but it's clear that we are not to think of the narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart" or Montresor in "The Cask of Amontillado" as a hero, or someone admirable, or someone whom we might aspire to be like. In other words, we're not supposed to take his side or to be on his side. I'm not sure the same kind of thing is true in the fantasy fiction of our time.

I have been reading stories by Thomas Ligotti. The first in the collection I have next to me is called "The Frolic." Mr. Kiernan's story reminds me of "The Frolic," which I think can be included in the category of cosmic horror. In "The Frolic," the situation is reversed, though, for we get things from the point of a view of a psychologist who is treating a serial killer whose names are legion but is called John Doe. The psychologist describes Doe as:

"[. . .] a comparatively lazy demi-demon from a Neverland where dizzy chaos is the norm, a state of affairs on which he gluttonously thrives. Which is as good a description as any of the metaphysical economy of a psychotic's universe."

Note the word chaos, which, as we have seen, is a synonym of abyss or void. Here is some of what Doe writes in his final note to his psychologist:

[. . . ] for in the black-foaming gutters and back alleys of paradise, in the dank windowless gloom of some intergalactic cellar, in the hollow pearly whorls found in sewerlike seas in starless cities of insanity, and in their slums . . .

(The italics are in the original.)

Here also is the imagery of cosmic horror, including mention of the sea, a word for which abyss and void might be synonyms.

I think it fair to say that the author of "The Frolic" is mentally ill. I don't take any pleasure in saying that. I don't say it gratuitously. I say it to make a point, which is that authors of today may very well write, specifically and with purpose, about the things that most torment them. One reason they might do this is as a kind of self-treatment. They are acting as their own therapists. Another might be more significant and it is that authors may attempt to bring these things, through their art, into the real world, thereby making of them a kind of affirmation of what they have inside themselves. For as long as they are inside, they are formless, chaotic, even abyssal. But if an author can speak them through word into creation, then they can be made real and ordered, after some fashion. But just because something exists in the real world doesn't mean that it's good and right and true. Material is not necessarily good, even if you're a materialist. In addition, what you might make true for yourself through your creation is not necessarily true about the universe, nor for all of us, nor for any one of us. It might still be your own private horror. I have a feeling, though, that readers of a certain type go looking for dark, negative, violent, nihilistic, atheistic, materialistic, death-dealing fiction because they believe it affirms their view of the world and all of its people, including themselves, as a terrible place. It doesn't though. There is no affirmation. The universe is not like that. All of that exists only in your head, in your heart, in the gutters and gloom, in the cellars and sewers inside you, in the God-shaped hollows you have carved out of yourself and that you keep open inside like a niche made for Nothing.

* * *

So there appear to be parallels between, first, the narrator and the box, and second, the author and his fiction. The narrator says, Open the box to see what's inside me. The author says, Open the book to see what's inside me. The hope (or despair) in each case is that the viewer or reader will be drawn into the narrator's/author's worldview--into the abyss of himself and his beliefs--and thereby converted, thereby ruined. Note that "Night Fishing" is told in the first person.

* * *

Although the words box and book are similar, they are apparently unrelated. It's interesting that both refer to the names of trees, box to boxwood and book to beech.

* * *

A hollow is a void, the numeral zero, a rim around a hole, the hole being the point and the operative part. It's no wonder, I guess, that so much of the depravity, insanity, and departures from normality of our time--that so much of atheism, materialism, nihilism, gnosticism, leftism, progressivism, and so on--that so much psychopathology and narcissism and delusional thinking--is about sex, for it's all about trying to fill a hole, to grow something self-punishers and self-sufferers hope to be good and positive inside their own voids. But you can't create yourself, you can't give birth to yourself, and you can't christen yourself. You have to get over yourself and be what you are, what you were created to be, which is a God-made human being, in your essence entirely unalterable.

To be concluded . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan-Part Three

In "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan, the narrator, a physics professor with psychiatric problems--actually problems far more profound than any psychiatrist could treat--reveals to the reader that he has committed murder, or something approaching murder. Actually there is more than one murder, for, like a serial killer, he has gone after people, one after another, who live on the fringes of society. But are these really murders? Or is he a recruiter of sorts--a groomer--who lures his victims into his abysses? He writes:

If not murder, then let's say a fisher of men.

That suggestion is ironic of course, an inversion of the original. In Matthew 4:19, Jesus says:

"Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men."

In his own story, the narrator alludes to Edmond Hamilton, who alluded to Charles Fort before him, writing:

I think we're fished for.

The fish is a Christian symbol of course. Darwinists have co-opted that symbol for humorous and satirical purposes. You see it mostly on their cars. Darwinist or not, if we're fished for, we're all sooner or later going into the creel.

By the way, one who fishes draws in his catch. Remember the word.

* * *

The narrator remembers night fishing with his grandfather and his grandfather's friends. One of those friends, named Snuffy Smith after the comic strip character, tells a story of his own childhood in which he went into the cellar to look for some canned peaches for his mother. There he found the shape of a girl that changed as he looked upon it. "And her eyes were like burning white pinpricks in the darkness." Elsewhere in the story, the narrator describes a night on the lake:

     The stars wheel above the lake like a drunken tapestry, a billion blazing pin pricks [. . .].

There are, then, stars in the shape-shifters and shape-shifters in the stars. Or, shape-shifters are star stuff, just like us, except they're not the good kind. Remember here how the hero in The Incredible Shrinking Man describes the stars: "God's silver tapestry spread across the night." Setting aside the mixed metaphor of a tapestry that wheels, we can say that God's tapestry is not drunken but properly ordered. It is designed, just as every tapestry is designed.

* * *

There is also in "Night Fishing" a story of something pulled up from the bottom of the lake, the way the aliens in Hamilton's story trawl the surface of the earth from their high-atmospheric ships. The narrator is keeping secrets from his psychiatrist--and from us. What was the drawn-up thing? Was it an alien entity, a visitor from the void? Or was it simply a dead body? The author may also be keeping secrets from us. Is there really something cosmic, supernatural, or super-scientific going on in his story? Or does the thing of which he writes exist only in the abyssal depths of the narrator's soul? In other words, is the horror external or internal? Another question: has the author put himself into his own story? It is, after all, about transformations. He writes: "[T]his does not have to be any one thing." It, and possibly everything else, can be many, or any of its own choosing.

* * *

The thing in the box that the narrator has bought from an estate sale--the thing from the abyss--is a shape-shifter. It is in service to this shape-shifter that the narrator, now in adulthood, does his own night fishing among outcasts, what people might call the dregs of society. For example, the narrator's latest victim, the only one who actually makes an appearance in the story, is a transvestite. (Trawl, draw, drag, dredge, and possibly dregs are related words.) In an imaginary session with his psychiatrist, the psychiatrist asks him, "You think it followed you . . . through time, from that night on the lake?" After a while, the narrator says, "That night on the lake, it saw my face [. . . .] It saw something wrong with my soul. It saw an easy mark." In other words, a thing brought up--like Dagon or Cthulhu--from an abyss looked into him and recognized also an abyss. And now he goes about its work and his.

* * *

The author of "Night Fishing" is one person but has attempted to become another, complete with a name change. Emulating God, he has attempted to speak word into the creation of something new. Similarly, the thing in his story is one thing, then becomes another. The narrator may have been one person before becoming another, but his soul appears to have been already ruined when he first saw the thing. Maybe he was ruined at his conception. This can't be original sin, though, because the law governing this story--and the author's beliefs--won't allow it. The boy in the story is a transvestite, in other words, someone pretending to be another he is not. Using the object that was one thing before transforming itself into another, the narrator introduces the boy into his world. The boy thereby also becomes something else. You could say that he undergoes a transition. So the narrator, more or less a groomer, recruits the boy into his abyss. He is a fisher of men but an inversion of Christian fishers of men, who recruit their fellows into faith in God and his Creation, also called Cosmos.

* * *

In "Night Fishing," Caitlín R. Kiernan has synthesized what I think are the two main themes or images in Weird Tales #367, first, the abyss or void, and, second, an alien presence among us. Both are treated in this issue as sources of cosmic horror. Or maybe his story was the starting point for this themed issue and the other authors were invited to write variations on his two themes. (Probably not. More likely this was convergent evolution--or conformist creation, if there can be such a thing. Or maybe a better word for it is groupthink.) I should also emphasize here the theme and imagery of the sea, for the sea is in "Night Fishing" as well as in the other works so far in the Cosmic Horror Issue. But then we should remember that abyss and void may also refer to the sea and did from the beginning, for they are both in the creation story, in the Book of Genesis.

So far, these allusions or references--other connections, too--are to:

• The Book of Genesis, specifically the story of creation

• The New Testament

• "The City in the Sea" by Edgar Allan Poe

• Mythical and pseudoscientific lost continents

• "Nemesis" by H.P. Lovecraft

• "Dreamland" by Edgar Allan Poe

• "The Space Visitors" by Edmond Hamilton

• The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort

• Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future by Friedrich Nietzsche

• "There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea," a traditional song

• "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" by Dylan Thomas

I hope this list is complete. It may not be.

* * *

There is also a theme in Mr. Kiernan's story of shape-shifting, transition, or transformation. This shape-shifting is nothing but horrific. That's something for us to remember. The shape-shifter or skin-walker is a monster among us. Watch out.

* * *

Believers in God are seekers after spiritual transcendence. Non-believers pursue in its place transition, transformation, transgression, transgenderism, transvestism, trans-humanism, and other trans-systems, trans-processes, trans-experiences, trans-beliefs, trans-etc. Believers in God also believe in Cosmos--order, law, purpose, meaning. Non-believers see, fear, love, hate, pursue, and embrace Chaos--disorder, confusion, the void, the abyss, meaninglessness, destruction, ultimately death.

* * *

Another theme, motif, or plot device: the opening. In "The City in the Sea," the old man is sent on his journey after opening a package. In "A Ghost Story for Christmas," the narrator encounters black emptiness upon opening a door. In "The Forest Gate," the narrator passes through the eponymous opening to experience his own horrors. And in "Night Fishing," the narrator and his victim peer into an abyss by opening a box. One aspect of the thing in the box is "a book with a cracked leather binding, like the family Bible my mother kept on the coffee table." One of course opens a book, like a door through which one may pass. Inside--on the other side--may be glories. On the other hand, as in the Necronomicon or "The King in Yellow," there may be horrors. Opening has two meanings. First is from the verb, to open, the action of opening. Second is the noun, opening, denoting an empty space, a doorway or gateway, a gap, a hole, an open mouth, an orifice, the hole in the numeral zero, a void, such as the void in the narrator's soul.

* * *

Another aspect of the thing is "a stone disk with seven sides, carved from greenish soapstone that feels oddly greasy to the touch." As in "The City in the Sea," there is a strange object, a kind of sculpture. The strange object or sculpture, sometimes a box, is in all kinds of genre fiction, including The Maltese Falcon, "The Call of Cthulhu," "Claimed!" by Francis Stevens, "The Calamander Chest" by Joseph Payne Brennan, "The Striped Chest" by Arthur Conan Doyle, and so on. There are so many that there could be an Internet Strange Object, Sculpture, and Box Database.

* * *

See what happens when you read Nietzsche? You write in brevities and put little breaks between them. He used numbers, I have used asterisks, and in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, the designer used little black Cthulhus.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan-Part Two

The narrator in "Night Fishing" has a cosmic horror problem. We get a hint of that in the first column of the story as it appears in Weird Tales #367:

There's a hallway that seems a lot longer than it can possibly be.

Dread stretches time and space.

Time and space being the dimensions and scales in which cosmic horror operates.

Telling about night fishing with his grandfather, the narrator relates to his psychiatrist: "We'd just drift around out there on the lake, the stars wheeling overhead--I swear there were more stars in the sky when I was a kid. I look up now at night, and it's like something came along and ate most of them." Remember the image of the zero: a gaping maw. Remember the consuming, engulfing void: now an eater of stars.

Instead of using an epigraph, the author of this story, Caitlín R. Kiernan, quotes from other works within its main body. These include a traditional song called "There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea" and the poem "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" by Dylan Thomas, which also has imagery of the sea. (Another variation on a theme in the Cosmic Horror Issue.) There is also an allusion to a story by a long-ago teller of weird tales, paraphrased from an idea by an author before him.

Read on . . .

In Mr. Kiernan's story, there are these words in italics, which he uses to connote quotations from other works:

I think we're fished for.

Right away, I recognized that as an idea originally in The Book of the Damned (1919), the first of Charles Fort's four books on strange and anomalous phenomena. In Chapter 12 of that book, Fort concluded: "I think we're property," meaning, we are the property of races alien to Earth. This, I think, could very well have been the origin of the ancient astronauts hypothesis so popular today. And it's one of the two main themes I have identified in the Cosmic Horror Issue, or one of two main sources of these feelings of cosmic horror about which its authors write. We have this vast cosmos in which to work and yet they have come up with only two sources of horror at our apprehension of it. At least Mr. Kiernan put these things together in interesting ways, even if they are, again, meta-references.

Eleven years after The Book of the Damned was published, author Edmond Hamilton had a story called "The Space Visitors" in Air Wonder Stories. The date was March 1930. His story was reprinted in Startling Stories in September 1939, the month in which the Second World War began. Hamilton's story is a Fortean story--or a storified plot really--of a visitation made by aliens to Earth. (Storified is my new word. There were lots of storified plots in the early years of science fiction.) The aliens' purpose is unknown except that they seem to be studying us. Their study is, however, extremely destructive and heedless of human life and pain. In the story, a Dr. Jason Howard, of Gotham University no less, theorizes on the matter at hand:

Did we live at the bottom of an ocean, an atmospheric sea? Were we merely crawling things upon earth's surface, to be fished for and examined curiously by unimaginable beings and vessels far above?

Emphasis added. As in the Cosmic Horror Issue, there is imagery here of the sea. And coincidentally or not, Hamilton's second banana to Dr. Howard has the same surname, Ransome vs. Ransom, as C.S. Lewis' hero in his Space Trilogy of 1938-1945.

Soon after the allusion to an allusion to Charles Fort, there is an allusion to another, earlier figure. The narrator of "Night Fishing" has purchased a box containing some objects from an estate sale. Unfortunately, these objects--or is it just one self-transforming artifact?--have strange properties. He wonders about it. Then he writes:

     I stare at the box, and I imagine it stares back at me.

And now Friedrich Nietzsche rears his head, for in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), he wrote:

     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.

Emphasis added again. This aphorism is from Chapter 4, being all of No. 146. In my Vintage edition of 1966, it appears on page 89. Nietzsche wrote a prelude to a philosophy of the future. Remember that the protagonist in The Incredible Shrinking Man saw himself as a possible man of the future.

And so we have that word again, abyss, roughly equivalent to void, and the condition of chaos that preceded God's speaking Cosmos into existence. Abyss is also in the imagery of the sea, as in the scientific term abyssal zone, or that layer that is among the deepest in the ocean. The word abyss is also in "Dagon" by H.P. Lovecraft, one of the earliest stories--if not the earliest--in Weird Tales (Oct. 1923) that has in it cosmic scales and cosmic scope. It's also in "The Call of Cthulhu," which appeared in "The Ghost Table" Issue of Weird Tales in February 1928. Both usages are in regards to the depths of the sea. Dagon is from the sea, but Cthulhu is from the stars.

So, from Charles Fort comes the idea that there are aliens among or above us, who own us, prey upon us, or are fishing for us, and from Friedrich Nietzsche comes the image of the abyss as not just emptiness but something that is watching us, waiting for an opening through which it might gain access to our world.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan-Part One

Caitlín R. Kiernan was born on May 26, 1964, in Dublin, Ireland, and came to the United States as a child with his mother and sister. I believe his is an assumed name. That's okay. There have been lots of tellers of weird tales with pseudonyms, adopted names, or assumed names. Last week I heard from the son of Robert Spencer Carr (1909-1994), who let me know that his father's name at birth was Theodore Bonifield. I used that knowledge to update my biography of him. So the truth has come out more than one hundred years after Carr's birth. We're probably not allowed to know Mr. Kiernan's real name. There is supposed to be truth in art. Artists, though, are human beings, and human beings keep secrets, sometimes for all of their lives.

Mr. Kiernan is a writer, publisher, paleontologist, and onetime musician. His credits include novels, short stories, comic book scripts, and at least one screenplay. His first published short story was in 1995 and his first published novel in 1998. Mr. Kiernan lives and works in Alabama. I believe he also lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Although he's still living, his papers are deposited at the John Hay Library at Brown University. If authors' papers are stored in that library alphabetically (I doubt that they are), then Mr. Kiernan's can't be very far away from those of H.P. Lovecraft. Anyway, the author is another comic book and movie person, but his credits are mostly in prose form. Good for him. He's pretty prolific, too, so double good for him.

Caitlín R. Kiernan's story in Weird Tales #367 is called "Night Fishing." It's nine pages long, plus a full-page, illustrated title page. This is the most psychologically and thematically complex of all of the stories so far in the Cosmic Horror Issue. It's probably the best in stylistic terms, too. I especially like an image from his story: "patient as a spider." "Night Fishing" is also the first to refer overtly to the two main themes or images I have identified in this issue. More on that in a while.

Like "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, "Night Fishing" begins with a meta image on its title page. In Mr. Cornell's story, that meta image is a picture of a television set showing on its screen an image of John Mills in the British TV serial Quatermass, broadcast in 1979. (Thanks to reader Mike Harwood for identifying the source and the actor.) In Mr. Kiernan's story, the meta image is a picture of an office with a picture on the wall, an image of the painting "Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth (1948). So the illustration is a picture of a picture. We as readers, then, are looking at a picture of a picture of a woman looking at a house. Could there be in the house a picture on a wall? And in that picture could there be another picture, or even a picture of a picture?

(Actually, the illustration on the title page is a printed image made from an image engraved on a printer's plate and then transferred to a roller--assuming the magazine was printed by an offset process--of an original digital image that does not exist in the real world, showing a picture of an image of a woman looking at the image of a house. In other words, we are at remove after remove from any real, original, physical thing.)

"Night Fishing" is about a troubled man who is undergoing psychiatric treatment. Or is it merely psychological treatment? I have already written about some lack of precision in Weird Tales #367. In "Night Fishing," the narrator lets us know in his first sentence that he's going to a psychiatrist (pg. 33, col. 1). A while later, the psychiatrist is now a psychologist (pg. 33, col. 2). Then he goes back to being a psychiatrist again. There's an important difference to be made between the two, as a psychiatrist is a medical doctor who may treat his or her patients using drugs. In other words, psychiatry takes what could be interpreted as a materialistic approach to problems that may not be materialistic after all. I forgot to mention that Caitlín R. Kiernan is an atheist. And I forgot to mention that his narrator is a physicist.

There are lots of brandnames and a lot of product placement in "Night Fishing." Taco Bell, Coleman, Old Crow and Jack Daniels, Mason jars, Craftsman, Crayola crayons, Xanax, Case knife, TV Guide, Hershey's. There are other proper nouns, too: Snuffy Smith, Red Angus bulls, Sunset Boulevard, Mandelbrot set, Alabaman place names, Schrödinger and Heisenberg, Eisenhower, the King James Bible. Some of that is okay. Some of it makes for concrete detail and lends verisimilitude to a story. But to come across, as you read, a brandname in every few sentences or paragraphs in a story of just nine pages becomes a distraction. It points to something larger going on.

So why do they do it?

Why do writers of today so easily turn to using brandnames in their works? I guess it's a kind of conditioning. They grew up in a consumerist culture, and it all comes naturally to them. They think in terms of what they can buy, or what they might buy one day. In this culture, we are, every day, bombarded with commercial messages. Our favorite names are brandnames. Again and again in the comments section of this blog, I have asked readers to refrain from mentioning where they have bought this thing or that. If you're going to talk about a book, talk about the book, not about where you bought it. Sadly, even fans of fiction and readers of literature are commercially minded. I guess, too, that if your life is largely emptied out of real, human things, you have only commercial products with which to share your thoughts, your feelings, and your days. You develop relationships with them and they become your friends and lovers. Maybe that's one of the reasons that hoarding has become such a problem in our society. People objectify other people and humanize material things. We have it all backwards.

Many people, especially on the left, complain about materialism--commercial materialism--without understanding that to be of the left--Marxist, socialist, generically progressive--is to be, necessarily, a materialist. Erich Fromm, one of the Frankfurt School, was of the left. And yet in his book The Art of Loving (1956), he diagnosed a problem in which people see each other as material objects rather than as real human beings (a real human being being not material but non-material). In seeking after love, we commodify each other. We engage in decision-making as if we were in the marketplace. This is especially pronounced in a liberal, i.e., capitalist society. (This is obviously a Marxian critique. And now I wonder if there is product placement in the work of China Miéville, a known--and whiny--Marxist.) So maybe there is a similar kind of commodification carried out by the artists in our society, a commodification not only within and of their works but also of themselves. Commercial products have become an object of art, equal in importance perhaps to feelings, meaning, relationships, and so on, the original and true currency in the making of art. (Yes, I see the irony here in using the word currency.) And so writers in Weird Tales and elsewhere are like children watching Saturday morning cartoons, focused on the commercials and the brandnames as much as on their favorite shows. What's next as an epigraph? A jingle? A slogan?

But at least Caitlín R. Kiernan knows that there is a bird called a mockingbird and a snake called a water snake. Authors can name every brand of TV show, movie, comic book, and video game they have ever consumed, but they don't know the difference between a bass and a basswood. They should work on that.

To be continued . . .

Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

What Is Cosmic Horror?

Weird Tales #367, from 2023, is a themed issue. The theme is cosmic horror. I'm not sure that a themed issue is a good idea. What happens if you as a reader don't like the theme? Well, you go elsewhere for your reading, and your money follows you. That was one of the really good things about the original Weird Tales: no matter what your tastes were when it came to weird fiction, fantasy, or even science fiction, you would probably find something you liked in every issue.

There has been a proliferation of genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres in genre fiction. It's pretty ridiculous actually. I'm not sure why there should be such proliferation except that I think everybody is trying to be extraordinary. Democracy has its discontents. People ask themselves, if we're all equal, how am I to stand out from everybody else? How am I to show myself to be above others? One way of doing it, I guess, is to make yourself extraordinary within a subset or sub-subset of our larger society and culture, even if you have to invent that subset or sub-subset for yourself. The other day, I wrote about an interview that one contributor to the Cosmic Horror Issue conducted with another. In his introductory paragraph to that interview, Nicholas Diak wrote of "The Forest Gate" by Samantha Underhill: "Using cosmic horror and existential dread poetic styles, this poem . . ." and so on. So I guess cosmic horror and existential dread are poetic styles and the proliferation extends into not only genres but also forms and styles. I have used the word proliferation here. Actually I think it's a balkanization of culture, more accurately an atomization. People working in culture are in pursuit of the infinitesimal, for if you can divide culture finely enough, then you can be extraordinary within your own self-created infinitesimal. If your world is your navel, then you can easily occupy your whole world. You can be within it the greatest of anything and everything you can think of.

So what is cosmic horror? Well I'll let you know that my title is a trick. I don't know what it is. But then I didn't invent the thing. I'm not sure that it even exists. The other day, I pointed out that cosmos and chaos are opposites. Cosmos is order. It is the universe. It's where we live and it's a place governed by laws. Although there is emptiness in the universe, the emptiness is not what counts. The important parts lie among the emptiness. If time is what keeps everything from happening all at once (a quote attributed to Ray Cummings), then emptiness--space--is what keeps everything from happening all in the same place.

Chaos is cosmos' opposite. It is disorder, confusion, emptiness. The Online Etymology Dictionary explains its meaning as "gaping void; empty, immeasurable space." The original Greek word, khaos, means "abyss." Those two words, void and abyss, appear again and again in the Cosmic Horror Issue. That was my point in suggesting that cosmic horror should probably be called chaotic horror, for the horror appears to be in encounters with or contemplation of the void or the abyss. Alternatively, this invented, theoretical, or critical (versus natural, organic, or evolved) sub-sub-genre could be called abyssal horror or voidal horror. There isn't any such word as voidal, I guess, but if we can invent one thing, we can invent another.

I have a copy of Otto Struve's Elementary Astronomy, published in 1959 and reprinted in 1961. Struve's book is brimming with black-and-white photographs of immense galaxies and countless stars. In the first page of text, there are numbers representing immense quantities: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the observable universe, a like number of cubic inches of almost empty space in the Milky Way galaxy. That's a lot of zeroes, kept from emptiness or void by an initial non-zero integer. More such numbers appear on the next page. These, then, are cosmic scales, cosmic here having mathematical value but being empty of any value judgments, or at least any outright negative value judgments. Dr. Struve was a dispassionate scientist after all. Even though they are cosmic, we can still write about things of this scale. Otto Struve did it in his textbook. Other authors have done it in their fiction. I should add that zero represents nothing. The numeral looks like a hole, an opening, a gaping maw.

I guess cosmic horror is an expression or a feeling of horror that arises from apprehending or contemplating the cosmic scale of the universe. Maybe it's not the cosmos itself that gives rise to this feeling, though. Again, cosmos is order. Chaos is its opposite. In the biblical story of the creation of the universe, what we call cosmos was preceded by chaos, emptiness, a void:

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep

or:

the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep

or:

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

(Genesis 1:2)

We live in an atheistic and nihilistic age. Maybe the horror that some people feel in their contemplation of the universe is the horror not of cosmos but of the void that preceded it. In intervening and in his act of creation, God put an end to chaos. The void, which was non-existence, is now doubly non-existent. There cannot be a void if there is cosmos. But people don't believe in God any longer. I suspect that many if not most of the authors and poets who contributed to the Cosmic Horror Issue are non-believers, if not atheists, materialists, nihilists, or even anti-natalists, as Thomas Ligotti (not a contributor to this issue) so famously (or infamously) is. And so if there is not God to keep back the void--if it can poke through wherever he is not on watch--then horror might emerge and erupt and engulf. If you don't believe in God, then maybe you must fear the void.

In his first paragraph of Elementary Astronomy, Dr. Struve wrote that the word astronomy is from two Greek words, the first, obviously, for "star," the second, significantly, for "law." To fear or to feel horror at the great scale of the universe in terms of both space and time is, I think, off the mark. It is to ignore the fundamental order and lawfulness of the universe. There are people who feel small or insignificant, their lives essentially meaningless, when they they think about the immensity of the universe. Why should that be? They're having, I think, an inappropriate response. I would say that their response is actually self-centered, possibly tipping into a kind of solipsism. If you feel this way, you need to get over yourself. If you think these things, you're actually putting yourself at the center of the universe in that you're thinking about the effect the universe has on you and that your feeling this way is somehow significant, that it is indicative of something that is out there instead of in here. Or maybe you're trying to make of yourself the universe, or vice versa.

Carl Sagan had a better view of it, I think. He saw us as the products--perhaps the end-products--of an orderly universe. "We are star stuff," he famously said in his series Cosmos. The stars have existed so that we might also exist and grow to contemplate them, ourselves, and the cosmos in which we live. We are the mind and consciousness of the cosmos. He gloried in the immensity and magnificence of that great structure, process, and more after which he named his show. I still remember a montage from Cosmos over which exultant music, composed by Beethoven, played, a montage of us, made from star stuff, formed from the dust of stars, set about our tasks of living, thinking, loving, and creating.

At the end of his novel Contact, Dr. Sagan indicated that the universe is actually designed, a curious conclusion for an atheist. And though he might have been an atheist, he was obviously not a nihilist, nor was he negative, depressed, anxious, or fearful in his contemplation of the universe. He could hardly have studied it and accomplished what he did if he had felt those kinds of feelings. In that he was wise. Those who are horrified by the cosmos are, I think, unwise.

I suspect that cosmic horror is actually not based on anything especially serious or meaningful. As Nicholas Diak wrote in his essay, it's actually something done for fun. We like thrills. We like to be scared. Especially when we return from reading, return to what is safe and sure. I think it best to look at it this way, that cosmic horror in storytelling is done for fun. Unfortunately, most of the works in the Cosmic Horror Issue are pretty limited in their approach to cosmic horror. Again, there seem to be two main themes or images in these pages: the void or the abyss, and the alien presence. If there is a cosmos through which chaos occasionally breaks through, and if there is actually a genre of cosmic horror, then the possibilities for telling stories within that genre would seem vast, theoretically endless. Why limit ourselves? Why have the authors of cosmic horror so limited themselves? Maybe it's because we as a culture--and the creators of our culture in particular--have run out of ideas. And maybe we have run out of skills, too, and so we accomplish almost nothing of note.

Now comes the really fun part in all of this, for opposite cosmic horror is cosmic insight, cosmic happiness, cosmic transcendence. Richard Matheson, a teller of weird tales, wrote the screenplay for The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). In the end, that film shows itself as a vehicle for an uplifting, even exultant, philosophical and theological conclusion. Here are the final words spoken by the title character (with my own paragraphing of a transcript of the narration):

I was continuing to shrink, to become . . . What? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world?

So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.

I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens, the universe, worlds beyond number. God's silver tapestry spread across the night.

And in that moment I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of Man's own limited dimension. I had presumed upon Nature. That existence begins and ends is Man's conception, not Nature's.

And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away and in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something too.

Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too.

To God, there is no zero.

I still exist.

"My fears melted away," he says. "To God, there is no zero." Those, I think, are proper responses as we contemplate the cosmos. And I should point out that The Incredible Shrinking Man closes with swelling music played over photographs of the stars and galaxies, just as in Otto Struve's book, which is full of so many zeroes, all of them made from nothing into something by God's word and law.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"The Forest Gate" by Samantha Underhill

"The Forest Gate" by Samantha Underhill is the first poem in Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue. This work is included under the heading of fiction in the table of contents, but it's clearly a poem. So what happened here? A mistake? Or is this another example of a lack of precision in word and meaning so common in our century?

Samantha Underhill was, by her own account, born in Appalachia. She is a poet, author, educator, researcher, voice actress, and audio reader and narrator. Her poetry collection Sadness of the Siren appeared in 2022. The forward is by Jonathan Maberry, editor of Weird Tales. So it looks like Ms. Underhill is another insider. I don't detect any TV or comic book work in her resumé, but it could be there nonetheless. She has done audio work related to the Lord of the Rings. That's fitting, I would say, for someone named Underhill.

"The Forest Gate" is a somewhat long poem of twelve stanzas of four lines each, plus a closing couplet. The lines are long, and the rhyme scheme AABB. It is printed using a large typeface and has a dark, apocalyptic, illustrative background, similar to an American-Romantic painting of the early nineteenth century. The whole thing takes up four pages in this issue, more, really, than what is needed. But as I have indicated, the content in Weird Tales #367 is thin and there's a lot of padding in its pages. Abysses and voids appear on many of them and there seems to have been a lot of effort put into stretching this thing to 96 in all.

I like this poem and its lush, vivid imagery. I like that it's a change of pace in the Cosmic Horror Issue, not only for its form but also because it stands alone and is separate from all other works. It exists in a world all its own, a dark, fantastic, dream-like world. This is high fantasy, I guess, or a Poesque work. Maybe after all it's related to the image of Poe's city in the sea. And now I notice the expression "[s]tar-spawned nightmares" and start to think that H.P. Lovecraft is lurking on its edges as well. The mood is different in "The Forest Gate" than what has come before. This is a poem of course, but it's also the work of the distaff side of humanity. I guess I wouldn't expect anything less than difference.

Ms. Underhill touches on the two main themes or images I have detected in the Cosmic Horror Issue. There are of course the dark parts and the cosmic parts. The poem is dark and the word cosmos appears more than once here. But those aren't the two I mean. Actually, the first of the two themes or images I have mentioned and about which I'll write more is of the abyss or the void. Samantha Underhill writes of a "shimmering void" and "the unlimitable void of space," also the aforementioned "[s]tar-spawned nightmares of the abysses of night." Towards the end, the narrator is "[s]wallowed by the abyss." If there is imagery here similar to that found in "The City in the Sea" by Edgar Allan Poe, then I would like to point out that the word void also is in that poem.

Abyss and void, void and abyss. If this were Pee Wee Herman's Playhouse and these were the secret words of the day, we would all be screaming really loudly--a lot in this issue.

The abyss or the void seems to be tied up with cosmic horror. I'm not sure why that is. Cosmos is from a Greek word meaning "order." The origins and meaning of the word are why Carl Sagan chose it as the title of his 1980s television series. In contrast, abyss refers to "depths of the earth or sea; primordial chaos," according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. I have added the emphasis to the word chaos here because its meaning is essentially the opposite of cosmos. Chaos--disorder, emptiness, or confusion--came first. Then there was Cosmos, which is where we live. Maybe the correct term for this ill-defined sub-genre or sub-sub-genre should be chaotic horror. Remember here that Lovecraft's god Azathoth--perhaps his supreme god--rules from a "black throne at the centre of Chaos." Look for the sea and for depths in Poe's aforementioned poem.

As for void--I would say that the void and the abyss are far more closely related to each other as words or concepts, and so they can stay together I think.

The second theme or image I have detected is what Samantha Underhill alludes to as "some monstrous alien race." She doesn't develop that idea in her poem. That's not what this is about. But there will be more on this theme and image in the next few works in the Cosmic Horror Issue. And connected to these two themes and images--the void and alien races--will be two real-life historical-literary figures, one for each. You have seen their names before in this blog. There are even labels for them appearing on the right on your screen. But that will be only after a while.

There isn't any meta-content or self-references or insider information in "The Forest Gate" as far as I can tell. If you're looking for that kind of thing, go to "Piercing the Veil of Reality: Cosmic Horror Stories in Weird Tales #367," a series of interviews carried out by Nicholas Diak, a contributor to Weird Tales #367, and posted on his website. The date was April 26, 2023. In addition to interviewing Samantha Underhill, Mr. Diak interviewed Angela Yuriko Smith and Carol Gyzander, who also contributed to this issue. There's another image in mythology and fantasy that comes to mind as I discover these things, that of the worm ouroboros, which swallows its own tail.

Before leaving Mr. Diak's website, I thought I would quote a blurb from therein:

A century later, even after a few turbulent decades, Weird Tales is still regarded with prestige and as a premiere publisher of pulp stories, including the cosmic horror genre it pioneered. 

He posted that on April 26, 2023, in other words during the centennial of Weird Tales. So at some point, someone connected with the magazine realized that this was an anniversary year. I'm glad to know that. And I would agree that Weird Tales still carries with it a cachet, although that was earned in the first third (or maybe only quarter) of its hundred years. (What used to be a magazine has turned into a brand and a commodity.) I'm still not sure about cosmic horror, though--whether it's actually a thing or not.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley