"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