Francis Paul Wilson was born on May 17, 1946, in Jersey City, New Jersey. He is a writer of science fiction, horror, and weird fiction. He has also worked in television, and some of his works have been adapted to that medium and the medium of film. His novel The Keep, from 1981, was adapted for theatrical release in 1983. It was also adapted to a board game and a role-playing game. In 2006, Mr. Wilson wrote the script for a comic book adaptation. Jonathan Maberry, current editor of Weird Tales, used Mr. Wilson's character Repairman Jack in his own series novel Cave 13, published in 2023. So there is still the same pattern: the authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue are friends of the editor, they are involved in TV and movies, and they write for comic books.
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The short story "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson follows his essay "Abrahamic vs. Cosmic Horror." There is a full-page illustration enclosing the main title followed by six solid pages of text. Thank goodness for some solid content.
I have been writing about brandnames used in fiction. Now here comes one driving right into the title of Mr. Wilson's story. That's okay, I think. America is a country of cars and roads. If we could translate that word--America--it might mean "a nation of people on the road, on the move." Many of our cultural works have been about cars and driving and being on the road. I won't list any. You'll think of plenty on your own. I'll just add that I had a chance to buy a Bonneville once. I wish I had done it.
"The Last Bonneville" is a third-person narrative. That seems to me significant, for the two other major works so far in this issue, "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell and "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan, are told in the first person and are, I think, somewhat autobiographical. Remember that the worm ouroboros, inverted and turned in upon itself, is rolling through the Cosmic Horror Issue. This story is told from a different point of view.
There are more brandnames and proper nouns in "The Last Bonneville," just as in previous stories: Maserati Ghibli, Elon Musk (a maker of both cars and rockets), Apollo Eight and its three astronauts, Borman, Lovell, and Anders. Two Kennedys, a Nixon, and another victim of an assassin's bullet, Martin Luther King. (Two out of the four of them sent men to the Moon. One of them went to the mountaintop.) There will be more. There will also be several meta-references. In other words, "The Last Bonneville" does not stand alone in its storytelling.
There are two characters in "The Last Bonneville." One is Felix De Groot, who drives a Maserati and works as a rocket scientist, an occupation that approaches that of the physicist in "Night Fishing." The other is a crazy guy named Bonneville who drives a Bonneville. DeGroot picks up Bonneville on the road. They talk as De Groot drives.
(Felix De Groot by the way means "happy" and "the great." He's about to be taken down a few notches in both categories. Bonneville's first name is Dwight, which is a pagan name referring to the pagan god Dionysus. His given name connects him to the Ancient Greek origins of science fiction, if Jack Williamson is right about these things. It also connects him to the chaotic aspect of the Dionysian. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the dichotomy between Apollonian order and Dionysian chaos. You are about to read another reference to Apollo, in three . . . two . . . one . . .)
Bonneville claims to have gone around the Moon on Apollo Eight. He is evidently an atheist. He calls it "ignorant and anti-science" to believe in God and the Creation. (The other day on this blog I was called ignorant by an anonymous believer in an anti-science belief system. Anonymous might be an atheist. He certainly believes that human beings can be gods and that we can create ourselves. He and his co-religionists should leave well enough alone and let God do his stuff.) While the other astronauts were reading from the Book of Genesis for all the world to hear--it was Christmastime after all--Bonneville
"stared in the other direction at all that empty space out there. At the Void. And not only did the Void stare back, it spoke to me--or at least something within the Void spoke." (p. 53)
So here they are again in Mr. Wilson's story: the Void and the allusion to Nietzsche.
Bonneville was going to blow up Apollo because he thought we should be quarantined on Earth (not realizing, I guess, that the idea of a quarantined Earth came from a thoroughgoing believer in God, C.S. Lewis). But the Void told him there isn't any reason to keep the people of Earth quarantined: "We were to be contained--not because we were a disease, as I thought, but because we were playthings." Whose playthings? Those of "Our Owner." (p. 53)
And now Charles Fort makes his return appearance, after his first in "Night Fishing." Nietzsche and Fort, together again at last.
Like "A Ghost Story for Christmas," there is a Christmastime theme. And like "Night Fishing," "The Last Bonneville" is a pretty full story, even if it's pretty short. There is talk of the Fermi Paradox, the Drake Equation, the "Wow!" Signal, the BLC-1 Signal. Brandnames come back, but the author makes a mistake by calling a Bonneville an Olds. It's actually a Pontiac. There is also mention of AirPods, an Apple product. Do these authors get kickbacks for dropping names in their stories? If he's waiting for a check from Pontiac, Mr. Wilson shouldn't hold his breath.
To be continued . . .
Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley
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