"The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson-Part Two

In "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson, a crazy guy named Bonneville is picked up on the road by a rocket scientist named Felix De Groot. Bonneville tells De Groot that he was on board the Apollo Eight spacecraft . . .

On his trip around the Moon, Bonneville spoke in tongues, in the language of the Void. (There is speaking in tongues in "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan as well.) What he said was recorded back at NASA. What he said drove men insane. He has a recording of his gibberish with him. His interlocutor asks to listen. Upon listening, De Groot, too, loses his mind--or his will to live--and crashes his car against an abutment in a fiery, orange ball. So, like the unnamed narrator in "Night Fishing," Bonneville is in possession of something from the Void, and when he exposes others to it, they meet their end in one way or another. These things happen when you open the wrong object or objects: your ears, a book, a box, a door, a gate, a package . . .

And that brings up a connection to Robert W. Chambers, for readers of "The King in Yellow" also lose their minds or their will to live after reading it. It also brings up a connection to H.P. Lovecraft, for the same thing happens to his characters when they read the Necronomicon. And it brings up a connection to Orson Welles' radio play The War of the Worlds, from eighty-six years and a month ago, for there are supposed to have been people who became hysterical and even threatened to kill themselves upon listening to it.

* * *

In Genesis (from which the Apollo Eight astronauts read on Christmas Eve 1968), God speaks and the Universe comes into existence. His Word is positive and creative. In stories of cosmic horror, though, words are negative and destructive. They bring an awareness or visions of the Void, or Chaos, the abyssal darkness that preceded Cosmos. 

God's Word establishes order and is intelligible to us. The words of the Void or Chaos are unintelligible, though. They are gibberish. They bring about disorder and insanity. So is it even possible for Word and Chaos to exist in the same Universe? Is this what the atheistic and materialistic authors of cosmic horror are trying to do, to speak word into Chaos instead of into Creation or Cosmos? Do they imagine, then, that they have a kind of inverse Godlike power? Are they not then engaged in a self-contradiction, an impossibility, an absurdity?

Maybe the proper construction or dichotomy is:

God speaks his Word into Creation, or Cosmos, and there is order.

Those who are against God utter their gibberish into the Void, or Chaos, and there is disorder and madness.

Or maybe it's the other way around:

The Void speaks its gibberish into us, thus making us mad--and annihilating us.

Men are not God. We create after him, because of him, in emulation of him, but we can't create something that can't be created. We can't bring non-existence into existence. We can't bring back something banished by God. The Void has been voided. Creation is here to stay.

But I guess we can play at the Void in our storytelling and our art, and that can be fun and entertaining, I guess, for as long as we keep it that way.

To be concluded . . .

Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley