The Ships of Literature

When I wrote last, I pretty clearly placed literature above the level of genre fiction. That might be a little harsh. It's likely to offend fans of weird fiction, science fiction, horror, and so on. It might sound a little snobbish, too. People read for lots of different reasons. Every one is a good one, I think, unless you're reading a book on how to murder your spouse. Fans of genre fiction read for entertainment and escape, but the same can be said of those who read more nearly literary works. We read to escape from our own lives and to learn about the lives of others, to encounter them in the times and places in which they have lived. In that way, every book is a fantasy, and all reading an adventure. How many bookplates and library posters have you seen in which a book is compared to a sailing ship? That ship takes us away from our own lives and homes and countries, even to the other side of the world. Although there are literary novels of adventure, we think of adventure as a type of genre fiction. So maybe every good book is a type of fantasy, a story of adventure, something that takes us away and allows us to escape from our own lives, if only for a while. Remember that the first pulp magazine, a magazine of all fiction, was called The Argosy and was named after a ship of adventure.

None of that takes away from the fact that genre fiction, especially weird fiction, horror, science fiction, and even detective stories, are very often done in poor taste. Fiction of this type can be extremely and gratuitously violent, bloody, and gory. Too many readers seem to like it that way. They seem to seek out and actually enjoy bloody horrors. There is also a lot of salacious writing in these genres. Readers seem to seek out that kind of thing, too. And beyond that, there is the simple crime of just plain bad writing. Fans and scholars of genre fiction want their subject matter to be elevated to the level of literature and art, but you can't have it both ways. It can't be good if it's bad. It can't be considered at a high level if it exists at a low one. People love H.P. Lovecraft. His writing has received a fair amount of scholarly attention. Even Leslie Fiedler mentioned Lovecraft in his book Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). But none of that changes the fact that Lovecraft was guilty of some pretty bad writing. And he's at the top of the heap. What must be below him? Anyway, if you're going to defend genre fiction as being good or in good taste, you might be forced into the same situation as William Gaines, who said before Congress that a comic book cover showing a man holding a woman's severed head was in fact in good taste.

Speaking of Lovecraft, a few years ago, I read a book called Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff (2016). I meant to write about it at the time. I still might. There are lots of literary and other kinds of offenses in Mr. Ruff's novel. I won't go into that right now. I'll just say that within ten minutes of finishing it, I began reading Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003), and I found more good writing on the first page or two of Ms. Atwood's novel than in all of Lovecraft Country. Although Margaret Atwood derides science fiction as "talking squids in outer space" (she's looking at you, Admiral Ackbar!), Oryx and Crake is science fictional, for it is both dystopian and post-apocalyptic. But as a literary work, it exists at a higher level than things like Lovecraft Country. And I'm afraid that an excerpt from Lovecraft Country would fit right in with the current Weird Tales. Anything Margaret Atwood writes might not, as she understands (I think) that only a woman can be a woman. That's not a popular opinion in popular fiction or our current popular culture.

This is not to say that what is called literature is necessarily good, or better, or more enjoyable, or written at a higher level than is genre fiction. It's also not to say that what is called literature cannot be bloody, violent, salacious, and so on. Not long ago, I read a novel called Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess (1966). On its surface, Tremor of Intent is a spy novel, or a type of genre fiction, but I think Burgess had a more serious intent in writing it. (The American first edition was subtitled "An Eschatological Spy Novel.") Tremor of Intent is literary: I think Anthony Burgess was a good writer with a high purpose. Nonetheless, it has one of the most gruesome scenes I have ever read in a novel of any kind, so gruesome as to be fascinating in its gruesomeness. The point is that just because a work is considered literary doesn't mean that it does not also have things in common with genre fiction. The opposite can be true, too.

Anthony Burgess was a near contemporary of John Osborne, who wrote, among other things, Look Back in Anger (1956). Osborne was one of the "angry young men" of the 1950s. I read his play a long time ago. I found his protagonist Jimmy to be cruel, unpleasant, unlikable, unsympathetic. Look Back in Anger is considered a realist play. It followed in a line going back to the nineteenth century, including the naturalism of the nineteenth century. Naturalism and realism are considered literary. I guess we're supposed to find value in works of this type. Realism caught on well in America. One example that has leapt into my mind is The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren (1949), another novel that I found to be pretty unpleasant. And just a couple of weeks ago, I read an anthology called Nelson Algren's Own Book of Lonesome Monsters: 13 Masterpieces of Black Humor (1962), and I can tell you this is one of the worst books I have ever read. I should have read a science fiction novel instead of this book of "literature."

Unfortunately, themes, styles, and subject matter have gone back and forth between literature and genre fiction. And unfortunately, genre fiction seems to have become too heavily influenced by what is called literature. I think this is chiefly through naturalism, realism, and I guess post-modernism. The sympathies of authors who work in genre fiction seem to have gone over to the outcast, the aberrant, the perverted, the hateful, the murderous, the nihilistic, and so on. Those same authors seem to want to invite us into the horrible places inside themselves and their own psyches, there to join them in all of their decadence, corruption, hatred, and descent. People don't read in order to hate or to be corrupted or dragged down into darknesses, voids, and abysses, or at least they shouldn't. If they do, there is something really seriously wrong with them. They need spiritual help. (It's there.) When we board a craft, we want it to be a great sailing ship (the leaves of a book are like the sails of a ship), not Charon's ferryboat. Or if we go that way, we want an Orpheus to lead us back.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

A Friend

A friend died very recently. I don't yet know what day. I came back earlier this week, late on a rainy and utterly black night to find a terrible message waiting for me. The next morning I drove into a rising and reaching fog. It had been cold overnight. The rain and humidity from the previous night had frozen not in sheets or crusts on the ground but as heavy frost, a strange, almost supernatural, turn in the weather. In the morning, a thick, misty fog, made from the previous night's rain, went up in tendrils, into cold but warming air and a bright sky, into the blue sky of morning after a storm in the night.

I hesitate to write about her here, but the world must know what has happened. I know nothing yet except that she is gone, nothing outside of what a couple of friends have told me. I hadn't seen my friend in a long time, but that was okay. Just knowing that she was in the world was enough. Even if I had never seen her again, knowing that she was still with us would have been enough. I won't name her. This isn't the place for that. I don't want to sully her with this association. After all, the word weird is in the title of my blog (even if I have tried to show that weird is a concept that predates and rises above the level of most weird fiction and science fiction). She came from something higher and finer. The Internet is a lowly and shabby place. It's mostly garbage. And yet here I am still writing about her. I guess I'm trying to make this shabby place into something better. I hope that remembering her will help raise it up.

My friend was a wonderful person. She had a bright and positive personality. The world was a better and happier place with her in it. Now she is gone, taken from us, and it has been diminished. The hole that's left is not just the size and shape of her. It's much bigger than that. And pieces keep falling away, like how a bank is cut and undermined by a fast-flowing river. I feel like something has been taken from inside of me, too. I don't know whether more pieces will go, or if this will end and the cuts will soften and smooth over.

She was a professor of English literature. She specialized in British literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially literature by women and about women, feminism, women's rights, and women's suffrage. She taught us one book about a woman and another by a woman. In her own book she wrote about Joseph Conrad. Recently I wrote about Conrad, too. If I can find a copy of her book, I can see what she wrote about him and about other authors of his time. In a photograph of her, taken in her office, there are books by Conrad on the shelf behind her. I always liked to hear about her research. She traveled to England before the coronavirus, there to look for primary sources. To me it sounded like an adventure. The last time I talked to her was under a great dome.

My friend loved and was excited by literature. It's rare to find someone who loves what you love and cares about what you care about. When you find her, you discover a kindred spirit. Weird fiction and science fiction are fine, but they are mostly just entertainments. In literature, though, there is enormous power, depth, scope, and meaning. Literature is one of our greatest creations, I think, and shows back to us so much about ourselves, our lives, our hearts and minds, the nature of our existence, our relationships with each other, our place in the universe. She saw in literature all of that and wanted others to see it, too. Her love and excitement went out around her like a cloud--a gently forceful and persuasive and inviting cloud. That's one of the reasons I say that the hole that is left in her dying is so much larger than she was in her person.

She was a good teacher. She had enough confidence in herself, in her love for and excitement about literature, most of all in her subject matter to stand in front of a group with an open book in front of her, while theirs were closed, or maybe only half open, and to lead them--to lead us--and to say to us, "Follow me." And we did. But now she's gone and I don't know what we're supposed to do. This feeling is not about the loss of her as a teacher but as a whole and wonderful person. We need her still because we love her. She has gone ahead of us, though, and we will surely all follow those whom we have lost. But maybe once again she has read the book ahead of us and she understands it, or at least she understands it better than we do, and maybe she can lead us again. And we will learn from her and follow.

Nothing that exists passes out of existence. Because she and everyone else who has left us existed, she and they exist. I am certain of that. Her body and spirit have separated from each other. Her body has gone back to the earth, which is where it came from. Her spirit has gone somewhere else, which is where it came from. We will never again see on this earth the people who have left us. But I believe we will all see each other again.

The saying is that journalism is the first draft of history. Maybe grief and sorrow are the first draft in learning how to live without someone whom you have loved--but whom you can always still love, because love, once created, cannot be destroyed. Because love is imperishable.

Terence E. Hanley, Saturday, March 29, 2025.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

The Weird Tales Scam

Every once in a while I look on the Internet for news of my blog. This isn't really vanity--or not mostly vanity--I just want to see what's going on out there. I don't have any connections to people in weird fiction or science fiction except for the members of our weird fiction book club. I don't know anything about current trends, developments, or controversies. I don't subscribe to any magazines and don't go looking for new fiction. The main reason I ordered Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue, is that it was advertised as the 100th anniversary issue. Now here it is two years later and I'm still writing about the thing.

But other people are, too.

In my most recent Internet search, I came upon an essay called "Pulp Fiction Scholar Savages Jonathan Mayberry's [sic] Weird Tales Fantasy Magazine Revival," by Richard Merritt on the website Fandom Pulse, and dated November 26, 2024. As it turns out, I'm the "pulp fiction scholar" of the title. I guess I don't mind being called a scholar. But I like John Keel's disclaimer: "Not an authority on anything." I don't have an advanced degree. I don't work in academia. I have never had anything published in a scholarly journal. I have never been a speaker or presenter at a conference. I'm not a publisher or editor. I don't know what that makes me. Maybe scholar is it.

So today I would like to write about Mr. Merritt's essay.

I'll start by saying that one of the first courtesies you can extend to another person is to get his name right. Jonathan Maberry, current editor of Weird Tales, seems to have failed in that with one of his contributors, Nicole Sixx, whose name is apparently not Nicola, as it is spelled in his table of contents. But then Mr. Merritt misspelled Mr. Maberry's last name in the very title of his essay, and then mixes correct and incorrect spellings in its main body. Does anybody work with a proofreader or editor these days?

Mr. Merritt's essay starts off well enough when he suggests that the current Weird Tales is a skinsuit. It's hard not to see things that way. Weird Tales looks like Weird Tales and has some of its trappings, but it's mostly an imitation. More accurately, I think, it's a type of exploitation. A lot of people have glommed onto something that they never created and could never have created because they're too small, all for their own purposes and their own gain. It's actually pretty cynical when you think about it. The egregious failure of the current Weird Tales to meet its business obligations is more cynical still. I'll go beyond the word skinsuit: the current Weird Tales is a scam.

I don't have Mr. Merritt's full essay. It's behind a paywall. (My blog is free. Things about my blog you have to pay for.) My friend Nate was kind enough to get it for me, but my version is cut off. I have this clause from Mr. Merritt, though: "Even legacy magazines from the heyday of the pulp era aren't safe from crusaders injecting their tired politics into them [. . .]." If he's referring to Weird Tales #367, I will say that at least Mr. Maberry and his contributors did not inject politics into their magazine (or at least I didn't detect any politics in my reading of it). We can be thankful for that. There is a political issue on the fringes of the magazine, though. I covered that last year. The editor and his authors wisely avoided these otherwise poisonous topics, poisonous and fatal to fiction-writing and the pleasures of reading.

Richard Merritt went through some of what I wrote about the magazine. "Overall," he concluded, "the revival is a mess." Those are his words. Although I wouldn't call it a mess, I would also not praise it very highly, either. Most of it is readable. Some of it is fair to good. None of it is very good or excellent. As I wrote before, probably nothing in here will ever be anthologized, which is far less than you can say about the original Weird Tales and its contemporaries in science fiction. I guess we like to mine the material and culture from the past while putting ourselves above the people who created it. This is presentism in one of its worst forms. Read on . . .

Near the end of his essay, Mr. Merritt showed something that Jonathan Maberry posted on Twitter/X in 2019. Mr. Maberry wrote: "My goal is to find exceptional stories from writers of all kinds. None of the racism, sexism, and homophobia that was once associated with this title." So the goal is not to seek out good and promising writers, regardless of their identitarian qualities, to guide and advise them in their work, or to publish good, enjoyable, memorable, and well-written stories. No, the goal is evidently something else, something less. The focus isn't on what's good but what's bad about the past. And the goal is negative rather than positive. Any adult should know (Jonathan Maberry is sixty-six years old) that negative goals don't work. You have to be for something, not against something else. Anyway, maybe that's where the reference to politics in the first paragraph of Mr. Merritt's essay comes from.

Richard Merritt also quoted from the magazine Cirsova, which wrote, I believe also on Twitter/X: "the guy who's behind the most recent woke relaunch of Weird Tales slapped the Weird Tales logo on his own book and called [it] 'The first Weird tales novel'." I don't know who wrote that and when. In addition to not having any connections to anybody, I don't use X or any other social media. In any case, that quote seems to be from someone called #stolenvalor. That's another fitting phrase, if I'm reading the reference the right way. Mr. Maberry has no claim at all to the label "the first Weird Tales novel." I think what he means actually is that his novel is the first Weird Tales-branded novel. And as we have seen, branding, the use of brandnames, product placement, and the advertising of Weird Tales merchandise seem to be the main activities in the writing and publication of Weird Tales #367. Good writing isn't it.

Skinsuit . . . scam . . . stolen valor. All seem to be accurate in reference to the current Weird Tales. I will say to the current editor and publisher: Let us have our magazine back. At the beginning, in the November issue of 1924, the new editor, Farnsworth Wright declared:

Weird Tales belongs to you, the readers, and we will be guided by your wishes.

Let us have our magazine back.

-----

Corrected on April 2, 2025. Thanks to Mike for the correction.
Thank you to Nate for a copy of Richard Merritt's essay.
Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

The 100th Anniversary in the San Diego Comic Con Book

As I was going through anniversaries and observances of anniversaries last year, I missed an observance. This one was for the 100th anniversary of Weird Tales, and it was published in the Comic Con International: San Diego 2023 Souvenir Book, which went along with that renowned comic book convention held from July 20 through July 23, 2023. The article is called "Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird," and it was written by the current editor of the magazine, Jonathan Maberry. Mr. Maberry's article is nine pages long and includes a lot of illustrations and photographs. If you read it, you will probably notice the lists. Lists after lists. And after the lists, there are more lists. My complaint from before--lists are not writing--still applies. A second complaint: the use of brandnames, this time in the names of undefined or ill-defined sub-sub-genres of fiction, little pools filled with little fish, including "cosmic horror" and "dark fantasy," as if the use of these brandnames is somehow incantatory. Then there is product placement, more or less an advertisement for the 100th anniversary book, also edited by Mr. Maberry. And then another complaint: a lack of editing. Where was the editor or proofreader of Mr. Maberry's article when he wrote:

Part of the fun of this is working with the writers to discover new ways of crafting tales that do not fit easily into any other magazine's "box" but that whisper to the dark heart of  .

Yes, there really is an unfinished sentence in a professionally written and printed publication. And of course I have already written about this insistence that there is something new in genre fiction, when really there is nothing new at all as far as I can tell, including in the 100th-anniversary issue of Weird Tales, which has on its cover and in its lead story a thirty-five-year-old comic book character.

Next: I continue beating a dead horse.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Anne Forman Ellis (1893-1946)

Travel Writer, Tourist/Traveler, Secretary
Born December 18, 1893, Carrollton, Kentucky
Died June 22, 1946, Leigh Memorial Hospital, Norfolk, Virginia

Anne Elizabeth Forman Ellis was born on December 18, 1893, in Carrolton, Kentucky to Alfred Soward Forman and Jennie Wilson Forman. She was a traveler and tourist who had just one letter in Weird Tales, published one hundred years ago this month. Here it is in its entirety, with an editorial introduction:

This is very gratifying, but sh! not too loud, or we may get some hard knocks. But no; the next letter is even more enthusiastic. It is from Anne Forman Ellis, of Norfolk, Virginia, who writes: "Doubtless many of your readers have perused their recent copies of WEIRD TALES under more difficult conditions or in stranger surroundings or at points farther away than I, but I think that for anyone not a professional traveler I may claim the palm for long-distance commuting in my reading, for I read part of the May-June-July quarterly while on my way from Norfolk to California in July, the rest of it on my return trip a week later, the November number while on my way out again in October, the December number as I returned this month--a total of some 14,500 miles to the three copies. To me the apotheosis of comfort and content is the Pullman berth with its drawn curtains shutting out the world, the lulling rock of the fast train, a box of carefully selected chocolates AND a copy of the newest WEIRD TALES with its delightful shudders."

I'm not sure that I have ever read a better or more fun account of someone reading and enjoying Weird Tales than this. What any of us wouldn't give to be there again in those years, riding a train across America!

Anne Forman Ellis lived in Norfolk, Virginia, for thirty years. She was secretary of Mutual Federal Savings & Loan Association, and before that of the Tidewater Automobile Association. She traveled throughout the United States and wrote on historic and scenic sites in Virginia. She was married to and divorced from (in 1926) Carleton Bliss Ellis. Despite his name, there does not appear to have been any bliss in their marriage, for she sued him for desertion and their time together (and apart) lasted just three years and four months. Despite that, she kept his name and the title Mrs. She died on June 22, 1946, at Leigh Memorial Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia. She was just fifty-two years old. Luckily we have her letter.

Anne Forman Ellis' Letter to "The Eyrie"

March 1925

Further Reading
"Mrs. Anne Forman Ellis" (obituary), The Portsmouth (Virginia) Star June 24, 1946, page 8; other obituaries and newspaper items, too.

Anne Forman Ellis (1893-1946)

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Margaret McBride Hoss (1890-1962)

Poet, Lyricist, Author, Librarian
Born November 8, 1890, Nevada, Missouri
Died September 29, 1962, Lake Worth Beach, Florida

Margaret McBride Hoss was born on November 8, 1930, in Nevada, Missouri. That's pronounced Ne-VAY-da for non-natives of the Show Me State. She was the daughter of Judge Granville Snell Hoss (1850-1918) and Julia (McBride) Hoss (1856-1949) and a very distant relative of Daniel Boone. Her brother was also a teller of weird tales. His name was Granville S. Hoss [Junior] (1885-1950), and he wrote five stories published in "The Unique Magazine." They are:

• "The Man Who Thought He Was Dead" (May/June/July 1924)
• "Dr. Jerbot's Last Experiment" (Mar. 1926)
• "The Mist-Monster" (Feb. 1928)
• "The Frog" (June 1930)
• "Out of the Sun" (Dec. 1936)

I have access to various newspaper articles mentioning Hoss, published in Ellington, Missouri, a place I called home for a year in my life.

Margaret McBride Hoss had just one story in Weird Tales, "The Weird Green Eyes of Sari," from March 1925, one hundred years ago this month. Her story is about a fish-woman. "Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H.P. Lovecraft has some similarities to "The Weird Green Eyes of Sari." In Margaret McBride Hoss' story, the man retreats to Kansas, far from any ocean.

Margaret M. Hoss also wrote slogans, song lyrics, poems, and short stories published in American newspapers and magazines from 1924 onward. Following are some of her credits:

• "Over the Hills with Sally" in Motor Life (article, Nov. 1924)
• "Noses" (poem, 1924)
• "Ode to Man" (poem, 1924)
• "That School Girl Complexion" (poem, 1924)
• "What Every Feller Oughter Have" (poem, 1931)
• "Gypsy Woman" (short story, 1936)

Margaret McBride Hoss graduated as valedictorian in a class of twenty ladies from William Woods' College (now William Woods University) in Fulton, Missouri. Her degree was an A.B. and her field was a literary course of study. In 1920, she moved from her home in Cherryvale, Kansas, to Lake Worth, Florida. Cherryvale, by the way, was the birthplace of movie actress Louise Brooks (1906-1985), who was a generation younger than the Hoss children. Margaret M. Hoss married Don Eastin on May 19, 1930, in Florida, and worked as a librarian at Lake Worth City Library until her retirement in 1959. Margaret McBride Hoss Eastin died on September 29, 1962, in Lake Worth Beach, Florida, at age seventy-one.

Margaret McBride Hoss' Story in Weird Tales
"The Weird Green Eyes" of Sari" (Mar. 1925)

Further Reading
Various newspaper articles, poems, and short stories published during her lifetime.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

What is it? What was it?

In "The Horla," by Guy de Maupassant, one of the narrators asks, "What is it?", this invisible being that has afflicted him. His question echoes the title of Fitz-James O'Brien's earlier short story "What Was It? A Mystery," originally published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in March 1859. "What Was It?" was reprinted in Weird Tales in December 1925 as No. 6 in a series called "Weird Story Reprints." It was reprinted many times before that and has been many times since.

As in "The Horla," the invisible being in O'Brien's story first falls upon the narrator while he is in his bed. The being tries to choke him, but that's where the similarity ends. Fitz-James O'Brien was an Irish writer, but he wrote his story while living in America, and his story is set in America. In crossing over from the Old World to the New, O'Brien seems to have become an American, and his hero is one, too, for he triumphs over his invisible attacker, whereas Maupassant's narrators fall victim to theirs, especially in the second version of 1887. I have written before about the difference between the American hero and his European counterpart. Maupassant's narrators are defeated in their encounters with the Horla. The first is hospitalized. The second is driven nearly insane and decides he must kill himself. O'Brien's narrator subdues his tormenter and keeps it captive until its tragic death. Although it was written in Antebellum times, "What Was It?" is very much like an American science fiction monster movie from 1950s.

There are imperfect parallels between the American hero and the triumphant science-fictional hero versus the European protagonist and the defeated, humiliated weird-fictional protagonist. O'Brien's narrator is an example of the former. Maupassant's narrators are examples of the latter. I have written about that before, too. You can read part of what I wrote in "Weird Tales & Weird Fiction-Part Two," from January 24, 2023, by clicking here. It's one of my favorite entries in this blog. We'll see what you think of it. Anyway, I find the difference between these two stories and their authors to be striking. They are, I think, a simple distillation of the difference between the American and European ways of looking at the world and a simple example of why America remains the indispensable nation. Without us, the world would be overrun by invisible monsters, including the invisible monsters of the mind.

An illustration by Lawrence for "What Was It?" by Fitz-James O'Brien, from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1949.

P.S. Fitz-James O'Brien died by violence in our Civil War. Guy de Maupassant died by self-destruction. There are of course Americans who destroy themselves. It's a way of life not only for us but also for all people everywhere. This is just a too-obvious example of the difference between an American writer and his European counterpart. Ernest Hemingway combined these two ways of dying, for he died by violent self-destruction. Will Rogers famously said, "We'll be the first nation in the world to go to the poor house in an automobile." We're probably also the first people to go the morgue along the barrel of a gun.

I should point out that American literature began in part with a discussion of the invisible, with Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World, published in 1693. Here is a passage from Chapter II that reads like the attacks of the invisible beings in O'Brien's and Maupassants' stories:

An Army of Devils is horribly broke in upon the place which is the Center, and after a sort, the First-born of our English Settlements: and the Houses of the Good People there are fill'd with the doleful Shrieks of their Children and Servants, Tormented by Invisible Hands, with Tortures altogether preternatural. After the Mischiefs there Endeavoured, and since in part Conquered, the terrible Plague, of Evil Angels, hath made its Progress into some other places, where other Persons have been in like manner Diabolically handled. These our poor Afflicted Neighbours, quickly after they become Infected and Infested with these Dæmons, arrive to a Capacity of Discerning those which they conceive the Shapes of their Troublers [. . .]. 

That sounds like O'Brien's narrator and his friends making a plaster casting of his invisible attacker: he discerns and conceives the shape of his troubler.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Four Men-Part Four

"The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant is in two versions. The first version is a short story or tale published in 1886. The second is a long short story or novelette published in 1887. If you can, you should read these two versions together, even if the second version is fuller and, I would say, more important in the history of science fantasy and science fiction.

The first version is shorter, more objective, and more emotionally even. It takes the form of a first-person narrative within a third-person narrative, and so we're not completely immersed in the narrator's low or declining mental state. There is the very likely possibility that he's telling the truth about his experiences with an otherwise inexplicable invisible being. The situation, with its framing device set inside of a hospital, reminds me of the movie version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

The second version of "The Horla" is longer and entirely subjective. The narrator is very slowly losing his mind, and by the end is ready to kill himself. His version takes the form of a series of diary entries. The diarist can be taken as an unreliable narrator. He may be merely insane rather than a witness to real but inexplicable events. Could Maupassant have gone into steep decline in between his composition of these two versions? Could he have been his own diarist/narrator?

A long time ago, I wrote about Fritz Leiber, Jr., and the problem of the weird tale in the twentieth century. That problem is summarized in passages from Leiber's short story "The Hound," originally in Weird Tales in November 1942:

"We begin by denying all the old haunts and superstitions. Why shouldn't we? They belong to the era of cottage and castle. They can't take root in the new environment."

* * * 

"The supernatural beings of a modern city? Sure, they'd be different from the ghosts of yesterday. Each culture creates its own ghosts."

In "The Horla," Maupassant anticipated the problem of the weird tale in the twentieth century, for the new being of his title is a materialistic/scientific monster set to displace the supernatural monsters and ghosts of the past. At this point, I should say that "The Horla" is a very rich story, full of ideas and episodes, each with its own interest. It's a kitchen-sink kind of story, an attempt at a single explanation for seemingly many disparate things. Every fan of weird fiction should read it carefully, for it treats concepts of the supernatural past, the Nietzschean (and Darwinian) present, and the Fortean future, mostly directly and on full display now that we have had nearly a century and a half to read stories of this type. "The Horla" also anticipated H.G. Wells, and I wonder: was it the first alien invasion story in the history of science fiction?

In the two versions of "The Horla," the eponymous being is compared directly or indirectly to an incubus/succubus, a vampire, and a demon that takes possession of a man's life, mind, and activity. In the second version especially, "The Horla" presents a kind of unified-field theory of anomalous phenomena in that so many things that were formerly explained by supernatural means--incubi/succubi, night paralysis, vampires, demons, ghosts, poltergeists, and so on--now have a materialistic explanation, this for an age in which God has been proclaimed dead and the supernatural no longer has any power in our lives:

     We've always had a foreboding of him, for centuries we've dreaded him and announced his coming. Our forefathers were always haunted by fear of the Invisible.
     Now he has come.
     He was the true subject of all the old legends about fairies, gnomes and evil, elusive spirits in the air. He was sensed in advance by men who were already apprehensive and trembling. (First version, Bantam, 1994, p. 295)

Note the language of the Christian concept of the Second Coming and of a relief from anxiety, fear, and trembling--except that those feelings are not relieved but enforced by the coming of the Horla.

From the second version, in which the hypnotist Dr. Parent, obviously meant to represent a man of science, speaks from a position of supposed authority:

"Ever since man has thought, since he has felt himself close to a mystery which is impenetrable to his coarse and imperfect senses, and he endeavors to supplement the feeble penetration of his organs by the efforts of his intellect. As long as that intellect remained in its elementary stage, this intercourse with invisible spirits assumed forms which were commonplace though terrifying. Thence sprang the popular belief in the supernatural, the legends of wandering spirits, of fairies, of gnomes, of ghosts, I might even say the conception of God, for our ideas of the Workman-Creator, from whatever religion they may have come down to us, are certainly the most mediocre, the stupidest and the most unacceptable inventions that ever sprang from the frightened brain of any human creature." (Random House, 1945, 1950, p. 33)

In "The Horla," God is dethroned first by science and materialism, and that clears the way for man to be dethroned from his place near the top of the great chain of being. Why should we enjoy any special status? Why should we not give way to this new superior being? For no reason at all.

There is much in "The Horla" for us to contemplate, definitely more than I can cover in a blog entry or two. I'll bring up two more concepts before getting to the main part of what I set out to say today. The first involves Friedrich Nietzsche . . .

I have read that if God is dead, then all that remains to drive human activity is the Nietzschean will to power. (The only other options, I guess, are nihilism and self-destruction, both of which were at work in Maupassant's work and life, as well as, ultimately, in that of Nietzsche.) I'm not a philosopher and don't understand philosophical ideas very well. All I can say is that there are exercises of will shown in "The Horla." An introduction to this concept is in the episode in which the diarist's cousin is hypnotized and her will coopted by her hypnotist. This taking-over of her will foreshadows that of the Horla's taking-over of the diarist's will later in the story. There seems to be a parallel made between possession by a supernatural being--a demon--and that of the materialistic/scientific Horla. In both instances, the possessed person loses his ability to exercise his will to a more powerful--or superior--being. We now recognize mesmerism as a pseudoscience, and so the force of Maupassant's idea is reduced in our time. But in his, mesmerism was perhaps seen as more potent scientifically and no doubt useful for his purposes. In any case, hypnotism or mesmerism was a way for him to treat the concept of a loss of will--or the Nietzschean concept of the will to power--to effect.

The second materialistic or scientific (or pseudoscientific) concept treated indirectly in "The Horla" is that of Darwinism, for the obvious point is that the Horla is more advanced than humanity in evolutionary terms: he has come, again, to displace us. In the first version, Dr. Marrande speaks as the narrator closes out his narrative:

"I don't know if this man is mad or we both are, or . . . or if our successor has really arrived." (p. 296)

In the second version, the diarist describes the Horla as man's "successor in this world." (p. 38) On August 19, he writes:

     Now I know. I can divine. The reign of man is over, and He has come. [. . .] Woe to us! Woe to man! He has come [. . .] the Horla--it is He--the Horla--He has come!--" (p. 39)

He continues:

     A new being! Why not? It was assuredly bound to come! Why should we be the last? We do not distinguish it, like all the others created before us? The reason is, its nature is more delicate, its body finer and more finished than ours. [. . .]
    There are only a few--so few--stages of development in this world, from the oyster up to the man. Why should there not be one more, when once that period is accomplished which separates the successive products one from the other?
     Why not one more? (p. 40)    

That, surely, is progress and evolution.

It's plain to me that the Horla is a being from another planet, from the stars. Some readers might see it differently. But I see "The Horla" as an alien invasion story, and perhaps the first of its type. H.G. Wells usually gets credit for writing the first or one of the first alien invasion stories in his scientific romance or seminal science fiction novel The War of the Worlds (1895; 1897). It's easy to see why "The Horla" would have slipped notice, for it is a far more subtle and less sensationalistic work. Again, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, another far more subtle (and insidious) work, is closer in concept to "The Horla."

Finally, I would like to bring up Charles H. Fort, the youngest of the four men of the title. I have written a lot of about Fort. I see him as a seminal figure in science fiction as well. In thinking about man's place in the universe, Fort famously concluded:

"I think we're property."

(From The Book of the Damned, 1919, Chapter 12; see "Piecing Together Separated Things," from May 13, 2022.) That idea--that we are merely the property of superior beings, extraterrestrial in origin--has come down to us through all kinds of science fiction and science fantasy stories from the pulp era to the present. In fact, it's extremely prominent in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, published nigh on two years ago. Fort is credited as the originator of that idea, which also, as it so happens, forms the basis, I think, of the ancient astronaut hypothesis. But was Fort the originator? Or did it come from somewhere else? I'll answer my own questions, for it seems to have come from "The Horla." Very obviously from "The Horla," in both of its versions. From version one:

     What is it? Gentlemen, it's the being the earth has been awaiting, after man! He's come to dethrone us, subjugate us, tame us, perhaps to feed on us, as we feed on cattle and hogs. (pp. 294-295)

And from version two:

. . . but the Horla will make of man what man has made of the horse and of the ox: His chattel, His slave, and His food, by the mere power of his will. Woe to us! (p. 39)

So in the second passage, there is--as in the Cosmic Horror Issue--the combination of a Nietzschean idea--"the mere power of will"--and a Fortean one--we are "chattel."

(There are episodes involving mirrors and gazing into mirrors in "The Horla." I don't have those puzzled out, but I wonder if they could allude to the Nietzschean idea of gazing into abysses.)

As for the narrator/diarist in "The Horla," he finally puts together his ideas regarding the Horla by availing himself of what I have called the Fortean method. This is more overt in the first version than in the second, but it's present in both, for in both, the narrator/diarist discovers, like Fort, a newspaper account that provides an explanation for what has so afflicted him. In the first version, that account refers to "[a] kind of epidemic of madness" that has struck in Brazil, that is, attacks by "invisible vampires." These are obviously made by what the narrator has called the Horla. And he remembers that a Brazilian ship recently passed by his house near the Seine. Without the newspaper account, the attacks would remain an isolated mystery, perhaps an individual madness. But with it, they become real in the world, the account being all of the evidence needed that something strange is indeed going on here.

(The arrival of a vampire carried on board ship from another place reminds me of the plot of Dracula by Bram Stoker, published in 1897.)

So did Fort read Maupassant, specifically "The Horla"? I don't know. I didn't find entries on Maupassant in the indexes of either of my biographies of Fort (by Damon Knight and Jim Steinmeyer). Fort traveled in the Old World. Presumably he was exposed to Old World literature. But I guess these things will remain mysteries. In any case, I would say that "The Horla" was at least an early story to treat the problem of the supernatural past in the materialistic/scientific present; that it was one of the first if not the first alien invasion story; that it seems to have treated the Nietzschean concept of a will to power; that it also seems to have treated the Darwinian concept of man as just a link in an evolutionary chain reaching forever forward; that it predated the Fortean concept that we are merely the property of superior extraterrestrial intelligences; and that newspaper accounts and other documents can be used to explain what would otherwise remain disparate and unexplainable phenomena, and so in addition to science, we have journalism as an explainer.

So read "The Horla" and see what you can find in its pages.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Four Men-Part Three

God created the cosmos, thereby banishing the void and chaos that preceded it. For as long as God exists and reigns supreme, there can be no void, and nothing from the void can exist in or intrude upon the universe. All things are under God and there can be no horror emanating from anything in his Creation. All horrors must wait, lurking outside the circle of star-firelight that is the universe, like beasts from before time and history.

But "God is dead," or so proclaimed Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in The Gay Science, published in 1882. So if God is dead, then there can be cosmic horror. He no longer stands as a bulwark against void and chaos. And like so many horrors, cosmic horror had to wait until the nineteenth century before it could emerge--or re-emerge--for God's position at the top of creation was forever secure and unassailable before then. His law was always supreme. Weird came back in the nineteenth century. (Weird is not a horror.) But maybe it is our little fit of foot-stamping--God is dead, we cry--that made horrors, both fictional and actual, possible in the twentieth. Remember that the most murderous regimes in human history have been atheistic.

It's useful, I think, to look at chronologies. Nietzsche proclaimed God to be dead in 1882 (or recognized a belief among his fellows to that effect). That was very near the beginning of Guy de Maupassant's career as a published author. The first version of "The Horla" was published in October 1886. The second came along in 1887. Also in 1886, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future by Nietszche was published. (We would recognize the title as almost science-fictional.) In that book, Nietzsche 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. (From Chapter 4, No. 146)

If you think only in terms of genre fiction, then you might read that as predictive of stories of supernatural horror, weird fiction, and science fantasy of the coming century. We have Nietzsche's concept and stories of that type overtly in our own, in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023).

* * *

Nietzsche read Maupassant. In his autobiography, he wrote:

I do not see from what century of the past one could dredge up such inquisitive and at the same time such delicate psychologists as in contemporary Paris [. . .] to single out one of the strong race, a genuine Latin toward whom I am especially well disposed, Guy de Maupassant. (From Ecce Homo, "Why I Am So Clever," Chapter 3, in my Vintage edition, pages 243-244; Ecce Homo written in 1888 and published posthumously.)

I don't have a biography of Maupassant. Surprisingly, such a thing is hard to come by. So I don't know whether he ever read Nietzsche.

* * *

Nietzsche had a mental breakdown on January 3, 1889. He was institutionalized, I believe, that same month. In the in-between time, he wrote a number of letters to his friends. Most of these were signed "Dionysius." (Remember that the Nietzschean title character in "The Last Bonneville," by F. Paul Wilson is named Dwight, a name derived from Dionysius.) Nietzsche hung on until 1900 and died in Maupassant's (and Lovecraft's) birth month, August, also the same month in which the Horla becomes known to his hapless victim. (Twenty and five make twenty-five.) As for Maupassant, he had his breakdown almost exactly three years later, on January 2, 1892, when he tried to kill himself. He was committed to an asylum and died there in 1893. What is it about January?

* * *

Guy de Maupassant died of syphilis. There was a time when people thought that Nietzsche had died of the same thing. I guess that idea has gone by the wayside. H.P. Lovecraft's father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, also died of syphilis. He had a psychotic breakdown in April 1893 and died in 1898. Lovecraft's mother, Sarah Susan (Phillips) Lovecraft, also suffered from mental illness and was also committed to an institution. She died in 1921. So all three authors--Nietzsche, Maupassant, and Lovecraft--had mental illness in their lives, and all three died while quite young. The same things are true of Edgar Allan Poe who preceded them.

* * *

Before moving on to Part Four of this series, I will point out that Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933) studied art in France. I'm not sure that anyone knows the exact dates, but I believe he returned to the United States in the period 1893 to 1894 or 1895. I don't think there's any doubt that Chambers read Maupassant. How could he have avoided it? And there are some similarities in their respective works, even if Lovecraft observed in his consideration of The King in Yellow (1895) what he called "a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by [George] Du Maurier's Trilby [first published in 1894]."

* * *

I had hoped to get more into "The Horla" in this part, but that will have to wait until next time.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

100 Years of R'lyeh!

I have overlooked the 100th anniversary of the real-life earthquake that brought the fictional (we hope) Cthulhu Island to the surface of the South Pacific Ocean. It happened this past weekend, February 28-March 1, 2025. The earthquake struck at 9:23:30 p.m. on February 28, 1925, off the coast of Maine. In the South Pacific, it was March 1, and at coordinates 47° 9′ South, 126° 43′ West, Cthulhu's undersea crypt, on the island known as R'lyeh, was thrust up from the ocean floor. If I have calculated correctly, it was a little before 1 o'clock in the morning local time that R'lyeh bubbled up from the depths.

The Cthulhu crisis culminated on March 23, 1925, when the crew of the Emma encountered--and were slaughtered by--the Great Green Fiend from another world. Second Mate Gustaf Johansen fled. Once on board ship again, he drove the Emma into Cthulhu, cleaving him like a sunfish. Johansen escaped, only to be murdered later on by some Cthulhu cultists. Johansen's act was one of desperation and survival. But maybe we can stretch things a little and say that he acted heroically, as did, we hope to say, other characters in "The Call of Cthulhu." That's more than can be said of weird-fictional characters of today, who are either unheroic or downright reprehensible in their actions. Anyway, Happy Anniversary, Earthquake and R'lyeh!

(By the way, singer and band member David Johansen died on February 28, 2025. We send condolences to his friends and family. It's sad, so sad, that so many people so prominent in the culture of the 1960s and '70s have died and that those times are so rapidly fading from memory.)

The location of R'lyeh (at the crosshairs), about halfway between New Zealand and Tierra del Fuego.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Four Men-Part Two

I'll set aside Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft before bringing them up again. The four men of the title are:

• German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900);

• French author Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893);

• American author Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933); and

• American author and gadfly of science Charles H. Fort (1874-1932).

Some of the stories in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023) allude to ideas from two of these men, Nietzsche and Fort. Now that I have read "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant, I can draw him into this discussion, too, along with Robert W. Chambers.

Robert W. Chambers is mentioned by name in the Cosmic Horror Issue. Guy de Maupassant is not, except very indirectly, for in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, one of the videos watched by the main character during his solitary holiday binge is Diary of a Madman (1963), starring Vincent Price. Although it bears the title of one of Maupassant's stories, Diary of a Madman is mostly based on another, namely, "The Horla." Both stories take the form of diaries, and so it was easy, I guess, to put them together. If the moviemakers had entitled their film The Horla, no one would have known what it was about. Besides that, it probably wouldn't have gotten by the censors.

The main character in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" thinks a little about Vincent Price but not at all about Maupassant. Thematically, "The Horla" is related to Quatermass (1979), a show in which Mr. Cornell and his TV watcher are much more interested. The illustration at the beginning of the story is of John Mills' image on a TV screen, Mills being the star of the show. I don't know whether Mr. Cornell was aware of the thematic connection when he wrote his story. The idea that we are property, or cattle, seems to have come from Charles Fort. No one writing for the Cosmic Horror Issue seems to have looked to "The Horla" for inspiration. I think, though, that "The Horla" must be considered seminal in the history of science fiction. I'll get into that a little more. Right now I'll just say that I can't believe I had never read it before a couple of weeks ago. But then you can't read everything all at once. Where would that leave you?

"The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant was published in two versions, the first in the October 26, 1886, edition of the French newspaper Gil Blas, the second in a hardbound collection called The Horla, published in 1887. I have the first version in Pierre and Jean and Selected Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant (Bantam, 1994). I have the second and I guess definitive version in Selected Tales of Guy de Maupassant (Random House, 1945 and 1950), with illustrations by Adolf Dehn. Even so, this version is different from other translated versions. If you can, you should read these two versions together. I'll quote from them next time, or maybe the time after that if this brief series turns into a long one. By the way, "The Horla" was reprinted in Weird Tales in August 1926, in its author's birth month, as well as the same month that Maupassant's diarist first sees his previously invisible tormenter. 

Translator Charlotte Mandell has suggested that the portmanteau word horla is a combination of the French hors, meaning "outside," and là, meaning "there." The Horla, then, is "the Outsider, the outer, the one Out There," or "the 'what's out there'." (Quoted in Wikipedia.) That's an excellent interpretation, I think, and just another indication that we should always endeavor to look into the meanings of words. A simple English version of the word Horla might be alien, and I think that's what we are to believe about Maupassant's being, that it is an alien, probably an extraterrestrial alien.

H.P. Lovecraft was an admirer of Guy de Maupassant and Robert W. Chambers. Both are mentioned in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature." Lovecraft especially liked "The Horla." It's supposed to have been an influence upon him in his composition of "The Call of Cthulhu" (Weird Tales, Feb. 1928). I can't say that that's true. It appears to be one of those things that people say so often that everyone just accepts it. We should have some evidence instead, and then we can believe it for sure. The influence of Chambers upon Lovecraft is more evident. In contrast, any connection to or awareness of Nietzsche in Lovecraft seems tenuous. As for Charles Fort, look no farther than "The Whisperer in Darkness" (Weird Tales, Aug. 1931) for Fort's name in Lovecraft's fiction.

All four men of my title read Poe, for Poe, once he arrived upon this earth, became inescapable. Here is Nietzsche in a discussion of Poe, and others:

     Those great poets, for example, men like Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol--I do not dare mention far greater names, but I mean them--are and must be men of the moment, sensual, absurd, fivefold, irresponsible, and sudden in mistrust and trust; with souls in which they must usually conceal some fracture; often taking revenge with their works for some inner contamination, often seeking with their high flights to escape into forgetfulness from an all-too-faithful memory; idealists from the vicinity of swamps--what torture are these great artists and all the so-called higher men for him who has guessed their true nature!

The quote is from Nietzsche contra Wagner: Out of the Files of a Psychologist (1888). A different version is in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886). So, like Maupassant, Nietzsche sometimes changed what he wrote.

To be continued . . .

An illustration for "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant, source and artist unknown. This may be in an edition published by P.F. Collier & Son in 1910, although the almost unreadable words above appear to be in French.

Posted early and revised later in the morning on March 2, 2025. I have changed what I have written, too.
Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Four Men-Part One

Two figures cast their long shadows over the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. They are of course Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. But it seems to me that there is more of Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Fort than Poe or Lovecraft in Weird Tales #367. From Nietzsche comes the theme and imagery of staring into voids and abysses. From Fort comes the idea that we are merely the property of superior beings from outer space. I think there is very little if anything of Robert W. Chambers in this issue, even if his name is mentioned first.

• In "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, a man stays at home at Christmastime to watch TV. (Fun fun.) Among the shows he watches is Quatermass, a British TV serial from 1979. As I understand it, the premise of the show is that people on Earth are being harvested by aliens for their protein. Human beings, then, are essentially cattle, in other words, property. (Cattle is from the same root word as chattel, i.e., the Latin capitale, meaning "property.") This is the Fortean aspect of Mr. Cornell's story. Now the Nietzschean aspect:

The door opens. He's opened it inward. And he's just looking at darkness. Just space. (p. 24)

I take that to be an oblique reference to a quote from Nietzsche:

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. (From Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, Chapter 4, No. 146) (1886)

• The reference to Nietzsche is more direct in "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan:

I stare at the box, and I imagine it stares back at me. (p. 38)

The reference to Fort is also more direct:

I think we're fished for. (p. 38)

It's also kind of indirect in that those italicized words refer to Edmond Hamilton's overtly Fortean story "The Space Visitors," from 1930.

• In "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson, the title character says that on his trip to the Moon, he:

"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)

Here's the Fortean concept to go with the foregoing Nietzschean one:

"We were to be contained--not because we were a disease, as I thought, but because we were playthings."

Whose playthings? According to Bonneville, we are the playthings of "Our Owner." (p. 53) So, again, we're property.

There is an alien presence in "The Traveler" by Francisco Tignini, "Mozaika" by Nancy Kilpatrick, and "Laid to Rest" by Tim Lebbon, while the void appears right in the title of Carol Gyzander's story "Call of the Void -- L'appel du Vide." I can't say that any of these stories has both a Nietzschean and a Fortean aspect.

As for the other two stories, "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story" by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, and "Concerto in Five Movements" by Ramsey Campbell, Poe and Lovecraft have a more prominent place in the former, while Mr. Campbell's story is the most Lovecraftian of all. And if cosmic horror is a synonym of Lovecraftian horror, then "Concerto in Five Movements" is perhaps closer than any to the concept of cosmic horror.

The title of this little essay is "Four Men," but I have written about only two of the four. The other two will come along in part two of this series.

To be continued . . . 

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Robert W. Chambers & Lost Lands

One sub-sub-genre of fantasy and adventure fiction is the tale of lost cities, lost lands, and lost continents. Sometimes those places that are lost are sunken cities and submerged continents. Atlantis is a lost continent, lost in time and lost beneath the sea. You could say that Cthulhu's sunken island crypt is a lost land, too. In the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023), the cover story, "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story," by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, refers to Edgar Allan Poe's "City in the Sea," also to several other lost lands, continents, and islands. And this is where I would like to write about Robert W. Chambers again.

In Robert W. Chambers' collection The King in Yellow, first published in 1895, there is a story called "The Demoiselle D'Ys." This story is not within the King in Yellow series that opens the book, even if there is a character named Hastur in the story. Nor is it exactly in the Paris series that closes Chambers' collection. It actually sets itself apart from those two series. "The Demoiselle D'Ys" is a fantasy. It draws from the legend of Ys or Kêr-Is, a seaside city in Brittany that became disastrously inundated. Ys, then, is a city in the sea, a lost land, a drowned place.

The Demoiselle D'Ys of the title is lost, too, but lost in time rather than in space. Chambers' version of her story is a familiar one in which a man of our own world encounters a lovely and mysterious woman, either in the past, out of the past, or from some other fantasy land. Usually, but not always, she becomes lost to him. In Dian of the Lost Land by Edison Marshall (1935) there is an example of the woman who is not lost. Rather, the man becomes lost with her by giving up on his own world and remaining with her in hers. Maybe when Chambers returned to the United States in 1894 or so, he felt like he had lost a magical or mystical world, that of France, where he had studied art for some time.

Unlike Philip, the protagonist in "The Demoiselle D'Ys," Chambers fetched back a woman from his lost land. Her name was Elsie Vaughn Moller. She was born in Paris on March 22, 1881. The two were married on July 11 or 12, 1898, in Washington, D.C., when he was thirty-three and she was just seventeen. They had a son together, Robert Husted Chambers, also called Robert Edward Stuart (possibly also Stewart) Chambers (1899-1955). The younger Chambers' parents both died in the 1930s, Robert on December 16, 1933, Elsie on November 3, 1939, an unhappy decade for the Chambers family and for the Europe of their past. I have a feeling that the Chambers were unhappy anyway.

Robert Husted Chambers was a writer, too. He had four stories now listed in The FictionMags Index, these published from 1920 to 1934. Some of his stories were collected in a book, John Tom Alligator and Others, published in 1937. He does not seem to have had a very happy life. He was married at least three times and had at least one other engagement broken. He served in the U.S. Army during World War I and World War II, finally attaining the rank of captain, but he was discharged with a medical condition. He died fairly young, at age fifty-five, seventy years ago last month. He appears to have died without issue, and so Robert W. Chambers doesn't have any direct descendants. There may still be Chambers descendants, though, the progeny of his brother, architect Walter Boughton Chambers (1866-1945), with whom Chambers had studied in Europe.

Next: Four Men.

"La Cathedrale engloutie" ("The Drowned Cathedral"), a woodcut by M.C. Escher based on one of Claude Debussy's Préludes and before that on the legend of the lost city Ys.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Robert W. Chambers & the Language of Cosmic Horror

Robert W. Chambers' name is the first to appear in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (#367, published in 2023). This is in "The Eyrie," which used to be a letters column but has become simply a place for the editor to write about whatever pleases him. If you have ever read Chambers' book The King in Yellow (1895), you might recognize aspects of cosmic horror in its pages. I believe it to be there anyway. Chambers' early take on cosmic horror has been an inspiration for other writers in this now popular sub-sub-genre of fiction. I'm not sure that his take exists in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, though. The authors in that issue seem to have gone down a different road, actually two parallel roads laid down a long time ago by Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Fort. There are two prevailing themes, too. One, from the former, has to do with peering into voids. The other, from the latter, has to do with our existence as mere property of higher and more advanced intelligences. Both are pessimistic or negative, even somewhat nihilistic. Both can be applied in the writing of cosmic horror stories.

If you have read Weird Tales #367, you might have noticed the appearance and reappearance of the words void and abyss. If this were Pee-Wee's Playhouse and those were the secret words, there would have been a lot of screaming. There must be, I think, lots of different aspects of cosmic horror, or different ways of writing about it. The authors in that issue seem to have limited themselves pretty badly, though. So were they required to apply certain narrow interpretations of that term by the editor, or were they free to look into their own interpretations and simply settled on more or less the same across the board? I don't know. Either way, I don't think things went very well. Writers of genre fiction are supposed to let their imaginations roam. The writers in the Cosmic Horror Issue seem to have kept theirs pent up.

The words void and abyss are not in The King in Yellow. There is no cosmos, cosmic, universe, galaxy, or galactic either. Chaos appears, but it's used in conventional ways (x2). There is mention of stars, but most of these are in the first half of the book, black stars being a recurring phrase (x4).

Following are two passages that come close to the language of cosmic horror but don't quite get there. From "The Street of the First Shell":

"And through the smoke pall the lightning of the cannon played, while from time to time a rift above showed a fathomless black vault set with stars."

From "The Yellow Sign":

With eyes starting from my head I peered into the darkness, but when he came into the room I did not see him. It was only when I felt him envelope me in his cold soft grasp that I cried out and struggled with deadly fury, but my hands were useless and he tore the onyx clasp from my coat and struck me full in the face. Then, as I fell, I heard Tessie's soft cry and her spirit fled: and even while falling I longed to follow her, for I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now.

I think what happened here is that Chambers wrote too early in the history of weird fiction or genre fiction and, much more broadly, too early in--or before--the modern era. Although there were lots of scientific discoveries regarding astronomy and physics in his time, Albert Einstein's postulations of special and general relativity were still in the future, as was Edwin Hubble's discovery, more or less, of a greater universe outside our own galaxy. (Hubble's discovery was reported in November 1924 when the first issue of the revived Weird Tales was on the newsstand. He presented it in person on January 1, 1925, or one hundred years ago last month. So 2024 or 2025, depending on how you look at it, is the centenary of our awareness of the universe.) Also still in the future were modern art, modern music, modern poetry and fiction, the terrible disasters of World War I and the Russian Revolution, and a proliferation of isms that grew out of and fed into these many developments. A popular writer of the late nineteenth century could have looked upon human existence from a cosmic perspective, but I'm not sure he could have seen very far, nor would he have had necessarily the background or experience to write what is, very often--too often--nihilistic fiction. Cosmic horror need not be nihilistic, but in the hands of too many of the authors in Weird Tales #367, that proved to be the case. We could have had something different, something with more imagination, insight, vigor. We could even have had a taste of Chambers-style cosmic horror and his fin-de-siècle ennui and decadence. But that wasn't to be, I guess, and I wonder why.

Next: More on Robert W. Chambers.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Tellers of Weird Tales in The New Yorker

The first issue of The New Yorker was dated February 21, 1925, one hundred years ago today. Unlike Weird Tales, The New Yorker has been published continuously since its inception. Also unlike Weird Tales, The New Yorker is a general interest magazine. It is and was a slick magazine, too, whereas Weird Tales was a pulp magazine for about as long as pulp magazines lasted. (Weird Tales switched to the digest format in 1953.) Even so, over the years, The New Yorker has published stories by authors of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Some of them seldom if ever touched the pulps. They include Shirley Jackson, John Collier, Margaret Atwood, and Joyce Carol Oates. Others were actual contributors to Weird Tales, including Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and cartoonist Gahan Wilson. The New Yorker has written on these pulp genres and their authors, including an article on Robert A. Heinlein in the issue of July 1, 1974. It even had a Science Fiction Issue dated June 4 & 11, 2012, which included a story by Ray Bradbury, who died on June 5, I guess at the time the magazine was available on the newsstand and in the library. There have been lots of flying saucers, aliens, monsters, ghosts, and witches on the cover of the magazine and of course macabre cartoons inside, most famously by Charles Addams. Anyway, there may have been other tellers of weird tales in The New Yorker, but I won't go searching for them. If anyone makes such a search and cares to share his or her results, I'll be here. Just drop me a line.

Happy 100th Anniversary to The New Yorker!

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley