I have been writing for a long time now about Weird Tales in its first year and in its 100th. Weird Tales began in March 1923 with a story called "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud. In its current incarnation, the magazine observed its 100th anniversary in 2023. In a series called "Origins of Ooze," from March 2023, I wrote about the concepts of primordial ooze, primordial slime, and primordial soup. These are supposed to be scientific concepts, but they're actually closer to pseudoscience, hoaxes, and frauds. Like overpopulation, though, ooze and slime escaped from the confines of genre literature and got into the general consciousness. And like overpopulation, people in the general public accepted it and internalized it.
Not long ago, I reread Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney (1984; Vintage Books, 1987). One of the interesting things about this book is that it was written in the second person. The only other fictional work I can think of written in the second person is Ralph Milne Farley's short story "The House of Ecstasy," originally in Weird Tales in April 1938. Bright Lights, Big City is also written in the present tense, so it's close to unique in two ways. (Two-nique?) Getting back to ooze and slime, here's a brief quote: "The woman looks at you as if you were something that had just crawled out of the ocean trailing ooze and slime." (p. 13) It doesn't seem to me that that was a random choice of words: writers seem to have heard of ooze and slime and it has stuck in their brains.
The imagery in the 100th anniversary issue of Weird Tales has to do with voids and abysses. I have tried to bring into my discussion of that issue, its authors, and its lead characters the image of the worm that swallows its own tail. The other evening I finished reading The Doomsters by Ross Macdonald (1958; Knopf, 1979). That book doesn't start off very well, but it finishes with some power. Here is a passage regarding a human inner darkness or void:
His eyes were still burning with fierce and unquenched light. I thought it was a light that burned from darkness, a blind arrogance masking fear and despair. Behind his shifting masks, I caught a glimpse of the unknown dispossessed, the hungry operator who sat in Grantland's central darkness and manipulated the shadow play of his life. I struck at the shape in the darkness. (p. 163)
I guess you could say that Dr. Grantland has a heart of darkness. (And again we have a medical doctor who is dark or empty inside.) On its last page, the image of the worm ouroboros shows up: "The circuit of guilty time was too much like a snake with its tale in its mouth, consuming itself." (p. 200) The title, by the way, is from Thomas Hardy's poem "To an Unborn Pauper Child" and these lines:
Sleep the long sleep:
The Doomsters heap
Travails and teens around us here . . . ,
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