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
No comments:
Post a Comment