Agon Again, or, The Bonnevilles of Literature

If you remember high school English class, you might remember the concept of conflict in fiction, and you might remember that there are four basic types of conflict:

Man against man

Man against nature

Man against society

Man against himself

It used to be that there were just three, I think. Man against himself was added sometime later, maybe in the 1950s when there was a new kind of fiction beginning to develop. Maybe that new kind of fiction was based in part on Freudian psychology. Anyway, we have our words protagonist and antagonist. We recognize that the protagonist is on the positive side of the conflict or struggle and that the antagonist is on the negative side. The protagonist is the hero. He or she is the character with whom you identify. You're on his side and you root for him. The antagonist is against the protagonist. Your hope is that he will be defeated. In most stories, it's easy to tell which is which, who wears the white hat and who the black. I'll add that the idea of conflict in a story is predicated on the idea that there is a protagonist, in other words, a positive character or figure.

At the heart of these two words is agon. I think we're more familiar with protagonist and antagonist than we are with agon. Agon seems to have a narrower and more specialized meaning. It doesn't mean just "conflict." It has an older meaning based in Classical Greek drama. That's my understanding anyway. For today at least, I'll think of agon as being the central conflict of a story.

In weird fiction, the conflict is usually between man and nature. At its extreme, it is against super-nature, i.e., supernatural, preternatural, fantastic, or super-scientific forces, even if the "science" is an impossible kind of science. For example, Cthulhu is not a supernatural monster. He is instead a super-scientific one. He's an alien from another planet, and he came here by super-scientific means. Our conflict with Cthulhu is one of man against nature, for he exists as a physical being in a physical universe. He's like a super-sized, interstellar Moby-Dick. He reminds me of Leviathan.

In "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," his first story in Weird Tales (Mar.-Apr. 1923), Otis Adelbert Kline expressed an insight that there isn't actually anything supernatural because there isn't anything that is above God. God reigns at the pinnacle of nature. All things are below him. With that being the case, the conflicts of man against nature, man against the supernatural, man against fate, man against God, and maybe even man against himself are all rolled into one. We are, after all, part of nature and of God's creation. When we fight against ourselves, we fight against our own nature, i.e., nature. As for the supposed conflict of man against technology, I think that might be lumped in with man against man or man against society, for technology is of our own invention and is made for own purposes. It is a tool that we use. If someone is trying to kill you with a shovel (a work of technology), your conflict is not with the shovel. It's with the man. In other words, man against technology is a science-fictional conflict. These are not perfect categories.

In science fiction, the conflict is more varied than it is in weird fiction, but then science fiction is a much broader genre than is weird fiction. Again, the science-fictional conflict is usually man against man or man against society. If one of the purposes of science fiction is to serve as a satire of society, for example, in stories of dystopia, then maybe a very large portion of science fiction involves a conflict of man against society.

In "Four Car Stories-Part Two," I wrote:

It used to be that hero was synonymous with protagonist, but as we have seen, a story does not need a hero in order to function. In a story of a different type, Dwight Bonneville would be not the protagonist but the antagonist. We would recognize him as a villain. But if there isn't any hero, how can there be a villain in opposition to him? And if the hero is absent and the villain becomes the protagonist, what is the agon? There isn't any conflict within Bonneville. He is a man of conviction. He has his obsession. His conflict isn't with the men he hunts. Being weak and without conviction themselves, they go easily to the slaughter. Theoretically, his struggle (or one of his struggles) is against a society that wants to stop him from spreading death and destruction. But where is that society? Nowhere to be found. He goes on with his mission with nothing to stand in his way. He is active, competent, and efficient. And what are we to do as readers? Identify with him? Root for him? What reader would?

In writing that, I hadn't considered the possibility that there is another type of conflict, what you might call a meta-conflict:

Man against the reader

In this conflict, the man--a character who acts as the protagonist--resides within the story, but there is no one there to oppose him. There isn't any conflict, and he lacks an antagonist. His essential conflict is with the reader, if the reader is willing to take up the struggle. If man against the reader is a type of conflict, then that conflict extends outside of the work. A character like Dwight Bonneville, within his milieu of the story, is an affront to us as readers. His actions are criminal and transgressive, his beliefs morally offensive and intolerable. He isn't out to negate just the fictional rocket scientists of the world. He's out to negate all of us. But if there isn't anyone within the story to stand against him, then only the reader can fill that role.

Again, the Bonneville-type character is an antagonist in a story that lacks a protagonist, and so his role as antagonist dissipates, as does the whole concept of conflict. He's not a hero, unless he is his own hero with his own cause, but he is also not really a protagonist because he isn't a positive character and there isn't any conflict within the story. The only conflict is between us as readers and the Dwight Bonnevilles of literature--again, as long as we are willing to take up that struggle. If we are indifferent to the Bonnevilles of literature, or if we agree with them and support them in their cause, then there also isn't any conflict, except with other readers who possess some moral sense. And if that happens, then the conflict moves completely outside of the work and into the real world where it becomes a conflict between those who share in Dwight Bonneville's goal and those who stand at some higher level of morality. In this example of reader versus reader, the author serves as a neutral party: he sets up an experiment by which his readers are tested against each other, or against some moral absolute. Some will pass the test, while others will fail, but there is no keeping score, except in the reader's own heart. I feel certain that there are readers who are content to remain as moral monsters even after they read about Dwight Bonneville, at least three other of the "protagonists" in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, or characters like them. One of the reasons I feel this way is that there are authors who seem to be moral monsters. Either that or they are stupid, ignorant, or unserious, or they are simply chasing after money, status, and approval by following their readers instead of taking on the obligations incumbent upon the artist as a leader in matters of taste.

So in the example of "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson, there will be readers who are cool with atheism, nihilism, murder, despair, destruction, and so on. There will be others who are not. The first group is affirmed in its beliefs by Bonneville's words and actions. He destroys because the world and humanity deserve to be destroyed. That's how they like it. They would like to read more of his adventures. If there were a Dwight Bonneville t-shirt, they would wear it. Readers on the opposite side of things may be outraged by what he and his fans and followers do and think and believe, but hopefully they are moved in their reading of a story like this one. Hopefully they are not discouraged. Hopefully they keep the faith and don't fall into despair like Bonneville's rocket-scientist victims. They should tell themselves what the dying Captain Lawrence said to Oliver Hazard Perry: "Don't give up the ship." In this case, maybe the ship is our whole civilization, which was built, after all (to mix metaphors) upon the rock of faith and holds that place by a continuance of faith. Once that goes, the ship of civilization will be wrecked upon the rocks like how Felix De Groot wrecks his car against a concrete abutment along the highway. To switch metaphors from the ship to the automobile of civilization, we could very well be modockin down the freeway of self-destruction. We should not want that. We should want to live.

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Four Car Stories-Part Four

In "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror" by Alex Gaby (The Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 14, 1956, reprinted ten years later in 52 Miles to Terror and Other Stories of the Road), a man named Biff, driving on a lonely road in the American West, is tormented by the unseen driver of a red hotrod. The driver of the hotrod is anonymous. The threat seems embodied in the vehicle itself. In Gaby's story, the man is not alone. He has his wife and his daughter in the car with him. The driver of the hotrod is also not alone. His passenger is as unspeaking and anonymous as he is. Both drive unnamed cars. We can assume the first is a conservative, family-type car, although it does okay in a drag race. Maybe the second is a souped-up Ford. Anyway, all of that reminds me of the story "Duel" by teller of weird tales Richard Matheson, which was published in Playboy in April 1971 and adapted to film later that year by Steven Spielberg from Matheson's script. We watched Duel on television when we were kids. Only much later did I read the story.

In the film version of Duel, the driver of the truck is anonymous, unspeaking, faceless, and almost unseen. The truck seems to be disembodied and to act on its own. It seems itself to be the menace and the threat, or maybe the driver is simply an extension of the truck. When we watched Duel, I had a sense that the truck and driver were together a supernatural force. I don't think there's anything in the movie to dispel that sense. But then in any encounter with an inexplicable evil, we are perhaps also in an encounter with the supernatural.

In Duel the movie, the protagonist, named, significantly, Mann, drives a red, late-model Plymouth Valiant. (The model name sounds like the epithet of a knight, a hero. Look for a Plymouth Valiant in the story behind "Vehicle" by the Ides of March, from 1970.) The truck is a 1957 Peterbilt 281. The vehicles, especially the truck, become almost like characters. In "Duel" the story, neither vehicle is identified. It might have been a better story if they had been. It might have helped us visualize the duel or joust that takes place. In film, cars and trucks can't be generic. They have to be identifiable products. In prose, you can write "car" and "truck" and that can work, at least as a bare minimum.

"Duel" the story seems to me overwrought, somewhat repetitive, probably padded for length. The atmosphere of menace and suspense seems partly artificial to me. The writing style is pulpish. As I remember it, Duel the movie is more streamlined and economical. There are of course no thoughts and not much dialogue. (There are long periods of silence in No Country for Old Men [2007], too.) Prose can be inward, whereas film is mostly outward. Beyond that, Duel was made by a 23-year-old director who grew up on movies rather than reading prose. And it is very suspenseful.

In "Duel," there is a wreck at the end, but the driver Mann seems somewhat passive. The wreck is partly by accident. In Duel, there is also a wreck at the end, but Mann, played by Dennis Weaver, brings that about. He is the agent of his own salvation. In that way, he's like Biff in "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror." Both men are triumphant in the end, for they have vanquished their tormenters. Both are the heroes and the protagonists of their own stories. The drivers of the other vehicles--or the vehicles themselves--are the obvious antagonists. In Duel the movie, though, the situation is more extreme, the threat and menace more dire, the antagonist actually evil as far as we can tell, partly because his motivation remains unknown and unexplained. Duel might count as a weird tale. It might also be a conte cruel except that it ends in relief and release.

* * *

Richard Matheson based his story on an experience he had while driving with his friend Jerry Sohl on a California road. The date was November 22, 1963. John F. Kennedy was  assassinated on that day in Dallas. He was our only president killed while riding in an automobile, a Lincoln Continental, named for our first president to die by violence. C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley also died that day. Their deaths were of course overshadowed by the assassination of the American president.

* * *

The last of the four car stories in this series is The Hitcher, released in 1986. In that movie, C. Thomas Howell's character, named Jim Halsey, is driving a red Cadillac Seville across West Texas when he runs into the title character, a man named John Ryder, played by Rutger Hauer. An hour or more of suspense and terrible menace, evil, violence, and gore follows. The writer of the original story, Eric Red, was inspired by the song "Riders on the Storm" by the Doors and its lyric "there's a killer on the road." The character name "John Ryder" lets us know that that's what he does--he rides. By the way, Eric Red also wrecked his car. A strange story.

As in the three previous stories I have written about in this series, The Hitcher takes place on the road, in the American West, when one driver encounters another.* In "The Last Bonneville," the first driver is not the protagonist. He in fact falls victim to the second. In the other three, the first driver is the protagonist, and he has a clear antagonist. I don't know that Richard Matheson ever read "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror." He didn't have to. He had personal experience from which to draw in writing his story. Film critic Gene Siskel may have detected a subsequent influence when he wrote that The Hitcher is "a thinly veiled but more gruesome ripoff of Steven Spielberg's 'Duel.'" I can't say one way or another. But there are similarities among these three stories, written before the twentieth century came to an end. "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson is significantly different. It's a story of the twenty-first in which there aren't any heroes and evil drives through the world, seemingly unimpeded, with the top down and the driver whooping it up as he puts the miles and leaves the bodies in a trail behind him.

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*I have written that "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror" takes place in the West. It's actually on the approach to Waco, which is in central Texas. We just don't know in which direction the driver is going. In any case, if you drive across Texas from east to west, you will begin in places that are almost indistinguishable from the East and make your way into places that are very clearly in the West. Just where is the transition? Somewhere in central Texas, I guess, where it turns from green to brown.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Four Car Stories-Part Three

"The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson is a car and driving story that reaches its climax as a man crashes his car into an abutment along a desert highway. That man, named Felix De Groot, is not the hero or protagonist of this story. He is in fact the tormented. His tormenter lives on, unscathed, part of his mission accomplished. He drives away, next stop Nevada, to continue in his mission of spreading despair, death, and destruction.

I finished reading the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales in January 2024. Later that year I found a Scholastic book called 52 Miles to Terror and Other Stories of the Road, edited by Ruth Christopher Carlsen and G. Robert Carlsen, and published in 1966. The cover story is "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror" by Alex Gaby. It was originally in The Saturday Evening Post, in the issue of January 14, 1956. "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror" was adapted to film as Hot Rods to Hell, released in 1967, but by then the original concept might have become obsolete, for in the 1960s, teenagers were no longer villains, no longer the punks or duck-tailed greasers or juvenile delinquents of the 1950s. Instead, by 1967, young people were the main subjects and probably the main consumers of American popular culture. In reading "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror," I was reminded of "The Last Bonneville." These two stories, published nearly seventy years apart, have their parallels and their divergences. In a small way, they show how things have changed in our society and culture since the 1950s.

Like F. Paul Wilson's story, "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror" is about a driving and being on the road in the American West. Biff and Paula are on their way to see Aunt Mildred and her husband and family in Waco, Texas. In the back seat is their ten-year-old daughter Ruth. We don't know what kind of car they're driving. They call it "Steady Nellie," as if it were a horse, as if this were 1900 instead of midcentury. This is the 1950s, and they're a family. Their story is in The Saturday Evening Post, a popular, conservative, general-interest, slick magazine. On the other side of things are two teenagers in a bright red hotrod. They represent youth and new things, which might be cause for apprehension and fear.

Biff isn't exactly a hero--you'll have that if your name is Biff--but he is the protagonist in this story. The two unnamed teenagers in their unnamed red hotrod are the antagonists, the tormenters of Biff and his family. Biff is foolish in provoking them: he gets in a drag race with them in a small Texas town along the way. They win. He catches up and upbraids them at a last-chance gas station. After that, there are sixty miles of straight, empty road ahead of Biff and his passengers. Or it's empty until the red hotrod catches up. And then the torment and menace begin. Racing, dangerous road games, and games of chicken ensue. Finally, Biff tricks his tormenters with a complicated scheme that results in their wrecking their car against the concrete balustrade of a small bridge over a drainage ditch. When I read that, my mind went back to the story I had read ten months before.

Again, Biff isn't a hero exactly. He's too foolish and immature for that. And his tormenters aren't exactly villains. There's a "Hey, you kids, get off my lawn" quality to this story. Biff's tormenters are really just two teenaged boys, too immature to understand the seriousness of what they're doing. (Their mistake is in thinking that they're up against another teenaged driver and that he shares in their values and interests, that he wants to play their game. It doesn't help that Biff, tapping into his own immaturity, instigates the whole thing by taking them up on the invitation to drag race on a city street.) But Biff saves his family from a situation (that he helped create) and so maybe he is heroic after all. He is also cunning and competent. His scheme works. And in the end, out of charity, he offers to deliver the two anonymous teenagers--they go unnamed, in fact they don't even speak--to the nearest town.

In "The Last Bonneville," there isn't any Biff, for there isn't any hero and no one is saved from any menace. In "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror," there isn't really any villain in the end, just two teenaged boys trying to have what they call fun. At the climax of both stories, a car is wrecked against a concrete structure along the road. In "The Last Bonneville," it is the tormenter, not the tormented, who comes away unscathed. In "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror," it is the tormenters who are stopped. In Alex Gaby's story, there is a scheme. It works, and the menace is ended. Biff and his family drive on, and we can be sure of a happy ending. What a story they will have for Aunt Mildred and the gang in Waco. In F. Paul Wilson's story, there is also a scheme. It works, too, and the menace continues. Like Biff, Dwight Bonneville is cunning and competent. It's on to Nevada for him. Who will die there?*

In "Fifty-Two Miles to Terror," Biff's family car is something of a character. They call it--her--"Old Nellie." Even so, we know who Old Nellie's passengers are. They're the real characters in the story. The passengers of the red hotrod, however, are almost unseen. They are unspeaking and anonymous. The threat and the menace are almost disembodied from human characters and are instead embodied in the car itself. (Cars have bodies, too. And is the hotrod red because it is somehow diabolical?) In Gaby's story, the red hotrod becomes the character, the antagonist, the threat. What do the hot-rodders call their car? We don't know, but it seems almost certain to have a name. Finally, after the crash and after the torment is gone, Biff the hero, such as he is, has mastery over the hotrod and the two teenagers. The whole situation reminds me of a third car story . . .

Next: Duel

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*The movie No Country for Old Men (2007), another story of the road and the American West, ends with a car crash, too. The killer doesn't come away unscathed. Nonetheless, he comes away, and we can be sure that the killing will go on.

52 Miles to Terror (1966), with cover art by Mort Künstler (1927-2025), one of the most aptly named artists ever. I can't tell what kind of car that is. Is it a Chevy? Could it be a Corvair? Anyway, there is only one story in this collection that might be considered a weird story, and no science fiction stories at all, even if the souped-up jeep in Bill Mauldin's story is a work of near super-technology. The almost weird-fictional story is "Hearse of the Speedway" by Peter Granger, originally in Esquire in September 1936.

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Four Car Stories-Part Two

In "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson (Weird Tales #367, 2023), the title character so torments his interlocutor that he drives his car--a Maserati--into an abutment along a desert highway and dies in a fiery crash. The hapless victim is named Felix De Groot, and he is a rocket scientist. Dwight Bonneville wants him erased because his mission--Bonneville's mission--is to make sure that human beings remain earthbound for the benefit of what he calls "Our Owner" (an obvious Fortean reference). He does this by killing off scientists, more accurately, by driving them (no pun intended) to kill themselves.* So he goes on the road, driving across the American West, tracking them down in his Bonneville with a recording of gibberish, fresh from the Void, in hand. He has them listen to it, and they thereby lose the will to live. It's like an audiobook version of The King in Yellow or the Necronomicon. In the end, Felix De Groot, despite his name, is neither happy nor great.

De Groot is not the protagonist of "The Last Bonneville." Although he's a human character, he's basically just a bump in the road. Bonneville is the one who acts, and this is his story. He might not be the hero of it, but he is--I think, I guess--the protagonist, a role he would probably refuse if it were offered him. In "The Last Bonneville" and most of the Cosmic Horror Issue, nobody plays the hero. There are mostly just protagonists, and even at that, most are weak. But then we live in an age of weakness and failure.

Last time I wrote about the lack of heroes in contemporary fiction. Is that a real thing, or is that just my perception? There are certainly few, if any, heroes in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, but then this is weird fiction--or at least it's what passes as weird fiction. We think of heroes as ascendant, even if they come to their ends, for example, as Robert Jordan does in For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940). The weird-fictional protagonist more often descends, or falls, or even plunges into plutonian depths. Again, if you're looking for heroes and heroic action, you should probably read something other than weird fiction. Even so, you might not find them or it in what's out there today.

I see the artist as a leader in matters of taste. An artist is not and should not be a follower. He or she should not follow the zeitgeist. The artist should lead. The purpose of art is not to tear down or destroy. It is to create. The spirit of our time, though, is that every person and every thing, including the world, is terrible. They and it deserve to be torn down. By this interpretation, art is dishonest if it is positive, affirmative, inspirational, edifying, uplifting. In our age of hatred, cynicism, destruction, nihilism, and extreme ironic stances, there are and can be no heroes. Heroism is stupid. It's fake. It's sentimental. It's cringe. It's from the past. It might even be fascist. Heroes from previous eras are demoted in our popular culture, while horrible people and horrifying characters are elevated. People tear down statues of Abraham Lincoln while wearing Che Guevara t-shirts. Superman, the former Man of Steel, becomes a weak and whiny character, a stalker, a loser, full of self-doubt. People flock to see a very dark movie about the Joker, seemingly out of identification with a dark, mentally ill, and nihilistic character. They also go to see the story of Odysseus except that he's not the Odysseus of myth and literature. He has been made into a modern man, wracked with doubts, guilt, and anxiety. Readers, viewers, and audiences seek out works of supposed art that affirm their view of the world. And the artist stands by, weakly gives in to their demands, even chases after them, giving them exactly what they want, or what he or she thinks they want. The artist emerges from their midst, or if not, becomes one of them, all in their service. He or she is only slightly more articulate, creative, and imaginative than they are. There isn't any higher calling in any of this. We must debase everything, including ourselves. In the words of British author Duncan Williams, drawing from C.S. Lewis, we must make of ourselves trousered apes. We must create a sick literature.

None of that is to say that F. Paul Wilson is at work trying to tear things down. It is his character--his protagonist--who is doing that within his story. I think Dr. Wilson was actually trying to make a point in "The Last Bonneville"; it should probably be read in conjunction with his essay "Cosmic vs. Abrahamic Horror" in that same issue of Weird Tales. It used to be that hero was synonymous with protagonist, but as we have seen, a story does not need a hero in order to function. In a story of a different type, Dwight Bonneville would be not the protagonist but the antagonist. We would recognize him as a villain. But if there isn't any hero, how can there be a villain in opposition to him? And if the hero is absent and the villain becomes the protagonist, what is the agon? There isn't any conflict within Bonneville. He is a man of conviction. He has his obsession. His conflict isn't with the men he hunts. Being weak and without conviction themselves, they go easily to the slaughter. Theoretically, his struggle (or one of his struggles) is against a society that wants to stop him from spreading death and destruction. But where is that society? Nowhere to be found. He goes on with his mission with nothing to stand in his way. He is active, competent, and efficient. And what are we to do as readers? Identify with him? Root for him? What reader would? I guess we're left with this: we must see this story as an entertainment, while nonetheless picking up on the point being made. In that, the author was entirely correct in his approach, for "The Last Bonneville" is ironic and light in tone, even humorous, albeit in a pretty grim way. After all, who hasn't run into or been waylaid by somebody like Dwight Bonneville? If humor is about recognition, who doesn't recognize in him the patented American crackpot?

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*There has been an ongoing conspiracy theory about missing and deceased scientists, mostly in the American West. Could Dwight Bonneville be at work in the real world?

Next: Fifty-Two Miles to Terror

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Four Car Stories-Part One

The second car and driving story in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023) is "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson. You can tell it's a car story from the get-go because it has the name of a car in its title. That name is also the surname of a character in the story, Dwight Bonneville. You could call the use of that name and product--the Pontiac (not Oldsmobile) Bonneville--a kind of product placement or a commercial message dropped into a story. I prefer not to see it that way. (There is other product placement and namedropping in his story, though.) I have tried to make the case that using the brandnames of cars, guns, alcoholic beverages, and tobacco products is or may be acceptable in fiction. That use has to mean something, though. It has to tell us something about a character or a situation. It has to bear on the story or its events.

I can't say why exactly the name Bonneville might bear on the story "The Last Bonneville." One possibility is that a Bonneville is a certain type of car with a certain cachet involving power, speed, handling, and styling. That cachet goes back to the name of the car, which was taken from the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, a place where land speed records are made using turbojet- and rocket-powered cars, also from the Bonneville Salt Flats Race Track. This place is, again, in the Desert West where postwar science and technology were developed and tested. The author misidentified the Bonneville as an Oldsmobile rather than a Pontiac. I wonder if that misidentification was intentional and meant to be an allusion to the Oldsmobile Rocket 88, for there are rockets in "The Last Bonneville," specifically the Saturn 5 rocket that carried the Apollo 8 astronauts into space at Christmastime in 1968. (Vehicles named for pagan gods ascended into the heavens in a Christian season.) Remember the slogan: "Rocket Ahead with Oldsmobile." You don't really need that allusion, though, if you can rocket ahead with a Bonneville, or in a rocket-powered vehicle on the salt flats at Bonneville. I should point out that Pontiac automobiles are no longer being made. One day there truly will be a last Bonneville.

One of the problems with the Cosmic Horror Issue and possibly with contemporary fiction in general is that there aren't any heroes. There are only protagonists, whatever their agon might be. This is weird fiction, or what passes for weird fiction these days. The lack of a hero might be baked in, for the protagonist in weird fiction is usually flawed, often weak (or the opposite, filled with hubris and ambition), possibly mentally unbalanced or even insane, and very often defeated or humiliated, if not killed, in the end. There are heroes to be sure in weird fiction, but if you're looking for heroic men and heroic action, you will more likely find it in science fiction and adventure stories. It need not be that way. Weird, or Wyrd, is prominent in Beowulf, one of the oldest works in our literature, and yet it is a story in which there are heroics. Beowulf and his men are heroes, even if they eventually fail or fall, as we all must.

For examples of the lack of heroes in the Cosmic Horror Issue:

• In "The City and the Sea," the character Hellboy does very little. He is mostly just an observer. He also lacks any moral or intellectual dimension. He is literally two-dimensional, being originally a comic-book character.

• In "A Ghost Story for Christmas," the protagonist is a TV watcher and a man completely wrapped up in himself. He is depressed (wrapped up in himself), has poor relationships with everybody around him (wrapped up in himself), and is presumably an atheist (wrapped up in himself). If you were to meet someone like him in real life, you would probably just walk away.

• In "Night Fishing," the protagonist is unpleasant, self-absorbed, mentally ill, presumably also an atheist, and, as it turns out, a murderer, or at least an agent of murder and destruction. We are led to believe that he is a witness to the Void, but, as it turns out, the Void is within him. To his credit, he knows this.

• In "The Traveler," the protagonist is basically an idiot, a typical twenty-first century American numbskull. As I wrote before, here is almost his whole description of the marvel of an alien interstellar spacecraft: "a f--king spaceship." Such detail. Such eloquence.

• In "Mozaika" and "Call of the Void -- L'appel du Vide," the protagonists are fog-brained artists who have problems with their mothers and live in the small world inside of their own heads. What exactly is the agon? Is it in any way interesting or compelling? You decide.

• In "Laid to Rest," the protagonist is a man with a truncated personality and seemingly incapable of fully loving another person or of changing within himself in order to become a better person. He is also stubbornly an atheist. If anyone should have gone to a terrible place of suffering, it should have been he rather than his lover. She doesn't deserve her fate. He doesn't deserve her.

• In "The Last Bonneville," the protagonist is a crazy person, a crackpot--except that he's not in at least one way--and an atheist. He is a genuine American psycho. His mission in life is to spread despair, madness, and death. He succeeds.

The only story in which there is a likable or sympathetic protagonist is "Concerto in Five Movements" by Ramsey Campbell. All of the other authors chose to write about unlikable or unsympathetic--or at the very least, not very interesting--protagonists. For most, their struggles are also not very interesting. Maybe only F. Paul Wilson among the creators of these unlikable, unsympathetic, or uninteresting protagonists chose his because of his own ironic viewpoint and his larger purpose in telling his story. Only he seems to have gotten outside of his own character and refrained from writing at least in part an autobiographical story. ("Concerto in Five Movements" is still the exception.) In other words, I don't get the sense that Dr. Wilson is like his character in any way or that he sympathizes with Dwight Bonneville's nihilistic beliefs or terrible mission. It's worth pointing out that F. Paul Wilson's tone is also different than in all of the other stories. Only he chose an ironic and slightly humorous approach. (There is some ironic distance in "Night Fishing," too.) The others are serious, even if they are not very compelling. And I should point out again that I think "The Last Bonneville," "Night Fishing," and "Concerto in Five Movements" are the best, most complex, most well written, or most interesting stories in the Cosmic Horror Issue. "The Last Bonneville" is probably my favorite. Part of that is because it moves. Part of the reason it moves is that it's about cars and driving. I also have to admit a bias in favor of the American-style story.

To be continued . . .

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Television and the Road

"Movie Night at Phil's" by Don Webb (2012) is a story about watching TV. "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, from the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023), is also about watching TV. Watching TV is not an activity. It's actually the opposite of an activity. A person can descend into himself, as he would like, by watching TV. Watching TV can also lead him to a descent into himself without his seeking it. As with loneliness, nothing happens while a person is watching TV. Nothing can happen. Driving on the other hand is an activity. I suppose it's possible, but I'm not sure that anyone has ever descended into himself by driving, by actually going somewhere in the world. He might descend into himself at the end of his journey, in some small, dark, and enclosed space, but while he's there, on the road, the road goes on.* The road is a straight line into the future and not a descent into a figurative parking garage, into the hollow, cave-like, concrete gyre of the self. The road is a ribbon stretched out before you, in the sun, in the sun. Walker Percy wrote a novel called The Moviegoer (1961).** His novel is about a lot of things, including watching movies in the dark, on a big screen. If you're Walker Percy, you can write about watching movies on a screen. If you're not Walker Percy, you should probably write about something else. Joseph Conrad wrote about a journey into the heart of darkness. If you watch TV and think of that as an activity of interest to anybody but yourself, you may be on your own journey into a heart of darkness. But that heart is only in your own bottomless, cramped, empty, cave-like interior. In short, nobody wants to hear about your TV-watching "experience."

There are two stories about cars and driving in the Cosmic Horror Issue. First is "The Traveler" by Francesco Tignini. Although "The Traveler" is partly about driving, we don't know the make or model of the car. All we know is that it has both an airbag and a cigarette lighter. In other words, it's a car of the imagination, dreamed up so as to meet the requirements of the author and his plot. He can't alter his plot to fit the real world. Oh no. The world has to be altered instead, thereby making his story inauthentic. Mr. Tignini works in television and movies, and it shows. He, like many of the writers in the Cosmic Horror Issue, has what essayist Lincoln Michel calls "TV brain." He and they are not principally writers of prose. In this issue they're only slumming. TV is where the bread is.

Mr. Tignini lets us know that his narrator is listening to the radio as he drives. A Chuck Berry song plays, and he lets us know that, I think because he wants us to know that he's cool and knowing and with it. Chuck Berry sang one of the most famous of car songs, "Maybellene," released in 1955. Here are the words of the first verse:

As I was motorvatin' over the hill
I saw Maybellene in a Coupe DeVille
A Cadillac a-rollin' on the open road
Nothin' will outrun my V8 Ford
The Cadillac doin' 'bout ninety-five
We was bumper to bumper, rollin' side to side

There is more excitement and color in the brief lyrics of "Maybellene" than in the whole of "The Traveler," which isn't very much longer. But then there's a difference between good writing and the other kind.

I think modockin must be the Indiana version of motorvatin'.

"The Traveler" is a warmed-over version of the alien contact/alien abduction story told so many times in the history and culture of flying saucers. There is almost nothing original in its very meager contents. And it is written under the influence of TV brain. "Radar Love" by Golden Earring (1973) is a not entirely authentic driving song. Even so, I'll take it over a story written by a TV-influenced keyboard operator. In fairness to him, though, I will lay the blame for his story at the feet of his editor, who should have sought out a better story or nursed his friend along in the development of his own. Anyway, the singer in "Radar Love" is also listening to the radio as he drives. His driving song is Brenda Lee's "Coming On Strong." He lets us know that not because he's trying to be cool. It's simply to add a concrete detail to his story and to give a backdrop to his quest. Mention of Brenda Lee and her song is not product placement nor a case of namedropping, two literary offenses that are becoming all too common these days. I guess in the minds of contemporary authors, every story has to have its commercial breaks, for they have been conditioned to be that way by a lifetime of TV-watching. It's probably automatic and unavoidable for them because they lack imagination. A mind free of commercials and brandnames is probably inconceivable to them, maybe even frightening, for it would leave them naked and alone, without things--physical objects--around them. They have to have and display their stuff, and they have to let you know about their expertise when it comes to their stuff. My advice to every aspiring or practicing author: turn off your TV and pick up a book. And it's probably best to make it a book published before the year 2000.

The second car-and-driving story in the Cosmic Horror Issue is "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson. I'll write about that next.

-----

*There were genre authors who ended up that way, including L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986), whose end is a study in extreme decadence. I remember also the female character who kills herself (does she double back on herself?) in the dark and suffocating bedroom in the rear of an apartment in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001). By the way, there is a character in that movie named Camilla. That fact will become pertinent in a matter of seconds . . .

**The mother of the narrator in The Moviegoer has as her maiden name Castagne. I would not be surprised if David Lynch had read The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers (1895), but was Walker Percy also a reader? The spelling is different, but maybe that doesn't matter very much. On the other hand, maybe it's just a coinkydink.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Planes, Trains, & Automobiles

I read a long time ago an essay about American literature and how many stories and novels begin with a character arriving on a train. An example given in that essay is Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron (1951). In the first episode of Dark Shadows (1966), Victoria Winters, played by Alexandra Moltke, travels to Collinsport by train. The former is considered a Southern Gothic novel. The latter was part of a Gothic revival in popular culture during the 1960s and '70s. The title Lie Down in Darkness sounds like it could be a vampire story. Dark Shadows becomes a vampire story.

Railroad stories are or tend to be Romantic (or Gothic), even if they rely on technology in order to get the story literally moving. A possible explanation: railroad trains originated in the first half of the nineteenth century, in fact during the Romantic Era (or Gothic Revival period) and before science and technology took over Western thought and culture. (Old railroad trains look like Gothic monsters and railroad stations like Gothic churches and cathedrals.) There are or must be science fiction stories that take place on trains, but it's hard to think of any. If John Frankenheimer's film The Manchurian Candidate is part science fiction (or low science fiction--see below), it has a sequence set on a train, but that sequence is not science-fictional. It's actually the beginning of a romance. The film Horror Express, from 1972, blends science fiction with the horror, monster, and weird fiction genres. If this movie is science fiction, it's a Gothic kind of science fiction, as monster stories tend to be. (I'm against genrification, but I might be in favor of considering monster stories as their own separate genre or sub-genre.) "Take the Z Train" by Allison V. Harding (Weird Tales, Mar. 1950) leaps to mind as an example of a weird-fictional tale set on a train. "The Return of Paul Slavsky" by Captain George Warburton Lewis (Weird Tales, Mar. 1923) is another, and a good, though minor one. There are many, many more Romantic or Gothic stories--genre and non-genre stories alike--that involve train travel. We could start making a list. We might finish around the end of next year.

Another possible explanation: a story set on a train is like one set on board a ship, and that makes it a Romance, for ships predate science, and there is a romance of the sea.* There was even a Baby Boomer TV show made by this equation: Romance + Ship = The Love Boat. Stories set on fast, high-technology-type conveyances can be Romances, too, but not necessarily.

Once they enter the realms of fantasy, airplane stories and car stories are more often science-fictional than horror-, Gothic-, or weird-fictional, although they may include horror, Gothic, and weird elements, too. A perfect example is "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" by Richard Matheson, adapted to an episode of The Twilight Zone in 1963. It's a monster story and a story of psychological horror and modern anxiety, but it can also be seen as a kind of science fiction story in that it's about a creature of the air that lives by damaging and destroying technological works. (He must be one of the gremlins of the World War II years. AMC named one of its cars of the 1970s after his relatives.) The Twilight Zone was hosted by Rod Serling. His older brother, Robert J. Serling, who worked in aviation, wrote a novel called The President's Plane Is Missing (1967). The older Serling's novel is a thriller, but it's also a story set on the day after tomorrow, in other words, it is a speculative or alternative future history, or a near-future history. Does that make it science-fictional?

A couple of years ago, I wrote about planes and trains in an entry called "Weird Webs and Sci-Fi Lines." In particular, I made a point that if Walter Kirn's novel Up in the Air (2001) had been written in 1960 about air travel in 2001, it would have been a science fiction story. That's how great a part the details of air travel play in Mr. Kirn's novel. The automobile dates from almost the twentieth century, the airplane from the twentieth century. Both came along after the early nineteenth-century Romantic Era had faded away. By 1900, science and technology strode over our culture, displacing or even kicking aside the traditions upon which other genres of fiction are based. They even displaced religion. In his book The Education of Henry Adams (1918), Henry Adams wrote (in the third person) about his visit to the world's fair in Paris in 1900, his encounter with a new force and symbol in the form of the dynamo, and how it changed his way of looking at the world:

to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring--scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power--while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive. (Chapter XXV)

I wonder if the hall of dynamos was on Divinity Avenue, as in e.e. cummings' poem.

There is romance in travel by car and airplane. There is even an expression, "the romance of the road." And just because a story is about being in the air or especially about being on the road doesn't mean that there is necessarily an emphasis on the technology of flying or driving. But if there is an emphasis on the car as a way of traveling--or rocketing--through time and space, and if the story is dependent upon the science and technology of automobiles, then maybe the car story can be considered a kind of low science fiction. If high science fiction is about the effects that distant, speculative, or extrapolative science and technology have on human beings, then is low science fiction about the same kind of effects that near or current science and technology have? Or is a car story just a car story? (I'm proposing a thesis and shooting down my thesis, both at the same time.)

High science fiction. Low science fiction. These terms already existed before I began writing today. I take it that they are analogous to low fantasy and high fantasy. If they work in fantasy, why shouldn't they in science fiction? I have heard Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (1996) described as science fiction. If it is, it would have to be a kind of low science fiction because it can plausibly (maybe) take place in the world of today, no extra science or technology needed. Kiss Me Deadly (1955), starring Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer (what a contrast in surnames), is a crime/detective story, but it's also sometimes considered a science fiction film. It's the earliest movie I have seen with an answering machine: technology bears on the plot. In the movie, everybody is looking for a locked box inside of which is a mysterious radiological hazard: science and technology bear even more on the plot. In fact they are central to it, and yet the story takes place in the present day of 1955. The end of the movie is nothing short of apocalyptic. In monster movies from the 1950s, A-bombs and radiation awaken monsters or bring them about by genetic mutation. In Kiss Me Deadly, they do the same things to people, i.e., they awaken the monsters in us or turn us into monsters in pursuit of their power.

The screenplay for Kiss Me Deadly was written by A.I. Bezzerides (1908-2007). No, he was not a machine, although he was an engineer. In the near future there will be a different kind of A.I. writing screenplays. In trying to think of the first novel about cars and driving, I remembered his novel The Long Haul, from 1938. It was made into a movie called They Drive by Night in 1940, starring George Raft and Humphrey Bogart. I have seen the movie but have never read the book. Now I'll have to go looking for it. (Kiss Me Deadly and They Drive by Night both begin with picking up a female hitchhiker.) Billy Idol is now making a return appearance to this blog, for on his debut album with Generation X, the self-titled Generation X from 1978, there is a song called "Kiss Me Deadly," presumably named for the earlier film. Kiss Me Deadly was an influence upon French moviemakers of the Nouvelle Vague, the name of which was (or must have been) an influence upon the names of British New Wave science fiction of the 1960s and British new wave music of the 1970s and '80s. The French group Nouvelle Vague have made a name for themselves by redoing British new wave songs, often in the mode of Brazilian bossa nova. I just heard one of the originals tonight, "Let Me Go" by Heaven 17. Nouvelle Vague remade songs by lots of other groups about which I have written lately, including Joy Division.

In looking further for the first novel about cars and driving, I have discovered The Scarlet Car by the American author and journalist Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916), published in 1906. Before that, there was an epistolary novel, The Lightning Conductor: The Strange Adventures of a Motor-Car by a husband-and-wife writing team, Charles Norris Williamson (1859-1920), a Briton, and Alice Muriel Williamson (1858-1933), an American, from 1902 or 1903. Williamson was also an engineer. He and his wife wrote a number of novels involving automobiles and motoring, as it was called then. She may actually have been the principal author of their books, and that makes me happy, for she was an American. I like to think that Americans were the first to write stories about cars and driving. And imagine: people born before or during the Civil War wrote those first car stories. In 1908, Royal Book Company of Norwalk, Connecticut, published a dime novel called Automobile Lillian: The Daring Girl Bandit of Arizona. The author of that book appears to have been anonymous. Gawen Brownrigg, also British, wrote Later Than You Think (1938), about auto racing. There were many more novels about auto racing after that, and some of them were made into movies. World War II intervened, but after that we were off to the races.

There is a lot of driving in that quintessential American novel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925). There are also lots of cars and driving in movies from that time and later. Moviemakers seem to have caught on to cars and driving faster than did authors of short stories and novels. Science fiction authors wrote about electronics, rayguns, robots, and rocketships. Cars and driving were left to those working with lower levels of science and technology. An exception: the Tumblebugs in Robert A. Heinlein's story "The Roads Must Roll," in Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1940. In that story, the roads themselves move and carry people from place to place. As in Italian Futurism, speed counts. By the way, George C. Patton was the first American to use motorized vehicles--three Dodge touring cars--in a military attack. That was in 1916 in Mexico. Maybe he had taken a lesson from Automobile Lillian.

Finally, I have one example of a science-fictional car story, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang by Ian Fleming, from 1964. The subtitle is "The Magical Car," and Fleming's novel (or Romance) is naturally a fantasy, also a crime/suspense story and a children's story, but why not science fiction, too? (Does that mean that My Mother the Car, from 1966, is also science fiction? Or was it low fantasy? Either way, critics have not been kind. Here's one more thing for inside the parentheses: maybe KITT from Knight Rider was a souped-up Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang.) By the way, the original Chitty Bang Bangs, real-life automobiles from the 1920s, were powered by airplane engines. And that brings me to . . .

Last year I read a book called Wild Wheels: Thrilling Adventures of Men and Cars, edited by Don McKay and published by Dell in 1968. One of my favorite stories in that book is "The 6 Transistors Go to the Races" by Allen Childs, originally in Boys' Life in May 1966. It's a very funny story about a group of teenagers who fill their tank with aviation gas and accidentally get themselves into an auto race. It's a car story, a humorous story, and a teenager story. But if the premise of the story depends upon technology, can we also call it a kind of science fiction? I'm not sure. But if we can, it must fall into the category of low science fiction, if there is such a thing. The flubber-powered car in The Absent-Minded Professor (1961) is more obviously science-fictional. After all, aviation fuel exists in the world of today. Putting it into your gas tank is only mildly extrapolative.

The creation of low science fiction as a critical or analytical category would of course be a further genrification, of which there has probably been too much already. Can we allow it? Or should there be just one broad and overriding genre for every story, regardless of how else it can be categorized? That would avoid the muddiness of genrification that has been going on for some time now. I'm not sure we can get rid of genres completely, but simplicity is better than overly intellectualized and academic complexity. After all, most people who read, read for fun. And car stories are fun. I wish there were more of them.

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*There was a clipper ship called the Romance of the Sea, launched in 1853. It was built by Donald McKay (1810-1880), who was obviously not the same Don McKay who edited Wild Wheels. The figurehead of the Romance of the Sea included the names of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, described in a contemporary newspaper account as "the greatest romancers of the century." If the science fiction authors of the twentieth century were the new romancers, then Scott, Cooper, and their contemporaries must have been among the old.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Seven

Car Names & Brandnames

There are lots of songs about cars, driving, and being on the road. Here are just a few:

• "Be Thankful for What You've Got" by William DeVaughn (1974):

Though you may not drive a great big Cadillac

Gangsta whitewalls

TV antennas in the back

[. . .]

Diamond in the back, sunroof top

Diggin' the scene with a gangsta lean

The "diamond in the back" refers to the 1970s-era Cadillac Coupe DeVille, which had a diamond-shaped rear window.

• "Hot Rod Lincoln" covered by Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen (1971):

My pappy said, "Son, you're gonna' drive me to drinkin'

If you don't stop drivin' that Hot Rod Lincoln."

Have you heard this story of the Hot Rod race

When Fords and Lincolns was settin' the pace

That story is true, I'm here to say

I was drivin' that Model A

It's got a Lincoln motor and it's really souped up

That Model A body makes it look like a pup

It's got eight cylinders; uses them all

It's got overdrive, just won't stall

With a 4-barrel carb and a dual exhaust

With 4.11 gears you can really get lost

It's got safety tubes, but I ain't scared

The brakes are good, tires fair

The name of the band is science-fictional, but I think it has more to do with the nostalgia for the 1930s and '40s that was prevalent in the 1960s and '70s than it does with science fiction. Even so, the singer includes a lot of hard detail on his Model A with the Lincoln motor. That was common in midcentury car culture, for example in the letters column of CARtoons magazine (1959-1991). But it is and was also common in the hard science fiction and military science fiction of the 1920s until--when? Now? For an example of hard details about machinery, spacecraft, etc., see Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein (1959), such as in Chapter VII in which the narrator describes his battle suit and how it works. Here's a briefer example:

It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic.

From Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984).

That attention to detail when it comes to machinery wasn't new in American literature in 1984, or 1959, or 1926 when Amazing Stories made its debut under the editorship of electronics gadgeteer Hugo Gernsback. Here is an excerpt from "To a Locomotive in Winter" by Walt Whitman, from 1876:

 Thee for my recitative,

            Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining,

            Thee in thy panoply, thy measur'd dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive,

            Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel,

            Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides,

            Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,

            Thy great protruding head-light fix’d in front [. . .].

If you sense sexual overtones in Whitman's poem, you might be onto something. Here is a poem by another American in which you will likely have the same sense:

she being Brand

by e.e. cummings (1926)

 

she being Brand

-new;and you

know consequently a

little stiff i was

careful of her and(having

thoroughly oiled the universal

joint tested my gas felt of

her radiator made sure her springs were O.

K.)i went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her

up,slipped the

clutch(and then somehow got into reverse she

kicked what

the hell)next

minute i was back in neutral tried and

again slo-wly;bare,ly nudg.  ing(my

lev-er Right-

oh and her gears being in

A 1 shape passed

from low through

second-in-to-high like

greasedlightning)just as we turned the corner of Divinity

avenue i touched the accelerator and give

her the juice,good

      (it

was the first ride and believe i we was

happy to see how nice she acted right up to

the last minute coming back down by the Public

Gardens i slammed on

the

internalexpanding

&

externalcontracting

brakes Bothatonce and

brought allofher tremB

-ling

to a  dead.

stand-

;Still)

There is barely disguised sex-in-the-machine in rock and pop music, too:

• "Pink Cadillac" by Bruce Springsteen (1984):

I love you for your pink Cadillac, crushed velvet seats

Riding in the back, oozing down the street

Waving to the girls, feeling out of sight

Spending all my money on a Saturday night

Honey, I just wonder what you do there in the back

Of your pink Cadillac, pink Cadillac

• "Freeway of Love" by Aretha Franklin (1985):

We got some places to see

I brought all the maps with me

So jump in, it ain't no sin

Take a ride in my machine

[. . .]

We going riding on the freeway of love

In my pink Cadillac

(If cars, futuristic machinery, rockets, and spacecraft are symbolic of sex, then maybe the term hard science fiction has an unintentional double meaning.)

Will Rogers famously said that in Depression-era America, "We'll have the distinction of being the only nation to go to the poor house in an automobile." Americans go other places in automobiles, for example, to the:

• "Love Shack" by the B-52s (1989):

Hop in my Chrysler, it's as big as a whale, and it's about to set sail

I got me a car, it seats about 20

So come on and bring your jukebox money

Two more examples of where we go in our cars: First, in 1971 and 1972, Americans loaded automobiles onto rocketships, took them to the moon, and there they went modockin, in relative terms (or maybe I should say they went moondockin) among craters and rocks and over moon dust. Second, in 2018, Elon Musk launched a red Tesla Roadster into outer space, and so an earthly automobile became an outer space-craft. It's still out there, circling through the solar system with a dummy driver called Starman. You can follow his flight on the Internet. If that's not a science-fictional development made manifest in the real world, I don't know what is.

There have been lots of TV shows with custom cars: Batman, The Green Hornet, The Monkees, The Banana Splits, The Dukes of Hazzard, Starsky & Hutch, Knight Rider. At least a couple of those cars are science-fictional. There have also been TV shows with cars that aren't custom but nonetheless are identified with a certain character, for example, Columbo and his battered Peugeot 403, Jim Rockford and his teeny Pontiac Firebird Esprit, and Thomas Magnum and his borrowed Ferrari. In popular science fiction and outer space fantasy, spaceships are distinctive, like makes and models of cars, for example in Star Wars or Thunderbirds. A lot of those cars and spaceships have been made into die-cast toys--Hot Wheels, Tootsie Toys, Matchbox, Galoob. They have also been made into plastic models. This was Baby Boomer culture: everything became a toy, a game, a model, a bubblegum card (e.g., Weird Wheels), a comic book, a Halloween costume, or a piece of candy. I confess I can't think of a car-themed candy from the years when Baby Boomers were still young.

Cadillac . . . Ford . . . Lincoln . . . Chrysler . . . all of these are brandnames, and each appears in in at least one of the songs listed above. I'm sure you can come up with plenty more on your own. I have been railing against product placement and the use of brandnames in fiction. Last year, I wrote:

Another problem with the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales is that it is shamelessly, perhaps thoughtlessly, commercial. Its authors place the names of commercial products in their stories as if they had been paid to do so. In contrast, there is only one brandname in Heart of Darkness [by Joseph Conrad], Martini-Henry, the name of a rifle. That's a concrete detail. It's not product placement. In general, I think using the names of weapons, cars, cigarettes, and alcoholic drinks is probably okay in a work of fiction. The list of acceptable brandnames used after that must be, I think, pretty short, especially in a short story.

Using the name of a car in a story or song is not product placement, though, for the name of the car tells us something we need to know. The B-52s sang about a Chrysler "as big as a whale," and we can picture that because we know something about cars. If you're going to the Love Shack, you'd better drive a car that seats a lot of people. I knew someone in the air force who had a car so big and loose in its handling that it was called "the Tuna Boat." (I don't remember the make or model. Maybe it was an Oldsmobile.) When we were kids, our neighbors down the street had a huge car--an Oldsmobile Delta 88--light blue, all steel, with a hood the size of a barn door. Half the kids in the neighborhood could sit on that hood without its buckling. In the summer it got so hot it would scorch the back of your legs. You could have fried an egg on it. On the other end of the street was a light green AMC Gremlin, a completely opposite kind of car, named for a folkloric creature that bedevils aircraft. One of our grade school teachers, a small, intense woman with tall hair, drove a metallic blue Corvair. It was the perfect car for her. Every morning she would tear into the parking lot, late as always and unaware, I guess, that the Corvair was supposed to be "unsafe at any speed." Each of those cars had its own look and feel. It wasn't just "a car." If the detail counts in your story, you go with the detail. By the way, the Delta 88 was named after a jet airplane, the F-102 Delta Dagger, and so there are further connections between automobiles and futuristic technology. But let's move on down the road . . . a Cadillac is a car, but the name also has a certain cachet. If you were alive in the 1970s, you probably remember seeing big Cadillacs cruising up and down the streets of the city. William DeVaughn's details are perfectly evocative of not simply the car but also a time, a culture, a milieu. All are gone forever, but at least we have his song and the memories that will die only when we do.

The make or model of a car is informative, like writing "sycamore" or "oak" instead of "tree." As I wrote before, using the brandnames of weapons, cars, tobacco products, and alcoholic drinks is, I think, acceptable because that use is not about commerce or consumerism but about the story and its characters. We don't need to know specifications and details about most other products. There's a difference between a Lincoln and a Volkswagen. That difference is or can be meaningful in a story. Likewise with a Camel versus a Virginia Slim. The cover illustration of Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins (1980) looks like a pack of Camel cigarettes. That's not product placement. The package design is part of the story. One of my greatest friends ever smoked Virginia Slims. They fit her as if they had been designed for her. When Steve McQueen drove a Ford Mustang in Bullitt (1968), that wasn't product placement (although I'm sure it helped sales). The car fit with the character and with the actor, even if the Dodge Charger he chased all around San Francisco outperformed his Mustang.

In movies of the 1980s and '90s, there was a lot of product placement. For example, in Raising Arizona (1987), the Snoats brothers sit down to eat, and there in front of them--between us and them, practically in our faces--are a can of Coke and a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, with a picture of M&Ms on the back of the box to boot. Evelle Snoats doesn't say, "Awful good Kellogg's Corn Flakes®, Mrs. McDonough" because he doesn't have to. It's right there in front of us. That's an advantage that film has over prose: the storyteller's product placement can happen right along with the story. It's still obvious and it still detracts from the storytelling, but at least it doesn't become the storyteller's point. Put another way, film is like a syrinx, for in film the artist can sing two notes at once. Another difference between film and prose: product placement in film is explicitly self-conscious, purposeful, and commercial. The people making the movie or TV show get paid for their services. Authors who use brandnames and place products in their prose presumably do not. Their use of brandnames and their product placement are presumably unselfconscious. They give away their services, for they are so steeped in commercialism and consumerism that this is just how they think. You use brandnames in your writing and speech. It's just what you do. These things add nothing to the story. In fact they detracts from it. And yet authors of today continue to detract from their writing by including brandnames and placing commercial/consumer products, and now services, in their stories.

In our weird fiction book club for June (2026), we read new or newer stories in Robert W. Chambers' King in Yellow universe. (He didn't create that universe. Writers after him did, mainly to capitalize on his creation.) One of the stories we read is "Movie Night at Phil's" by Don Webb.* Born in 1960, Mr. Webb is a Baby Boomer, in other words, one of the TV-watching generation. His story is about watching TV. Fun fun. Writers are instructed to write from their own experience, but what if the only "experience" you have ever had is watching TV? This story is one result. If I were to keep reading newer fiction, I'm sure I would find more. What a dreary prospect that is.

I have to tell you, "Movie Night at Phil's" is an extremely annoying story. In the first sentence is a brandname, BetaMax. Although Mr. Webb's story depends on that specific commercial product, his use of a brandname in the first paragraph is jarring and immediately off-putting. Why not write a story that is not dependent upon a branded product? Wouldn't that be a better exercise? Anyway, in the second paragraph is another brandname, Loreal®, complete with the registered trademark symbol. Then another, Frisbee, then Amazon, then eBay, then Sharpie® and its registered trademark symbol. Imagine: a professional writer actually included the registered trademark symbol in his story, not once but twice, the reason being, I guess, that he can't think of a physical object or a commercial service without attaching a brandname to it. If this were a pulp fiction story, would those symbols have counted as words? Would the author have been paid a penny or two for including them? I'm sure the manufacturers of 2012 appreciated his support. Maybe they sent him a check for helping him advertise their products. Writers tend to hawk their own wares, but why would they devote any space at all to hawking anybody else's?

Anyway again, in Mr. Webb's story, even place names and the names of universities are treated as brandnames. These are among his literary offenses that include namedropping, listing, and self-referential and too cute insider information. Maybe Mr. Webb was trying to be satirical. But if your satire is indistinguishable from the things you're attempting to satirize, then something could be wrong with your writing. I suspect he was not attempting satire in his story. I suspect there wasn't any irony at all and that he was writing in weak and pale earnest the way writers do these days because they don't know any other way to write. They have thousands of years worth of literature to which they can turn for guidance, example, edification, and inspiration, and still they write as if they have never read anything at all. It's as if the only storytelling they have ever seen is on the small screen, as if the only cultural past to which they turn is their own childhoods during which they watched nine billion TV shows and commercials, as if the only thing they have ever read--or watched--is a pop culture that was based on a previous pop culture that was based on a previous pop culture . . . in a continuous stepping down from some increasingly remote original of some increasingly remote quality.

I'll take "I got me a car, it seats about 20," or even this:

Da-ga-da-beep-a-con-ja-choo-chon, honk, honk, honk

A-don-ta, ee-cha-koo-na-nee-cha

Bop-a-loo-la-ree-chow

Bomp-a-kee-cho, ee-sonk-konk

(from a driving song) over the contemporary dreck we have in prose form. No more TV-style or TV-influenced writing. No more pitches made in prose form for a new TV show. No more brandnames, no more product placement, no more commercial messages, no more displays of consumeristic knowing and prowess, and definitely no more registered trademark symbols. Please, let's just have good writing.

Be warned: I will soon be writing about more dreck.

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*"Movie Night at Phil's" was originally in A Season in Carcosa, edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., and published in 2012. 

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley