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