Weird Again

In 2017, when I wrote my forthcoming series on the so-called "New Weird," I was less skeptical than I am now about the whole thing. I think I was more willing to accept and write about the concept of "the New Weird" on its creators' terms than on my own. (I have since gone back and placed that phrase in what people call "scare quotes." Take that, all of you "New Weird" people.) Then, in early 2023, I looked more deeply into the meaning and origins of weird, culminating in an entry called "Weird vs. 'The Weird,'" dated February 2, 2023. (Click here.) In that series, I found that the word and concept weird seem to have begun as a noun and not an adjective, that weird, related to fate but not the same thing as fate, was originally a personification--Wyrd or Weird--of the workings upon us of life and the nature or conditions of our existence, of something above us and outside of us, of something beyond our knowledge, comprehension, or control. In short, weird and an awareness of weird predated fiction and literature.

Now to apply the process of calculatus eliminatus to find out some of the things that Weird or weird is not:

Weird is not quite the same as fate, even if the concepts are related.

Weird is not a person, nor a spirit or a goddess, nor a being of any kind.

Weird is not necessarily supernatural. With that being the case, a weird tale is not necessarily a fantasy. In other words, a work of straight or conventional fiction can be a weird tale and vice versa, although weird is obviously emphasized in weird fiction.

Weird is not necessarily punishment, nor judgment, nor retribution, nor law (like doom).

Weird is not a force, least of all the so-called "force" of history. Our lives turn, twist, and bend in unexpected, awful (or awesome), often cruel and seemingly arbitrary, but always necessary ways. We are not to know why. It is not in our ken.

We don't know what are the ways and workings of Weird. We are not to know why she does the things that she does.

Weird is not evil nor ignorant. It does no good at all to rail against her. We must accept her ways, for her decisions are unassailable, even if we cannot understand them. This is just how life is.

Weird surrounds us. We don't surround her. We don't and can't theorize about non-personified weird. Weird is a nonintellectual topic. We don't sense the presence of or apprehend weird through reason, at least of a later type. Weird and an awareness of weird predate reason and every written language.

Weird cannot be circumscribed. It is not an object, a mass, or a quantity. There is no "the Weird." The definite article does not apply.

Weird began as a noun. Only later did it become an adjective. I think that happened for want of a hyphen. That might be a little facetious, but . . . .

In Macbeth (ca. 1606) are the Weird (or Weyward) Sisters. They are of a type, I think, the type being the weird-woman of Scottish tales and Scottish literature. The three sisters in Macbeth are not weird in the way we think of as weird, as in, "I saw a weird guy at the store today." They are weird because they speak the weirds of Macbeth and Banquo. (Weird-woman is like milkman, weird and milk both being nouns. One is delivered by a woman, the other by a man.) There are other weird-women in Scottish literature. I encountered one late last year in "The Two Drovers" by Sir Walter Scott (1827-1828). In any case, if the term, type, and concept weird-woman had been hyphenated, we might have avoided the premature conversion of weird from a noun into an adjective, and our understanding of weird might have been better long ago and better now. That understanding would not have been derailed. In other words, a weird tale is not essentially about weird things. It's about the workings of weird upon the world and the lives of men. Only after understanding that is it acceptable, in my opinion, for us to use weird as an adjective. I'll add that it can be a really useful adjective.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, there were those who tried to create something they called "the New Weird." I suspect those people were and are progressive in their worldview. They must believe that there can be new things. I think they were also trying to engage themselves in a critical and analytical exercise. I think they were attempting to make of themselves great discoverers, creators, or theorizers, equals to the great men and women of the past. What they failed to understand is that there is nothing new under the sun. They also failed to understand that cultural developments don't start from the top. A person can't decree from whatever high perch or post he imagines himself to occupy that a new form or genre shall come into being. Culture does not come from authority. It is naturally occurring and organic. It grows from below. It is more nearly evolutionary than revolutionary. Culture is not an a priori or gnostic system of thought.

One of the proponents of "the New Weird," China Miéville, is a Marxist. Marx, like Hegel before him, Darwin in his own time, and Charles Fort afterwards, believed that he had discovered an all-explanatory theory of nature and history. (1) We should not underestimate the powerful draw that such a thing represents to the modern and post-modern scholar, academic, theorizer, or intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual), for if he can discover a theory of everything, then he can make of himself a great man, greater of course than what he is in his current not-so-great life. (2) All-explanatory theories, or even theories that try to explain smaller things, usually fail, for life and history continue to confound us. We're not quite smart enough to impose our theories and structures upon them. Facts come before theories. It's not the other way around.

"The New Weird" isn't new anymore, but even when it was supposedly "new," it wasn't, for it seems to me that the idea was based on an old-new thing, namely the British New Wave in science fiction of the 1960s and '70s. [Reading Jeff VanderMeer's introduction to The New Weird (2008) confirms as much.] The construction is the same: "the" plus "new" plus a word that begins with "w," in this case weird, converted from its previous use as an adjective back into a noun again after however many decades and centuries. (At least there's that, even if "the weird" is a clunky and aesthetically unpleasing phrase and sound.) In short, the phrase "the New Weird" is, to me, in obvious imitation of "the New Wave," which was, truth be told, in imitation of the "new wave," or nouvelle vague, of French cinema of the 1950s. (Bossa nova, not quite literally a new wave, is of the same period. The French group Nouvelle Vague, which often performs in the bossa nova style, is of about the same age as "the New Weird.") I think the proponents of "the New Weird" were trying to hitch their wagon to a star--the star of the New Wave--even if that star had faded by the turn of the millennium. What was supposed to be new wasn't new after all. It's older still now.

In summary: "the New Weird" isn't and wasn't new; the definite article doesn't apply; and, although weird is more properly a noun rather than an adjective, the proponents of "the New Weird" used it in the wrong way, applying it, I assume, to a body of fiction of a certain type or sub-genre governed by a theory [or mission statement--see Mr. VanderMeer's introduction] rather than to the weird of pre-modern times governed not at all by men. They tried to throw a rope around it. What they didn't realize is that Weird is not roped.

Notes

(1) Marx considered history to be a science. One of his names for his system of belief was "scientific socialism," as opposed to "utopian socialism," which might also be called, by a stretch, "romantic socialism." Never mind that Marxism is also utopian and romantic, or irrational, in theory and in practice. I would add that Marxism is a kind of horror story for our age.

(2) I first saw this kind of thing for myself when I went with a group of aspiring young life scientists to a library in St. Louis and watched them gaze with awe and reverence upon a tome, shielded in a glass case, by Charles Darwin. I had the sense that they desired to make of themselves something extraordinary, if only they could, by discovering a theory or concept equal to his.

"Macbeth and the Three Witches" by Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839). On January 10, 2026, I posted "Catholic & Cosmic Horror" and closed my posting with two images, one by Giotto, the other by Margaret Brundage. Both depicted swirling, spiraling, undulating flights of the human form, just as in this painting.

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

A New-Old Series on a New-Old Topic

In the second half of 2017 I was writing about Gray Barker and Albert K. Bender, two flying saucer aficionados who wrote on Fortean topics. Charles Fort, their original, was a monist. His thesis in his first book, The Book of the Damned (1919), is that all things are continuous with each other. That got me to thinking about continuities and discontinuities in genre fiction.

Before there were named genres of fiction, there was just fiction.* Even when there was genre fiction, there weren't any clear distinctions to be made, early on, among the various genres: no fixed categories, no hard conventions, no uncrossable boundaries, no firm labels. In some cases, there weren't any labels at all. That began to change once genre fiction began to develop more fully after World War I.

Another (imperfect) term for genre fiction is pulp fiction. Pulp fiction began in 1896, in the decade during which so much of our popular culture originated. Early on, there were general-fiction pulp magazines: Argosy, Adventure, Blue Book, Short Stories. That changed after the war, coincidentally or not in the same year that The Book of the Damned was published. The first Western pulp magazine, Western Story Magazine, began in 1919. So did The Thrill Book, a forerunner to Weird Tales. Then came Black Mask, the first (I think) crime/detective pulp, in 1920, and Love Story Magazine, the first romance pulp in 1921. Weird Tales came along in March 1923. It was the first weird fiction magazine in America. Amazing Stories, first published 100 years ago this month, was the first science fiction magazine.

As pulp magazine titles proliferated, so did the pulp genres. There were adventure pulps, railroad pulps, sports pulps, aviation pulps, war pulps, jungle pulps, spicy pulps, horror and terror pulps, weird hero pulps, and so on. Even categories such as science fiction were split. The Astounding Science-Fiction of the 1940s published hard science fiction, while others published science fantasy and planetary romance-type stories. There were ghost-story pulps because ghost stories are not the same as weird fiction. There was North•West Stories because stories of the Far North are different from Westerns. There were "Easterns," too, such as Oriental Stories.

The proliferation of pulp genres was partly or wholly an economic matter. Different pulp genres sold to different categories of readers. And every month, readers read vast amounts of fiction and non-fiction. For as long as the pulp fiction era lasted, those different genres were sustained. But even after the pulps faded away, there were still genres--and, increasingly, sub-genres. I think genres and sub-genres shrank away in digest magazines, just as the dimensions of the magazines shrank, but they thrived in newspaper comic strips, comic books, and paperbacks, as well as on television. Once our culture became atomized, beginning, I think, in the 1980s and continuing through the present, genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres proliferated even more. There were evermore (and ever smaller) categories of readers, and each wanted to read within its own genre. In the Middle Ages, the question was how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Now a similar question might be how many sub-genres and sub-sub-genres can dance on the head of science fiction? Or fantasy?

In the 1960s, I think, something else began happening, and that is that academics, as well as critics and writers trained in academia, became interested in the pulp genres, and another proliferation commenced. I don't think that proliferation was economic. Instead it had to do with the academic's need for recognition, validation, improved status, and prestige. Academics and intellectuals pride themselves on being theorizers and discoverers. But what happens once everything has already been discovered? How are you going to make yourself extraordinary when there aren't anymore all-explanatory theories to be made? Well, if you're going to make a name for yourself and earn the esteem (better yet, envy) of your colleagues, you have to find things where they don't exist, in places where there isn't any room anymore for theorizing or discovery. You have to come upon new lands in an already thoroughly mapped world.** And if that takes making things up, well, your self-esteem (which you paradoxically seek to be provided you by other people), dependent as it is on your status and prestige, is at stake, and so you'll do it. Yes, you'll cloak your invention--not discovery--in high-falutin' scholarly language, but you're still making it up. Your hope is that no one will notice. Your hope is that those letters you have appended to your name will provide cover for your ideas and theories and blind people to your purpose. They have to believe what you're saying because you have a Ph.D. You're an expert.

I have written before about a couple of cases of scholars making stuff up. One has to do with Francis Stevens and the so-called sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of "dark fantasy." The other has to do with zombies and when they arrived in America. But I think there's another one, although in this case, it seems to have been critics and academically trained authors who tried to create a "new" thing.*** That "new" thing was called "the New Weird," and I started writing a long series about it in mid 2017. I got pretty far in my series, but it has remained only in draft form since then. As it stands, it's a little out of date. What I'd like to do is bring it more up to date and to publish it in this space over the next few weeks.

Beware, there is much reading to come.

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*There were exceptions: Gothic romance, Utopian fiction, and the English ghost story come to mind.

**Charles Fort came up with an all-explanatory theory. He also wrote a book called New Lands (1923).

***The academic training and viewpoint of the authors is important, I think, in understanding the development of "the New Weird." In his introduction to the 2008 anthology The New Weird, Jeff VanderMeer referred to authors of pulp fiction, for example H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, as "self-taught." I'm not sure that he meant that as a pejorative, but it's clear that he was making a distinction between what he called "Old Weird" and a more well-educated, well-informed, and more aware (or self-aware) "New Weird."

North•West Stories Romances, Spring 1945, with a cover story, "The Snow-Witch" by Dan Cushman. The artist's signature is on the lower left, but I can't read it. It's times like these when we need an Internet Western & Northern Fiction Database.

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Rocketships & Holidays

It has been a long time since I posted twice in one day, but it occurs to me . . .

Today, Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026, we have a spacecraft on its way to a trip around the Moon. Today, one of our astronauts, mission pilot Victor Glover, gave an impromptu message for people on Earth. Among his words:

I think, as we go into Easter Sunday, thinking about all the cultures all around the world, whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing, and that we've gotta get through this together.

Nearly sixty years ago, on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1968, the Apollo astronauts, Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman, were also on their way to a circumlunar flight. In a live television broadcast, they read from the Book of Genesis, beginning with the words:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Both spacecraft were named for Greek gods. Even so, their astronauts named only God.

There was war then and there is war now. But there will be peace, if only people will turn towards it and the Creator of all things.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Happy Easter 2026!

Metropolitan Magazine, Special Easter Number, April 1906,
with cover art by Jules Guerin (1866-1946).

Happy Easter

from Tellers of Weird Tales!

Terence E. Hanley, 2026.

100 Years of Amazing Stories

In April 1926, H.P. Lovecraft returned from Brooklyn to his Providence home. In New York, he had been an outsider. Once in Rhode Island again, he was an insider, at least in his own life and his own home. Weird Tales published "The Outsider" in its issue of April 1926. Lovecraft could easily have read it on his train ride home. If he had, would he have seen any irony in his situation? After all, he had gone out into the world, just like his narrator, and now he was on his way home again. Except that he was happy.

I have written before about "The Outsider." I wrote then about Frankenstein's monster and Kaspar Hauser, two other outsiders who only wanted to be in. But they never could be. And now I think that Grendel could have been an outsider made bitter and murderous by his awareness of his situation. He was a march-stepper, a wanderer along borderlands, like Lovecraft. Could he have once seen himself in a mirror? Could that have driven him away to lurk in fen and fastness? Probably not, for Grendel was not a modern man.*

Lovecraft could have read another magazine on the way home that spring. That one was the first issue of Amazing Stories, published in New York City by Hugo Gernsback. Weird Tales is supposed to have been the first American magazine devoted entirely to fantasy fiction. I'm not sure that that's true. It would take a lot of reading through the first thirty issues of the magazine, published from March 1923 to March 1926, to find out whether it is so. But we can be sure that the first issue of Amazing Stories was full of fantasy and nothing else. It was the first fully science-fictional magazine in America. I wonder if Lovecraft read it at all. He must have. But how early in its history of publication?

Here are the contents of Amazing Stories #1, adapted from the Speculative Fiction Database:

• "A New Sort of Magazine," editorial by Hugo Gernsback
• "Off on a Comet, or Hector Servadac," part one of a two-part serial by Jules Verne (1877)
• "The New Accelerator" by H. G. Wells (1901)
• "The Man from the Atom" by G. Peyton Wertenbaker (1923)
• "The Thing from -- 'Outside'" by George Allan England (1923)
• "The Man Who Saved the Earth" by Austin Hall (1919)
• "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" by Edgar Allan Poe (1845)

All of these stories were reprints. Wells, Hall, and Poe also had stories in Weird Tales. Note that Hall's story is of "The Man Who . . ." type, while England's is of "The Thing . . ." type. England's story is also about "the outside," just as Lovecraft's story in Weird Tales that month was. I'm sure his was a different type of outside. The cover art and three interior illustrations of that inaugural issue were by Frank R. Paul. F.S. Hynd illustrated Poe's story.

Amazing Stories is still around, although it isn't currently in print but only on line. Unfortunately, it allows its contributors to use AI tools in the writing of their stories. I don't have to tell you that I hate AI in writing and art. Even so, I'll say: 

Happy 100th Anniversary to Amazing Stories!

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*There is another outsider who looks in on and raids the celebrations of men. He is the Grinch. Could his name and Grendel's have come from the same root? Most obviously: grin, from the Old English grennian, "to show the teeth (in pain or anger)," or the Old Norse grenja, "to howl."

Amazing Stories, April 1926, with cover art by Frank R. Paul. Those are skaters, I presume on one of the moons of Saturn. Have they arrived on sailing ships? Update (Apr. 2, 2026): Good old me, comment below, has pointed out that the illustration is for "Off on a Comet, or Hector Servadac" by Jules Verne. Thank you, Good old me.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Henry Leverage (1879-1931)-Part Two

David Carroll Henry, later known as the author Henry Leverage, was born in Wa-Keeney, Trego County, Kansas, on October 9, 1879, to John Cummings Henry (1848-1901) and Susan Ann (McFadden) Henry (ca. 1856-?). David C. Henry had younger sister, Sadie Lucinda Henry, later Vinschger.

I found David C. Henry in the U.S. Census of 1880 (in Wa-Keeney, Kansas) and Henry Leverage in the New York State Census of 1915 (at Sing Sing Prison) and nothing in between. That's okay, for Robert Messenger has the early part of Leverage's career covered in his blog posting of November 7, 2019. Henry, aka Leverage, was a liar, or a self-booster, however you'd like to think of it. He told all kinds of stories about going to sea, traveling in the Far East and Europe, and fighting in the Great War. He was a bit like L. Ron Hubbard, minus the utter insanity and the deadly danger he represented to people he perceived as his enemies. (Both men claimed expeditions to Alaska. Leverage was charged with inciting a riot in San Francisco in 1912, too, at Pier 54 as the Star of Russia was about to sail. That's one example I can find of his criminal misadventures.) In any case, Leverage's crazy way of life caught up with him in late 1914 when he was sent upriver by New York Judge William H. Wadhams for receiving stolen property (an automobile). Claiming that his real name was Charles Henley, Leverage was received at Sing Sing Prison, Ossining, New York, on December 16, 1914. He was single, in good health, stood 5 feet 5-1/2 inches tall, and weighed all of 121 pounds. After two years, four months, and 28 days in Sing Sing, Leverage was released on April 17, 1917, just eleven days after the American entry into the Great War, a war in which Leverage did not fight, even if he later claimed that he had. Before going up, he said in court, "I admit that I have been an ocean card sharp and a general crook and that I did not have to steal." But he did anyway. The good thing, I guess, is that he seems to have turned his life around while in prison.

Leverage was a newspaper editor at Sing Sing. He began as editor of The Star of Hope in April 1916, succeeding former attorney Henry Hoffman Browne. After The Star of Hope went out of business, Leverage became editor of the weekly Star-Bulletin, in February 1917. While he was in prison, Leverage also wrote the screenplay for The Twinkler (1916), a prison drama based on his own story. The film, now lost, starred William Russell and Charlotte Burton and was released on December 18, 1916.

William Leverage was the author of scores of short stories in the crime, detective, aviation, railroad, Western, romance, and other genres. His series characters include Chester Fay and "Big Scar" Guffman. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists the following stories in the genres of science fiction and fantasy:

• "The Wild Star" in All-Story Weekly, December 29, 1917
• "The Skywaymen" in All-Story Weekly, February 15, 1919
• "The Voice in the Fog" in Weird Tales, June 1923
• "Black Light" in Scientific Detective Monthly, April 1930
• "The Sealed Room" in Amazing Detective Tales, June 1930
• "The Black Cabinet" in Amazing Detective Tales, September 1930

For Munsey's Magazine, he wrote "The Absconder," "The Gray Brotherhood," "The White Moll," and others. For The Saturday Evening Post, he wrote perhaps his most successful story, "Whispering Wires," a mystery adapted to the stage by Kate L. McLaurin and to the silver screen by William M. Conselman. The movie version was released in 1926 and starred Anita Stewart.

The FictionMags Index has a list of Henry Leverage's credits from 1917 to 1932. These include stories in Adventure, The Argosy, Battle Stories, Black Mask, The Blue Book Magazine, Clues, Cosmopolitan, Detective Story Magazine, Flynn's Weekly, Prison Stories, Railroad Man's Magazine, Short Stories, Star Magazine, Telling Tales, Top-Notch, and others. I found two more in newspapers, "Shyster Lawyers and Human Souls" in the Leavenworth New Era (July 14, 1916) and "An Occasional Offender" in the Sacramento Union (Nov. 27, 1927).

In addition, Leverage wrote novels, The Shepherd of the Sea (1920, a "Northern" rather than a Western), Where Dead Men Walk (1920), The Ice Pilot (1921), The Phantom Alibi: A Detective Story (1926), and The Purple Limited: A Detective Story (1927). His non-fiction included "Two Years of Prison Reform" in Forum, published in May 1917, just a month after he was released from prison. He also wrote a column, "Dictionary of the Underworld," which appeared in Flynn's Weekly from January to May 1925.

Henry Leverage married a woman named May. They were enumerated in the 1930 U.S. Census while living in Los Angeles. He died on February 24, 1931, at Druskin Hospital in New York City at age fifty-one, the same age as his father when he died.

Henry Leverage's Story in Weird Tales

"The Voice in the Fog" (June 1923)

Further Reading

Yesterday's Faces: From the Dark Side by Robert Sampson (1987, pp. 81+), plus lots of newspaper articles about him and his father.

An advertisement for the stage adaptation of Whispering Wires, from the Sacramento Union, November 10, 1926.

Thanks to The Internet Speculative Fiction Database and The FictionMags Index.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Henry Leverage (1879-1931)-Part One

Né David Carroll Henry

Aka David Carl Henry, Carl Henry, Carl Henry Leverage, Charles Henley, Winfield Byrd, Sing Sing No. 65368
Author, Newspaper Editor, Movie Scenarist
Born October 9, 1879, Wa-Keeney, Trego County, Kansas
Died February 24, 1931, Druskin Hospital, New York, New York

I began with the author Henry Leverage on June 30, 2022, but gave up on him when his case became too complicated, confused, unclear, and uncertain. Usually when you're doing this kind of research, if something seems wrong, it is wrong. Or as a fence builder I met in the Missouri Ozarks said when talking about fence posts, "If it looks crooked, it probably is crooked." Anyway, there was a reason for my confusion, and it's because "Leverage" was a liar, and he seems to have lied about everything in his life. From more than one hundred years distance, he looks crooked, like a crooked post. In fact he admitted that he was a crook, and so I can honestly say that I'm not impugning the reputation of a long-dead man. Yes, he was a liar, or a teller of tales if you want to be nice about it, and a convicted criminal, but he also told real fictional tales--i.e., pulp fictional tales--after he was released from prison. You could say that Leverage leveraged his lies against potential profits to be made as an author. Maybe personal economic considerations decided him on his adopted surname.

I am not the discoverer of Henry Leverage's identity. That distinction goes, I assume, to Robert Messenger of Canberra, Australia, who writes on the blog ozTypewriter: The Wonderful World of Typewriters. You can find Mr. Messenger's posting on Henry Leverage, entitled "Henry Leverage -- The Pulp Fiction Author Who Made His Corona 3 Portable Typewriter Sing Sing: Seven Million 'Sold Words' in 11 Years" and dated November 7, 2019, by clicking here. Mr. Messenger's angle is to write about Leverage's use of a Corona portable typewriter during his successful career as an author of short stories and novels. I won't rehash Robert Messenger's biography of Leverage. I'll just provide some facts, many of which are peripheral, as well as make some corrections.

According to Robert Messenger, Henry Leverage was actually David Carroll Henry, not British at all, as he claimed, but peculiarly American and born plumb in the middle of the country, in fact about one hundred miles from the geographic center of the United States at that time. His father was John Cummings Henry (b. June 19, 1848, Ontario, Canada; d. May 3, 1901, at home, Denver, Colorado), who is supposed to have invented the first electric streetcar in the world, put into operation in Kansas City in 1883. The elder Henry was an electrical engineer and was supposed to have held more than 70 patents. He was more than that, too.

I have found John C. Henry in the U.S. Census of 1880 in Wa-Keeney, Kansas. His son, David C. Henry, was then eight months old. It is from that record that I have been able to find out more about John C. Henry and to trace him and his family through public records. Unfortunately, the man later known as Henry Leverage is hard to find in those records, and so his life story and all of the assumptions I must make about him are secured only on one end, at least at this point in my research. (We'll see how things develop.) If Henry Leverage wasn't David Carroll Henry, then I don't know what to think. It seems like he was, though.

John C. Henry was a pioneer in what is now Trego County, Kansas. I assume that he arrived in that place by railroad, which had been laid down in the area in 1868. A newspaper item from 1888 states that Henry was "the first to obtain a patent for a quarter section of land [i.e., 160 acres]" and "the first to build a substantial residence" in Trego County. The first patent for his quarter-section of land was dated March 1, 1873. I have found record of a second patent, dated September 6, 1876*, for that same quarter-section, namely, the Northwest 1/4 of Section 8, Township 12 South, Range 23 West. A newspaper article from 1879 says that "the first furrow of prairie sod [in Trego County] was turned by him." He later grew millet and wheat. Henry built his house, a stone construction, at Trego Tank in 1875. His farm, described as "handsome" and "prosperous," was about a mile west of the later site of Wa-Keeney.

Prior to that, on May 28, 1874, Henry was appointed postmaster of Park's Fort, a 30-foot x 30-foot sod embankment with no buildings, only tents, located about six miles west of Ogallah and about two miles east of what became Wa-Keeney. That same article states that the railroad station at Park's Fort was moved to Henry's farm, and though the wording is ambiguous, it appears as though there were two or three saloons there, while "the principal industry was the collection of buffalo bones and hides." In other words, Henry's farm seems to have been the original settlement in Trego County, before the founding of Wa-Keeney in 1877-1879. In 1879, Henry and a partner acquired a general store in Wa-Keeney, renaming it Henry & Kyle. He ran a meat market in a 12 x 15-foot building in Wa-Keeney and became secretary of the Wa-Keeney Coal Prospecting Company in 1880. Henry seems to have been a prominent and accomplished man in his adopted home country, state, county, and town.

There is still a house in that lonely quarter, located not far to the west of the current Wakeeney. (The hyphen was dropped in the early 1900s.) An online "street" view from dusty Old U.S. Highway 40 shows a lane behind a double pipe gate that leads to a distant, weathered house, well away from the road. It looks like there are other structures there, too. Was that Henry's house? I can't say. But Trego Tank was located one mile west of Wa-Keeney, and so it was in about the right place for Henry's quarter-section and that old gray house still standing. Trego Tank was for several years the only stop along the Kansas Pacific Railroad in what became Trego County. There was a deep well there and a large windmill. I don't see a windmill in the "street"-view picture I'm looking at, but there is a low, brushy area with a few trees, and so maybe there is water not far below the surface. This is at the top of a ravine that flows to the south, soon into Big Creek. There must be water there after all. Now comes news that Henry's horse Patsey was killed at Trego Tank on July 16, 1880, by a westbound train. Called "the old favorite," Patsey "had a reputation second to none for his speed and endurance." A month later, an article by Henry on "changing the climate" made the rounds of Kansas newspapers. His article was about water, which was and is one of the defining resources and issues of the American West.

Platted and established in 1877-1879, Wa-Keeney was named for its founders, Albert E. Warren and James F. Keeney. The two men were boosters, and the place that they founded is referred to on line as a "colony." That colony seems to have been from Chicago. A plat map from 1886 shows a place west of Wa-Keeney called Colony Station. I'm not sure whether there is a connection between the "colony" of Wa-Keeney and the place called Colony Station. In any case, by 1883, Wa-Keeney was in decline due to crop failures and other misfortunes. Nonetheless, Wakeeney still exists as the seat of Trego County government. As it so happens, we drove that way several years ago on our way to Denver. Not long after that, I based a long short story on that trip and one of its sights, the World's Wonder View Tower, or Tower Museum, at Genoa, Colorado.

John C. Henry seems to have been gone from Trego County by 1884, when he appears to have lost his farm after having become delinquent on his taxes. Maybe the misfortunes of the early 1880s turned Wa-Keeney from a boomtown to a bust. Anyway, when I said that Henry Leverage was peculiarly American, what I meant is that he may have been what I have described before as an American type, the commercial crackpot or the earnest conman. He seems to have been a low type of character, but maybe he came into the world in a place started by high and respectable men of the same essential type. Maybe he learned something from them.

By the way, Trego County was named for Captain Edgar Poe Trego (1838-1863) of the 8th Kansas Infantry, who was killed in action at the Battle of Chickamauga on September 19, 1863. So it looks like Henry Leverage, a teller of weird tales, began life in a place named for a man who was named (presumably) for the original teller of weird tales in America, who was of course Edgar Allan Poe.

---

*That was less than three months after the Battle of Little Bighorn, which happened two-and-a-half states and about 700 miles to the northwest of Trego Tank.

* * *

According to Robert Messenger, Henry Leverage, né David Carroll Henry, was born in Wa-Keeney, Trego County, Kansas, on October 9, 1879, so just a few months after Trego County was organized on June 21, 1879. His father was, again, John Cummings Henry. His mother was Susan Ann (McFadden) Henry, a Pennsylvanian born in about 1856. David C. Henry and his younger sister, Sadie Lucinda Henry (b. July 28, 1881, Kansas City, Missouri; d. ?), were baptized in Philadelphia, at Norris Square Methodist Episcopal Church, on November 4, 1886. The Henry family lived in Wa-Keeney, Kansas, and Denver, Colorado, presumably also in Kansas City, Missouri (in the 1880s). John C. Henry died at home in Denver on May 3, 1901, and was buried at Fairmount Cemetery in that city. His wife and daughter afterwards shared a household in Montclair, New Jersey (1910, 1920, 1930). By 1940, Susan A. Henry was gone. In the meantime, Sadie L. Henry had married Edward J. Vintschger, later chairman of the board of Markt & Hammacher Company, a New York-based export firm co-founded by his father. They lived in Montclair for many years. David C. Henry was nowhere in sight. Sadie's husband, then, was presumably straight, while her brother was admittedly crooked.

To be continued . . .

Wa-Keeney, Kansas, 1880s, from the website Legends of Kansas.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Return

I'm back after nearly three months since writing last and nearly two months after my last posting. My situation hasn't changed. In other words, it's still messed up. But I have missed writing and am happy to be back. My program for this year is the same as before. Part of that program includes finishing some entries that have been in draft form for months and years. I would also like to work on some unfinished series and unfinished ideas. I'll begin tomorrow morning with a teller of weird tales named--but not named--Henry Leverage.

Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Requests

My last entry is a biography of author Clyde Irvine. I wrote it in response to a request from last year. I would like everyone to know that I am available to write about authors, artists, and other types of people, as well as on topics of interest to fans and readers of weird fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and so. I would ask that people not use my work or what I write on my blog as free content for their own projects. I don't do what I do so that others can benefit monetarily from it. I understand that, people being people, some will take what I write here for their own purposes, without permission, credit, attribution, or citation, needless to say without compensation paid to me. I would ask that the best of you show some respect and consideration. I'm not anyone's employee. What I write hasn't just fallen out of the sky. I created it.

Please contact me with requests. Although I write for free on this blog, I would seek compensation for any writing I do outside of it. That seems reasonable enough, even if those who seek content for free might be shocked, offended, or insulted by such a request.

Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Clyde Irvine (1899-1948)

John Clyde Irvine
Aka Lindsay Nisbet
Author, Playwright, Newspaper Drama Critic/Reviewer and Feature Editor
Born April 15, 1899, Glasgow, Scotland
Died June 21, 1948, Los Angeles, California

John Clyde Irvine was born on April 15, 1899, in Glasgow, Scotland. His name echoes those of geographic features in his native land: the River Clyde flows through Glasgow and into the Firth of Clyde north of Irvine. Knowing something about his life as a Scotsman transplanted to America and Canada makes me wonder whether he could have been the pseudonymous author Abrach in Weird Tales.

Clyde Irvine was the son of John Irvine, an agricultural worker and gamekeeper, and Jessie Easton Evans. Irvine attended school in Glasgow and served in the British army. In the census of 1921, he was counted in Maymyo, Burma, where he was a private in the Second Battalion of the King's Own Royal Regiment. A far more well-known writer was also at Maymyo. His name was Eric Arthur Blair, but we know him as George Orwell (1903-1950). Blair was at Maymyo in about 1923. I can't say whether these two men ever met, but crossed paths and the possibility of crossed paths are always fascinating to consider.

Eric Blair was a police officer in Burma. John C. Irvine seems to have been a police officer in Mashonaland, a region of what was at that time called Rhodesia. I base that supposition on a piece published in Short Stories magazine in its issue of October 25, 1939, credited to Clyde Irvine. Co-written with a Major Desmond, "I Was a Cop in Mashonaland" was Irvine's first known credit in an American pulp magazine, and it seems to establish his connection to Rhodesia. That connection will come into play shortly.

On February 28, 1921, Irvine married Kate Doreen "Scotty" Nisbet (1900-1980) in Glasgow. She was a pianist and, after her husband's death, a musician in a nightclub in Southern California. The couple had four children, Noreen Nisbet Easton Irvine Wilson (1922-2009), Rex John Irvine (1924-1996), Mona Hay Irvine Warren (1928-2001), and Clyde Irvine, Jr. (1933-2003), three of whom lived into the current century. According to The FictionMags Index, Irvine wrote as Lindsay Nisbet in Weird Tales magazine, March 1940. Nisbet was of course his wife's maiden name. There are other Nisbets listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, but I can't say whether any was related to her. Irvine had a short story under his own name in that same issue of Weird Tales.

Irvine was an author, playwright, newspaper drama critic/reviewer, and feature editor of The Daily Record, then and now based in Glasgow. Irvine's plays include "So Free We Seem" (performed at the Arran Drama Festival in 1938), "Scrap" (1938), "Yet They Endure" (1940), "The Last Cavalier," "Death Chair", and "Saltire in Crimson." He was also a member of International P.E.N.

All of that was in his first career in Scotland.

In late 1938 or early 1939, Irvine came to the United States as a representative of the Southern Rhodesia Government in its exhibit of a replica of Victoria Falls, put on display at the World's Fair in New York City. Irvine handled publicity around the exhibit and gave talks to clubs, groups, and organizations in the area of the city. He also returned dispatches to The Daily Record in Glasgow about his stay in New York.

When the enumerator of the U.S. Census came around in 1940, she found Irvine living in Queens Village, Queens, New York. He gave his occupation as freelance writer. I wonder if Irvine encountered pulp magazines for the first time when he came to the United States, for all of his credits in that type of magazine were published in 1939 and after. Here's a list from The FictionMags Index from before and after 1939:

• "Some Kind Letters and Cross Words" (with The Duke), column, in Ziffs Magazine, Nov. 1925
• "I Was a Cop in Mashonaland" (with Major Desmond) in Short Stories, Oct. 25 1939
• "Bush Devil" in Jungle Stories, Spring 1940
• "The Centurion’s Prisoner," in Weird Tales, Mar. 1940, as by Lindsay Nisbet--First installment of "It Happened To Me"
• "The Horror in the Glen," in Weird Tales, Mar. 1940
• "Second Chance Booter," in 12 Sports Aces, Mar. 1940
• "Bride of the Dragon," in Mystery Tales, May 1940
• "Idol of Death," in Jungle Stories, Fall 1940
• "The Eye of Death," in Action Stories, Oct. 1940
• "The Devil’s Bodyguard," in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Dec. 1940
• "Satan on Safari," in Jungle Stories, Winter 1940
• "Code of the Veldt," in Jungle Stories, Summer 1941
• "The Singing Skull, " in Jungle Stories, Fall 1941
• "Bush Gamble," in Jungle Stories, Winter 1941
• "The Crocodile’s Bride," in Jungle Stories, Spring 1942
• "White Man’s Voodoo," in Jungle Stories, Summer 1942
• "Kraal of Blood-Miracles," in Jungle Stories, Fall 1942
• "The Juju of N'Jola," in Jungle Stories, Winter 1942
• "Diamonds of Death," in Jungle Stories, Apr. 1943

There is also a credit for a John Irvine, a poem called "Mairi," published in The Cornhill Magazine in February 1938. There are enough stories there to make a collection. I would like to read them.

Irvine's credits in the list above ended in 1943. I think there's an easy explanation for that, for he relocated to Canada during World War II. There he appears to have served once again in the military, and he continued to write. I have as evidence one credit for him in that part of his career, a feature article called "Two-Time Winner--The Story of a Guy With Courage Plus!," by Sgt. J. Clyde Irvine, in the Canadian military newspaper Khaki, in its issue of February 16, 1944. Irvine's story is about Sgt. George Alfred Hickson (1915-1979) of Kitchener, Ontario, a Canadian war hero.

[Update (Apr. 4, 2026): Tracy Irvine Cracraft, comment below, has let us know that her father's "role in the army while in Canada was to teach soldiers jiu-jitsu." Maybe that was a skill he learned in Burma. Thank you, Tracy.]

After the war, Clyde Irvine moved with his family to Southern California. He died on June 21, 1948, in Los Angeles at age forty-nine and was buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery, Inglewood, California.

Clyde Irvine's Story in Weird Tales
"The Horror in the Glen," (Mar. 1940)

Lindsay Nisbet's Story in Weird Tales
"The Centurion’s Prisoner" (Mar. 1940)--First installment of "It Happened To Me"

The list from The FictionMags Index is the work of that website and its compilers, and I thank them for it. I also thank them for the image shown below.

Jungle Stories, Summer 1942. "White Man's Voodoo" by Clyde Irvine is inside. His name is on the cover.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

H.P. Lovecraft, Cosmic Horror, & August Derleth-Part Two

August Derleth quoted Harold Farnese on H.P. Lovecraft, putting words at the tip of Lovecraft's pen that were never there.

Derleth also misquoted Lovecraft in a newspaper column called "The New Books," published in the Madison, Wisconsin, Capital Times on August 2, 1942. His subject was Clark Ashton Smith and his new book Out of Space and Time (Arkham House, 1942). Derleth wrote:

"None strikes the note of cosmic horror so well as Clark Ashton Smith," wrote the late great master of the macabre H.P. Lovecraft.

It's nice that Smith was getting some press. Somewhat questionable is the idea that Derleth the reviewer was promoting in his column a book that Derleth the publisher had just made available for sale. Unacceptable is the fact that Derleth misquoted his "late great master," for what Lovecraft actually wrote, in "Supernatural Horror in Literature," is this:

Of younger Americans, none strikes the note of cosmic terror so well as the California poet, artist, and fictionist Clark Ashton Smith [. . .].

Emphasis added in both quotes.

So Derleth replaced "terror" with "horror." You might call that a quibble. Someone else might see it differently. After all, terror and horror are not the same thing. More to the point, by 1942, "cosmic horror," perhaps already synonymous with Lovecraftian horror, at least in the fan's imagination, had probably become or was beginning to become a thing.* Clark Ashton Smith may have written Lovecraftian tales of cosmic horror, but Lovecraft didn't say that. Derleth did, thereby putting words into Lovecraft's mouth. Again we have to wonder whether this was a simple mistake or misinterpretation, or something done because it suited Derleth's purposes. Did he seek to make a claim to "cosmic horror" as a concept in the way that he seems to have done to the ideas and works of H.P. Lovecraft? Answering that question would take more research than what I can accomplish right now. I'll just add that in her review of Out of Time and Space, Gail Stackpole of the Oroville (California) Mercury-Register was original in describing Smith's collection as "these tales of cosmic horror" (Nov. 12, 1942).

In misquoting Lovecraft in print, Derleth once again propagated an inaccurate idea about his subject, in this case Clark Ashton Smith. When Robert Elder wrote his obituary of Smith (Auburn [California] Journal, Aug. 17, 1961), he perpetuated that idea, using Derleth's exact words--"cosmic horror"--from 1942. Elder may have used Derleth's previous review as a source for his quote. Again, this might be just so much quibbling, but if "cosmic horror" is a real category, we should use the term describing it with as much precision as possible. A larger principle is that we should be as assiduous in our research and as accurate in our quotations as we can be.

------

*The first use of the modifier Lovecraftian in newspapers that I have found was by William T. Evjue, writing in the Capital Times on November 28, 1945, in regards to an essay ("Tales of the Marvellous and Ridiculous") by Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker (Nov. 24, 1945). The first of its opposite, un-Lovecraftian, is in R.S. Devon's review of The Lurker at the Threshold by August Derleth (1945), in the same paper on December 31, 1945. I agree with Devon that Derleth's book is un-Lovecraftian, possibly even anti-Lovecraftian. I have written before on Wilson and The Lurker at the Threshold. Click on the name and title for a link.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

H.P. Lovecraft, Cosmic Horror, & August Derleth-Part One

The phrase "cosmic horror" or "cosmic horrors" was in use as early as 1879, though not in the way scholars, fans, and readers of genre fiction use it today. That kind of meaning came later, perhaps around the turn of the nineteenth century, certainly by the pulp fiction era of the 1920s through the 1940s. I base all of this on an online search of newspaper articles from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The word cosmic is in "Supernatural Horror in Literature" by H.P. Lovecraft (1927; 1933-1935; 1939). The exact phrase "cosmic horror" appears five times in his essay. There are other "cosmic" phrases as well:

• "cosmic mystery"
• "cosmic fear"
• "cosmic terror"
• "cosmic tragedy"
• "cosmic setting"
• "cosmic unreality"
• "cosmic panic"
• "cosmic malignity"
• "cosmic adumbrations"
• "cosmic space"
• "cosmic alienage"
• "cosmic aberration"
• "cosmic fright"
• "the . . . cosmic"

It's clear that Lovecraft took what he thought of as a cosmic view of things and that he did it pretty early on in the history of pulp fiction. I guess that's why cosmic horror is now also called Lovecraftian horror and is so closely associated with him. I'm not sure how much cosmic horror as a sub-genre has changed in the one hundred and one years since Lovecraft first sat down to write. It seems like many authors still compose under a Lovecraftian spell.

"Supernatural Horror in Literature" was first reprinted in book form in The Outsider and Others (1939). Lovecraft's first book, published posthumously, was also the first volume issued by Arkham House, then owned and run by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. Derleth was an acolyte of Lovecraft. As I have written before, Derleth seems to have loved what Lovecraft did so much that he wanted to make it his own, even if that meant altering it from its original form. Maybe a wise thing to do is to be suspect of everything that Derleth wrote about his master until you can confirm that his words were indeed Lovecraft's own.

It was August Derleth who coined the phrase "Cthulhu mythos." That phrase does not appear in Lovecraft's oeuvre as far as I know. Derleth, a devout Catholic, also tried to turn Lovecraft's material, amoral, indifferent, and even malignant cosmos (and its opposite, chaos) into a battleground between good and evil. At least that's how I understand it. I don't know the exact location of that idea. Maybe there isn't just one location. In any case, Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi put a torch to that and other ideas by and about Derleth in his review of A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos: Origins of the Cthulhu Mythos by John B. Haeffle (Odense, Denmark: H. Harksen Productions, 2012). You can read what Mr. Joshi wrote on his own website by clicking here.

One of Derleth's ideas came from a supposed quotation of Lovecraft's words in a letter from Lovecraft to Los Angeles-based musician, composer, and teacher Harold Farnese. Farnese had lost track of Lovecraft's letter to him, and so when Derleth wrote to Farnese after Lovecraft's death, Farnese attempted a paraphrase. That paraphrase, the infamous "black magic quotation" or BMQ, originated with Farnese. (The phrase "black magic quotation" and acronym BMQ are in Mr. Haeffle's book and Mr. Joshi's review.) Derleth wasn't responsible for it as far as anyone knows. But he propagated the "black magic quotation" to a point that we still have it today. Some people may even still believe it. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that the "black magic quotation" should never have been put into print unless it had come with a disclaimer. Harold Farnese was after all legitimately a correspondent of Lovecraft, and we should know something about him, including that the BMQ was in his words and not in Lovecraft's. Anyway, if Mr. Joshi is correct in his analysis, then Derleth's propagation of the "black magic quotation" seems to have a been a sin of commission instead of omission, for it would seem to have served his purposes by way of his passing it off as a direct quotation from Lovecraft. It would seem to impute a moral dimension--and to apply Derleth's interpretation--to Lovecraft's cosmic vision.

I have found another misquote of Lovecraft's words, made by Derleth. This one, about Clark Ashton Smith, may be unknown today, but we should know about it now if only because it helps to confirm a pattern. By the way, if you want to read what I wrote previously on Harold Farnese and the "black magic quotation," click here.

To be concluded . . .

Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Writers in The Habit of Being

There are lots of writers and books in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald (The Noonday Press, 1979; 1988). Most are the usual subjects of American literature: Henry James, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Allen Tate, Eudora Welty. There are British, French, and other authors, too. One of the French authors is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), who was an inspiration for the old priest in The Exorcist, written by William Peter Blatty. I won't cover very many authors here. Instead I'll just write about those who are of interest to readers and fans of weird fiction, science fiction, and fantasy--plus one more.

Hugh B. Cave (1910-2004) wrote for Weird Tales. In a letter to Robert Giroux (Sept. 29, 1960; p. 409), Flannery O'Connor mentioned that the Sister Superior of a Dominican congregation of nuns had written to "a man named Hugh Cave," asking him to write about the life a twelve-year-old girl who had died of cancer. He declined, saying that a Catholic author ought to do it, and so the Sister Superior approached Flannery to edit a manuscript that they had developed on their own. Where things went from there, I don't know. But it's interesting that a teller of weird tales is in her letters.

In a letter to Elizabeth McKee, dated July 16, 1952, Flannery O'Connor wrote: "A man named Martin Greenberg from the American Mercury wrote and asked me if I have any stories. I referred him to you." (p. 42) With Gunther Stuhlmann, Martin Greenberg worked as an associate editor at the American Mercury. The editor was William Bradford Huie. In the summer of 1952, the magazine changed hands, selling to a businessman named Russell Maguire. The editorial staff seems to have stayed on for a time. I have gone into this detail because there was a science fiction editor and publisher named Martin Greenberg (1918-2013). However, I haven't found anything to indicate that these two men were one and the same.

In her letters, Flannery O'Connor wrote about Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. She was especially influenced by her reading of The Humorous Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. (pp. 98-99) The problem for me now is that there doesn't seem to have been a book by that title.

Her opinion of Ayn Rand is too good to pass up. On May 31, 1960, she wrote to Marryat Lee: "I hope you don't have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickie Spillane look like Dostoevsky." (p. 398)

Tennessee Williams is in The Habit of Being. He wrote one story for Weird Tales. So is Philip Wylie. He didn't, not even one. Wylie wrote science fiction, though, including an episode of The Name of the Game entitled "L.A. 2017," about a dystopian future. (The protagonist dreams rather than sleeps his way into the future.) I remember The Name of the Game and would like to see it again. I'm not sure that I ever will. Five hundred channels to look at and no Name of the Game.

The one more is Hollis Summers (1916-1987). As far as I know, he never wrote any works of fantasy, science fiction, or weird fiction. He did, however, write a crime novel called The Case of the Bludgeoned Teacher (originally Teach You a Lesson, 1956) under a pseudonym, Jim Hollis. Summers was a novelist, short story writer, poet, and teacher. He was one of a group of authors who taught at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, in the 1960s and afterwards. In addition to Hollis Summers, they included Jack Matthews (1925-2013), Daniel Keyes (1927-2014), Walter Tevis (1928-1984), and Cecil Hemley (1914-1966). I have a friend who lives outside of Athens on the site of an old strip-mine operation. When she was young, her parents would have people over to the house. I asked her about some of the Ohio University authors. She remembers meeting Hollis Summers. "What kind of a person was he?" I asked. "Oh, he was a fantastic person," she said. By the way, Cecil Hemley was the director of the Noonday Press, which published The Habit of Being years after his premature death.

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) knew Hollis Summers. In a letter to John Hawkes, dated September 10, 1963, she wrote: "I remember Hollis Summers and his wife very well and always liked them. They usually send me a poem at Christmastime with no return address on it but I think they are somewhere like Kentucky or Ohio." (pp. 537-538) At the time she wrote, Summers was not only "somewhere like . . . Ohio," he was actually in Ohio, teaching at Ohio University.

I received The Habit of Being as a Christmas gift. I backtracked from the index in search of the letter to Betty Hester. But I also looked for other authors, and I was pleased to find mention of Hollis Summers. I read his novel City Limit (1948) last year and enjoyed it. But I was even more pleased to read that he sent Christmas cards to Flannery O'Connor, for I have some of his Christmas cards, too, or at least the verse from his Christmas cards. I found them in copies of his books that I bought at a boutique in Athens. What a strange and wonderful thing it is to find these connections, especially when you can talk to a person who knew an author, or find something in your own life that was once in a book, or something in a book that is part of your own life. (My exact birthdate is in a book by Frederick Forsyth. I have never encountered such a thing before.) I suppose books and reading will one day go by the wayside as we rush into our illiterate and idiotic future. But at least we still have these things now. They of the future will have no idea what they missed.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Old Gods Again

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Ephesians 6:12

I meant to write on this topic in 2023 for the fiftieth anniversary of the release of The Exorcist. Now seems the right time to return to it.

* * *

The Exorcist was released at Christmastime in 1973, even if it was hardly a Christmas movie. I don't remember the winter of 1973-1974, but by accounts it was cold and snowy. That didn't stop people from going to the movie theater to see The Exorcist. I remember there was a lot of talk and some controversy over the film. I think the talk far outweighed the controversy. The Exorcist was a national event in a way that may no longer be possible in America now that we live in atomized cultures. It seemed like everyone wanted to see The Exorcist and to talk about it afterwards.* I remember that my parents went to see The Exorcist. I remember that afterwards they were silent about what they had seen. They must have been very deeply affected by their experience. If you have ever seen The Exorcist, you must know why.

We as children were not allowed to see it, but children hear and listen and seek out knowledge about things forbidden them. It was as if something had happened in another room of the house. It's as if we had heard muffled voices, snippets of sentences, cadences and tones, but never the whole thing. We wanted to know what it was all about. We talked about it ourselves in our very limited knowledge. We listened to every rumor.

I watched The Exorcist years later. One of my first thoughts was this: My parents went to see this movie. They were old-fashioned Catholics, shocked and embarrassed then by things people don't even think twice about now. And yet they went to see The Exorcist, either in late 1973 or early 1974. I'm sure they wanted to see what the talk was all about. But maybe they wanted to see something more.

Despite all of the shocking, disturbing, disgusting, and frightening scenes in The Exorcist, it is, I think, within the worldview of Catholicism, for it says that God is real and powerful and that he intercedes in earthly affairs. It says also that there are demons in the earth and that they wish to do us harm. They wish to turn us from good, to exploit our weaknesses and doubts so as to turn us from belief in God. The Exorcist says that we are engaged in an eternal conflict between good and evil. And it says that the Catholic Church leads in that conflict, with its priests as its foot soldiers. It's no wonder, then, that my parents would have seen The Exorcist. I believe that it would only have affirmed their beliefs, despite--or maybe because of--all that it is. Depictions of the fight against evil cannot be bland. They must be shocking. They must shock us awake and into vigilance, resolve, and greater faith.

The author of the screenplay for The Exorcist was William Peter Blatty (1928-2017). Born ninety-eight years ago almost exactly to today's date, he was a devout Roman Catholic and the son of Lebanese immigrants. In 1971, he wrote the novel The Exorcist, in which he cast (pun partially intended) the ancient, Asiatic, pre-Christian god Pazuzu as the demon that possesses the body of a twelve-year-old American girl. There is much in the novel that is not in the movie adaptation. Some of that involves searching in books for possible answers to the deadly serious problem at hand. That same kind of searching happens in weird fiction, for example in the opening of "The Black Stone" by Robert E. Howard (Weird Tales, Nov. 1931). In reading that part of Blatty's novel, I found that discussions of books can actually be an exciting and interesting part of a work of fiction. That's a good thing to learn for lovers of books and for people who write fiction.

Pazuzu was an actual historical deity, represented by Babylonians and Assyrians in the first millennium before Christ. I don't know when belief in Pazuzu would have faded away, but it's clear that Christianity and later religions would have displaced belief in Pazuzu and other old gods. The Exorcist begins with a sequence in the Iraqi desert: an archaeological dig would seem to have exhumed Pazuzu.** Or maybe that was only a symbolic exhumation, for the way for the return of the old gods would have already been opened by then. By the early '70s, the sea of faith--to mix metaphors--had already long before begun its "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar." (There are winds in the original stories of Pazuzu, in that beginning sequence of The Exorcist, and in Matthew Arnold's poem, from which I have drawn my second metaphor.) Significantly or not, the possessed girl's mother in The Exorcist is an atheist. Perhaps by her disbelief she opens the door--to return to my first metaphor--to the entry of an old god, long in exile. Again, despite all of its obscenities and bodily horrors, The Exorcist subscribes, I think, to a Catholic worldview. Again, by watching it, my parents and people like them would have been affirmed in their beliefs.

Blatty's sequel to The Exorcist, entitled Legion, was published in 1983 and again adapted to film. His title of course comes from the biblical account of Jesus' encounter with a man possessed. When Jesus asks the demon's name, it replies: "Legion." In an act of exorcism, Jesus casts the legion of demons into a herd of swine, which rush off a cliff and perish in the sea. That casting of possessing demons into the bodies of others is echoed in the climactic scene in The Exorcist in which the demon Pazuzu is cast into the body of the young priest, who throws himself out of the bedroom window, thereby killing himself, sending away the demon, and leaving the girl once again herself. I'm not sure what to make of the young priest's making of himself one of the Gadarene swine.

Old gods have returned to earth. I have written before on this topic, thus the title of today's entry. You can read what I wrote, dated September 29, 2023, by clicking here. In The Exorcist, the old god Pazuzu is recognized for what he is. He is not welcome and in the end is sent away. That was more than fifty years ago. Now, because we so easily give into depravity and our own worst desires, the old gods are invited back into our midst. My parents and people like them are gone. There is nothing in their place. The good God is gone, or dead according to observations by Friedrich Nietzsche and Flannery O'Connor, leaving the old ones to fill the vacuum left with his withdrawal, more accurately our driving him away. Moloch is perhaps most welcome of all of the old gods: we daily make sacrifices of unborn babies, infants, and children to him. There are others of course. Read on . . .

Murder has approached our family three times in recent years. The man involved in one of those cases is also alleged to be involved in Odinism. Odin was of course a Norse god, in other words, a pagan and pre-Christian god. Christianity did away with the old gods and all of their demands and tolerance for human sacrifice, child sacrifice, animal sacrifice, abortion, infanticide, ritual mutilation, bestiality, cannibalism, and other horrors. Thank God. But in turning away from belief in God, we turn ourselves back to those and other horrors, back to the pre-Christian past. We shouldn't wonder at all that people of today do the things they do. Why would it be otherwise? I wonder when we might turn back again, not to the old gods but to the One God that preceded and banished them.

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*Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune loved The Exorcist. Martin Knelman of the Toronto Globe and Mail hated it, describing it, among other things, as "fascist." Some things never change, I guess: in 2026 as in 1973, if you don't like someone or something, or disagree with him or it, just call him or it "fascist" and that disposes of your problem. Nothing is required on your part and you can dismiss opposing ideas and the people who hold them.

**There are similarities between the opening sequences in The Exorcist and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Both take place in silent and arid wildernesses. Both involve encounters with artifacts representing gods or godlike entities. Those gods or entities become influences upon humanity, for better or worse. Remember that Jesus went into a desert wilderness, there to encounter and to be tempted by Satan. Jesus stayed strong, resisted the influence, and sent him away.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley