Four Men-Part Four

"The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant is in two versions. The first version is a short story or tale published in 1886. The second is a long short story or novelette published in 1887. If you can, you should read these two versions together, even if the second version is fuller and, I would say, more important in the history of science fantasy and science fiction.

The first version is shorter, more objective, and more emotionally even. It takes the form of a first-person narrative within a third-person narrative, and so we're not completely immersed in the narrator's low or declining mental state. There is the very likely possibility that he's telling the truth about his experiences with an otherwise inexplicable invisible being. The situation, with its framing device set inside of a hospital, reminds me of the movie version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

The second version of "The Horla" is longer and entirely subjective. The narrator is very slowly losing his mind, and by the end is ready to kill himself. His version takes the form of a series of diary entries. The diarist can be taken as an unreliable narrator. He may be merely insane rather than a witness to real but inexplicable events. Could Maupassant have gone into steep decline in between his composition of these two versions? Could he have been his own diarist/narrator?

A long time ago, I wrote about Fritz Leiber, Jr., and the problem of the weird tale in the twentieth century. That problem is summarized in passages from Leiber's short story "The Hound," originally in Weird Tales in November 1942:

"We begin by denying all the old haunts and superstitions. Why shouldn't we? They belong to the era of cottage and castle. They can't take root in the new environment."

* * * 

"The supernatural beings of a modern city? Sure, they'd be different from the ghosts of yesterday. Each culture creates its own ghosts."

In "The Horla," Maupassant anticipated the problem of the weird tale in the twentieth century, for the new being of his title is a materialistic/scientific monster set to displace the supernatural monsters and ghosts of the past. At this point, I should say that "The Horla" is a very rich story, full of ideas and episodes, each with its own interest. It's a kitchen-sink kind of story, an attempt at a single explanation for seemingly many disparate things. Every fan of weird fiction should read it carefully, for it treats concepts of the supernatural past, the Nietzschean (and Darwinian) present, and the Fortean future, mostly directly and on full display now that we have had nearly a century and a half to read stories of this type. "The Horla" also anticipated H.G. Wells, and I wonder: was it the first alien invasion story in the history of science fiction?

In the two versions of "The Horla," the eponymous being is compared directly or indirectly to an incubus/succubus, a vampire, and a demon that takes possession of a man's life, mind, and activity. In the second version especially, "The Horla" presents a kind of unified-field theory of anomalous phenomena in that so many things that were formerly explained by supernatural means--incubi/succubi, night paralysis, vampires, demons, ghosts, poltergeists, and so on--now have a materialistic explanation, this for an age in which God has been proclaimed dead and the supernatural no longer has any power in our lives:

     We've always had a foreboding of him, for centuries we've dreaded him and announced his coming. Our forefathers were always haunted by fear of the Invisible.
     Now he has come.
     He was the true subject of all the old legends about fairies, gnomes and evil, elusive spirits in the air. He was sensed in advance by men who were already apprehensive and trembling. (First version, Bantam, 1994, p. 295)

Note the language of the Christian concept of the Second Coming and of a relief from anxiety, fear, and trembling--except that those feelings are not relieved but enforced by the coming of the Horla.

From the second version, in which the hypnotist Dr. Parent, obviously meant to represent a man of science, speaks from a position of supposed authority:

"Ever since man has thought, since he has felt himself close to a mystery which is impenetrable to his coarse and imperfect senses, and he endeavors to supplement the feeble penetration of his organs by the efforts of his intellect. As long as that intellect remained in its elementary stage, this intercourse with invisible spirits assumed forms which were commonplace though terrifying. Thence sprang the popular belief in the supernatural, the legends of wandering spirits, of fairies, of gnomes, of ghosts, I might even say the conception of God, for our ideas of the Workman-Creator, from whatever religion they may have come down to us, are certainly the most mediocre, the stupidest and the most unacceptable inventions that ever sprang from the frightened brain of any human creature." (Random House, 1945, 1950, p. 33)

In "The Horla," God is dethroned first by science and materialism, and that clears the way for man to be dethroned from his place near the top of the great chain of being. Why should we enjoy any special status? Why should we not give way to this new superior being? For no reason at all.

There is much in "The Horla" for us to contemplate, definitely more than I can cover in a blog entry or two. I'll bring up two more concepts before getting to the main part of what I set out to say today. The first involves Friedrich Nietzsche . . .

I have read that if God is dead, then all that remains to drive human activity is the Nietzschean will to power. (The only other options, I guess, are nihilism and self-destruction, both of which were at work in Maupassant's work and life, as well as, ultimately, in that of Nietzsche.) I'm not a philosopher and don't understand philosophical ideas very well. All I can say is that there are exercises of will shown in "The Horla." An introduction to this concept is in the episode in which the diarist's cousin is hypnotized and her will coopted by her hypnotist. This taking-over of her will foreshadows that of the Horla's taking-over of the diarist's will later in the story. There seems to be a parallel made between possession by a supernatural being--a demon--and that of the materialistic/scientific Horla. In both instances, the possessed person loses his ability to exercise his will to a more powerful--or superior--being. We now recognize mesmerism as a pseudoscience, and so the force of Maupassant's idea is reduced in our time. But in his, mesmerism was perhaps seen as more potent scientifically and no doubt useful for his purposes. In any case, hypnotism or mesmerism was a way for him to treat the concept of a loss of will--or the Nietzschean concept of the will to power--to effect.

The second materialistic or scientific (or pseudoscientific) concept treated indirectly in "The Horla" is that of Darwinism, for the obvious point is that the Horla is more advanced than humanity in evolutionary terms: he has come, again, to displace us. In the first version, Dr. Marrande speaks as the narrator closes out his narrative:

"I don't know if this man is mad or we both are, or . . . or if our successor has really arrived." (p. 296)

In the second version, the diarist describes the Horla as man's "successor in this world." (p. 38) On August 19, he writes:

     Now I know. I can divine. The reign of man is over, and He has come. [. . .] Woe to us! Woe to man! He has come [. . .] the Horla--it is He--the Horla--He has come!--" (p. 39)

He continues:

     A new being! Why not? It was assuredly bound to come! Why should we be the last? We do not distinguish it, like all the others created before us? The reason is, its nature is more delicate, its body finer and more finished than ours. [. . .]
    There are only a few--so few--stages of development in this world, from the oyster up to the man. Why should there not be one more, when once that period is accomplished which separates the successive products one from the other?
     Why not one more? (p. 40)    

That, surely, is progress and evolution.

It's plain to me that the Horla is a being from another planet, from the stars. Some readers might see it differently. But I see "The Horla" as an alien invasion story, and perhaps the first of its type. H.G. Wells usually gets credit for writing the first or one of the first alien invasion stories in his scientific romance or seminal science fiction novel The War of the Worlds (1895; 1897). It's easy to see why "The Horla" would have slipped notice, for it is a far more subtle and less sensationalistic work. Again, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, another far more subtle (and insidious) work, is closer in concept to "The Horla."

Finally, I would like to bring up Charles H. Fort, the youngest of the four men of the title. I have written a lot of about Fort. I see him as a seminal figure in science fiction as well. In thinking about man's place in the universe, Fort famously concluded:

"I think we're property."

(From The Book of the Damned, 1919, Chapter 12; see "Piecing Together Separated Things," from May 13, 2022.) That idea--that we are merely the property of superior beings, extraterrestrial in origin--has come down to us through all kinds of science fiction and science fantasy stories from the pulp era to the present. In fact, it's extremely prominent in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, published nigh on two years ago. Fort is credited as the originator of that idea, which also, as it so happens, forms the basis, I think, of the ancient astronaut hypothesis. But was Fort the originator? Or did it come from somewhere else? I'll answer my own questions, for it seems to have come from "The Horla." Very obviously from "The Horla," in both of its versions. From version one:

     What is it? Gentlemen, it's the being the earth has been awaiting, after man! He's come to dethrone us, subjugate us, tame us, perhaps to feed on us, as we feed on cattle and hogs. (pp. 294-295)

And from version two:

. . . but the Horla will make of man what man has made of the horse and of the ox: His chattel, His slave, and His food, by the mere power of his will. Woe to us! (p. 39)

So in the second passage, there is--as in the Cosmic Horror Issue--the combination of a Nietzschean idea--"the mere power of will"--and a Fortean one--we are "chattel."

(There are episodes involving mirrors and gazing into mirrors in "The Horla." I don't have those puzzled out, but I wonder if they could allude to the Nietzschean idea of gazing into abysses.)

As for the narrator/diarist in "The Horla," he finally puts together his ideas regarding the Horla by availing himself of what I have called the Fortean method. This is more overt in the first version than in the second, but it's present in both, for in both, the narrator/diarist discovers, like Fort, a newspaper account that provides an explanation for what has so afflicted him. In the first version, that account refers to "[a] kind of epidemic of madness" that has struck in Brazil, that is, attacks by "invisible vampires." These are obviously made by what the narrator has called the Horla. And he remembers that a Brazilian ship recently passed by his house near the Seine. Without the newspaper account, the attacks would remain an isolated mystery, perhaps an individual madness. But with it, they become real in the world, the account being all of the evidence needed that something strange is indeed going on here.

(The arrival of a vampire carried on board ship from another place reminds me of the plot of Dracula by Bram Stoker, published in 1897.)

So did Fort read Maupassant, specifically "The Horla"? I don't know. I didn't find entries on Maupassant in the indexes of either of my biographies of Fort (by Damon Knight and Jim Steinmeyer). Fort traveled in the Old World. Presumably he was exposed to Old World literature. But I guess these things will remain mysteries. In any case, I would say that "The Horla" was at least an early story to treat the problem of the supernatural past in the materialistic/scientific present; that it was one of the first if not the first alien invasion story; that it seems to have treated the Nietzschean concept of a will to power; that it also seems to have treated the Darwinian concept of man as just a link in an evolutionary chain reaching forever forward; that it predated the Fortean concept that we are merely the property of superior extraterrestrial intelligences; and that newspaper accounts and other documents can be used to explain what would otherwise remain disparate and unexplainable phenomena, and so in addition to science, we have journalism as an explainer.

So read "The Horla" and see what you can find in its pages.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Four Men-Part Two

I'll set aside Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft before bringing them up again. The four men of the title are:

• German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900);

• French author Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893);

• American author Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933); and

• American author and gadfly of science Charles H. Fort (1874-1932).

Some of the stories in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023) allude to ideas from two of these men, Nietzsche and Fort. Now that I have read "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant, I can draw him into this discussion, too, along with Robert W. Chambers.

Robert W. Chambers is mentioned by name in the Cosmic Horror Issue. Guy de Maupassant is not, except very indirectly, for in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, one of the videos watched by the main character during his solitary holiday binge is Diary of a Madman (1963), starring Vincent Price. Although it bears the title of one of Maupassant's stories, Diary of a Madman is mostly based on another, namely, "The Horla." Both stories take the form of diaries, and so it was easy, I guess, to put them together. If the moviemakers had entitled their film The Horla, no one would have known what it was about. Besides that, it probably wouldn't have gotten by the censors.

The main character in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" thinks a little about Vincent Price but not at all about Maupassant. Thematically, "The Horla" is related to Quatermass (1979), a show in which Mr. Cornell and his TV watcher are much more interested. The illustration at the beginning of the story is of John Mills' image on a TV screen, Mills being the star of the show. I don't know whether Mr. Cornell was aware of the thematic connection when he wrote his story. The idea that we are property, or cattle, seems to have come from Charles Fort. No one writing for the Cosmic Horror Issue seems to have looked to "The Horla" for inspiration. I think, though, that "The Horla" must be considered seminal in the history of science fiction. I'll get into that a little more. Right now I'll just say that I can't believe I had never read it before a couple of weeks ago. But then you can't read everything all at once. Where would that leave you?

"The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant was published in two versions, the first in the October 26, 1886, edition of the French newspaper Gil Blas, the second in a hardbound collection called The Horla, published in 1887. I have the first version in Pierre and Jean and Selected Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant (Bantam, 1994). I have the second and I guess definitive version in Selected Tales of Guy de Maupassant (Random House, 1945 and 1950), with illustrations by Adolf Dehn. Even so, this version is different from other translated versions. If you can, you should read these two versions together. I'll quote from them next time, or maybe the time after that if this brief series turns into a long one. By the way, "The Horla" was reprinted in Weird Tales in August 1926, in its author's birth month, as well as the same month that Maupassant's diarist first sees his previously invisible tormenter. 

Translator Charlotte Mandell has suggested that the portmanteau word horla is a combination of the French hors, meaning "outside," and là, meaning "there." The Horla, then, is "the Outsider, the outer, the one Out There," or "the 'what's out there'." (Quoted in Wikipedia.) That's an excellent interpretation, I think, and just another indication that we should always endeavor to look into the meanings of words. A simple English version of the word Horla might be alien, and I think that's what we are to believe about Maupassant's being, that it is an alien, probably an extraterrestrial alien.

H.P. Lovecraft was an admirer of Guy de Maupassant and Robert W. Chambers. Both are mentioned in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature." Lovecraft especially liked "The Horla." It's supposed to have been an influence upon him in his composition of "The Call of Cthulhu" (Weird Tales, Feb. 1928). I can't say that that's true. It appears to be one of those things that people say so often that everyone just accepts it. We should have some evidence instead, and then we can believe it for sure. The influence of Chambers upon Lovecraft is more evident. In contrast, any connection to or awareness of Nietzsche in Lovecraft seems tenuous. As for Charles Fort, look no farther than "The Whisperer in Darkness" (Weird Tales, Aug. 1931) for Fort's name in Lovecraft's fiction.

All four men of my title read Poe, for Poe, once he arrived upon this earth, became inescapable. Here is Nietzsche in a discussion of Poe, and others:

     Those great poets, for example, men like Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol--I do not dare mention far greater names, but I mean them--are and must be men of the moment, sensual, absurd, fivefold, irresponsible, and sudden in mistrust and trust; with souls in which they must usually conceal some fracture; often taking revenge with their works for some inner contamination, often seeking with their high flights to escape into forgetfulness from an all-too-faithful memory; idealists from the vicinity of swamps--what torture are these great artists and all the so-called higher men for him who has guessed their true nature!

The quote is from Nietzsche contra Wagner: Out of the Files of a Psychologist (1888). A different version is in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886). So, like Maupassant, Nietzsche sometimes changed what he wrote.

To be continued . . .

An illustration for "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant, source and artist unknown. This may be in an edition published by P.F. Collier & Son in 1910, although the almost unreadable words above appear to be in French.

Posted early and revised later in the morning on March 2, 2025. I have changed what I have written, too.
Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Four Men-Part One

Two figures cast their long shadows over the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. They are of course Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. But it seems to me that there is more of Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Fort than Poe or Lovecraft in Weird Tales #367. From Nietzsche comes the theme and imagery of staring into voids and abysses. From Fort comes the idea that we are merely the property of superior beings from outer space. I think there is very little if anything of Robert W. Chambers in this issue, even if his name is mentioned first.

• In "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, a man stays at home at Christmastime to watch TV. (Fun fun.) Among the shows he watches is Quatermass, a British TV serial from 1979. As I understand it, the premise of the show is that people on Earth are being harvested by aliens for their protein. Human beings, then, are essentially cattle, in other words, property. (Cattle is from the same root word as chattel, i.e., the Latin capitale, meaning "property.") This is the Fortean aspect of Mr. Cornell's story. Now the Nietzschean aspect:

The door opens. He's opened it inward. And he's just looking at darkness. Just space. (p. 24)

I take that to be an oblique reference to a quote from Nietzsche:

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. (From Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, Chapter 4, No. 146) (1886)

• The reference to Nietzsche is more direct in "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan:

I stare at the box, and I imagine it stares back at me. (p. 38)

The reference to Fort is also more direct:

I think we're fished for. (p. 38)

It's also kind of indirect in that those italicized words refer to Edmond Hamilton's overtly Fortean story "The Space Visitors," from 1930.

• In "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson, the title character says that on his trip to the Moon, he:

"stared in the other direction at all that empty space out there. At the Void. And not only did the Void stare back, it spoke to me--or at least something within the Void spoke." (p. 53)

Here's the Fortean concept to go with the foregoing Nietzschean one:

"We were to be contained--not because we were a disease, as I thought, but because we were playthings."

Whose playthings? According to Bonneville, we are the playthings of "Our Owner." (p. 53) So, again, we're property.

There is an alien presence in "The Traveler" by Francisco Tignini, "Mozaika" by Nancy Kilpatrick, and "Laid to Rest" by Tim Lebbon, while the void appears right in the title of Carol Gyzander's story "Call of the Void -- L'appel du Vide." I can't say that any of these stories has both a Nietzschean and a Fortean aspect.

As for the other two stories, "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story" by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, and "Concerto in Five Movements" by Ramsey Campbell, Poe and Lovecraft have a more prominent place in the former, while Mr. Campbell's story is the most Lovecraftian of all. And if cosmic horror is a synonym of Lovecraftian horror, then "Concerto in Five Movements" is perhaps closer than any to the concept of cosmic horror.

The title of this little essay is "Four Men," but I have written about only two of the four. The other two will come along in part two of this series.

To be continued . . . 

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

"The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson-Part One

Francis Paul Wilson was born on May 17, 1946, in Jersey City, New Jersey. He is a writer of science fiction, horror, and weird fiction. He has also worked in television, and some of his works have been adapted to that medium and the medium of film. His novel The Keep, from 1981, was adapted for theatrical release in 1983. It was also adapted to a board game and a role-playing game. In 2006, Mr. Wilson wrote the script for a comic book adaptation. Jonathan Maberry, current editor of Weird Tales, used Mr. Wilson's character Repairman Jack in his own series novel Cave 13, published in 2023. So there is still the same pattern: the authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue are friends of the editor, they are involved in TV and movies, and they write for comic books.

* * *

The short story "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson follows his essay "Abrahamic vs. Cosmic Horror." There is a full-page illustration enclosing the main title followed by six solid pages of text. Thank goodness for some solid content.

I have been writing about brandnames used in fiction. Now here comes one driving right into the title of Mr. Wilson's story. That's okay, I think. America is a country of cars and roads. If we could translate that word--America--it might mean "a nation of people on the road, on the move." Many of our cultural works have been about cars and driving and being on the road. I won't list any. You'll think of plenty on your own. I'll just add that I had a chance to buy a Bonneville once. I wish I had done it.

"The Last Bonneville" is a third-person narrative. That seems to me significant, for the two other major works so far in this issue, "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell and "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan, are told in the first person and are, I think, somewhat autobiographical. Remember that the worm ouroboros, inverted and turned in upon itself, is rolling through the Cosmic Horror Issue. This story is told from a different point of view.

There are more brandnames and proper nouns in "The Last Bonneville," just as in previous stories: Maserati Ghibli, Elon Musk (a maker of both cars and rockets), Apollo Eight and its three astronauts, Borman, Lovell, and Anders. Two Kennedys, a Nixon, and another victim of an assassin's bullet, Martin Luther King. (Two out of the four of them sent men to the Moon. One of them went to the mountaintop.) There will be more. There will also be several meta-references. In other words, "The Last Bonneville" does not stand alone in its storytelling.

There are two characters in "The Last Bonneville." One is Felix De Groot, who drives a Maserati and works as a rocket scientist, an occupation that approaches that of the physicist in "Night Fishing." The other is a crazy guy named Bonneville who drives a Bonneville. De Groot picks up Bonneville on the road. They talk as De Groot drives.

(Felix De Groot by the way means "happy" and "the great." He's about to be taken down a few notches in both categories. Bonneville's first name is Dwight, which is a pagan name referring to the pagan god Dionysus. His given name connects him to the Ancient Greek origins of science fiction, if Jack Williamson is right about these things. It also connects him to the chaotic aspect of the Dionysian. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the dichotomy between Apollonian order and Dionysian chaos. You are about to read another reference to Apollo, in three . . . two . . . one . . .)

Bonneville claims to have gone around the Moon on Apollo Eight. He is evidently an atheist. He calls it "ignorant and anti-science" to believe in God and the Creation. (The other day on this blog I was called ignorant by an anonymous believer in an anti-science belief system. Anonymous might be an atheist. He certainly believes that human beings can be gods and that we can create ourselves. He and his co-religionists should leave well enough alone and let God do his stuff.) While the other astronauts were reading from the Book of Genesis for all the world to hear--it was Christmastime after all--Bonneville

"stared in the other direction at all that empty space out there. At the Void. And not only did the Void stare back, it spoke to me--or at least something within the Void spoke." (p. 53)

So here they are again in Mr. Wilson's story: the Void and the allusion to Nietzsche.

Bonneville was going to blow up Apollo because he thought we should be quarantined on Earth (not realizing, I guess, that the idea of a quarantined Earth came from a thoroughgoing believer in God, C.S. Lewis). But the Void told him there isn't any reason to keep the people of Earth quarantined: "We were to be contained--not because we were a disease, as I thought, but because we were playthings." Whose playthings? Those of "Our Owner." (p. 53)

And now Charles Fort makes his return appearance, after his first in "Night Fishing." Nietzsche and Fort, together again at last.

Like "A Ghost Story for Christmas," there is a Christmastime theme. And like "Night Fishing," "The Last Bonneville" is a pretty full story, even if it's pretty short. There is talk of the Fermi Paradox, the Drake Equation, the "Wow!" Signal, the BLC-1 Signal. Brandnames come back, but the author makes a mistake by calling a Bonneville an Olds. It's actually a Pontiac. There is also mention of AirPods, an Apple product. Do these authors get kickbacks for dropping names in their stories? If he's waiting for a check from Pontiac, Mr. Wilson shouldn't hold his breath.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan-Part Three

In "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan, the narrator, a physics professor with psychiatric problems--actually problems far more profound than any psychiatrist could treat--reveals to the reader that he has committed murder, or something approaching murder. Actually there is more than one murder, for, like a serial killer, he has gone after people, one after another, who live on the fringes of society. But are these really murders? Or is he a recruiter of sorts--a groomer--who lures his victims into his abysses? He writes:

If not murder, then let's say a fisher of men.

That suggestion is ironic of course, an inversion of the original. In Matthew 4:19, Jesus says:

"Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men."

In his own story, the narrator alludes to Edmond Hamilton, who alluded to Charles Fort before him, writing:

I think we're fished for.

The fish is a Christian symbol of course. Darwinists have co-opted that symbol for humorous and satirical purposes. You see it mostly on their cars. Darwinist or not, if we're fished for, we're all sooner or later going into the creel.

By the way, one who fishes draws in his catch. Remember the word.

* * *

The narrator remembers night fishing with his grandfather and his grandfather's friends. One of those friends, named Snuffy Smith after the comic strip character, tells a story of his own childhood in which he went into the cellar to look for some canned peaches for his mother. There he found the shape of a girl that changed as he looked upon it. "And her eyes were like burning white pinpricks in the darkness." Elsewhere in the story, the narrator describes a night on the lake:

     The stars wheel above the lake like a drunken tapestry, a billion blazing pin pricks [. . .].

There are, then, stars in the shape-shifters and shape-shifters in the stars. Or, shape-shifters are star stuff, just like us, except they're not the good kind. Remember here how the hero in The Incredible Shrinking Man describes the stars: "God's silver tapestry spread across the night." Setting aside the mixed metaphor of a tapestry that wheels, we can say that God's tapestry is not drunken but properly ordered. It is designed, just as every tapestry is designed.

* * *

There is also in "Night Fishing" a story of something pulled up from the bottom of the lake, the way the aliens in Hamilton's story trawl the surface of the earth from their high-atmospheric ships. The narrator is keeping secrets from his psychiatrist--and from us. What was the drawn-up thing? Was it an alien entity, a visitor from the void? Or was it simply a dead body? The author may also be keeping secrets from us. Is there really something cosmic, supernatural, or super-scientific going on in his story? Or does the thing of which he writes exist only in the abyssal depths of the narrator's soul? In other words, is the horror external or internal? Another question: has the author put himself into his own story? It is, after all, about transformations. He writes: "[T]his does not have to be any one thing." It, and possibly everything else, can be many, or any of its own choosing.

* * *

The thing in the box that the narrator has bought from an estate sale--the thing from the abyss--is a shape-shifter. It is in service to this shape-shifter that the narrator, now in adulthood, does his own night fishing among outcasts, what people might call the dregs of society. For example, the narrator's latest victim, the only one who actually makes an appearance in the story, is a transvestite. (Trawl, draw, drag, dredge, and possibly dregs are related words.) In an imaginary session with his psychiatrist, the psychiatrist asks him, "You think it followed you . . . through time, from that night on the lake?" After a while, the narrator says, "That night on the lake, it saw my face [. . . .] It saw something wrong with my soul. It saw an easy mark." In other words, a thing brought up--like Dagon or Cthulhu--from an abyss looked into him and recognized also an abyss. And now he goes about its work and his.

* * *

The author of "Night Fishing" is one person but has attempted to become another, complete with a name change. Emulating God, he has attempted to speak word into the creation of something new. Similarly, the thing in his story is one thing, then becomes another. The narrator may have been one person before becoming another, but his soul appears to have been already ruined when he first saw the thing. Maybe he was ruined at his conception. This can't be original sin, though, because the law governing this story--and the author's beliefs--won't allow it. The boy in the story is a transvestite, in other words, someone pretending to be another he is not. Using the object that was one thing before transforming itself into another, the narrator introduces the boy into his world. The boy thereby also becomes something else. You could say that he undergoes a transition. So the narrator, more or less a groomer, recruits the boy into his abyss. He is a fisher of men but an inversion of Christian fishers of men, who recruit their fellows into faith in God and his Creation, also called Cosmos.

* * *

In "Night Fishing," Caitlín R. Kiernan has synthesized what I think are the two main themes or images in Weird Tales #367, first, the abyss or void, and, second, an alien presence among us. Both are treated in this issue as sources of cosmic horror. Or maybe his story was the starting point for this themed issue and the other authors were invited to write variations on his two themes. (Probably not. More likely this was convergent evolution--or conformist creation, if there can be such a thing. Or maybe a better word for it is groupthink.) I should also emphasize here the theme and imagery of the sea, for the sea is in "Night Fishing" as well as in the other works so far in the Cosmic Horror Issue. But then we should remember that abyss and void may also refer to the sea and did from the beginning, for they are both in the creation story, in the Book of Genesis.

So far, these allusions or references--other connections, too--are to:

• The Book of Genesis, specifically the story of creation

• The New Testament

• "The City in the Sea" by Edgar Allan Poe

• Mythical and pseudoscientific lost continents

• "Nemesis" by H.P. Lovecraft

• "Dreamland" by Edgar Allan Poe

• "The Space Visitors" by Edmond Hamilton

• The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort

• Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future by Friedrich Nietzsche

• "There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea," a traditional song

• "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" by Dylan Thomas

I hope this list is complete. It may not be.

* * *

There is also a theme in Mr. Kiernan's story of shape-shifting, transition, or transformation. This shape-shifting is nothing but horrific. That's something for us to remember. The shape-shifter or skin-walker is a monster among us. Watch out.

* * *

Believers in God are seekers after spiritual transcendence. Non-believers pursue in its place transition, transformation, transgression, transgenderism, transvestism, trans-humanism, and other trans-systems, trans-processes, trans-experiences, trans-beliefs, trans-etc. Believers in God also believe in Cosmos--order, law, purpose, meaning. Non-believers see, fear, love, hate, pursue, and embrace Chaos--disorder, confusion, the void, the abyss, meaninglessness, destruction, ultimately death.

* * *

Another theme, motif, or plot device: the opening. In "The City in the Sea," the old man is sent on his journey after opening a package. In "A Ghost Story for Christmas," the narrator encounters black emptiness upon opening a door. In "The Forest Gate," the narrator passes through the eponymous opening to experience his own horrors. And in "Night Fishing," the narrator and his victim peer into an abyss by opening a box. One aspect of the thing in the box is "a book with a cracked leather binding, like the family Bible my mother kept on the coffee table." One of course opens a book, like a door through which one may pass. Inside--on the other side--may be glories. On the other hand, as in the Necronomicon or "The King in Yellow," there may be horrors. Opening has two meanings. First is from the verb, to open, the action of opening. Second is the noun, opening, denoting an empty space, a doorway or gateway, a gap, a hole, an open mouth, an orifice, the hole in the numeral zero, a void, such as the void in the narrator's soul.

* * *

Another aspect of the thing is "a stone disk with seven sides, carved from greenish soapstone that feels oddly greasy to the touch." As in "The City in the Sea," there is a strange object, a kind of sculpture. The strange object or sculpture, sometimes a box, is in all kinds of genre fiction, including The Maltese Falcon, "The Call of Cthulhu," "Claimed!" by Francis Stevens, "The Calamander Chest" by Joseph Payne Brennan, "The Striped Chest" by Arthur Conan Doyle, and so on. There are so many that there could be an Internet Strange Object, Sculpture, and Box Database.

* * *

See what happens when you read Nietzsche? You write in brevities and put little breaks between them. He used numbers, I have used asterisks, and in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, the designer used little black Cthulhus.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan-Part Two

The narrator in "Night Fishing" has a cosmic horror problem. We get a hint of that in the first column of the story as it appears in Weird Tales #367:

There's a hallway that seems a lot longer than it can possibly be.

Dread stretches time and space.

Time and space being the dimensions and scales in which cosmic horror operates.

Telling about night fishing with his grandfather, the narrator relates to his psychiatrist: "We'd just drift around out there on the lake, the stars wheeling overhead--I swear there were more stars in the sky when I was a kid. I look up now at night, and it's like something came along and ate most of them." Remember the image of the zero: a gaping maw. Remember the consuming, engulfing void: now an eater of stars.

Instead of using an epigraph, the author of this story, Caitlín R. Kiernan, quotes from other works within its main body. These include a traditional song called "There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea" and the poem "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" by Dylan Thomas, which also has imagery of the sea. (Another variation on a theme in the Cosmic Horror Issue.) There is also an allusion to a story by a long-ago teller of weird tales, paraphrased from an idea by an author before him.

Read on . . .

In Mr. Kiernan's story, there are these words in italics, which he uses to connote quotations from other works:

I think we're fished for.

Right away, I recognized that as an idea originally in The Book of the Damned (1919), the first of Charles Fort's four books on strange and anomalous phenomena. In Chapter 12 of that book, Fort concluded: "I think we're property," meaning, we are the property of races alien to Earth. This, I think, could very well have been the origin of the ancient astronauts hypothesis so popular today. And it's one of the two main themes I have identified in the Cosmic Horror Issue, or one of two main sources of these feelings of cosmic horror about which its authors write. We have this vast cosmos in which to work and yet they have come up with only two sources of horror at our apprehension of it. At least Mr. Kiernan put these things together in interesting ways, even if they are, again, meta-references.

Eleven years after The Book of the Damned was published, author Edmond Hamilton had a story called "The Space Visitors" in Air Wonder Stories. The date was March 1930. His story was reprinted in Startling Stories in September 1939, the month in which the Second World War began. Hamilton's story is a Fortean story--or a storified plot really--of a visitation made by aliens to Earth. (Storified is my new word. There were lots of storified plots in the early years of science fiction.) The aliens' purpose is unknown except that they seem to be studying us. Their study is, however, extremely destructive and heedless of human life and pain. In the story, a Dr. Jason Howard, of Gotham University no less, theorizes on the matter at hand:

Did we live at the bottom of an ocean, an atmospheric sea? Were we merely crawling things upon earth's surface, to be fished for and examined curiously by unimaginable beings and vessels far above?

Emphasis added. As in the Cosmic Horror Issue, there is imagery here of the sea. And coincidentally or not, Hamilton's second banana to Dr. Howard has the same surname, Ransome vs. Ransom, as C.S. Lewis' hero in his Space Trilogy of 1938-1945.

Soon after the allusion to an allusion to Charles Fort, there is an allusion to another, earlier figure. The narrator of "Night Fishing" has purchased a box containing some objects from an estate sale. Unfortunately, these objects--or is it just one self-transforming artifact?--have strange properties. He wonders about it. Then he writes:

     I stare at the box, and I imagine it stares back at me.

And now Friedrich Nietzsche rears his head, for in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), he wrote:

     Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Emphasis added again. This aphorism is from Chapter 4, being all of No. 146. In my Vintage edition of 1966, it appears on page 89. Nietzsche wrote a prelude to a philosophy of the future. Remember that the protagonist in The Incredible Shrinking Man saw himself as a possible man of the future.

And so we have that word again, abyss, roughly equivalent to void, and the condition of chaos that preceded God's speaking Cosmos into existence. Abyss is also in the imagery of the sea, as in the scientific term abyssal zone, or that layer that is among the deepest in the ocean. The word abyss is also in "Dagon" by H.P. Lovecraft, one of the earliest stories--if not the earliest--in Weird Tales (Oct. 1923) that has in it cosmic scales and cosmic scope. It's also in "The Call of Cthulhu," which appeared in "The Ghost Table" Issue of Weird Tales in February 1928. Both usages are in regards to the depths of the sea. Dagon is from the sea, but Cthulhu is from the stars.

So, from Charles Fort comes the idea that there are aliens among or above us, who own us, prey upon us, or are fishing for us, and from Friedrich Nietzsche comes the image of the abyss as not just emptiness but something that is watching us, waiting for an opening through which it might gain access to our world.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales, May/June/July 1924-Non-Fiction & Other Fillers

Following is a list of the fillers in the May/June/July issue of Weird Tales, a list transcribed from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Thanks to them again. All are by uncredited authors. Most have asterisks around them. Read on to see what they mean.

• **"Juvenile Criminal," about the Hon. Grey Bennett and a boy named Leary. There really was a Grey Bennett, as remote from the first year of Weird Tales as we are from it.**

• **"Retaliation," about a British ship.**

• **"Providential Warning at Sea," about Captain Thomas Rogers and his ship Society in about 1694.**

• **"Pastime of Despots," about Czar Peter.**

• **"The Unnatural Son," about a theft in Salisbury.**

• **"Singular Discovery of a Murder in 1740," an account of events at St. Neots, England.**

• **"Giants," about very tall men known to history.**

• **"Sham Fight," about a battle between Christian and Musselman armies at Bostra [sic].**

• **"War Horses," about war in Funen, Denmark.**

• **"The Original Bluebeard," about Gilles, Marquis de Laval. Seabury Quinn had covered him before in his non-fiction series "Weird Crimes," in October 1923.**

• **"Distressing March of the Crusaders Through Phrygia."**

• **"Remarkable Accident," about Baptiste, an actor at the Comedie Francaise in 1820.**

• *"An Account of a Family Who Were All Afflicted with the Loss of Their Limbs," about John Dowling of Wattisham, England.*

• *"Hypocrisy Detected," set in Paris.*

• *"Force of Imagination," also set in Paris.*

• *"Immolation of Human Beings," about the Ashantees [sic] of Africa.*

• **"Imprisonment of Baron De Geramb."**

• *"Anecdote Concerning the Execution of King Charles the First."*

• **"Anne Boleyn."**

• **"The Heroes of Hindoostan."**

• *"Extraordinary Instance of Second Sight," about a French army officer quartered in Scotland during "the previous century."*

• **"Miracles," about a Dr. Connell and his patient, named Anne Mulligan, in 1777.**

• **"National Superstition," about two Venetians.**

• **"Death of the Duchess of Bedford."**

• **"Pardon for Forgery," a case from 1803.**

• **"Terrific Death of a Painter," about Peter Peutemann.**

• **"Deaths by Lightning," set in Ireland.**

• **"Wonderful Providence," about war in France in 1562.**

• **"Monsieur Rouelle," about the "celebrated chemist."**

• **"A Singular Experiment," about an Irish boy named Magrath who fell into the hands of a "subtile doctor," a kind of Procrustes who experimented on the boy and made of him a monstrous creation. This account goes along with my suggestion that medical doctors are very often psychopaths or sociopaths and see their fellow human beings as mere material and subjects for their bizarre and monstrous experimentation. We recently had one of those at the head of a large governmental agency. He and his fellows very likely developed and loosed upon the world a deadly virus and in response created an oppressive regime that is still lurking, still preying, including in the minds of his and their followers, supporters, and apologists. Monstrous medical doctors recently won a victory for themselves in Ohio, too. Now they have the power under the state constitution to decide who is a human being and who is not. Now we have another Moloch State.**

• **"Pentilly House, Cornwall," about a Mr. Tilly, an atheist.**

• **"Singular Combat," about England in the time of Henry IV.**

• **"Fatal Misfortune and Singular Instance of Affection in a Horse," set in England.**

• *"Punishment of the Knout in Russia."*

• **"Intrepid Conduct of Admiral Douglas," about a mutiny on board the ship Stately.**

• "Only Sound," a very brief item from the Los Angeles Times. (Below it are two jokes.)

• "Odd Facts," half a dozen brief fillers. (Below it are three anecdotes or jokes. So there are five untitled anecdotes or jokes in addition to 37 titled fillers.)

As I was about halfway through this list, I discovered the original source of most of these accounts. The source is:

The Terrific Register; or, Record of Crimes, Judgements, Providences, and Calamities, Volume I and Volume II, published in 1825 by Sherwood, Jones, and Co., of London, and Hunter of Edinburgh.

Presumably all are factual, so no fiction to add to the 37 stories in this issues. Items taken from Volume I have single asterisks around them in the list above. Those from Volume II have double asterisks. Seven of the items are from Volume I of The Terrific Register. Twenty-eight are from Volume II. That makes 35 in all, leaving only two that are from other sources.

So, if we're trying to get from 37 new stories in the interior of the anniversary number to the 50 promised on its cover, then we'll have to add 13 of the items listed above, I guess. You get to choose. A couple of them are almost as long as the shortest new stories.

It's clear that Otis Adelbert Kline was not the author of these fillers, as he had been (or probably was) in previous issues. But if he was acting as editor, or co-editor, then maybe he was the one who chose them for inclusion. And that makes me think that there must have been copies of these two volumes either in a public or university library in Chicago or in a private collection to which he had access. And now I think we had better look at the fillers in previous issues for their possible origins in the same two volumes of The Terrific Register.

I have written before about the Fortean method. I called it that after Charles Fort (1874-1932), author, gadfly of science, and collector of oddities. People who read and wrote for Weird Tales knew of Fort and his ways. Some became Forteans themselves. Others simply availed themselves of the Fortean method in creating their fictions. Like I said, I have suspected that Otis Adelbert Kline was the author of the many non-fiction fillers printed in Weird Tales in its first year, and maybe he was after all, taking after Fort in the process. But it's clear with this discovery of The Terrific Register as a source that Kline was not the sole author of the Weird Tales fillers and that Fort was not the first collector of oddities. He, along with Kline, was simply working in an older tradition. I wonder how far back that tradition goes. And I wonder: is history simply a field engaged in telling about the odd events--the crimes, judgements, providences, and calamities--of the past? Aside from that, are not these accounts simply retellings of how weird works in our lives and affairs?

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Historic and Unprecedented Vermont Floods"

As I write, there is flooding in Vermont. I don't want to take anything away from real-life peril and loss, but there is flooding in Vermont in weird fiction as well. In August 1931, Weird Tales published "The Whisperer in Darkness" by H.P. Lovecraft. Once you get past Lovecraft's first introduction, there is this second:

     The whole matter began, so far as I am concerned, with the historic and unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927. [. . .]. Shortly after the flood, amidst the varied reports of hardship, suffering, and organised [sic] relief which filled the press, there appeared certain odd stories of things found floating in some of the swollen rivers [. . . ].

     The tales thus brought to my notice came mostly through newspaper cuttings; though one yarn had an oral source and was repeated to a friend of mine in a letter from his mother in Hardwick, Vermont. The type of thing described was essentially the same in all cases, though there seemed to be three separate instances involved--one connected with the Winooski River near Montpelier, another attached to the West River in Windham County beyond Newfane, and a third centring [sic] in the Passumpsic in Caledonia County above Lyndonville. Of course many of the stray items mentioned other instances, but on analysis they all seemed to boil down to these three. In each case country folk reported seeing one or more very bizarre and disturbing objects in the surging waters that poured down from the unfrequented hills [. . .].

We recently saw the place name Winooski in "The Ape-Man" by J.B.M. Clark, Jr. (Weird Tales, Mar. 1923). There is also mention in "The Whisperer in Darkness" of newspaper clippings à la Charles Fort. (Fort is a character in the movie adaptation of Lovecraft's story.) And there is mention of the Mi-Go:

No use, either, to point out the even more startlingly similar belief of the Nepalese hill tribes in the dreaded Mi-Go or "Abominable Snow-Men" who lurk hideously amidst the ice and rock pinnacles of the Himalayan summits.

I'm not sure how anything can "lurk hideously." Remind me again of how Lovecraft belongs in any canon of American literature or how he might be the equal of Edgar Allan Poe.

The Mi-Go or Abominable Snowman was also mentioned in a letter printed in the September 1945 issue of Weird Tales. The writer of that letter gave a pretty good account of evidence and supposed sightings of the creature. He referred to "The Whisperer in Darkness" in his letter and asked that others who knew about the things about which Lovecraft wrote, including the Mi-Go, write to him, and he provided his address in Sharon, Pennsylvania. His name was Paul Doerr (1927-2007). Last year (in 2022), one or more investigators publicly made a case that Doerr was the infamous Zodiac Killer. There appears to be some good circumstantial evidence that he was in fact the killer. Among Doerr's habits were clipping items from newspapers and making collages. I have written about both of those things recently as well.

I have heard about the flooding in New York and New England. I have also heard that a woman drowned while trying to flee her flooded home. Let's pray for everyone to be protected from harm, for comfort for those who have suffered losses, and for strength and courage for everyone who goes to the rescue. There has been more than enough tragic death recently. We don't need any more.

C.C. Senf's illustration for "The Whisperer in Darkness," in Weird Tales, August 1931, page 33. The story starts on page 32, and already Senf is giving away the game. Lovecraft's story got short shrift, too, because this is the only illustration in his very long work of fiction. By the way, that's a reaching hand on the right. Senf specialized in that device.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Fate Magazine & Weird Tales (Again)

Last year, I wrote about connections between Weird Tales and Fate magazine. You can read what I wrote by clicking here. One of the points in my first essay is that Fate was one successor to Weird Tales, possibly the primary successor--at least until the 1960s when Robert A.W. Lowndes began as editor of Magazine of Horror. As have I pointed out, weird is from the Old English, wyrd, meaning "fate." So, Weird Tales and Fate are named for and treat the same concept, namely wyrd or weird or fate.

Fate is Latinate. Clipped, monosyllabic, with two hard consonant sounds, it sounds instead like an Anglo-Saxon word. The main title logo in Weird Tales is a little fancy and has an Art Deco appearance. The designer of that logo, which is still in use, was J. Allen St. John, who did cover art for both magazines. The main title logo for Fate is less fancy. It has a stern and uncompromising look, just like the word it represents.

The logo of Fate is made up of white lettering enclosed in a red rectangle. Life magazine also had white lettering enclosed in a red rectangle. The typeface in Fate is Roman, while that in Life is Gothic. Life and fate, perhaps two sides of a coin, are there represented, as are the ancient Roman (and Latinate, fate) and the medieval Gothic (and English, life).

Fate included in its contents art by Weird Tales artists and articles by Weird Tales authors. It also had brief articles, used as fillers, about real-life events, just as in the first many issues of Weird Tales. In both magazines, the use of these fillers might have been after the example of Charles Fort. (Fort's last name and the word fate have the same number of letters and the same two hard consonant sounds.) Many of the short filler articles in Fate are about the workings of fate. Many of them are essentially contes cruels. Both Weird Tales and Fate were strongly influenced by Fort. Fate was founded by Raymond A. Palmer and Curtis Fuller, both of whom were Forteans.

The conte cruel is a type of weird tale characterized by torture, cruelty, and torment. It was named for a collection of stories by the French author Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, from 1883. Although Villiers was not in Weird Tales, he was in Lowndes' Magazine of Horror. One edition of Contes Cruels shows a man chained to a Catherine's wheel on its cover. The wheel is of course a circle, like the wheel of fortune, "fortune" being another meaning of the root word wyrd. Regarding circles, Charles Fort declared, "One measures a circle, beginning anywhere." All things seem to turn in circles. Remember that "to turn" is the root meaning of wyrd.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Nonfiction Fillers in the First Issue

There are six nonfiction fillers in the first issue of Weird Tales. All were written anonymously. They are:

• "Queer Tribes of Savages Found in Africa" (p. 130)
• "African Brides Must Be Plump" (p. 130)
• "Ten Pallbearers for This Mammoth Woman" (p. 149)
• "Woman Starves to Feed Her Cats" (p. 149)
• "Unearth Vast Wealth in Egyptian Tomb" (p. 155)
• "'Evil Demon' Drives Man to Orgy of Crime" (p. 160)

"Queer Tribes of Africa" is about the El Molo people of East Africa. "African Brides Must Be Plump" is also about Africa, but it's about a general cultural practice and lacks specifics.

The next two articles are about women in New York City. Mrs. Martha Carmas of Middle Village, Queensboro, New York, is the subject of "Ten Pallbearers for This Enormous Woman." Mrs. Carmas, aged thirty-three, died on January 7, 1923, after having contracted elephantiasis. She weighed 710 pounds at her death. According to a contemporary newspaper article, "A coffin shipping case was used [to carry the body], as the basket coffins in which bodies are usually carried to the undertaking establishments were to [sic] small." (Source: "Builds Huge Coffin for Woman of 710 Pounds" in Lenoir (North Carolina) News-Topic, February 1, 1923, page 8.) The title of Herbert J. Mangham's story "The Basket" refers to just such a basket coffin. One remarkable thing about this brief article in Weird Tales is its immediacy: it was put into print and was on the newsstand about a month or so after the original story first appeared in American newspapers.

"Woman Starves to Feed Her Cats" was also immediate. On January 8, 1923, Mary Bosanti of Avenue S, Brooklyn, New York, was found by neighbors in her apartment. She was weak and starving, surrounded by more than two hundred empty milk bottles, which she had emptied over days and weeks in order to feed the neighborhood cats. Mary was transported to Bellevue Hospital, and that's the last we hear of her. Today we would call her a crazy cat lady.

"Unearth Vast Wealth in Egyptian Tomb" is the longest of the six articles. It tells about the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen, which had been accomplished in November 1922, almost certainly while the first issue of Weird Tales was in preparation. There aren't any stories about Egypt in the first issue, at least so far in my survey, but there would be, including in the giant-sized triple-issue of May/June/July 1924.

Finally there is "'Evil Demon' Drives Man to Orgy of Crime," which tells of Estanislao Puyat, a twenty-nine-year-old Filipino who went on a rampage after being spurned in his affections for his eighteen-year-old niece. Puyat's attack took place in Manila sometime in the month of November 1922. He was said to have been "de malas," that is, possessed by a demon. Puyat didn't know what had come over him. He was afterwards pronounced sane. The poor niece, however, was paralyzed after having been thrown from a window.

Someone associated with Weird Tales was watching the newspapers in the months leading up to the publication of that first issue. It was the kind of thing Charles Fort would have done, but Robert Ripley, creator of Believe It or Not!, was also in that business. We know that Otis Adelbert Kline was, too, for it was he who wrote true crime fillers for Detective Tales, the companion magazine of Weird Tales, in the issues of September and October 1922 at least. The source for that information is a compilation called "Curious Crimes: A Collection of Factual Fillers," in The Compleat OAK Leaves: The Official Journal of Otis Adelbert Kline and His Works (Clayton, GA: A Fictioneer Facsimile Edition, 1980; Issue No. 12, pages 9-11). The editor of OAK Leaves, the late David Anthony Kraft, introduced the compilation, letting us know that Kline's records indicate that he was in fact the author of those otherwise anonymous articles. Kline was a reader of manuscripts for Weird Tales, and he edited the aforementioned giant-sized first-anniversary issue of Weird Tales, dated May/June/July 1924. (See the image below.) He is known to have written anonymously, for the essay "Why Weird Tales?" was his. Considering all of that, I don't think there's any better candidate for authorship of the six nonfiction fillers in the first issue of Weird Tales.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946)-The First Serial

Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946) was a man of a dozen talents, a hundred friends, and a million words. He was an old-fashioned wordsmith who cranked out story after story over the years. As a manuscript reader, editor, and literary agent, he also helped other writers in their work. According to what I have found in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database and The FictionMags Index, Kline's two-part serial "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" was his first published genre work. It was likely his first published story of any kind. It was also the first serial in Weird Tales, even if its two parts, taken together, still come out at only short-story length.

Along with Farnsworth Wright, who was also represented in the first issue of Weird Tales, Kline acted as a manuscript reader, helping editor Edwin Baird wade through myriads of submissions during that first year in print. After Baird's departure, Kline edited the first-anniversary, jumbo-sized issue of May-June-July 1924. He also wrote, anonymously, the Weird Tales manifesto in that issue, called "Why Weird Tales?" The first-anniversary issue of Weird Tales was the only one edited by Kline.

Kline's output declined in his later years, no doubt in part because of his work as a literary agent, including for Robert E. Howard. Like Howard and Lovecraft, he died prematurely, in his case at age fifty-five. I have written about Otis Adelbert Kline before. For his biography, click here. For that and other articles about him and his family, click on the label "Otis Adelbert Kline" on the right. (1)

Otis Adelbert Kline's Story:

"The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" begins with a letter summoning young William Ansley, the narrator of the story, to his uncle's farm outside of Peoria, Illinois. The summons, whether it be a letter, a telephone call, or some other kind of message, is a good and common way to kick off a story, especially a weird fiction story. In Kline's story, it gets the narrator out of the city and into an isolated rural setting, very often a necessity if weird events are going to unfold properly. Peoria might not be Arkham or Innsmouth, but at least it's not Chicago.

The setting is made definite not only by the mention of Peoria but also by the narrator's letting us know that he works as a bookkeeper on South Water Street in Chicago, also that his parents were killed in the Iroquois Theatre fire when he was twelve years old. That fire was a real and terrible event that took place in Chicago on December 30, 1903. My own family has a connection to the fire, as do many, I'm sure, in Illinois and Indiana. Like his protagonist, Kline was twelve years old at the time that it happened. At the time the events in the story take place, the protagonist Ansley is a young man. Presumably, then, "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is set in the 1910s or early 1920s.

Ansley travels to Peoria where his uncle and benefactor, James Braddock, lived and died on his 320-acre farm. That's a sizable piece of land, half a square mile, or half a section. Maybe the idea is that this is the equivalent of an English estate. Anyway, Ansley lets us know that Braddock was "a scientist and dreamer," adding: "His hobby was psychic phenomena." So maybe he was the equivalent of an eccentric English gentleman, too. The story takes place when scary stories should, in October. (October is the month in which Edgar Allan Poe died mysteriously.) Once at his uncle's house, Ansley begins experiencing and witnessing occult occurrences. He resolves to investigate these occurrences in a scientific manner. When a Professor Albert Randall and his beautiful daughter show up (what do genre fiction writers have against the mothers of beautiful daughters?), Ansley becomes assistant investigator. It is Professor Randall who solves the mystery at hand.

In its two parts, "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" becomes a potpourri of psychic phenomena, complete with ectoplasmic manifestations, mental telepathy, automatic writing, mediums, trances, and hypnosis. There is talk of vampires and an onset of mass hysteria because of it. (Because this is America, the locals arm themselves with rifles, pistols, and shotguns rather than pitchforks and torches as they would in a European setting. Thank God for America.) There are also dream-visions and dream-regressions through time.

"The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is not an especially good story, although I think we should give Kline a break. After all, this was his first published story. There's no real problem with his prose, nor with his plot or the mechanics of his story, although the scheme at the climax is convoluted beyond necessity. There's also a fair amount of melodrama and a pat, everything-turned-out-okay and they-lived-happily-ever-after Hollywood-scenario-type ending. I think the real problem with "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is that it came at the beginning of one hundred years of weird fiction. Its only material had come before it either by way of ancient folklore--i.e., the vampire myth--or from the nineteenth-century, mostly American hoax/pseudoscience of Spiritualism. In its sentimentality and somewhat melodramatic events, the story is also more or less from the nineteenth century. In short, Kline had only worn-out conventions with which to work. He wasn't ready yet for innovation and not yet developed well enough as a writer to come up with something very new. Put another way, Kline and writers like him had not yet figured out what weird fiction is, and there were not yet powerful, convincing, and vibrant substitutes for those old and worn-out conventions that came before it, Spiritualism of course being the most obvious example. Kline may have been onto something by taking a science-fictional approach to his story. He simply went down the wrong path in chasing after ectoplasm.

In "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud, the previous story in that first issue of Weird Tales, there is a short discussion of what the author called "the pseudo-scientific story," what we now call science fiction. That passage acts in part, I think, as a guide to the reader, or as an explanation as to what the story and the magazine are all about. Call it the beginnings of a literary theory, or perhaps to an editorial approach that Weird Tales would take in this and its many issues to come. Well, there is a similar passage in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes." In this case, Kline wrote in regards to the supernatural:

     "It is but a step," I reflected, "from the natural to the supernatural."
     This observation started a new line of thought. After all, could anything be supernatural--above nature? Nature, according to my belief, was only another name for God, eternal mind, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient ruler of the universe. If He were omnipotent, could anything take place contrary to His laws? Obviously not.
     The word "supernatural" was, after all, only an expression invented by man, in his finite ignorance, to define those things which he did not understand. Telegraphy, telephony, the phonograph, the moving picture--all would have been regarded with superstition by an age less advanced than ours. Man had only to become familiar with the laws governing them, in order to discard the word "supernatural" as applied to their manifestation. (2)
     What right, then, had I to term the phenomena, which I had just witnessed, supernatural? I might call them supernormal, but to think of them as supernatural would be to believe the impossible: namely, that that which is all-powerful had been overpowered.
     I resolved, then and there, that if further phenomena manifested themselves that night. I would, as far as it were possible, curb my superstition and fear, regard them with the eye of a philosopher, and endeavor to learn their cause, which must necessarily be governed by natural law.

With that passage, Kline placed the supernatural back under nature, thereby making it explicable by way of scientific investigation. The effect seems to be that this story of the supernatural, at the very least, can actually be seen as a kind of "pseudo-scientific story," similar in its way to "Ooze." In "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," hypnosis and mental telepathy are accepted as valid, presumably scientific phenomena. There is also a scientific explanation offered for the existence of ectoplasm. As for the current state of Braddock in his casket and the tragedies that have befallen the local people, prompting their vampire hysteria, there is a medical, i.e., scientific, explanation for that, too. These events aren't so weird after all, meaning, they all have a scientific explanation, as long as you can accept Spiritualism as being based in science.

Unfortunately, Kline's transformation of one type of story--the supernatural story or ghost story--into another--the pseudo-scientific story--isn't very convincing, the reason being that he threw into "The Thing of  a Thousand Shapes" so many of the ragged and decrepit remains of nineteenth-century Spiritualism that it isn't able to take off very well. By 1923, discerning readers, writers, and thinkers would have known that there is nothing to Spiritualism. Harry Houdini was famously skeptical, but he wasn't alone. (Ambrose Bierce was also a skeptic.) Writing about Spiritualism at such a late date was like writing about the luminiferous ether after Albert Einstein had proposed his special theory of relativity in 1905, except that the existence of the ether was proposed in earnest, while séances, knocking, and ectoplasm are all frauds. You can differ with me if you'd like, but Kline was right when he wrote that there isn't anything above God. There is plenty worth exploring under God in his and our very mysterious universe, it's just that ectoplasm isn't one of them. What's missing from "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is an awareness of and apprehension of weird.

Speaking of God, both "Ooze" and "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" mention him. If I had to guess, I would say that these things were offered in assurance to observers, readers, and critics that Weird Tales was not and would not be profane, godless, atheistic, or otherwise a bad influence on anybody. These stories are offered for fun, entertainment, and momentary distraction and not at all to subvert or corrupt anyone or anything.

"The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is like Willard E. Hawkins' story "The Dead Man's Tale" in that automatic writing and the psychic or occult investigator make their appearance. The text of "The Dead Man's Tale" is presumed to have been composed entirely from automatic writing. The psychic investigator is mentioned only in the introduction to the story. In Kline's story, there is less automatic writing, but it comes at a turning point in the story. The role of the psychic investigator is far more prominent, and it is that investigator, Professor Randall, who figures it all out. By the way, Randall is dean of the local college. He and his daughter had gone to Indianapolis, only to return to Peoria when they heard of Braddock's death. So the two cities where Weird Tales was born, Chicago and Indianapolis, receive mention here. 

Again, "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is like "Ooze" in that it lets the reader know that the writer and editor know that God is still above everything. Both are also pseudo-scientific stories, although "Ooze" is far more convincing in that respect. Kline's story is unlike "Ooze" in that the scientist (the elder Cranmer in "Ooze") and the dreamer (the younger Cranmer) are combined in the same person, James Braddock in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes." The narrators in both stories take on the role of investigator, Rud's narrator well after the fact, Ansley in the middle of things. Both take a scientific approach to their investigations.

By Charles Fort's theorizing, all phenomena are continuous, even if science has excluded and damned certain kinds. In his own theorizing on things natural versus supernatural, Kline seems to have followed Fort's lead. It seems likely that Kline, like many well-known and prominent tellers of weird tales, had read and would continue to read the works of Charles Fort. Fort himself wrote about psychic and paranormal phenomena in his last book, Wild Talents (1932), which you might say issued from his grave.

The "Thing" in Kline's title is ectoplasm, a kind of ooze that issues from Braddock's inert body in every shape and form. Ectoplasm is equated in the story with protoplasm. (There's even an amoeba!) In his investigations and theorizing, Professor Randall has postulated the existence of what he calls psychoplasm, a material substance that emanates from the bodies of people in a state of catalepsy. Ansley has unwittingly secured a residue of psychoplasm from a book he used to crush an ectoplasmic bat. (Could the book have been by Ernest Lawrence Thayer?) It is Randall's first sample of this substance. He examines it, concluding, "While it is undoubtedly organic, it is nevertheless remarkably different, in structure and composition, from anything heretofore classified, either by biologists or chemists." (From Part II of "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," Weird Tales, April 1923, page 146.) Again, in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," supernatural things are reduced to merely natural ones, and all is explained by science.

Two more things about ectoplasm. First, it is sometimes supposed to be a fabric-like or fibrous substance. That's what made me think of cotton candy and Barbapapa. In Kline's story, it's more gelatinous. Second, in ufology, there is a substance called "angel hair." Its resemblance to ectoplasm is undeniable. UFOs or flying saucers are like the ghosts of the twentieth century, a technological manifestation of what was previously supposedly supernatural. Every encounter with a ghost and every sighting of a flying saucer turns out the same: "I saw something and then it went away (without leaving any evidence)."

I have covered both parts of "The Thing of  Thousand Shapes" here. Most of the action takes place in Part II, including a sequence in which Ansley dreams himself into the prehistoric past. He rushes from his dream into the path of a car. Professor Randall and his daughter Ruth are in the car, returning from Indianapolis (where Weird Tales came about and where C.L. Moore had just turned, in January 1923, the Golden Age of Twelve). It is Ruth that nurses him after he has been struck, and the three of them together save poor Uncle Jim.

One last thing: a distinction is made in Kline's story between urbane and well-educated people versus local farmers and other bucolic types. As always, there is an awareness of and a resorting to class distinctions in the popular fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Arthur Conan Doyle did it in his Sherlock Holmes stories. So did George Barr McCutcheon in Graustark. Anthony M. Rud and Otis Adelbert Kline did it in Weird Tales. (Rud's bucolic character is a backwoods Cajun.) And of course H.P. Lovecraft did it in so much of what he wrote. In these stories, main characters are high characters and they speak in perfect, unaccented English. Low characters can never be main characters. They speak in imperfect, accented English, for example, in Kline's story, a German man named Glitch, who sounds like the Captain from The Katzenjammer Kids, and another local yokel who talks like Jed Clampett. It's an annoying characteristic of fiction from that period. You wish that writers had had more imagination.

Notes
(1) Otis Adelbert Kline was the author of several non-fiction fillers published in Detective Tales in September and October 1923. The first many issues of Weird Tales also had non-fiction fillers. I wonder if Kline was also the author of at least some of those short features.
(2) This anticipates Arthur C. Clarke's famous adage, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Other authors have written variations on the idea. More wondering: was Kline first among them?

Holmes, Houdini, and ectoplasm, all in the same book. What more can you ask for? The Adventure of the Ectoplasmic Man by Daniel Stashower (1986).

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley