What is it? What was it?

In "The Horla," by Guy de Maupassant, one of the narrators asks, "What is it?", this invisible being that has afflicted him. His question echoes the title of Fitz-James O'Brien's earlier short story "What Was It? A Mystery," originally published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in March 1859. "What Was It?" was reprinted in Weird Tales in December 1925 as No. 6 in a series called "Weird Story Reprints." It was reprinted many times before that and has been many times since.

As in "The Horla," the invisible being in O'Brien's story first falls upon the narrator while he is in his bed. The being tries to choke him, but that's where the similarity ends. Fitz-James O'Brien was an Irish writer, but he wrote his story while living in America, and his story is set in America. In crossing over from the Old World to the New, O'Brien seems to have become an American, and his hero is one, too, for he triumphs over his invisible attacker, whereas Maupassant's narrators fall victim to theirs, especially in the second version of 1887. I have written before about the difference between the American hero and his European counterpart. Maupassant's narrators are defeated in their encounters with the Horla. The first is hospitalized. The second is driven nearly insane and decides he must kill himself. O'Brien's narrator subdues his tormenter and keeps it captive until its tragic death. Although it was written in Antebellum times, "What Was It?" is very much like an American science fiction monster movie from 1950s.

There are imperfect parallels between the American hero and the triumphant science-fictional hero versus the European protagonist and the defeated, humiliated weird-fictional protagonist. O'Brien's narrator is an example of the former. Maupassant's narrators are examples of the latter. I have written about that before, too. You can read part of what I wrote in "Weird Tales & Weird Fiction-Part Two," from January 24, 2023, by clicking here. It's one of my favorite entries in this blog. We'll see what you think of it. Anyway, I find the difference between these two stories and their authors to be striking. They are, I think, a simple distillation of the difference between the American and European ways of looking at the world and a simple example of why America remains the indispensable nation. Without us, the world would be overrun by invisible monsters, including the invisible monsters of the mind.

An illustration by Lawrence for "What Was It?" by Fitz-James O'Brien, from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1949.

P.S. Fitz-James O'Brien died by violence in our Civil War. Guy de Maupassant died by self-destruction. There are of course Americans who destroy themselves. It's a way of life not only for us but also for all people everywhere. This is just a too-obvious example of the difference between an American writer and his European counterpart. Ernest Hemingway combined these two ways of dying, for he died by violent self-destruction. Will Rogers famously said, "We'll be the first nation in the world to go to the poor house in an automobile." We're probably also the first people to go the morgue along the barrel of a gun.

I should point out that American literature began in part with a discussion of the invisible, with Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World, published in 1693. Here is a passage from Chapter II that reads like the attacks of the invisible beings in O'Brien's and Maupassants' stories:

An Army of Devils is horribly broke in upon the place which is the Center, and after a sort, the First-born of our English Settlements: and the Houses of the Good People there are fill'd with the doleful Shrieks of their Children and Servants, Tormented by Invisible Hands, with Tortures altogether preternatural. After the Mischiefs there Endeavoured, and since in part Conquered, the terrible Plague, of Evil Angels, hath made its Progress into some other places, where other Persons have been in like manner Diabolically handled. These our poor Afflicted Neighbours, quickly after they become Infected and Infested with these Dæmons, arrive to a Capacity of Discerning those which they conceive the Shapes of their Troublers [. . .]. 

That sounds like O'Brien's narrator and his friends making a plaster casting of his invisible attacker: he discerns and conceives the shape of his troubler.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

A Retreat of the Totalitarian Monster

Take a deep breath.

Now begin reading.

I like to listen to Mountain Stage, a radio show that originates in the Mountain State of West Virginia. On a Saturday night a few weeks ago, I thought about West Virginia and about fantasy and science fiction. More than a few writers for Weird Tales were born in, lived in, or died in the state. Fitz-James O'Brien received his mortal wound in what is now West Virginia, not long before it was admitted to the Union. (West Virginians can proudly claim theirs as the only state to secede from the Confederacy.) As I thought about West Virginia, I remembered a science fiction or fantasy story I read many years ago. In it, a man living in a West Virginia holler gets fed up with Hitler. In a mad vision, he gets in his car and drives to Nazi Germany to deal with his country's most hated foe. I wish I could remember the author and title of that story.

We had an election not long ago. If you remember, it was a little contentious. Only one state (Wyoming) had a wider spread, in terms of the percentage of the vote, separating the winner from the loser than did West Virginia. The loser has since gone home. Like Sasquatch, she is sometimes seen in the woods or on a hiking trail. The winner of the race is moving into the White House this month. In other words, person for person, West Virginians did more for their country than almost every other state did on November 8, not necessarily by voting for one candidate but by voting against the other so decisively. They helped to assure that she--an un-indicted criminal, an aspiring tyrant, and one of the most mendacious and corrupt presidential candidates in American history--was flushed down the toilet along with her equally mendacious and corrupt husband. They also helped to prevent at least one constitutional crisis by denying her the presidency.

Two thousand sixteen was a bad year in general for Western-style tyranny, meaning tyranny of the leftist-socialist-statist variety. The United Kingdom voted in favor of its own sovereignty and independence in June. An unhinged socialist was defeated in the American presidential primaries earlier that month. (Small comfort there considering who defeated him.) We can hope that another is nearing the end of his reign in Venezuela. Still more are set to go down in flames in 2017.

Fidel Castro died last year, too, at an entirely too-advanced age. He was praised and his loss lamented by what Lenin is supposed to have called the useful idiots of this world. They are idiots, so of course they are incapable of understanding even the simplest of things, one of which is that Castro, like tyrants everywhere, was a monster. Here is an excerpt from an article called "Credulous Western Dupes and Castro" by John Fund, posted on November 27, 2016, on the website of the National Review (here):

Lastly, for all of Castro’s ranting about the exploitive nature of capitalism, it takes a truly mercenary mind to come up with the schemes his regime employed to garner hard currency--from drug-running, to assassinations to, well, vampiric behavior. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported in 1966 that 166 Cuban prisoners were executed on a single day in May of that year. But before they were killed, they were forced to undergo the forced extraction of an average of seven pints of blood from their bodies. This blood was sold to Communist Vietnam at a rate of $50 per pint. Those who underwent the bloodletting suffered cerebral anemia and a state of unconsciousness and paralysis. But that didn’t stop the executions; the victims were carried on a stretcher to the killing field where they were then shot.

One of the themes of this blog is the manifest monstrousness of human beings in general and of totalitarian leaders in particular. People can be monstrous as individuals, as we all know. People involved in mass movements, of which totalitarianism is the all-too-common end point, practice a special kind of monstrousness, though, one backed by political or intellectual ideas that not only justify their actions but actually require the totalitarian and his minions to murder, starve, torture, imprison, or, as in Castro's case, drain their life's blood from his fellow human beings.

Richard Matheson, a teller of weird tales, doesn't get much credit for an innovation in popular culture: in his novel I Am Legend (1954), he invented the zombie horde, what we might recognize now as another kind of mass movement. Matheson didn't call them zombies. He used the word vampires instead. It was George Romero in Night of the Living Dead (1968) who turned the zombie, previously a solitary slave created by a fellow human being, into one of a mass of men infected by an indifferent pathogen. Richard Matheson's hordes of vampires were the direct inspiration for Mr. Romero's hordes of zombies, which have come down to us in the present day in movies and television shows such as The Walking Dead. More on that in a bit.

Even before I Am Legend, there were writers who recognized that zombies might represent certain political ideas. I don't usually provide links to videos, but here's an excerpt from the 1940 film The Ghost Breakers, starring Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a6YdNmK77k

Here is a transcript of the exchange:

Lawrence [Bob Hope]: You live here?

Montgomery [Richard Carlson]: Yes.

Lawrence: Well, then maybe you know what a zombie is.

Montgomery: When a person dies and is buried, it seems there are certain voodoo priests who . . . who have the power to bring him back to life.

Carter [Paulette Goddard]: How horrible!

Montgomery: It's worse than horrible because a zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.

Lawrence: You mean like Democrats?

That exchange may have been written by the screenwriter, George Marshall, but the punchline could easily have come from Bob Hope himself.

Even before that--long before that--there were suggestions of the monstrousness of the tyrant. Here is a quote from the eighteenth century:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

Note the word swarms, more or less equivalent to hordes or masses. Note especially the purpose of sending those swarms out into the world: to harass and eat out the substance of the people. Sounds a lot like a horde of zombies (or vampires or orcs or any number of monster types). The quote by the way is from the Declaration of Independence, written by the founder of what is now the Democratic Party. History is nothing if not full of ironies.

Now back to The Walking Dead. Before I go on, I have to admit that I'm a minority of one: I'm the only person in America who has never seen The Walking Dead. I can't really say much about the show. What I can say is what I have said before, that zombies in the Matheson/Romero mode can be interpreted as representing the great masses of men, or at the very least the fallen nature of man. Those great masses may be men living in a primitive state of nature, or men as ciphers in a contemporary mass movement, or anything in between. Whatever they are, zombies are monsters. They can also be used to symbolize men, who, too often, when they assemble into masses, act as monsters.

So in Castro we had a totalitarian monster acting as a vampire. He was also the leader of masses, or what he hoped to turn into masses--great numbers of people rendered without identity or autonomy and driven by a ravening desire to devour the free people of the world. In short, zombies. It didn't work of course. Nor has the leftist-socialist-statist program worked anywhere, although it often holds on for decades, in the process laying waste to people's lives. Anyway, that leap, from zombie horde to mass man and back again, is one I have sometimes made in this blog. Is it too big of a leap? Maybe. But I'm not the only person to see zombies and the zombie story as symbolic of things in the real world.

I recently read an article by Sean T. Collins called "The Shameful Fascism of The Walking Dead." It was posted on the website The Week on December 17, 2016, here. It's not a very long article; it will take you only a few minutes to read. What you'll find soon enough is that the author of the article sees The Walking Dead as fascist and more or less representative of America under our current president-elect. That's a fair enough interpretation. After all, I have made my own interpretations here and elsewhere. To each his own. I should add that my interpretation of the zombie horde doesn't necessarily clash with that of Sean Collins. He sees the show's human characters as fascists. I see zombies as representative of mass man, a category that includes communists and socialists. Fascism was a reaction to communism. The two go together. From the 1920s into the 1940s, they were locked in mortal combat. However, I don't see the human characters in a zombie story as representing fascists for a simple reason: they are free individuals acting freely--though not always admirably--in a state of nature, thus in the absence of a controlling State.

In his article, Sean Collins writes a good deal about the characteristics of fascism. His emphasis is on "a triumph of will" and "show[s] of force." What he leaves out is that fascism is a statist political system and a form of totalitarianism. That is its essence. Or, in Mussolini's words: "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." One characteristic of a post-apocalyptic setting is that there is no controlling State. At best, people are reduced to tribal living. In addition, fascism arose from and was a variation on socialism. In other words, it was just another mass movement, equal and in opposition to communism but not very much different from it or any other totalitarian system. (All leave a trail of blood.) If the human characters in The Walking Dead are fascists, then the conflict in the show is between two mass movements--opposing movements to be sure but mass movements nonetheless. So do the human characters in The Walking Dead exhibit the qualities of a mass movement? Are they driven by an intellectual or political idea? Are they burning with a holy fire? Do they wish to be subsumed by their movement? Do they yearn to surrender their individual identities and their autonomy to their cause and to an overarching State? More to the point, are they willing to die for it? Or do they wish to live as free, autonomous, and individual human beings, or failing that, to die so that others might live?

I can't say that the human characters in The Walking Dead represent free people. Again, I have never seen the show. But I can't see zombies as representing free people in their struggles against fascist oppressors, either. That would be an absurdity. Yet here is Mr. Collins' expert, Stephen Olbrys Gencarella of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst:

"The zombie trope in the United States emerged with the zombie-as-slave phenomenon around the turn of the 20th century, when American capitalism and colonialism led to ethical conflicts about labor and human rights." 

I'm not sure how historically accurate that assertion is. As I understand it, the idea of the zombie entered American culture in the 1920s and early '30s, not at the turn of the century. (I'm not sure when the first zombie story was published, but it seems to have been contemporaneous with the rise of fascism, i.e., in the 1920s.) As for that business about "American capitalism and colonialism"--well, that's typical leftist claptrap that can be disposed of without further regard.

Dr. Gencarella goes on, citing Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead as examples of a shift in the so-called zombie trope:

"[M]any zombie flicks of the late 20th century could be seen as critiques of consumerist desires, or calls for cooperation between disparate groups."

In his view, The Walking Dead

"is part of another shift, post-9/11, in which the ghouls fill in for presumed 'outsiders' to the nation--but a nation that is limited only to a worthy few." 

I have heard that argument before, that the humans in The Walking Dead are part of "a worthy few." You could fairly say that the creators of The Walking Dead have cast the zombies as representing people you're allowed to kill without compunction. Still, that doesn't get away from the idea that zombies are a mortal threat to humanity, not only because they want to kill humans but also because to die is to become a zombie. The comparison of zombie hordes to mass man seems to me unavoidable, for men who take part in mass movements, whether it be fascism, communism, or radical Islam, seek recruits before dead bodies. The bodies pile up only when people refuse to convert. The difference here is that to die is to become one of the enemy. The only alternatives are to live or be eaten, or to destroy yourself or be destroyed before you can be converted. In any case, to see zombies as people--especially to see them somehow as victims of a fascist movement afoot among the human characters--is to identify with them, or at least to have some sympathies with them. It is, more or less, a wish to see human beings destroyed or rendered into an undifferentiated, soulless mass, because that is the zombies' goal, or more accurately, the goal of the pathogen that animates them. That is also of course the goal of the totalitarian leader in control of a mass movement. There is of course one other alternative to interpreting the zombie story: that it is a simple entertainment and that if there is any symbolism at all, that it represents the human condition in the harshest of all possible worlds.

Not long ago I asked the question: Whom do leftists root for in movies and television? For people or for monsters? I sense now as I did then that they may actually identify or sympathize with the monsters rather than with the people. The admiration leftists express for men like Fidel Castro, whom we know to have been a monster, leads me to believe that their identification or sympathy with monsters extends into the real world. What they don't seem to understand--Sean Collins seemingly among them--is that the real fight in this world is not between fascism on one side and leftism or socialism on the other. It is a never-ending fight between freedom and tyranny. Fascism and leftism or socialism are essentially the same thing. Both are for the all-controlling State and against the individual and his free exercise of his unalienable rights. For as long as leftists detach themselves from that reality, their thinking will be stunted and their cause will continue to see defeat as it did so well in 2016. If it weren't for all the pain they cause in the process, I might wish them to go on in their detachment from reality. In any case, here's to further retreats by the aspiring tyrants among us and to the further expansion of the cause of freedom in 2017.

Happy New Year!

A drawing by Hungarian cartoonist Victor Vashi, a refugee or escapee from the two great socialist-statist systems of the twentieth century, nazism and communism. Vashi drew cartoons of both. This drawing, showing a Soviet officer as a kind of monster perched on a midden of skulls, is from Red Primer for Children and Diplomats (Viewpoint Books, 1967), published on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. This year, 2017, will mark the centennial of that revolution, one that carried communists to power so that they might commence a century of political murder. I have no doubt that leftists in the West will celebrate that centennial and lament the passing of their creed.

Text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Worlds Invisible

A long time ago, British historian, author, and television personality James Burke hosted a show called Connections in which he wandered through history making connections among seemingly disparate and unconnected events. It was a good show and he was a great host. It's always fascinating to me to see a great mind at work and to read history with a thesis rather than as just a chronicle of events. One of the points of Connections is that historical events have not taken place in isolation, rather, they should be seen and can best be understood in a historical and cultural context.

Fans of science fiction and fantasy prefer to escape from the facts of history, biography, and personality. It's why we read and why it's called escapist literature. The problem is that science fiction and fantasy do not and cannot exist in isolation, separate from their historical and cultural context. Likewise, escapist literature cannot be separated from the biographies of its individual authors. Those facts are among the reasons I write this blog, to place science fiction and fantasy in historical context and to tell something of the biography of the creators of these genres. As writers, readers, and fans, we would prefer not to be bound by history or fact. Instead, we would like to escape. But we should all realize as every person must realize in his or her life that there can be no escape from living.

The last time I wrote, I looked at the story "Unseen-Unfeared" by Francis Stevens (1919). It's a story about invisible monsters that are incarnated through human hatred and violence. The theme in Stevens' work of the monster created by humanity goes back to her novel, The Citadel of Fear (1918). Both stories are in the end positive and life-affirming. They may be fantasy, but they are not dark. 

The supposition is that Francis Stevens was the creator of the sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of dark fantasy. I haven't found any really good evidence of that yet, but then the term itself, dark fantasy, is ill-defined and seems to be whatever one person or another wants it to be. Dark seems to be the operative word, as dark fantasy is apparently dark, negative, pessimistic, and nihilistic. It involves malevolent forces from the outside that seek to corrupt and destroy humanity. In our materialistic age, that means creatures from other times, other places, or other dimensions. In other words, they are not supernatural in origin, as we in this age won't allow for such things. In a time of believers, fantasy, it seems to me, would have been the age-old story of good versus evil, of God versus the devil. It would have been clear to all just who was the Good Guy and who was the bad guy. That, at least, was true until science put God into his grave in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. With dark fantasy, writers, readers, and fans seem to have switched sides and to identify with the powers of darkness rather than Light.

With all that in mind, I realized that there was a concept of invisible monsters or invisible evil in American literature before Francis Stevens and H.P. Lovecraft, before Ambrose Bierce and Fitz-James O'Brien. I remembered my high school days and reading Wonders of the Invisible World by Cotton Mather (1693). This is where the connections begin.

Cotton Mather (1663-1728), like John Dee (1527-1608 or 1609) and Joseph Glanvil (1636-1680), whom I quoted recently (by way of Edgar Allan Poe), was a practitioner of pneumatology. That's a new word for me, and I had to look it up. According to Wikipedia, "pneumatology is the study of spiritual beings and phenomena." All three men found their way into the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. It's worth mentioning that Mather was also a scientist who advocated for inoculation against smallpox. The germ theory of disease was still far in the future, but it seems that Mather was interested in the invisible world of the spirit and of organisms invisible to the naked eye.

There isn't any evidence that Francis Stevens sought to connect a seventeenth-century dissertation on witchcraft in New England to events contemporaneous to her own life. But I wonder if in one way or another she updated the concept of an invisible evil to the twentieth century and introduced a very old idea into a newly forming genre, science fiction. There is reason to believe that Francis Stevens--Gertrude Barrows Bennett--was a Catholic. If that was the case, I wonder, too, how receptive she would have been to the very Protestant and very Puritan ideas of Cotton Mather. Finally, I wonder if dark fantasy is simply a genre that is essentially theological in nature but with God and devil (ideas that are considered naïve and unsophisticated today) removed, only to be replaced by material forces. If that's true, then Francis Stevens--if she was indeed an author of dark fantasy--would have come before the break from the theological past into a materialistic present. If that's the case, then it hardly makes any sense to say that she created the genre attributed to her.

It also occurred to me that the invisible creature spawned by human hatred, jealousy, and destructiveness reappeared, so to speak, in the movie Forbidden Planet from 1956. By then the creature was explained in purely materialistic terms as a monster of the Id manifested with the aid of vast and powerful machinery. Many of Freud's ideas are now considered politically incorrect or simply invalid, but in the 1950s, Freudian psychology was wildly popular and I think carried a kind of scientific cachet. It's no wonder that it found its way into science fiction. Heck, even Dianetics, the root of a science-fiction religion, is made up in part of Freudianism. The irony is that Marx, who was an out-and-out crackpot, has adherents today, while Freud has fallen out of favor, despite the usefulness of some of his ideas. The double irony is that the political correctness that has gone against Freud grew, I believe, out of a marriage of his ideas to those of Marx in the forms of critical theory and the schemes of the New Left.

The race that created the machines in Forbidden Planet were called the Krell. The source of their great power is subterranean. The name evokes, if ever so slightly, the subject of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's romance of 1871, Vril, the Power of the Coming Race. The Vril is the power, also subterranean. The people who wield that power are the Vril-Ya, which word seems to have been the source of H.P. Lovecraft's name for his submarine city, R'lyeh, in "The Call of Cthulhu." Bulwer-Lytton's book also influenced the Theosophists (who were mentioned in "The Call of Cthulhu"). They in turn seem to have influenced Raymond A. Palmer in his peddling of the so-called Shaver Mystery and perhaps even L. Ron Hubbard, an even greater huckster than Palmer, who invented a quasi-Freudian Dianetics and a quasi-religious Scientology. Forbidden Planet is said to have influenced the making of the television series Star Trek (1966). In one episode, "The Ultimate Computer," human "engrams" are encoded in the eponymous machine. Engram is of course a term from Dianetics and Scientology. The Krell's machinery, like the Vril-Ya's technology before it, might easily be called "the ultimate computer" as well. The Mathison E-meter is a pretty meager gadget by comparison. (1)

So, Karl Marx, Theosophy, Raymond A. Palmer, L. Ron Hubbard, and to a lesser extent Sigmund Freud attempted to uncover or explain earth's secret history, each in more or less materialistic terms. Cotton Mather had his own non-material explanation for historical forces. Poor Francis Stevens, whom hardly anyone remembers, relied on a very old and very simple explanation. She laid the blame instead at the feet of a corrupt humanity and its influencing "Powers of Evil."

The connections continue: There are those who explain witches and even zombies by material means. This is, after all, the era of Scientism in which all things are or can be explained by science. One of those means is by ingestion of jimsonweed, a highly toxic plant that grows in old barn lots, hog lots, and other waste places here in the Midwest. If jimsonweed is only one of many material sources of altered states of consciousness, morality, or being, then Cotton Mather's ideas are rendered obsolete. After all, in an era of Scientism, there can't be any supernatural or non-material explanations for human conduct.

Another name for jimsonweed is thornapple. You and I ran across that word recently in our reading. You will remember that Lee Brown Coye passed through an area overgrown with pines and thornapple trees on his way to a house of horrors in central New York State. I take that name, thornapple, to mean hawthorn, a small tree with apple-like fruits and thorny twigs. Hawthorn is common on old-field sites, as Coye's woods seem to have been. But there is a suggestion of the name of that far less innocuous plant that I have called jimsonweed. That suggestion gives a whole new meaning to Coye's tale, and to the story "Sticks," adapted by Karl Edward Wagner, who was a psychiatrist, a drug user, a nihilist, possibly an atheist, and the one who may very well have coined the term dark fantasy.

Note

(1) Speaking of the E-meter, I think people undergoing auditing grip cylindrical electrodes in their hands. If I remember right, I read a story that early auditors might even have used tomato cans as the electrodes. That makes me think of Mr. Haney, from Green Acres, who very famously said, "Don't look in the termator can!" It also makes me think of the "time machine" from Napoleon Dynamite, the title character of which was, like L. Ron Hubbard, Lee Brown Coye, and Karl Edward Wagner, a redhead. Here's another quote from Wikipedia: "Montague Summers, in his translation of the Malleus Maleficarum, notes that red hair and green eyes were thought to be the sign of a witch, a werewolf or a vampire during the Middle Ages." Readers of H.P. Lovecraft have of course heard of the Malleus Maleficarum. In some of the images of Cotton Mather on the Internet, his hair is suspiciously ruddy in hue. Anyway, if a witch is a drug user, and werewolves and vampires are either psychopaths or victims of bloodborne illness, then evil and corruption have satisfactorily been explained by science, and the individual is excused from responsibility for his own actions.

Copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Stories of Francis Stevens-Unseen--Unfeared

"Unseen--Unfeared" is a short story originally published in People's Favorite Magazine for February 10, 1919. It was Francis Stevens first story published after the end of the Great War, and there seems to be a cloud hanging over it, perhaps a cloud of awareness or an inkling of what had gone on in Europe over the previous four years and more. In the end, that cloud is dispelled and life is affirmed. The story is in five sections and takes up fifteen pages in The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy (2004).

Longer than "Behind the Curtain," the story "Unseen--Unfeared" is also more complex, more innovative, and I think more enjoyable. As with so many of Stevens' stories, "Unseen--Unfeared" is a hybrid. It begins and ends as a detective tale, but there are elements of fantasy, science fiction, and the ghost story in between. It approaches what people now call dark fantasy, but then backs away with an affirmation of the essential goodness and immeasurable value of human beings. It also has something in common with later stories by H.P. Lovecraft. Maybe he read it. More likely, tales like those written by Stevens and Lovecraft were in the making during the 1910s and '20s. The Germans, who were then entering into a period of decadence, call such a thing zeitgeist.

"Unseen--Unfeared" is set in the then-present and takes place in a large city, probably New York City or Philadelphia. The story opens and closes with conversations between the narrator, Blaisdell, and his "ever-interesting friend," Mark Jenkins, a police detective. The subject of their conversations is Doc Holt, "an amateur chemist and dabbler in different sorts of research work." (p. 213) Bracketed within these conversations is the narrator's account of a terrifying experience in a kind of laboratory/lecture hall located in a private home with Blaisdell as the sole member of the audience. The lecturer is an odd and frightening scientist--one guess as to who he is. By carefully explained (pseudo)scientific means, Blaisdell sees visions of monsters that--though invisible to us--inhabit the same space that we inhabit. The kicker is that these monsters are created by man "[o]ut of the ether . . . . By his evil thoughts, by his selfish panics, by his lusts and his interminable, never-ending hate he has made them, and they are everywhere!" (p. 221) Blaisdell resolves to abolish his "monster-creating self," (p. 222) but is interrupted in the nick of time by Jenkins the detective. In the end, coming out of his state of fear and dread, Blaisdell refuses "to ever again believe in the depravity of the human race." (p. 225) (1, 2)

Stevens' story has a Scooby-Doo kind of ending, but things aren't tied up completely with a rational explanation. There is still doubt--more than a little doubt--as to whether such an explanation is adequate. "Unseen--Unfeared" is science fiction, more accurately science fantasy. Just as in The Citadel of Fear, science and reason seem to explain things, but then something beyond science shows itself to be more powerful and closer to the real nature of the world and of human beings.

Human hatred seems to be a developing theme in the stories of Francis Stevens. Again and again, she turned away from hatred and towards "the goodness and kindliness of the human countenance." (p. 225) It's worth noting that in "Unseen--Unfeared," Blaisdell, in his state of fear, turns his thoughts against the "Italians, Jews, and . . . negroes"(p. 213) he sees in the street. "Oh, no," I thought as I was reading the story. It reminded me of nothing so much as "The Horror at Red Hook" by H.P. Lovecraft. The difference is that Stevens' narrator has fallen into a drug-induced state of fear and dread. In the end he recovers himself and embraces his fellow man.

"Unseen--Unfeared" puts me in mind of H.P. Lovecraft's work in other ways. Lovecraft was of course a materialist and probably would not have delved into a supernatural explanation as Stevens did. I can hardly imagine him closing a story with words like these:

. . . doubt is sometimes better than certainty, and there are marvels better left unproved. Those, for instance, which concern the Powers of Evil. (p. 126)

That may be the same idea as the mind not correlating all of its contents, but certainty and proof are in the province of science. The Powers of Evil inhabit the space beyond. I wonder now if Lovecraft ever used the concept of supernatural evil in his stories, or if the threats he imagined against humanity were always material, or at the very least, not in any way suggestive of God and the devil and their ongoing struggle for the human soul.

Unlike Lovecraft's stories, "Unseen--Unfeared" does not end with death, destruction, or disaster. It is affirmative rather than pessimistic or downbeat. The concept of invisible monsters and a scientific way of rendering them visible reminds me of "From Beyond" by H.P. Lovecraft, written in 1920. Was there influence of one upon the other, or, again, was this merely the zeitgeist? After all, Einsteinian relativity and talk of multiple dimensions was in the air in 1919. Invisible monsters had previously shown up in "What Was It? A Mystery" by Fitz-James O'Brien (1859), "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant (1887), and "The Damned Thing" by Ambrose Bierce (1893). The seed of interdimensional or intradimensional invisibility may have come from Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott (1884), a pretty well indispensable book.

If there was a spirit of the times, Francis Stevens appears to have partaken of the positive and affirmative parts. She seems to have been a woman of faith, as opposed to Lovecraft the materialist, who seems to have held such dim views of humanity and our place in the universe. The difference may be explained very well by biography. Unfortunately, biographical information on Francis Stevens--Gertrude Barrows Bennett--is sorely lacking. We're left with the stories themselves. So the continuing question is this: Did Francis Stevens create dark fantasy? If dark fantasy is negative, pessimistic, or nihilistic, the answer is still no.

Notes
(1) There may be an analogy here to the war years, but if there is, it's only in the mood of the story and of the times and not in any way overt in the story.
(2) In The Citadel of Fear, the god-monster Nacoc-Yaotl comes to hate humanity because they have made him what he is by their hateful and violent ways. In "Unseen--Unfeared" Francis Stevens took that idea a step further, for the invisible monsters in the story are manifestations of human hatred. In dark fantasy, the monster supposedly comes from the outside. He predates humanity and may be entirely indifferent to us. He certainly isn't created by us, just as Cthulhu wasn't created by us.

Francis Stevens had more than her share of space on the covers of pulp magazines in her brief career, but that wasn't the case in February 1919 when her story "Unseen--Unfeared" was published in People's Favorite Magazine. The cover artist is unknown.

Text and captions copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley 

A Survey of Monsters-Part One

Introduction

I have asked the question, "What is the monster of the twenty-first century?" Now here it is five weeks and eight parts of an article later and I still haven't proposed an answer. I hope to get to one soon. Before proceeding, I should offer a survey of monsters.

Fritz Leiber called it "the era of cottage and castle." That era stretched unbroken from the early Middle Ages into the Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution. The monsters of those many centuries were supernatural in origin and in character: vampire, werewolf, ghost, demon, and so on. (1) I suppose that in an Age of Reason, any culture would become more self-conscious. That's what happened when men and women of the mid-eighteenth century looked back upon their history with some nostalgia. The result was a Gothic revival. (They even created artificial "ruins" to go with their interests.) It probably wasn't the first retro movement in history. After all, the Renaissance was a revival of Classical learning. But Gothicism is still with us and still a powerful cultural force. You won't meet many true Renaissance men in your lifetime, but chances are you have seen a member of the Goth subculture some time in the recent past. Or maybe you are part of that subculture.

So the Gothic revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reconnected us to stories of ghosts, demons, vampires, and werewolves. Curiously, it also gave us a science-fictional monster, one of the earliest of its type: Frankenstein's monster. In Mary Shelley's Gothic romance of 1818, the monster is one of the undead, but he is reanimated not by a supernatural force but by purely natural--that is, scientific, or what passed for scientific--galvanism. In America, Edgar Allan Poe followed Mary Shelley's example, marrying the settings, trappings, and themes of Gothic romance to nascent science fiction. "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845), in which the title character is kept alive after his death through the power of mesmerism, is an example. Other writers of the nineteenth century followed suit. Their monsters--Varney the Vampire, Carmilla, Wagner the Were-Wolf, Spring-Heeled Jack--were in the Gothic tradition, sometimes with a little science thrown in.

At the end of the nineteenth century, in Bram Stoker's Dracula, the vampire--like the psychopathic killer before him--moved to the city. In Dracula's case, it was from rural Ruritanian Europe to the bustling metropolis of London, where he could so easily go about his business. Not many people today remember Varney or Carmilla, but the whole world knows of Dracula. He and his vampiric kin have been with us continuously since 1897, when Dracula first appeared in print. Two other monsters arrived in that same decade. (2) Also in 1897, space aliens, in the form of H.G. Wells' Martian invaders, arrived on Earth and in our imaginations. They have never left us, either. Half a decade before, Antoon Cornelis Oudemans published The Great Sea Serpent (1892), a scientific study of the phenomenon. Bernard Heuvelmans, the father of twentieth century cryptozoology, considered that book to be the first work in its field.

I have already written about two real-life monsters, the psychopathic killer and the totalitarian. If Jack the Ripper was the model for the psychopathic killer, then he predates the previously described monsters by only a few years, having done his work in 1888. The origin of the twentieth century totalitarian monster is harder to pin down. Part psychopath, part devil, and part god, he has probably been around since the beginning of time. As for his first occurrence in literature, I can offer two examples, "The New Utopia" by Jerome K. Jerome (1891) and Pictures of the Socialistic Future by Eugen Richter (1891). I haven't read either of those stories, but I don't believe the totalitarian monster was personified in either one of them. Maybe the example of the real-world totalitarian was necessary before he could cross over into literature. If anyone can propose the first totalitarian in literature, I would like to hear about it.

That leaves a few other types of monsters that I haven't talked about yet. Fitz-James O'Brien wrote about the invisible monster in "What Was It? A Mystery" (1859). Guy de Maupassant's story "The Horla" (1887) and Ambrose Bierce's story "The Damned Thing" (1893) are more well known. They also conveniently fall within the last decade or so of the nineteenth century, as does "The Invisible Man" by H.G. Wells (1897). The machine-monster has its origins in real-life automata of ancient times. If you were drawing a Venn diagram of machine-monsters, Frankenstein's monster might fall partially within your circle. The android would also, of course. The French writer Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, in L'Ève future (1886), was responsible for the first usage of that word as we understand it, that is, a robot in human form. Ambrose Bierce turned the game-playing automaton into a monster in "Moxon's Master" (1893). The word robot itself comes from the play R.U.R by Karel Čapek (1920). The computer-monster is just a later variation on the same type.

I don't know when the concept of the interdimensional being or monster came about, but ghosts, demons, and other supernatural monsters would have served that purpose in olden times. Cryptids, space aliens, and invisible monsters fill the bill today. The degenerate human is a kind of monster as well. I'm not sure you can point to his first appearance, although The Time Machine (1895) or The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), both by H.G. Wells (1896), are good candidates. My list isn't complete, but I'll close this part one with another type, the soulless monster, which can take various forms. For example, does Frankenstein's monster possess a soul? Does a vampire? More to my point, does the machine-monster have a soul? Or the space alien of the pod-person type? Or what about the monster du jour, the zombie?

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Once the Age of Exploration began, there would have been born a new kind of monster and one of the first monsters of science: the previously unknown creature out of terra icognita. Today we would call that creature a cryptid.

(2) The decade in which our current popular culture can be said to have begun.

Copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales at Christmas

Christmas is near and if you're in the mood for weird stories of Christmas and wintertime, you might look for these stories published in Weird Tales:

• "One Christmas Eve" by Elliott O'Donnell (July 1934)
• "The Crime on Christmas Night" by Gaston Leroux (Dec. 1930)
• "The Snowmen" by Loretta Burroughs (Dec. 1938)
• "The Wondersmith" by Fitz-James O'Brien (July 1935)

Merry Christmas

from Tellers of Weird Tales!

Text copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Ambrose Bierce (1842-?)-Part 3

GHOST, n. The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.

--from The Devil's Dictionary
by Ambrose Bierce

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Fritz Leiber, Jr. and the problem of the weird tale. You're probably saying, oh, no, not that again. Bear with me for a moment, then I'll move on. One of the points I had hoped to make in that article is that we will always have ghosts and monsters because we will always have fears. The form taken by our ghosts may change; they keep haunting us nonetheless. You never know when Ambrose Bierce is pulling your leg, but his definition of the word ghost goes along with what Leiber seemed to be saying and what I attempted to say in my essay. (1)

* * *

Speaking of fear, less than a decade and a half after Bierce's death--if he indeed bit the dust in Mexico in 1913 or 1914--another author of weird stories began a seminal essay with these words:

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

The author was H.P. Lovecraft and the essay was "Supernatural Horror in Literature." By the time he wrote those words, Lovecraft was well on his way to becoming the most important American writer in the field of horror and fantasy since Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce notwithstanding. I have wondered what influence Bierce may have had on later writers. It seems not to have been very significant, at least in any direct way. But listen to what Lovecraft had to say about him in the course of a very long passage from "Supernatural Horror in Literature": 

Closer to real greatness [than Fitz-James O'Brien] was the eccentric and saturnine journalist Ambrose Bierce. . . . Bierce was a satirist and pamphleteer of note, but the bulk of his artistic reputation must rest upon his grim and savage short stories; a large number of which deal with the Civil War and form the most vivid and realistic expression which that conflict has yet received in fiction. Virtually all of Bierce's tales are tales of horror; and whilst many of them treat only of the physical and psychological horrors within Nature, a substantial proportion admit the malignly supernatural and form a leading element in America’s fund of weird literature. . . .

Bierce's work is in general somewhat uneven. Many of the stories are obviously mechanical, and marred by a jaunty and commonplacely artificial style derived from journalistic models; but the grim malevolence stalking through all of them is unmistakable, and several stand out as permanent mountain-peaks of American weird writing. "The Death of Halpin Frayser," called by Frederic Taber Cooper the most fiendishly ghastly tale in the literature of the Anglo-Saxon race, tells of a body skulking by night without a soul in a weird and horribly ensanguined wood, and of a man beset by ancestral memories who met death at the claws of that which had been his fervently loved mother.

There's more, and in writing about Bierce, Lovecraft could almost have been writing about his own works. One story "evokes with singular subtlety yet apparent simplicity a piercing sense of the terror which may reside in the written word." In another, a character "is found crouched in a corner with distorted face, dead of sheer fright at something he has seen. The only clue visible to the discoverers is one having terrible implications." Another tale--"The Spook House"--is "told with a severely homely air of journalistic verisimilitude, [but] conveys terrible hints of shocking mystery." Lovecraft may have been a different kind of writer, but it seems that he gained something by reading Bierce.

In his conclusion on Bierce, Lovecraft wrote:

Bierce seldom realises the atmospheric possibilities of his themes as vividly as Poe; and much of his work contains a certain touch of naiveté, prosaic angularity, or early-American provincialism which contrasts somewhat with the efforts of later horror-masters. Nevertheless the genuineness and artistry of his dark intimations are always unmistakable, so that his greatness is in no danger of eclipse. (2)

Lovecraft created his dreamland fantasies and his tales of the Cthulhu mythos in part by looking at the works of writers who went before him. Lord Dunsany was of course a major influence. But what of the occurrence of proper nouns created by Ambrose Bierce in the work of H.P. Lovecraft? That will have to wait until next time.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Bierce continued his definition of ghost: "There is one insuperable obstacle to a belief in ghosts. A ghost never comes naked: he appears either in a winding-sheet or 'in his habit as he lived.' To believe in him, then, is to believe that not only have the dead the power to make themselves visible after there is nothing left of them, but that the same power inheres in textile fabrics. Supposing the products of the loom to have this ability, what object would they have in exercising it? And why does not the apparition of a suit of clothes sometimes walk abroad without a ghost in it? These be riddles of significance." Bierce lived during the era of spiritualists and had reason to look closely at these questions. It would wait for Dr. Seuss to answer them in "What Was I Scared Of?" in The Sneetches and Other Stories (1961).
(2) Lovecraft criticizes Bierce for his provincialism. One irony here is that Bierce was born and lived the first few years of his life in the same kind of place that Lovecraft set his rural horror stories such as "The Colour Out of Space" and "The Dunwich Horror."

Speaking of Dr. Seuss, if you haven't yet seen Dr.FaustusAU's version of "The Call of Cthulhu" as done by Dr. Seuss, you should do so right now. It's the kind of thing I wish I had done as an artist. You'll find it by clicking here.

Original text copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Nineteenth Century American Authors

The list of authors whose works were reprinted in the pages of Weird Tales reads in part like a who's who of nineteenth-century American literature. I have already covered about half of those authors. I hope to cover the other half over the next few weeks. In chronological order of their births, they are:

• Washington Irving (1783-1859)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
• Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
• Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
• Fitz-James O'Brien (1828-1862)
• Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833-1908)
• Frank Stockton (1834-1902)
• Mark Twain (1835-1910)
• Sidney Lanier (1842-1881)
• Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
• F. Marion Crawford (1854-1909)
• O. Henry (1862-1910)
• Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933)
• Frank Norris (1870-1902)

There are of course well known names absent from the list: essayists, philosophers, Transcendentalists, Abolitionists, political figures, many of the poets. More conspicuously absent are these indispensable authors:

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)-Most of Cooper's works were historical or adventure novels, but I found a reference to a book called The Monikins (1835), about "[a]n Antarctic land of educated monkeys that 'ape' English and American social and political folly." That description makes The Monikins sound more like a satire than a work of fantasy, but it's a book worth mentioning anyway.

Antarctica was discovered in 1820. Cooper's book may or may not have been the first novel of the frozen continent, but it preceded Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur G. Pym of Nantucket (1838) by three years. More than half a century later, Jules Verne published a sequel to Poe's novel, Antarctic Mystery: The Sphinx of the Ice Fields (1897). H.P. Lovecraft also referred to Arthur G. Pym in his own Antarctic novel, At the Mountains of Madness (1931), which was rejected by Weird Tales. You can find out more on the author at the website of the James Fenimore Cooper Society, here, and on polar fiction by clicking this link.

Herman Melville (1819-1891)-Herman Melville, friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, seems not to have written in the genre of weird fiction, but if you have ever read "Bartleby the Scrivener," you probably said to yourself, "Boy, that's weird." There are fantastic elements in other works by Melville. H. Bruce Franklin included the story "The Bell-Tower" in his anthology Future Perfect (1995), calling it "Melville's only complete science fiction." Otherwise Melville wrote mostly about the sea, including in his magnum opus, Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851). Although Moby-Dick has been adapted many times, the most well-known adaptation is the movie version from 1956 starring Gregory Peck and with a screenplay co-written by Ray Bradbury.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)-Of the authors on this list, Emily Dickinson is most aggrieved by not having had her work reprinted in Weird Tales. Could her poems have been too much even for Farnsworth Wright's tastes? Too subtle? Too sophisticated? Too morbid? Too obscure? Or was he simply unable to secure rights to reprint them? And shall I correct the oversight?

Bret Harte (1836-1902)-Bret Harte wrote not Westerns but of the West. Harte also wrote a parody of the Sherlock Holmes stories featuring a detective named Hemlock Jones. And, he may have been connected in the most roundabout way with H.P. Lovecraft through his work for a New Englander named Whipple.  

Kate Chopin (1851-1904)-I'm not familiar with Kate Chopin's stories. You may not find any work of fantasy or weird fiction there. All I can say is that she was influenced by Guy de Maupassant, the French teller of tales, some weird, some not. 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)-Of all the authors on this list, only Charlotte Perkins Gilman lived into the Weird Tales era. A feminist and social reformer, she wrote scores of short stories, novels, essays, poems, and lectures. Her most famous work is "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), a story of madness and horror that would have been suitable for the Weird Tales crowd. Charlotte also wrote the Utopian novel Herland (1915), sort of a combination of Looking Backward and King Solomon's Mines.

Stephen Crane (1871-1900)-In his brief life, Stephen Crane authored a number of American classics, including The Red Badge of Courage (1895). He also wrote terse, enigmatic, naturalistic--some would say harsh--verse such as this poem from 1895:

A man feared that he might find an assassin;

Another that he might find a victim.

One was more wise than the other.

A few of those poems would have fit in nicely in the pages of Weird Tales.

The cover of one of many editions of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Artists sense that yellow is the color of madness, or use the color yellow to express madness. See the work of Vincent van Gogh, such as . . . 

"The Night Cafe" from 1888.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley