Four Car Stories-Part Four

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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

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

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Planes, Trains, & Automobiles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

What Is Cosmic Horror?

Weird Tales #367, from 2023, is a themed issue. The theme is cosmic horror. I'm not sure that a themed issue is a good idea. What happens if you as a reader don't like the theme? Well, you go elsewhere for your reading, and your money follows you. That was one of the really good things about the original Weird Tales: no matter what your tastes were when it came to weird fiction, fantasy, or even science fiction, you would probably find something you liked in every issue.

There has been a proliferation of genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres in genre fiction. It's pretty ridiculous actually. I'm not sure why there should be such proliferation except that I think everybody is trying to be extraordinary. Democracy has its discontents. People ask themselves, if we're all equal, how am I to stand out from everybody else? How am I to show myself to be above others? One way of doing it, I guess, is to make yourself extraordinary within a subset or sub-subset of our larger society and culture, even if you have to invent that subset or sub-subset for yourself. The other day, I wrote about an interview that one contributor to the Cosmic Horror Issue conducted with another. In his introductory paragraph to that interview, Nicholas Diak wrote of "The Forest Gate" by Samantha Underhill: "Using cosmic horror and existential dread poetic styles, this poem . . ." and so on. So I guess cosmic horror and existential dread are poetic styles and the proliferation extends into not only genres but also forms and styles. I have used the word proliferation here. Actually I think it's a balkanization of culture, more accurately an atomization. People working in culture are in pursuit of the infinitesimal, for if you can divide culture finely enough, then you can be extraordinary within your own self-created infinitesimal. If your world is your navel, then you can easily occupy your whole world. You can be within it the greatest of anything and everything you can think of.

So what is cosmic horror? Well I'll let you know that my title is a trick. I don't know what it is. But then I didn't invent the thing. I'm not sure that it even exists. The other day, I pointed out that cosmos and chaos are opposites. Cosmos is order. It is the universe. It's where we live and it's a place governed by laws. Although there is emptiness in the universe, the emptiness is not what counts. The important parts lie among the emptiness. If time is what keeps everything from happening all at once (a quote attributed to Ray Cummings), then emptiness--space--is what keeps everything from happening all in the same place.

Chaos is cosmos' opposite. It is disorder, confusion, emptiness. The Online Etymology Dictionary explains its meaning as "gaping void; empty, immeasurable space." The original Greek word, khaos, means "abyss." Those two words, void and abyss, appear again and again in the Cosmic Horror Issue. That was my point in suggesting that cosmic horror should probably be called chaotic horror, for the horror appears to be in encounters with or contemplation of the void or the abyss. Alternatively, this invented, theoretical, or critical (versus natural, organic, or evolved) sub-sub-genre could be called abyssal horror or voidal horror. There isn't any such word as voidal, I guess, but if we can invent one thing, we can invent another.

I have a copy of Otto Struve's Elementary Astronomy, published in 1959 and reprinted in 1961. Struve's book is brimming with black-and-white photographs of immense galaxies and countless stars. In the first page of text, there are numbers representing immense quantities: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the observable universe, a like number of cubic inches of almost empty space in the Milky Way galaxy. That's a lot of zeroes, kept from emptiness or void by an initial non-zero integer. More such numbers appear on the next page. These, then, are cosmic scales, cosmic here having mathematical value but being empty of any value judgments, or at least any outright negative value judgments. Dr. Struve was a dispassionate scientist after all. Even though they are cosmic, we can still write about things of this scale. Otto Struve did it in his textbook. Other authors have done it in their fiction. I should add that zero represents nothing. The numeral looks like a hole, an opening, a gaping maw.

I guess cosmic horror is an expression or a feeling of horror that arises from apprehending or contemplating the cosmic scale of the universe. Maybe it's not the cosmos itself that gives rise to this feeling, though. Again, cosmos is order. Chaos is its opposite. In the biblical story of the creation of the universe, what we call cosmos was preceded by chaos, emptiness, a void:

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep

or:

the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep

or:

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

(Genesis 1:2)

We live in an atheistic and nihilistic age. Maybe the horror that some people feel in their contemplation of the universe is the horror not of cosmos but of the void that preceded it. In intervening and in his act of creation, God put an end to chaos. The void, which was non-existence, is now doubly non-existent. There cannot be a void if there is cosmos. But people don't believe in God any longer. I suspect that many if not most of the authors and poets who contributed to the Cosmic Horror Issue are non-believers, if not atheists, materialists, nihilists, or even anti-natalists, as Thomas Ligotti (not a contributor to this issue) so famously (or infamously) is. And so if there is not God to keep back the void--if it can poke through wherever he is not on watch--then horror might emerge and erupt and engulf. If you don't believe in God, then maybe you must fear the void.

In his first paragraph of Elementary Astronomy, Dr. Struve wrote that the word astronomy is from two Greek words, the first, obviously, for "star," the second, significantly, for "law." To fear or to feel horror at the great scale of the universe in terms of both space and time is, I think, off the mark. It is to ignore the fundamental order and lawfulness of the universe. There are people who feel small or insignificant, their lives essentially meaningless, when they think about the immensity of the universe. Why should that be? They're having, I think, an inappropriate response. I would say that their response is actually self-centered, possibly tipping into a kind of solipsism. If you feel this way, you need to get over yourself. If you think these things, you're actually putting yourself at the center of the universe in that you're thinking about the effect the universe has on you and that your feeling this way is somehow significant, that it is indicative of something that is out there instead of in here. Or maybe you're trying to make of yourself the universe, or vice versa.

Carl Sagan had a better view of it, I think. He saw us as the products--perhaps the end-products--of an orderly universe. "We are star stuff," he famously said in his series Cosmos. The stars have existed so that we might also exist and grow to contemplate them, ourselves, and the cosmos in which we live. We are the mind and consciousness of the cosmos. He gloried in the immensity and magnificence of that great structure, process, and more after which he named his show. I still remember a montage from Cosmos over which exultant music, composed by Beethoven, played, a montage of us, made from star stuff, formed from the dust of stars, set about our tasks of living, thinking, loving, and creating.

At the end of his novel Contact, Dr. Sagan indicated that the universe is actually designed, a curious conclusion for an atheist. And though he might have been an atheist, he was obviously not a nihilist, nor was he negative, depressed, anxious, or fearful in his contemplation of the universe. He could hardly have studied it and accomplished what he did if he had felt those kinds of feelings. In that he was wise. Those who are horrified by the cosmos are, I think, unwise.

I suspect that cosmic horror is actually not based on anything especially serious or meaningful. As Nicholas Diak wrote in his essay, it's actually something done for fun. We like thrills. We like to be scared. Especially when we return from reading, return to what is safe and sure. I think it best to look at it this way, that cosmic horror in storytelling is done for fun. Unfortunately, most of the works in the Cosmic Horror Issue are pretty limited in their approach to cosmic horror. Again, there seem to be two main themes or images in these pages: the void or the abyss, and the alien presence. If there is a cosmos through which chaos occasionally breaks through, and if there is actually a genre of cosmic horror, then the possibilities for telling stories within that genre would seem vast, theoretically endless. Why limit ourselves? Why have the authors of cosmic horror so limited themselves? Maybe it's because we as a culture--and the creators of our culture in particular--have run out of ideas. And maybe we have run out of skills, too, and so we accomplish almost nothing of note.

Now comes the really fun part in all of this, for opposite cosmic horror is cosmic insight, cosmic happiness, cosmic transcendence. Richard Matheson, a teller of weird tales, wrote the screenplay for The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). In the end, that film shows itself as a vehicle for an uplifting, even exultant, philosophical and theological conclusion. Here are the final words spoken by the title character (with my own paragraphing of a transcript of the narration):

I was continuing to shrink, to become . . . What? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world?

So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.

I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens, the universe, worlds beyond number. God's silver tapestry spread across the night.

And in that moment I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of Man's own limited dimension. I had presumed upon Nature. That existence begins and ends is Man's conception, not Nature's.

And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away and in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something too.

Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too.

To God, there is no zero.

I still exist.

"My fears melted away," he says. "To God, there is no zero." Those, I think, are proper responses as we contemplate the cosmos. And I should point out that The Incredible Shrinking Man closes with swelling music played over photographs of the stars and galaxies, just as in Otto Struve's book, which is full of so many zeroes, all of them made from nothing into something by God's word and law.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Comet Madness!

I wasn't going to interrupt my series on Earl Peirce, Jr. I was going to keep writing it straight through to the end, which is still a couple of weeks off at the current rate. But then I saw something yesterday that put me over the edge.

I saw a man driving a Jeep.

Alone.

With the top down.

And the doors off.

With the wind whipping all around him and through his vehicle.

And he was wearing a mask.

It's not just a Jeep Thing. Every day, I see people driving, with their windows up or down, or bicycling, or walking, in the breeze, in the fresh air, in the bright, hot, ultraviolet-y sunshine--and they wear masks. They're alone, and they wear masks. They're with their husbands or wives, with whom they presumably live, sleep, eat, and make love, and they wear masks. They could be astronauts in quarantine after a moon-landing--they could be the scientists in The Andromeda Strain, scrubbed and sterilized to the marrow--they could be the Bubble Boy inside his impervious plastic membrane--and they would still wear masks.

The operative part of coronavirus is virus, a thing--living, non-living, or somewhere in between--that is both discoverable and describable by science. Our superstitious acts--knocking on wood or throwing a pinch of salt over our shoulders--are of no use. They do nothing. To use a science-y kind of word, they are inefficacious. Likewise, the coronavirus does not exist or act in accordance with superstition. It does not go around in clouds, vapors, gases, or waves, like the poisonous tail of a world-ending comet, or a fog of mustard gas creeping over a Belgian battlefield, or a strange mist that engulfs you like the one in The Incredible Shrinking Man, leaving you coated all over the way a kindergartner is after crafting with sparkles and glue. It is a virus, and it is subject to the laws of nature, not the vagaries of superstition. We live in a world full of people who claim an absolute belief in science and an equally absolute disdain for superstition. In actuality, most people feed at a buffet in which both are offered and they take their pick. A little of this, a little of that . . .

A comet is crossing our skies this week. Called NEOWISE, it was discovered on March 27, 2020, the week before coronavirus deaths in the United States jumped from the hundreds into the thousands. Coincidence? I don't think so. Not when you realize that comets have been bringers of doom and disaster for as long as there have been people. It happened in 1832 with Biela's Comet. If you don't know that the world ended then, it's only because all records were wiped out in the disaster. The same comet came back in 1872 and the world ended again. In 1910, the French astronomer and science fiction author Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) predicted that if the Earth should pass through the tail of Halley's Comet, cyanogen gas could impregnate our atmosphere, thereby snuffing out all life here. I don't know which hat Flammarion was wearing when he made that prediction, whether it was his stargazer hat or his fantasist hat. Maybe he made this one himself from tinfoil. In any case, I don't remember that the world came to end in 1910, but then that was way before my time.

By the way, that's the second time Flammarion's name has come up in this blog in the last month. That's pretty good for a guy who has been dead for nearly a century and whom nobody remembers much anymore.

I'm not sure how Flammarion survived all of the cyanogen gas that swept the planet. Maybe he hid in a cave like we're all doing right now and like a "strange sect" in Georgia did on the night of May 18-19, 1910, as the comet made its deadly pass. (1) Those people were pikers, though. They may have had to deal with great clouds of cyanogen gas, but that's nothing compared to coronavirus. I heard that coronavirus can actually dissolve rubber. It happened to a fighter pilot over New Mexico when he flew through a cloud of it. His mask dissolved and he ended up crashing his airplane and dying. That's what I heard.

We don't know how many fatalities there were from Halley's Comet in 1910. We didn't keep good numbers back then. Not like today. Not like in Florida, where a man who was killed in a motorcycle crash the other day is rightly counted as a coronavirus victim because he had the coronavirus when he crashed. That's what Dr. Florida Man told us. I quote: "But you could actually argue that it could have been the COVID-19 that caused him to crash." Too bad Dr. Florida Man wasn't around in 1910 to count the victims. Then we would know. Instead all we have is the case of forty-eight-year-old Jacob Haberlach of Evansville, Indiana, who keeled over from a heart attack while trying to get a look at the comet. (2) The score so far: Coronavirus 10 billion, Halley's Comet 1.

If this is science, I guess we will go on having clouds and mists, vapors and waves, fogs and gasses, cloaking the planet in a deadly miasma but rendered completely harmless by pieces of cloth worn over our faces. Or really just parts of our faces because who ever breathes through their nose? You don't need a mask there.

I don't know how we're ever going to get through all of this.

Notes

(1) "Georgia Sect in Cave Awaiting End of World," York Daily (York, Pennsylvania), May 19, 1910, p. 1.

(2) "Comet Causes Heart Disease," York Daily (York, Pennsylvania), May 19, 1910, p. 1. Yes, they're from the same source.

Comet Madness!

"But wonders and wild fancies had been, of late days, strangely rife among mankind [. . . ]."

--Edgar Allan Poe

In its issue of December 1839, Burton's Gentleman's Magazine printed Edgar Allan Poe's tale "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion." The tale is brief. It takes the form of a dramatic dialogue between the two title characters, one newly arrived in the afterlife, the other a veteran. The newcomer Eiros explains how he got to this place: Earth came in contact with a comet that--tenuous as it was known to be--nonetheless took away all of our planet's nitrogen, leaving everything to "burst at once into a species of intense flame, for whose surpassing brilliancy and all-fervid heat even the angels in the high Heaven of pure knowledge have no name. Thus ended all." Was this the first comet story in fantasy and science fiction? I don't know. Was it the first tale of comet madness? I don't know that either. Let's just call it an introduction and draw from it the epigraph above, which is as true now--or truer--as it was in Poe's day. The illustration by the way is by the Italian artist Alberto Martini (1876-1954).

Clouds, gases, and waves, engulfing us, sweeping over us, carrying us away--these have been the promises, predictions, prognostications, and panics that have come again and again throughout history, especially since science and mass culture were invented in the modern period. "One of the Terrors of Halley's Comet Which Is Not at All Likely to Be Realized," reads the caption of this illustration from the New York Tribune, May 8, 1910. Thanks for letting us know that this probably maybe won't really happen. The copywriter left off a subtitle: "But We're Going to Show It to You Anyway, Just to Put a Scare into You!" We have the same thing now with predictions of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dead from the coronavirus. Anyway, this picture has it all: the comet and its tail in the background, an ominous black cloud in the middle ground, and a huge, devastating wave washing over the village in the foreground. We don't have any comet panic this week that I know of, but there has been talk of waves and second waves for months now in regards to the coronavirus. Don't Get Caught In the Wave! Wear Your Mask!

If you thought that passing through a tail of cyanogenic gas was bad, just think of what would happen if the comet were actually to crash into Earth! It would look like a cordial cherry when you squeeze it too hard, as in this illustration from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 15, 1910. There are clouds again and jets of gas, too.

This one's even better. There is actual pain, suffering, and destruction going on, though most of the people don't appear to be too worked up over things. One woman is even holding onto her hat as if to lose it would be the greatest of disasters. Taken from the Chicago Tribune, August 9, 1903, this illustration has a now-classic composition with people running around in the foreground while all kinds of terrible things are going on in the background. ("It's a cookbook! It's cookbook!") Basil Wolverton drew a picture almost exactly like it for a story called--appropriately enough--"The End of the World." To see it and others like it, click here.

So Halley's Comet passed and nobody died except Jacob Haberlach. Nelson Harding (1879-1942) of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle observed that happy event--the passing of the comet, not the passing of Haberlach--with this cartoon captioned "That Was Easy," dated May 19, 1910. Easy? Maybe. Old Planet Earth still has a little bit of sweat on his brow, though. But look how brave he is: no mask.

In World War I, on the battlefields of Europe, deadly clouds of gas became real, and men wore masks to protect themselves from it. "Learn to Adjust Your Respirator Correct and Quick" enjoined the caption on this poster by Lieut. W.G. Thayer (William Gordon Thayer, 1893-1921) of the U.S. Army. In 1918, when this picture was made, wearing a mask might mean the difference between a little more life and a horrifying death. Again, the threat was real and the need for the mask was real. Those two things don't always go together.

These are British soldiers "Fighting Foul Fumes and Fiends." They're wearing masks like the ones we're wearing now. The difference is that they faced horrors, many of them almost certain death. What do we face exactly?

The date--May 15, 1915--is significant: less than a month before, on April 22, 1915, the Germans used poison gas for the first time as they launched what became known as the Second Battle of Ypres. Note the blurb above the main title, "The Allies' Wonderful Advance on Turkey." It refers, I assume, to the landing at Gallipoli, April 25, 1915. That "advance" turned out to be not so wonderful after all.

By the way, American soldiers were gassed during the war, too, among them Robert Jere Black, Jr. (1892-1953), a teller of weird tales.

There were other veterans of the Great War who contributed to Weird Tales, most notably the editor, Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940), and the co-founder Jacob Clark Henneberger (1890-1969). The war was a seminal event in the creation of the magazine. It's hard to imagine that Weird Tales would otherwise have come about or that it would have had the subject matter from which to draw so many of its stories. There was (and is) a general atmosphere of doom or fate in weird fiction (that's actually close to the meaning of the word weird), also a feeling that we are helpless--or nearly so--in our encounters with the indifferent or even malevolent forces afoot in the universe. In the depths of mass warfare, men might only feel the same things.

In December 1939, just three months after World War II began, Weird Tales had its first war cover. The artist was a young Hannes Bok (1914-1964). The cover story is "Lords of the Ice" by David H. Keller (1880-1966). The plot is fanciful (it concerns a nameless dictator's plot to seize the natural resources of Antarctica), but the imagery would have been firm in the memory of its viewers: the man in the doorway could easily have stepped out of a trench in Flanders or France, circa 1915. He's even wearing a mask.

(We can safely add Keller's story to the Polar Fiction Database. We might also speculate that the idea of the secret Nazi base in Antarctica was in weird fiction and science fiction before it became a conspiracy theory in what some people think is the real world. But then that's usually the case, not just with conspiracy theories but with all kinds of wacky ideas.)

The 1930s were a time of anxiety as people sensed that real disaster was once again stalking Europe. On November 19, 1932, the Illustrated London News printed this shocking and sensationalistic image on its cover. The artist's signature is partially cropped out, as is any caption or subtitle. (I didn't do the cropping but I'll apologize for it anyway.) It doesn't take the reading of a caption to understand the subject matter: it can only be a gas attack, perhaps on London, certainly on a city of Western Europe. The timing would not appear random, for in November 1932, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party were wrangling for power in the German government. Two months later, he and they would have it.

And when it came time to stand up to the Nazis, the world didn't flinch. People didn't put on masks and hide in a corner of their houses. They showed courage, and they fought.

As I have already said and as everybody should already know, the coronavirus does not travel around the world in a cloud. You will not encounter it in any such way. Not on foot. Not in your car. Not on your bicycle. And especially not on a boat on the lake. (Unless you're in Michigan. But then only on a motorboat. Being in a canoe protects you from clouds of coronavirus.) What we're living through is not the coming of a comet or a World War I gas attack, and it's certainly not like this scene from The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957).*

This is actually the first image that came to me as I began seeing people driving around in their cars while wearing masks. This is what I picture must be going on in their imaginations: the approaching cloud of coronavirus . . .

The Incredible Shrinking Man was written by Richard Matheson (1926-2013), who also wrote for Weird Tales. His second and last story, entitled "Slaughter House," appeared in the magazine sixty-seven years ago this month, July 1953. Matheson went on to write I Am Legend (1954), the story of a terrible disease that ravages the world and probably the same story that started us off on the road to zombie hordes roaming over the Earth.

*Which was released, it so happens, in the month that the Asian Flu pandemic began, February 1957.

Original text and captions copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales #362 Now Available

Marvin Kaye, current editor of Weird Tales, calls his charge "the magazine that never dies." It's fitting, then, that the theme of the latest issue is "The Undead." Featuring stories by Elizabeth Bear, Ramsey Campbell, Ron Goulart, and Brian Lumley, and with an exclusive interview with Joyce Carol Oates, Weird Tales #362 (Spring 2014) is now available at the Weird Tales website, here. The front cover of the magazine will get plenty of exposure, but the back cover, a tribute to Richard Matheson (1926-2013) by Jeff Wong, is also worth a look.

Text copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Richard Matheson and Hell House

Last week I wrote about Dark Shadows, Star Trek, Richard Matheson's novel Hell House, and how fantasists use the material vs. the non-material in their storylines. In House of Dark Shadows (1970), Dan Curtis used a materialistic explanation for Barnabas Collins' vampirism. That was a neat and acceptable solution to the problem of the supernatural in an age of the merely natural. In Star Wars (1977), George Lucas implied that the Force, which holds the universe together, is non-material, and if not spiritual than at least mystical. We accepted that explanation without a word of reservation. Then, in the second Star Wars trilogy (1999-2005), Lucas reversed himself and explained the Force again as a merely material phenomenon. Lucas is a notorious tinkerer. (I'm not sure any of his tinkering has made an improvement on the original.) But we had already accepted his original explanation for the Force. We didn't need another explanation, especially a materialistic explanation. That's why I used the word disheartening in my comments the other day. I also used the word cynical. What I meant was that Lucas turned off his imagination and swallowed the materialist air of our times. He became a follower instead of a leader, that is, a leader in matters of taste, which is one of the roles of the artist. I suppose he thought he was being clever and scientific. His inspiration was obviously the existence of mitochondrial DNA within our own cells. But when he resorted to a high school biology textbook, he turned his back on the sense of awe and wonder we feel when we ponder the mysteries of the universe.

Material vs. non-material. Are they irreconcilable opposites? In his book Hell House (1970), Richard Matheson attempted an answer and created two characters to represent the material and the non-material approach to hauntings. Dr. Lionel Barrett, a scientist, believes that hauntings are merely physical or biological in nature. Florence Tanner, a spiritualist and medium, believes they are non-material and spiritual. The two become part of a four-person crew investigating the haunting at Hell House, "the Mount Everest of haunted houses." Barrett and Florence are immediately set against each other, mostly because of Barrett's dismissal of the supernatural. If you're planning to read the book, you might not want to read any further, although I won't give very much away. As it turns out, Matheson split the difference: the haunting of Hell House is both a material and a non-material phenomenon. A machine and a medium are both necessary to bring the haunting to an end.

In my research for the entry on Richard Matheson as an author for Weird Tales, I learned that he was a believer in paranormal or parapsychological phenomena. His knowledge of those fields comes through with ringing authenticity in Hell House. His catalogue of "Observed Psychic Phenomena at the Belasco House [Hell House]" runs for nearly a full page of dense type. The list is almost comic in its excess. (It reminds me of Major King Kong reading the contents of his survival kit in Dr. Strangelove.) If you know what half those words mean, you deserve a medal. Knowing that Matheson was a believer made me a little biased in my reading of Hell House. As readers, we willingly suspend our disbelief. Maybe the writer has an equal obligation to suspend his belief. Towards the end of the book, Matheson seems to speak through Dr. Barrett when Barrett calls parapsychology "science" and proceeds on a brief discourse in its defense.

I won't quibble. I enjoyed Hell House, despite its sensationalism and its attempts to shock the reader. (Like The Exorcist, Hell House uses sex as a shocker and sexual perversity or depravity as a representation of evil. Maybe there isn't any quicker way to get there, but I can think of more real and palpable evils. Any history of the twentieth century is full of examples.) Matheson's explanation of hauntings as simultaneously material and non-material phenomena is a perfectly acceptable one. In the end, we have two acceptable explanations--House of Dark Shadows and Hell House--and one unacceptable explanation--George Lucas' latter-day Star Wars.

Text copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Dark Shadows, Star Wars, and Richard Matheson

I have been away and still have much to do. I would like to acknowledge gifts received by email and to say thank you to the senders. It may be awhile yet before I write again.

I watched House of Dark Shadows tonight for the first time I think since I saw it as a child at the movie theater. (I should say since I saw most of it at the theater--part of the time I spent under my seat.) Watching the movie tonight brought back vivid memories of the last time I watched House of Dark Shadows. The scene at the old swimming pool where David Collins sees his dead cousin Carolyn stands out among them. It was and is a chilling scene. (Before moving on, I would just like to say how beautiful are the women of Dark Shadows, especially Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played the Gothic heroine Maggie Evans.)

I watched Dark Shadows the TV series as a child but don't remember it very well. In the movie, Doctor Julia Hoffman discovers that Barnabas Collins is suffering from a biological condition that causes his vampirism. He has some kind of cell infecting his blood. She attempts to cure him of the infection. I don't know if that also occurred in the show. In any case, what started out as a Gothic romance became science fiction of a sort--like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein now that I think about it. In House of Dark Shadows, the existence of the vampire, a creature of supernatural horror, is ultimately explained in material terms. I suppose it would have been an innovation to make the supernatural merely natural (though highly unusual) in Dark Shadows. The screenwriters must have been faced with the problem of the weird tale in the twentieth century, namely, how do you present the supernatural monster of centuries past when supposedly sensible people no longer believe in the supernatural? The writers of House of Dark Shadows disposed of the problem pretty neatly.

Seven years after that movie was released, another movie showed up on the big screen, a movie that started out as one thing and more recently ended up as another. Despite attempts to classify it as science fiction, Star Wars (1977) is a fantasy, perhaps even a fairy tale. It may have the trappings of science fiction, or more accurately, space opera, but the story is underlain not by science but by a mystical force called--what else?--the Force. Of course the world and George Lucas were different in 1977 than they were in 1999 when the second trilogy got underway. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Force was no longer mystical. It was in fact material, more specifically, biological, as vampirism was in House of Dark Shadows. There is a big difference between those two developments however. In House of Dark Shadows, vampirism is made material in order to tell a story, a more or less positive development. In the second Star Wars trilogy, a largely dreary affair, the Force is made material, I sense, to reflect the materialist air of the twenty-first century. In other words, we simply can't have a supernatural force that "surrounds us, penetrates us, [and] binds the galaxy together." Believing in such a thing is, after all, unsophisticated--a display of ignorance and backwardness. I think George Lucas betrayed his own beliefs when he abandoned the spiritual and made the Force merely material. Maybe he was only reflecting the beliefs of his age.

Anyway, House of Dark Shadows has led me to Hell House, a novel by Richard Matheson set in the same year that House of Dark Shadows was released. I have had that book on the dresser waiting to be read for awhile. Both stories take place in a house in Maine. Both of course tell of supernatural events. I was moved to write this evening by something the author, Richard Matheson, wrote on the second page of the story: the man who initiates the investigation into Hell House is eighty-seven-year-old Rolf Rudolph Deutsch, "bald . . . skeletal" and on his deathbed. He wants to know if anything survives. I suspect the makers of Dark Shadows would say yes. George Lucas might have a different answer. The reason I took note of Rolf Rudolph Deutsch's age, however, was that Richard Matheson died only a month ago . . . at age eighty-seven.

P.S. (July 27, 2013): As everyone knows, Dan Curtis (1927-2006) was the creator and executive producer of Dark Shadows, which ran on ABC-TV from 1966 to 1971. After Dark Shadows came to an end, Curtis collaborated with Richard Matheson (1926-2013) on the television movies The Night Stalker (1972), The Night Strangler (1973), Scream of the Wolf (1974), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1974), Trilogy of Terror (1975), and Dead of Night (1977). Matheson wrote the screenplays for all of those movies, while Curtis served as producer.

Copyright 2013 , 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Richard Matheson (1926-2013)

Author, Screenwriter
Born February 20, 1926, Allendale, New Jersey
Died June 23, 2013, Calabasas, California

Richard Matheson died earlier this week and the Internet has started to notice. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times printed obituaries four days ago. If the two Times are correct, then Wikipedia predictably has posted erroneous information on his place of death.

I'm not sure that I can offer more than what has already been written about Mr. Matheson. If you are from a certain generation or two, and if you watched television and movies in the genres of science fiction and fantasy, you have seen things sprung from his imagination: The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957); "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" from The Twilight Zone (1963); The Last Man on Earth (1964, remade as The Omega Man, 1971); Duel (1971); The Legend of Hell House (1971); The Night Stalker (1972, and its sequel, The Night Strangler, 1973); and Trilogy of Terror (1975). Wherever there was fear, terror, or dread of the most memorable kind, there was Richard Matheson.

I should have included Richard Matheson on my list of "More Authors of the Golden Age of Science Fiction," for his first published science fiction story came out in 1950. The story is called "Born of Man and Woman," and it originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in Summer 1950. I have not read "Born of Man and Woman" but a description of the plot makes me think of "The Outsider" and "The Dunwich Horror" by H.P. Lovecraft. Matheson's story was selected for inclusion in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1971.

Richard Matheson had two stories printed in Weird Tales, "Wet Straw" and "The Slaughter House," both from 1953. He was friends with Ray Bradbury and Forrest J Ackerman, both of whom also contributed to Weird Tales. Another in his circle of friends was Charles Beaumont (1929-1967), who died on the day after Matheson's forty-first birthday of a weird and unknown affliction like something out of a science fiction story (or like The Incredible Shrinking Man). I have made a mental list of authors and artists who should have been in Weird Tales. Charles Beaumont is near the top of that list. (Others include Frank Frazetta and John Jakes.) In remembering Richard Matheson, we should also remember Charles Beaumont.

Richard Burton Matheson, son of Norwegian immigrants, died on June 23, 2013, at his home in Calabasas, California. He was eighty-seven years old.

For Weird Tales
"Wet Straw" (Jan. 1953)
"Slaughter House" (July 1953)

Richard Matheson adapted the screenplay for The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) from his own novel published the year before (with a less sensationalistic title). The cover artist was Mitchell Hooks.

Matheson also co-wrote the screenplay for The Last Man on Earth (1964), adapted from his novel I Am Legend (1954) with apocalyptic cover art by Stanley Meltzoff.

Matheson also wrote thrillers and Westerns. Here's the cover of a British edition of Ride the Nightmare from 1959, artist unknown.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley