Dark Fantasy and Francis Stevens-Part Two

Thankfully, in his introduction to The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy by Francis Stevens (2004), editor Gary Hoppenstand defines dark fantasy, at least for the purposes of his essay:

Dark fantasy is defined as a type of horror story (possibly containing science fiction and fantasy elements) in which humanity is threatened with destruction by hostile cosmic forces beyond the normal ken of mortals.

Mr. Hoppenstand adds a second sentence to his definition, but the first seems to get to the heart of things. Anyway, here is the second sentence:

Within the larger genre of horror fiction, dark fantasy expresses a macabre existential variant, one that envisions a desperately weak worldview in which stereotyped notions of courage and heroism fail when confronted by the overwhelming presence of ancient and unfathomable evils. (p. ix)

There's a fair amount of academic gobbledygook in that sentence. Nonetheless, it expands a little on the preceding one.

The two sentences quoted above are near the beginning of Dr. Hoppenstand's essay. Here is more from near the end:

[Dark fantasy was] a new type of horror and fantasy story that evolved out of the apocalyptic calamity of World War I, one that posits the danger of forbidden knowledge and an ultimate lack of human understanding (and control) over such banal concepts as "good" and "evil." Dark fantasy is nihilistic fiction in its prediction (directly or indirectly) of a terrible end to our world that we inhabit in blissful ignorance. (p. xxiv)

That last phrase--"blissful ignorance"--echoes the sentiment in the opening paragraph of "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

So we have a workable definition: "Dark fantasy . . . is a type of horror story in which humanity is threatened with destruction by hostile cosmic forces beyond the normal ken of mortals." That sounds like the devil to me, but as Fritz Leiber, Jr., pointed out, Satan and his hosts have lost prestige in the face of a "decline of at least naive belief in Christian theology." (1) That's why I added that part from near the end of Mr. Hoppenstand's introduction, for it seems to me that an essential part of the definition of dark fantasy is this: "Dark fantasy is nihilistic fiction . . . ." As such, it is well suited to our age and to the writers and readers of our age, so many of whom seem to have lost their way, their faith, and their sense of place in the universe. As a result, they have adopted a nihilistic worldview.

If those things are true, it should come as no surprise that dark fantasy is a new genre--not new as in World-War-I-new, but new as in the last-decade-or-two-new. And it's no wonder that there is disagreement over who created it. Another reason I added that part near the end of the introduction of The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy is that it mentions World War I. That war--the war to end all wars--was without a doubt a calamity, an utter disaster for Western civilization and for Christendom, and the event that ushered in this past century of disasters and horrors. Depending on your interpretation, the war was a culmination, an ultimate expression, or a kind of beginning of European decadence in the extreme. There are reasons to believe that we now live in a time of extreme decadence as well and that we could be on the verge of further disasters. Again, it's no surprise that dark fantasy--if there is such a thing--would have come from the World War I years, that it would have been named and described only recently, and that it should prove so popular today.

To be continued . . . 

Note

(1) See yesterday's article.

Original text copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Dark Fantasy and Francis Stevens-Part One

An old wise man once said that you must be the change you wish to see in the world. With that in mind, I would like to take a look at dark fantasy and the stories of Francis Stevens.

In his introduction to The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy by Francis Stevens (2004), Gary Hoppenstand calls Francis Stevens "the woman who created dark fantasy." That is in fact the title of his introduction. In his first mention of Stevens, he equivocates, writing: "The person who may stake the best claim at creating the new genre of dark fantasy is Francis Stevens." (p. x) You can't really call your introduction "Francis Stevens: The Person Who May Stake the Best Claim at Creating Dark Fantasy," so later in his essay, Dr. Hoppenstand says with certainty that Francis Stevens was indeed The Woman Who Created Dark Fantasy. As you can see, Gertrude Barrows Bennett, who wrote as Francis Stevens, presents a problem to writers and critics. I'm not sure why.

The first problem is this: What is dark fantasy? Wikipedia, that fount of all knowledge, defines it in at least a half dozen ways, admitting, "A strict definition for dark fantasy is difficult to pin down." Wikipedia also attributes the creation of the genre or the naming of the genre to at least four different people, Gertrude Barrows Bennett included. At least Wikipedia tries. My library of reference works on fantasy, horror, and science fiction is either too small or too old to include a definition, or I haven't looked hard enough. I suspect that dark fantasy is a relatively new concept and that it has something in common with Justice Potter Stewart's concept of hard-core pornography: Those who read dark fantasy--or at least those with extraordinarily acute vision who read dark fantasy--know it when they see it. I still don't know what dark fantasy is, unless I just settle on Wikipedia's explanation:

Charles L. Grant is often cited as having coined the term "dark fantasy." Grant defined his brand of dark fantasy as "a type of horror story in which humanity is threatened by forces beyond human understanding." (1)

But that sounds a lot like what H.P. Lovecraft wrote about his own works:

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form--and the local human passions and conditions and standards--are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown--the shadow-haunted Outside--we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold. (2)

So is dark fantasy simply the Cthulhu Mythos? Here is Fritz Leiber, Jr., on the subject:

Perhaps Lovecraft's most important single contribution was the adoption of science-fiction material to the purpose of supernatural terror. The decline of at least naive belief in Christian theology, resulting in an immense loss of prestige for Satan and his hosts, left the emotion of supernatural fear swinging around loose, without any well-recognized object. Lovecraft took up this loose end and tied it to the unknown but possible denizens of other planets and regions beyond the space-time continuum. (3)

So if dark fantasy is a sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of fantasy in which forces "beyond human understanding" or from "the shadow-haunted Outside" or from "beyond the space-time continuum" threaten us, then any fantasy of that type written after about 1930 or so is almost certainly in imitation of or in tribute to H.P. Lovecraft. And if that's true, and Lovecraft was not the creator of dark fantasy, then it seems to me that only someone whose work predated his could have been that creator.

Gertrude Barrows Bennett is still in the running.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) From The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders, Vol. 1, edited by Gary Westfahl (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005).

(2) From a letter from H. P. Lovecraft to Farnsworth Wright, dated July 27, 1927, quoted in Selected Letters 1925-1929 (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1968), p. 150.

(3) From The Acolyte, Fall 1944, quoted in Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction by Sam Moskowitz [1963], p. 259.

Original text copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

What Is the Monster of the Twenty-First Century?-Part One

Introduction

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

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

--from "The Hound" by Fritz Leiber (Weird Tales, Nov. 1942)

A year and a half ago, I wrote about the problem of the weird tale, namely: how does an essentially Medieval genre remain relevant in a modern age? Consciously or not, Fritz Leiber, Jr., attempted a solution to that problem, especially in his stories "Smoke Ghost" (1941), "The Hound" (1942), and "The Dreams of Albert Moreland" (1945). (1) Leiber's solution was to recognize that, one, there will always be monsters, and, two, that the people of every age create monsters to suit their age, or, as one of the characters in "The Hound" says, "Each culture creates its own ghosts." To that end, Leiber created monsters for the early twentieth-century city--not the vampire, werewolf, witch, or ghost of the Middle Ages, but a sooty, smokey, black rag of a rooftop urban ghost; a slavering, pursuing hound, symbolic of the alienation, isolation, and horror of city life; and a powerful and terrifying chess player, representing a uniquely modern monster, the totalitarian dictator.

So Fritz Leiber, Jr., created monsters for his time. Those monsters represented some of the forces--science, reason, urbanization, mechanization, industrialization--that helped bring about the end of the Medieval world and the monsters that haunted it. But in writing about Fritz Leiber and the problem of the weird tale, I overlooked something that deserves some scrutiny, for the world in which he and his monsters lived is now long gone. We no longer live in the era of the industrial city, just as we no longer live in the "the era of cottage and castle." Just as the werewolf and vampire of the Middle Ages is ill-suited to the twentieth century, so too are the monsters of the modern age ill-suited to our own time. So if the monsters of the twentieth century are as antiquated as the monsters of the Middle Ages--if "[t]hey can't take root in the new environment"--what will our monsters be? In other words, what is the monster of the twenty-first century?

To be continued . . .

Note

(1) The quotes at the heading of this article and many more like them suggest that Leiber's attempts to solve the problem of the weird tale were in fact conscious.

Copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Unknown and Unknown Worlds-Part 1

Our story thus far: Although The Thrill Book, published in 1919, told weird and fantastic tales, the first magazine wholly devoted to those genres was Weird Tales, which began in March 1923. Weird Tales suffered from perennial financial difficulties. Nonetheless, it held on for 279 issues and thirty-one years, finally coming to an end in the pulp bloodbath of the 1950s. In that time, Weird Tales had its rivals and imitators. It even gave rise to a new genre, the weird menace or shudder pulps. Each in its turn folded, usually after only a few issues. Then, in 1939, a new magazine of fantasy arrived on the scene. For a time, it must have looked like the mantle of fantasy fiction would be taken from Weird Tales and placed upon Unknown. In his History of the Science Fiction Magazine, Mike Ashley wrote: "Unknown published without doubt the greatest collection of fantasy stories produced in one magazine." (1) There were stories by L. Sprague de Camp, Theodore Sturgeon, Anthony Boucher, Fredric Brown, Henry Kuttner, and L. Ron Hubbard. Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories first saw the light of day in Unknown. "They" by Robert Heinlein, one of the most paranoiac and solipsistic stories you're likely to read, was also published in the magazine. C.L. Moore migrated from Weird Tales to Unknown and its science fiction companion, Astounding, in 1939-1940. Unknown also published Leiber's "Smoke Ghost," one of the most memorable of weird tales, and "Conjure Wife," about witches on a modern college campus. "'Conjure Wife,'" wrote Robert Weinberg, "like 'Smoke Ghost,' pulled the supernatural story kicking and screaming out of ancient ruins and dropped it square into the middle of urban sprawl." (2) And that was entirely the point.

Unknown was published by Street and Smith and edited by John W. Campbell, Jr., the same crew that put out Astounding Science-Fiction. In Astounding, Campbell remade science fiction and forged a golden age. I think his intent was the same with Unknown and the genre of fantasy. Weird Tales, admittedly a little giant in terms of budget and sales, bestrode that genre. Every other fantasy magazine of its time was forced either to imitate Weird Tales (as in Strange Tales and Strange Stories) or to react to it some way. It seems to me that the weird menace pulps were one possible reaction: a sort of hybrid of weird fiction, hero pulps, and confession or true crime, in which the events of the story, no matter how weird, are in the end explained rationally. Campbell's Unknown was another:

[Campbell] stressed the power of good writing over the cheap theatrics and the purple prose that weighed down other weird-fiction magazines. More importantly, he demanded that his writers make their fantasy as logical as science fiction. There were to be no more fainting narrators, no more last-minute rescues, no more heaping on ridiculous fantastic effects. In Unknown, even the incredible had to operate by some sort of rationale. (3)

I think we can take that as a swipe--not by the writer of those words, but by John W. Campbell--at Weird Tales in general and at some very popular and well-loved writers in particular. (4) In any case, that approach, an attempt to bring weird fiction and fantasy out of the Gothic past and into the modern present, was something of an innovation. Campbell also introduced humor into fantasy fiction. On one hand, humor was sorely lacking in fantasy before Unknown. On the other, humor too often and too easily elides into irony, parody, and ridicule, all indicators of decadence, as our current culture shows us.

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) Volume 2: 1936-1945 (1975), p. 40.
(2) Horror of the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated History (2000), p. 108. A quibble: the use of the term urban sprawl is an anachronism and probably a little inaccurate in this case. "Smoke Ghost" takes place in the heart of the industrial city.
(3) From Stefan Dziemianowicz's introduction to Rivals of Weird Tales (1990), p. xvii.
(4) The fainting narrator is out of Lovecraft. Additionally, he and Robert E. Howard were both guilty of writing the purplest of prose. An example that leaps to mind is Howard's use of a supposed adverb, "blackly." If anyone can explain to me how anything can be done "blackly," I'd like to hear it. On the other hand, C.L. Moore and Fritz Leiber, both widely-admired and both contributors to Unknown, also committed the sin of using the "word" oilily. One of the first things you learn in composition class is to use adjectives and adverbs sparingly. And when you do put them into play, they should at least be real words. Any writer who uses blackly or oilily ought to know better and as punishment should be horsewhipped.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Menace Magazines-Part 1

You can split fantasy fiction as finely as you like. The resulting list of genres and sub-genres might exhaust an ordinary reader. There is science fiction, space opera, planetary romance, science fantasy, weird fiction, supernatural horror, ghost stories, high fantasy, low fantasy, and on and on. Then there is weird menace, also called terror stories, which found a home in the so-called shudder pulps of the 1930s and '40s. Weird menace is distinct from weird fiction, so distinct in fact that the weird menace titles of the pulp era probably can't be called rivals of Weird Tales. But I'm making a catalogue here and I want to be thorough.

So how might one characterize weird menace? I can't say for sure. I have never read anything that I recognized as part of the genre. Maybe the best way to learn about weird menace is to look at the covers of the magazines in which weird menace stories appeared. It's not something you're likely to enjoy, not because the art is bad (it isn't), but because those covers show torture and cruelty, terror and torment, bondage and sadism, in short, every brand of violence and depravity an ordinary reader might want to avoid. In the minds of some, the word pulp means trash if not pornography. My guess is that a good deal of that reputation for pulp trashiness came about because of weird menace.

We can lay the blame for weird menace at the feet of Henry Steeger, president of Popular Publications (not to be confused with the Popular Fiction Company, publisher of Weird Tales). "I got the idea during a trip to Paris," Steeger explained. "They had the Grand Guignol Theatre there, with these violent situations, and the audience was very enthusiastic. I thought, 'We could do a magazine like that with the same sort of emphasis'." (1) One of Steeger's titles, Dime Mystery Magazine, was faltering at the time. The publisher decided to give it a jolt. To quote Lee Server, author of Danger Is My Business, "The October 1933 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine launched what would prove to be the most depraved and blood-soaked chapter in the annals of American publishing." (2) With that issue, the genre of weird menace was born. That was eighty years ago next month. Maybe we should say happy birthday.

According to Mr. Server, two aspects of weird menace distinguish it from stories of supernatural horror. First, there isn't anything supernatural: the events of the story are explained rationally--if not logically--by story's end. Second, the horrors in a weird menace story are recounted in great detail and with extreme intensity. If you detect a pornographic or fetishistic element upon looking at the covers, you're probably onto something. I don't believe it's pornography or fetishism of sex so much as of violence directed at one of the sexes. Weird menace may not be a sub-genre of fantasy per se, but it seems to contain an element of fantasy, perhaps of a different kind.

Because the horror in weird menace is natural rather than supernatural, the monster must be human: mad scientists, cult leaders, psychopaths, fiends, "gnarled dwarves, brainless mutants, [and] horny hunchbacks" abound. (3) Popular culture had placed women in peril before. (A look at the covers of the shudder pulps will show that those being tortured and tormented were mostly if not exclusively female.) The Perils of Pauline (1914) kind of story, from a generation before, comes to mind. The Snidely Whiplash character, who ties young women to railroad tracks or wants to run them through a sawmill, became a cliché early on. (4) I doubt, however, that anything before the weird menace stories was as explicit or depraved. That leads me to wonder: Why then? Why the early thirties? I won't hazard a guess just yet, but I'll listen to opinions. (If you would like to make a comment, please do so below.)

Violence, torment, and torture aimed at women are still with us of course. The hacker and slasher movies of the last half century have thrived on that formula. (5) I have written before about the demise of the supernatural monster in our scientific and technological age. There may not be any more room in the world for a werewolf or a vampire. An ax-wielding psychopath is another story. There's more to it than that, I think. It has something to do with women and sex, and maybe with emancipation. After writing six paragraphs, however, I guess I'll have to leave the theorizing for another day.

Dime Mystery Magazine

Dec. 1932 to Dec. 1949
154 Issues (39 Volumes)

Published by: Popular Publications

Edited by: Rogers Terrill

Format: Presumably pulp size

Notes: According to the cover blurb, Dime Mystery Magazine was combined with 10 Story Magazine with the December 1944 issue. It became 15 Mystery Stories with the February 1950 issue.

Notes

(1) Quoted in Danger Is My Business by Lee Server (1993), p. 106.

(2) From Danger Is My Business, p. 105. The book was published in 1993. I wonder if the last twenty years' worth of depravity would cause Lee Server to reconsider his assessment.

(3) From Danger Is My Business, p. 109.

(4) Relentless Rudolph, from C.W. Kahles' comic strip Hairbreadth Harry, is one example. Dan Backslide in the cartoon "The Dover Boys" (1942) is another.

(5) Other anniversaries: Blood Feast, which was, according to Wikipedia, the first "splatter film," came out in 1963. That same year, the first Italian giallo, La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Girl Who Knew Too Much), also arrived in movie theaters. Giallo, by the way, is Italian for yellow, the color of mystery/thrillers in the Italian magazine and book market since 1929. Gialli--"yellows" or "yellow books"--is actually the name of the genre. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) is an exemplar (if that's the right word) of the hacker/slasher film. That anniversary is still a few months away.

Here's a typical, though comparatively tame, weird menace cover from the pioneering title in the genre, Dime Mystery Magazine. Guys with hoods are pretty common. So are women on tables, though usually they're bound in some way. It's interesting that mummies and Egyptian motifs are pretty common, too. (I suppose The Mummy [1932] was a sort of weird menace story.) I don't know the year or the name of the cover artist. "Harrison Storm" was a pseudonym of Bruno Fischer. "I was a little . . . I wouldn't say embarrassed," Fischer recalled, "but it was the thing to do, to use a pseudonym for these magazines." (Quoted in Server, p. 113.) Wyatt Blassingame (1909-1985) was a prolific author of stories and books, even for children.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 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

Fritz Leiber and the Problem of the Weird Tale-Part 5

"'It's a rotten world . . . . [f]it for another morbid growth of superstition. It's time the ghosts, or whatever you call them, took over and began a rule of fear. They'd be no worse than men.'"

--from "Smoke Ghost" by Fritz Leiber (Unknown, Oct. 1941)

If you want a good scare before going to sleep tonight, read Fritz Leiber's short story "Smoke Ghost." Published on the eve of America's entry into World War II, "Smoke Ghost" is set in a modern, industrialized city, a place filled with smoke, grime, soot, and cinders. I won't give too much away, but in this story from early in his career, Leiber clearly engaged himself in solving the problem of the weird tale, namely: How does the writer in a genre that is essentially Medieval in nature (rural, insular, supernatural, irrational) update that genre for a new age? The old-fashioned Medieval or Gothic ghost--draped in its shroud, dragging its clanking chains, haunting its lonely graveyard or empty castle--was long gone by 1941. But because there must be ghosts or "whatever you call them," the modern, industrialized city gives birth to a different kind of supernatural creature, embodied in the "Smoke Ghost" of the title. The protagonist of the story, Catesby Wran, explains to his secretary that there aren't any more ghosts. "Science and common sense and psychiatry all go to prove it." Yet men are still haunted. Wran concludes that far from being nonsense, "superstition [is] only a kind of wisdom." The view from the elevated train Wran uses offers him a view of "a dingy, melancholy little world of tar-paper, tarred gravel, and smoky brick," a view that comes "to symbolize . . . certain aspects of the frustrated, frightened century in which he lived, the jangled century of hate and heavy industry and total wars." From this landscape arises a new kind of ghost, the spirit of the urban, industrialized landscape, a spirit sated by recognition, obeisance, and worship--if only for a while. And the century wasn't even half past.

In "The Inheritance," Leiber continued with the theme of the monstrous city, describing it as "dingy," "dismal," "lightless," "nervous," "ugly," "crowded," and full of criminals and murderers. Like a story by Lovecraft (one of Leiber's mentors), "The Inheritance" is one of loneliness and isolation, a Gothic tale set in a desolate, twentieth century rooming house and in the dream-state of its protagonist. The monster turns out to be of a kind all too familiar to us today--and not from fiction but from real life. Bret Easton Ellis had a name for it: "American psycho."

As in "The Inheritance," "The Dreams of Albert Moreland" is set in a lonely rooming house and in a dream-state. Instead of a Gothic isolation from real events, "The Dreams of Albert Moreland" makes a connection between the horrors of the wider world and the personal horrors in the lives of its people. The action takes place in the autumn of 1939 with the beginning of the Second World War as a backdrop. In Manhattan, an elderly chess player is engaged in a titanic struggle--though perhaps only in his dreams. The antagonist is an unseen dream-creature, represented by its chess-like playing pieces, which are described as if Lovecraft were describing the gods of his Cthulhu mythos. The chess player's contest is against the forces of darkness and evil and for earth's survival. It's easy enough to see the opposing playing pieces as symbols of totalitarianism and oppression then (and now) afoot in the world. Published in April 1945--the same month in which Hitler killed himself, yet when the war had not been fully decided--"The Dreams of Albert Moreland" ends ambiguously. An opposing playing piece is captured, but is that a sign of victory for the chess player? Does the contest go on? Or is he actually defeated? The seven decades of history since then have yet to answer those questions. (On a final note, Orson Scott Card may very well have read "The Dreams of Albert Moreland" before beginning his novel Ender's Game [1985].)

In "The Hound," from 1942, Leiber treated the problem of the weird tale as nowhere else in this collection. The eponymous hound is in fact a monstrous canine--but more. (In the end, the creature can't even be described.) The haunted protagonist considers a question:

Werewolves? He had read up on such things at the library . . . but what he had read made them seem innocuous and without significance--dead superstitions--in comparison with this thing that was part and parcel of the great sprawling cities and chaotic peoples of the Twentieth Century . . . .

His friend (an obvious stand-in for the author) theorizes further:

Meanwhile, what's happening inside each one of us? I'll tell you. All sorts of inhibited emotions are accumulating. Fear is accumulating. Horror is accumulating. A new kind of awe of the mysteries of the universe is accumulating. A psychological environment is forming, along with the physical one. Our culture becomes ripe for infection. From somewhere. It's just like a bacteriologist's culture. . . . . Similarly, our culture suddenly spawns a horde of demons. And, like germs, they have a peculiar affinity for our culture. They're unique. They fit in. You wouldn't find the same kind any other time or place.

The monster--the hound of the title--is bred in the city. But is it chained to the city? The protagonist hopes so, yet his attempt to escape the hound and the city prove unsuccessful. Only another person--what could be interpreted as an escape from loneliness and isolation--saves him in the end. (It's worth noting that in the Middle Ages, some believed that a person born on December 24--as Fritz Leiber was--are prone to become werewolves.)

The dark spirit of the city, the psychopath, the evil and murderous dictator, the hound of the imagination--where do these twentieth century monsters come from? Fritz Leiber, through his narrators and protagonists, offered as good an answer as any.

From "The Inheritance":

Forces are at work that break people up, and scatter them, and make them lonely. You feel it most of all in a big city.

From "The Dreams of Albert Moreland":

Certainly a person without family, friends, or proper occupation is liable to mental aberrations.

Larger still:

And it seemed to me that social, economic, and physiological factors, even Death and War, were insufficient to explain such anxiety, and that it was in reality an upwelling from something dubious and horrible in the very constitution of the universe.

The Medieval and the Gothic may have been inadequate in the twentieth century, but the Middle Ages did not give birth to monsters. The people of the Middle Ages had monsters fitting for them and their times. So did the people of mid-twentieth century urban America. And so have the people since and all those to come. Monsters have always been with us and probably always will be, though behind an ever-changing disguise. The root of the word "monster" is from the Latin for "warning." If we are to exorcise monsters, we have to see through the disguise to the warnings our monsters bear about ourselves and our society.

Note: At five long parts, "Fritz Leiber and the Problem of the Weird Tale" is more than a blog should bear. Thanks to all readers who have been patient enough to wait for and to read what I have written here. Thanks also to the author of the blog "Good Short Fiction to Read" for the genesis of this article. 

Copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Fritz Leiber and the Problem of the Weird Tale-Part 4

Night's Black Agents, published by Arkham House in 1947 and reprinted in 1978, was Fritz Leiber's first book. It's divided into three sections: "Ancient Adventures," "Transition," and "Modern Horrors." The last section, "Modern Horrors," is the longest and most significant, at least in artistic terms. In the original edition, it included the following stories:

• "Smoke Ghost" (Unknown Worlds, Oct. 1941)
• "The Automatic Pistol" (Weird Tales, May 1940)
• "The Inheritance" (Weird Tales, Jan. 1942, as "The Phantom Slayer")
• "The Hill and the Hole" (Unknown Worlds, Aug. 1942)
• "The Dreams of Albert Moreland" (The Acolyte, Issue #10, Spring 1945)
• "The Hound" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1942)
• "Diary in the Snow" (original to the Arkham House edition, 1947)

These stories appear in the book almost in chronological order of their first publication. The exceptions are "Smoke Ghost," which is put to good use as the opening story, and "The Hound," a story very similar to "Smoke Ghost" and therefore perhaps purposefully separated from it by several intervening tales. All but "Diary in the Snow" were published during the war years. The remaining stories betray a feeling of anxiety, dread, and despair that must have pervaded the world between 1939 and 1945. All but "The Hill and the Hole" and "Diary in the Snow" take place in the city. Despite their rural setting, even those stories are modern (as opposed to Medieval) in that they include elements of science fiction and disturbing twentieth-century anxieties.

Throughout the 1930s, the world moved inexorably towards war. The fantasies of the Depression Era, whether authored by Busby Berkeley or H.P. Lovecraft, must needs have retreated as armies advanced. During his own writing career, Lovecraft had advanced the weird tale from a Dunsanian fantasy or a Poesque Gothic romance to semi-science fiction. You could argue that his best and most accomplished works--"The Call of Cthulhu," "The Whisperer in Darkness," "The Dunwich Horror," "At the Mountains of Madness," for example--are a fusion of those three forms. However, Lovecraft--an inhabitant of his own very real Gothic landscape--was essentially conservative, even reactionary. Few of his stories are set in a recognizably modern world where people go to movies, read magazines, talk on the telephone, carry on love affairs, or trudge off to work every day. A key element of the Gothic tale is physical isolation, usually in a remote place peopled (if at all) by rural characters, most of whom are simple, superstitious, even backwards. Anyone who has read Lovecraft's stories is familiar with the setting. On the other hand, the city and its worldly, sophisticated inhabitants play only a minor role in his work. Significantly, when he set one of his tales in the city, he described it as a place of horror, "a horror beyond all human conception--a horror of houses and blocks and cities leprous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds." (1) Lovecraft knew whereof he wrote, for he lived in New York City for two years between 1924 and 1926. Still, his prose is a little overwrought, his sentiment a bit of an abstraction. You get the feeling that his revulsion at the city had more to do with his fastidious, small-town waspishness than true modern anxiety. It would take someone like Chicago-born Fritz Leiber--who also called New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco home in his lifetime--to write more accurately, concretely, and effectively of the horrors the city had to offer.

H.P. Lovecraft died a year almost to the day before the Anschluss. The world was slouching towards war by then, but there was still time in the mid-1930s to enjoy the fantasies provided by American popular culture. The song from the closing of the First World War went like this: "How 'ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?" You might ask the same kind of question about World War II: How does fantasy--which relies so heavily on isolation from the real world--survive when its authors and readers are so violently thrust into that same world, a world in which the truest and most horrifying monsters are human beings? Cthulhu is a scary monster, effective as an artistic creation because, being based in a material, scientific universe, he is made more real. Vampires and werewolves may also be scary, but they are creatures of an earlier time, when the supernatural was a part of everyday life. (2) The vampire, the werewolf, the witch, and the ghost of the Middle Ages have been replaced in our modern age by the psychopath, the cryptozoological creature, the space alien, and the android. Put another way, the supernatural has been replaced with the "natural," that is, the material and the scientific. Alternatively, the twentieth-century monster is generated in the mind, its breeding ground, the city, with all its isolation and alienation. "Each culture creates its own ghosts," says a character in Fritz Leiber's story, "The Hound." So what kind of ghost haunts the modern world? I hope I can answer that question and conclude this ramble next time.

Notes

(1) From "The Horror at Red Hook."
(2) The only truly fearsome monsters of the twentieth century were real and psychopathic: Fritz Haarmann (1879-1925), "The Vampire of Hanover," and Peter Kürten (1883-1931), "The Vampire of Düsseldorf," for example. There were countless others, called "Beasts," "Killers," and "Rippers," among other things. There were of course political monsters as well, mostly socialists and other assorted true believers, such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. As for twentieth century werewolves--again, real, and again, German: as the defeat of Nazi Germany drew near, Joseph Goebbels announced plans for a commando force that would operate behind Allied lines. As with their supernatural counterparts, Nazi Werewolves proved more of a legend than a reality.

Copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Fritz Leiber and the Problem of the Weird Tale-Part 3

So I have concluded the first two parts of this article with the same question, namely: How does the writer carry the weird tale--essentially a Medieval genre--into the modern age? I have tried to show so far that weird fiction has its origins in the Middle Ages, what Fritz Leiber called "the era of cottage and castle." (1) The genre took two routes to get here. One was through folk culture and its tales of vampires, werewolves, witches, and ghosts. The other was through high culture and its reaction to reason, technology, and the academy. I think that almost every sub-genre of fantasy has taken one of these two paths. (2)

In his book of the same name, Carl Sagan described the pre-scientific world as a "demon-haunted world" and science as "a candle in the dark." What was that demon-haunted world like? We can hardly imagine a culture in which few ventured far from home and everyone was fixed in his or her predetermined place in the world. There was little mobility and little privacy. Psychological isolation and alienation may well have been rarities. It was primarily a rural culture and lit only by sun, moon, stars, and its own small fires. It was one in which machines were simple and powered only by people, animals, wind, and water. When night fell, the world would have been dark and quiet beyond our imagining. Most importantly, the Middle Ages were a time in which spiritual and theological concerns were paramount. The supernatural was part of the fabric of everyday life. The demon, the undead, and the monster were not simply bits of fiction. They were real and frightening. They were afoot in the world, lurking on the edge of the firelight, in forest and fen, in the swamps and the depths of the sea, in distant terra incognita, and in the dark, gloomy ruins of previous civilizations.

That world was brought to its own ruin by the forces of modernity: science, reason, humanism, democracy, urbanization, mechanization, industrialization. Those same forces slew all the supernatural beings that inhabited the Medieval world. Ghosts, demons, and other Medieval creatures survive only in tales that give us the shivers but are soon forgotten as we nod off to sleep and awaken to our daily lives. Those inventions of the Medieval European imagination "can't take root in the new environment," as Fritz Leiber wrote. Brownies, fairies, pixies, and gnomes; trolls, giants, unicorns, and chimerae; ghosts, angels, demons, and the undead--none has gained much of a place in the American mind. We have created our own folklore to be sure, populating it with creatures from tall tales, pranks, hoaxes, and commercial schemes. Scooby-Doo! may be more significant than we think. Even then, we haven't taken our own creations very seriously. (3) We're too practical and worldly, too busy in the hustle and bustle of our lives. Nagging questions remain, though: Where do monsters come from? Is there a need for them somehow? In the movie Forbidden Planet, Morbius, played by Walter Pidgeon, offers one answer: Monsters come from our subconscious minds. Every era breeds its own monsters because people will forever be plagued by fear and anxiety, by dread and despair. The Middle Ages may have come to an end, but fear and anxiety will always be with us. You might say that they have only proliferated in the modern world now that the certainties of the Middle Ages have been extinguished. "Each culture creates its own ghosts," as Fritz Leiber claimed. So what are the ghosts of the twentieth century? I'll write more about that in Part 4 of "Fritz Leiber and the Problem of the Weird Tale."

Notes

(1) From "The Hound" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1942).

(2) Some exceptions: classical myth, tales of the Orient, and maybe science fiction. There are probably others. I welcome comments and other opinions.

(3) More exceptions: The supernatural creature of Medieval Europe has been supplanted in the United States by the "natural," biological creature that falls within the purview of science. Bigfoot or Sasquatch is said to be an identifiable and describable species of hominid, studied by university professors of anthropology. Aliens from space are also said to be biological or technological in origin. Never mind that they serve more or less the same function as the angels, demons, and little people of Medieval Europe. Perhaps the most distinctly American monster is the psychopath, the only true monster. In the Middle Ages, he would have been called a werewolf or a vampire. Today he is a person suffering from errant brain chemistry, genetic mishap, or psychological trauma. All of these uniquely American monsters find their origins in science, pseudoscience, or science fiction.

Copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Fritz Leiber and the Problem of the Weird Tale-Part 2

"Weird Tales was the archetypically Gothic pulp magazine . . . . H.P. Lovecraft, of course, is as pure an instance of the Gothic writer as can be found in this century. . . ."

--Peter Nichols in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1995)

In an encyclopedia article on Gothic science fiction (from which the quote above comes), Peter Nichols offers his view of the origins of the Gothic in literature:

The Gothic may be seen as a reaction to the emphasis on reason which prevailed in the Enlightenment . . . . In a world ruled by Order . . . some room needed to be left for mystery, the marvellous [sic], the evil, the inexplicable.

Usage of the term "Gothic" in literature derives from The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, tellingly subtitled "A Gothic Story" and published in 1764. (1) With its "frightened heroines, unseen horrors, and ghostly visitations in gloom-ridden medieval architecture," The Castle of Otranto inspired a trend that carried on into the nineteenth century. (2) Even a novel such as Jane Eyre, from almost a century later, has its Gothic elements.

After the publication of The Castle of Otranto, novel after Gothic novel (or perhaps more accurately in literary terms, romance after Gothic romance) came off the printing press: Vathek (1784) by William Beckford, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, The Monk (1796) by M.G. Lewis, Zofloya (1806) by Charlotte Dacre, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Rev. Charles Maturin. In Frankenstein (1817), Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley married science and Gothicism, thereby writing what some consider the first science fiction novel but in the form of a Gothic romance. (3) In writing that novel, Mary Shelley seems to have attacked a problem, namely, how does the artist reconcile Gothicism--"a reaction to the emphasis on reason"--with modern science, a product of reason? Fritz Leiber--a writer of both fantasy and science fiction--ran into the same kind of problem at the outset of his career. Leiber had more to deal with though, for the twentieth century was one fully under the sway of science, reason, and materialism; a century of increasing urbanization, industrialization, and mechanization; a century of isolation, alienation, and existential anxiety, if not existential horrors.

 * * * * *

Although he also wrote humor, satire, and criticism, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) lands pretty squarely in the Gothic tradition, and a straight line can be drawn between him and Weird Tales. However, Poe never wrote in the form of pure fantasy (at least that I'm aware of), a genre that helped keep Weird Tales in print for at least the first half of its existence (that is, until 1938 or so). The literature of fantasy, exemplified in the twentieth century in the work of J.R.R. Tolkein, Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and others, finds its origins only in the nineteenth. Fantasy stories may go back to ancient (or prehistoric) myths and legends, but what we read today started with writers such as John Ruskin (1819-1900), George MacDonald (1824-1905), and William Morris (1834-1896). Significantly, Morris was a Pre-Raphaelite, while Ruskin influenced the young men who made up that group. As with eighteenth century Gothicism, the Pre-Raphaelites were in reaction to recent cultural developments. They too were "fascinated by medieval culture" (4) and wanted to return to what they believed to be the spirit and method of the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, hence "Pre-Raphaelite." (5)

The upshot of all this is that weird fiction, woven from threads of nineteenth-century fantasy, eighteenth-century Gothic romance, and earlier stories of ghosts, vampires, witches, and werewolves, is essentially Medieval (and European), whether in descent through folk culture or in modern reaction to the higher culture of literature, art, science, and philosophy. The question for the writer of weird fiction is this: How do I write a tale from Medieval times when the world is no longer Medieval in nature? Better yet: How can the weird tale be relevant in a material age?

Notes

(1) According to Peter Haining in The Art of Horror Stories (1986), The Castle of Otranto was published on Christmas Eve 1764. In other words, Fritz Leiber, Jr. and the Gothic novel came into the world on the same day, separated by 146 years.

(2) Quoted from Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction (1975) by James Gunn. Mr. Gunn took note of the then-recent revival of Gothic fiction. He was probably referring to romance novels, but there were Gothic revivals in other media as well, such as in Dan Curtis' television series Dark Shadows (1966-1971). It's interesting to note that the 1960s and '70s revival of Gothicism coincides pretty well with a renewed interest in pulp fiction and fantasy, especially the work of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and J.R.R. Tolkein.

(3) Significantly, that novel came out of a contest (among the Shelleys, Lord Byron, and Dr. Polidari) to write a ghost story. As Fritz Leiber's fictional character from over a century later said, "Each culture creates its own ghosts" (from "The Hound" in Weird Tales, Nov. 1942).

(4) Quoted from the Wikipedia article, "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood."

(5) Edgar Allan Poe died in 1849, a year after the founding of the Pre-Raphelite Brotherhood and about halfway between the publication of The Castle of Otranto (1764) and the first issue of Weird Tales (1923).

Copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Fritz Leiber and the Problem of the Weird Tale-Part 1

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

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

--from "The Hound" by Fritz Leiber (Weird Tales, Nov. 1942)

Fritz Leiber, Jr. was twenty-eight years old when he sold his first fantasy story to Unknown. "Two Sought Adventure," a tale of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser set in an imaginary land, appeared on the newsstand in August 1939, only a few weeks before the Nazis launched their attack on Poland, thereby propelling the world into war. Leiber's first story for Weird Tales, "The Automatic Pistol"--a sort-of Damon Runyon story written as weird fiction--followed in May 1940 at about the time the Sitzkrieg came to an end. In the little world of fantasy, a new master was making his debut. In the world at large, new horrors were being unleashed, the horrors of perfect order, of the totalitarian state on the march, of the attempted eradication of the individual and the extermination of whole peoples. (1) If war is the health of the State, then the State would enjoy a hale and hearty condition not just until 1945, but in some quarters for decades to come.

May 1940 also marked the end of an era at Weird Tales--and the beginning of another. Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940) had been at the helm of "The Unique Magazine" since 1924, guiding it through what many consider its golden age. During the 1920s and '30s, Wright's stable of writers included H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Seabury Quinn, Edmond Hamilton, E. Hoffman Price, C.L. Moore, and many others. On the strength of its editor and contributors, Weird Tales enjoyed a rare status among pulp magazines: a reputation for quality if not excellence. Other publishers launched their own magazines of fantasy and weird fiction in obvious imitation. Chief among them was John W. Campbell's Unknown, the magazine that printed Fritz Leiber's first story. The debut of Unknown was not the first crack in the Weird Tales edifice. In 1938, the magazine had moved from its longtime Chicago home to a new publisher in Manhattan. In May 1940, Dorothy McIlwraith took over editorship of the magazine and Farnsworth Wright went into retirement. Before the year ended he would be in his grave.

Weird Tales began in March 1923, launched by J.C. Henneberger, a fan of Edgar Allan Poe and a publisher who wanted to give prominent writers an outlet for stories of the fantastic. "When everything is properly weighed," Henneberger wrote, "I must confess that the main motive in establishing Weird Tales was to give the writer free rein to express his innermost feelings in a matter befitting great literature." (2) Hamlin Garland, Ben Hecht, and Emerson Hough were on Henneberger's list of potential contributors to his new magazine. However, Weird Tales turned into something different than he had imagined and none of those men ever wrote for the magazine. Instead--luckily for fantasy fans then and now--we have the works of Lovecraft, Howard, and all the rest.

As a genre, weird fiction had been around for a while, though it was still evolving in the 1920s and '30s, especially under its main theorist, H.P. Lovecraft. Weird Tales, like its namesake weird fiction, was a catch-all, a mixed bag of types. Picking up an issue from the magazine's golden age, you might read:

• a conventional ghost story,
• a monster story,
• a dreamland fantasy,
• an interplanetary tale (also called science fantasy),
• a heroic fantasy (also called sword and sorcery),
• light science fiction or contemporary fantasy,
• a story of a supernatural detective,
• a tale of outright horror, or
• a mix of any of these types.

Although some might be traced back to Poe (science fiction, detective), most of these types are ancient or Medieval in origin. For example, ghosts, monsters, dreamscapes, and other fantasies and horrors have probably been around for as long as people have been telling stories. But even a type as recent in its origins as the heroic fantasy is more or less an old kind of tale. Conan's Hyperborean world after all is simply a mix of Medieval, Classical, and prehistoric Europe, with a bit of the Orient, tropical Africa, and pirates of the Caribbean thrown in for good measure. The problem with the weird tale, then--especially as world war loomed in 1939 and raged until 1945--is this: How do you bring a story that is basically rural and Medieval in origin into an urban, industrial, materialist twentieth century? That was a problem that Fritz Leiber--if no one else--faced as he began his career as a writer of fantasy stories.

Notes

(1) In all those things except for perhaps the first, the Nazis would have found precedent in the Soviet regime and would have been equaled by or beaten at their game by the Communists.

(2) Quoted in The Weird Tales Story (1977) by Robert Weinberg, p. 3.

Copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley