The Weird Tales Scam

Every once in a while I look on the Internet for news of my blog. This isn't really vanity--or not mostly vanity--I just want to see what's going on out there. I don't have any connections to people in weird fiction or science fiction except for the members of our weird fiction book club. I don't know anything about current trends, developments, or controversies. I don't subscribe to any magazines and don't go looking for new fiction. The main reason I ordered Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue, is that it was advertised as the 100th anniversary issue. Now here it is two years later and I'm still writing about the thing.

But other people are, too.

In my most recent Internet search, I came upon an essay called "Pulp Fiction Scholar Savages Jonathan Mayberry's [sic] Weird Tales Fantasy Magazine Revival," by Richard Merritt on the website Fandom Pulse, and dated November 26, 2024. As it turns out, I'm the "pulp fiction scholar" of the title. I guess I don't mind being called a scholar. But I like John Keel's disclaimer: "Not an authority on anything." I don't have an advanced degree. I don't work in academia. I have never had anything published in a scholarly journal. I have never been a speaker or presenter at a conference. I'm not a publisher or editor. I don't know what that makes me. Maybe scholar is it.

So today I would like to write about Mr. Merritt's essay.

I'll start by saying that one of the first courtesies you can extend to another person is to get his name right. Jonathan Maberry, current editor of Weird Tales, seems to have failed in that with one of his contributors, Nicole Sixx, whose name is apparently not Nicola, as it is spelled in his table of contents. But then Mr. Merritt misspelled Mr. Maberry's last name in the very title of his essay, and then mixes correct and incorrect spellings in its main body. Does anybody work with a proofreader or editor these days?

Mr. Merritt's essay starts off well enough when he suggests that the current Weird Tales is a skinsuit. It's hard not to see things that way. Weird Tales looks like Weird Tales and has some of its trappings, but it's mostly an imitation. More accurately, I think, it's a type of exploitation. A lot of people have glommed onto something that they never created and could never have created because they're too small, all for their own purposes and their own gain. It's actually pretty cynical when you think about it. The egregious failure of the current Weird Tales to meet its business obligations is more cynical still. I'll go beyond the word skinsuit: the current Weird Tales is a scam.

I don't have Mr. Merritt's full essay. It's behind a paywall. (My blog is free. Things about my blog you have to pay for.) My friend Nate was kind enough to get it for me, but my version is cut off. I have this clause from Mr. Merritt, though: "Even legacy magazines from the heyday of the pulp era aren't safe from crusaders injecting their tired politics into them [. . .]." If he's referring to Weird Tales #367, I will say that at least Mr. Maberry and his contributors did not inject politics into their magazine (or at least I didn't detect any politics in my reading of it). We can be thankful for that. There is a political issue on the fringes of the magazine, though. I covered that last year. The editor and his authors wisely avoided these otherwise poisonous topics, poisonous and fatal to fiction-writing and the pleasures of reading.

Richard Merritt went through some of what I wrote about the magazine. "Overall," he concluded, "the revival is a mess." Those are his words. Although I wouldn't call it a mess, I would also not praise it very highly, either. Most of it is readable. Some of it is fair to good. None of it is very good or excellent. As I wrote before, probably nothing in here will ever be anthologized, which is far less than you can say about the original Weird Tales and its contemporaries in science fiction. I guess we like to mine the material and culture from the past while putting ourselves above the people who created it. This is presentism in one of its worst forms. Read on . . .

Near the end of his essay, Mr. Merritt showed something that Jonathan Maberry posted on Twitter/X in 2019. Mr. Maberry wrote: "My goal is to find exceptional stories from writers of all kinds. None of the racism, sexism, and homophobia that was once associated with this title." So the goal is not to seek out good and promising writers, regardless of their identitarian qualities, to guide and advise them in their work, or to publish good, enjoyable, memorable, and well-written stories. No, the goal is evidently something else, something less. The focus isn't on what's good but what's bad about the past. And the goal is negative rather than positive. Any adult should know (Jonathan Maberry is sixty-six years old) that negative goals don't work. You have to be for something, not against something else. Anyway, maybe that's where the reference to politics in the first paragraph of Mr. Merritt's essay comes from.

Richard Merritt also quoted from the magazine Cirsova, which wrote, I believe also on Twitter/X: "the guy who's behind the most recent woke relaunch of Weird Tales slapped the Weird Tales logo on his own book and called [it] 'The first Weird tales novel'." I don't know who wrote that and when. In addition to not having any connections to anybody, I don't use X or any other social media. In any case, that quote seems to be from someone called #stolenvalor. That's another fitting phrase, if I'm reading the reference the right way. Mr. Maberry has no claim at all to the label "the first Weird Tales novel." I think what he means actually is that his novel is the first Weird Tales-branded novel. And as we have seen, branding, the use of brandnames, product placement, and the advertising of Weird Tales merchandise seem to be the main activities in the writing and publication of Weird Tales #367. Good writing isn't it.

Skinsuit . . . scam . . . stolen valor. All seem to be accurate in reference to the current Weird Tales. I will say to the current editor and publisher: Let us have our magazine back. At the beginning, in the November issue of 1924, the new editor, Farnsworth Wright declared:

Weird Tales belongs to you, the readers, and we will be guided by your wishes.

Let us have our magazine back.

-----

Corrected on April 2, 2025. Thanks to Mike for the correction.
Thank you to Nate for a copy of Richard Merritt's essay.
Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Robert W. Chambers & the Language of Cosmic Horror

Robert W. Chambers' name is the first to appear in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (#367, published in 2023). This is in "The Eyrie," which used to be a letters column but has become simply a place for the editor to write about whatever pleases him. If you have ever read Chambers' book The King in Yellow (1895), you might recognize aspects of cosmic horror in its pages. I believe it to be there anyway. Chambers' early take on cosmic horror has been an inspiration for other writers in this now popular sub-sub-genre of fiction. I'm not sure that his take exists in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, though. The authors in that issue seem to have gone down a different road, actually two parallel roads laid down a long time ago by Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Fort. There are two prevailing themes, too. One, from the former, has to do with peering into voids. The other, from the latter, has to do with our existence as mere property of higher and more advanced intelligences. Both are pessimistic or negative, even somewhat nihilistic. Both can be applied in the writing of cosmic horror stories.

If you have read Weird Tales #367, you might have noticed the appearance and reappearance of the words void and abyss. If this were Pee-Wee's Playhouse and those were the secret words, there would have been a lot of screaming. There must be, I think, lots of different aspects of cosmic horror, or different ways of writing about it. The authors in that issue seem to have limited themselves pretty badly, though. So were they required to apply certain narrow interpretations of that term by the editor, or were they free to look into their own interpretations and simply settled on more or less the same across the board? I don't know. Either way, I don't think things went very well. Writers of genre fiction are supposed to let their imaginations roam. The writers in the Cosmic Horror Issue seem to have kept theirs pent up.

The words void and abyss are not in The King in Yellow. There is no cosmos, cosmic, universe, galaxy, or galactic either. Chaos appears, but it's used in conventional ways (x2). There is mention of stars, but most of these are in the first half of the book, black stars being a recurring phrase (x4).

Following are two passages that come close to the language of cosmic horror but don't quite get there. From "The Street of the First Shell":

"And through the smoke pall the lightning of the cannon played, while from time to time a rift above showed a fathomless black vault set with stars."

From "The Yellow Sign":

With eyes starting from my head I peered into the darkness, but when he came into the room I did not see him. It was only when I felt him envelope me in his cold soft grasp that I cried out and struggled with deadly fury, but my hands were useless and he tore the onyx clasp from my coat and struck me full in the face. Then, as I fell, I heard Tessie's soft cry and her spirit fled: and even while falling I longed to follow her, for I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now.

I think what happened here is that Chambers wrote too early in the history of weird fiction or genre fiction and, much more broadly, too early in--or before--the modern era. Although there were lots of scientific discoveries regarding astronomy and physics in his time, Albert Einstein's postulations of special and general relativity were still in the future, as was Edwin Hubble's discovery, more or less, of a greater universe outside our own galaxy. (Hubble's discovery was reported in November 1924 when the first issue of the revived Weird Tales was on the newsstand. He presented it in person on January 1, 1925, or one hundred years ago last month. So 2024 or 2025, depending on how you look at it, is the centenary of our awareness of the universe.) Also still in the future were modern art, modern music, modern poetry and fiction, the terrible disasters of World War I and the Russian Revolution, and a proliferation of isms that grew out of and fed into these many developments. A popular writer of the late nineteenth century could have looked upon human existence from a cosmic perspective, but I'm not sure he could have seen very far, nor would he have had necessarily the background or experience to write what is, very often--too often--nihilistic fiction. Cosmic horror need not be nihilistic, but in the hands of too many of the authors in Weird Tales #367, that proved to be the case. We could have had something different, something with more imagination, insight, vigor. We could even have had a taste of Chambers-style cosmic horror and his fin-de-siècle ennui and decadence. But that wasn't to be, I guess, and I wonder why.

Next: More on Robert W. Chambers.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Heart of Darkness-Part Five

Kurtz is mysterious, just as Africa is mysterious. Marlow penetrates into both mysteries. The title of Joseph Conrad's novella first appears in Marlow's description of his journey upriver: "We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness." (Dell, p. 69) In addition to traveling into the interior of tropical Africa, Marlow and his men travel back in time, thereby encountering, perhaps, something of what Kurtz refers to when he cries, "The horror! The horror!":

"We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign--and no memories." (pp. 69-70)

Nietzsche warned us not to peer into the abyss. Characters (and presumably authors) in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (#367, from 2023) fail to heed that warning. But their abysses are within themselves rather than outward in the cosmos. They are empty inside. Inside themselves they have created and nursed and cultivated voids. Kurtz is empty inside, too, and comes from a kind of void. Marlow calls him a "wraith from the back of Nowhere." (p. 88) Referring to human heads on posts outside his abode, Marlow says:

"They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him--some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last--only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude--and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core . . . ." (p. 99; emphasis added, ellipses in the original)

Marlow's assessment is echoed in Caitlín R. Kiernan's short story "Night Fishing," when the narrator says: "That night on the lake, it saw my face [. . . .] It saw something wrong with my soul. It saw an easy mark." So is that an allusion or reference to Heart of Darkness? Or is it a case of one author arriving independently at the same kind of conclusion as another?

In my Dell edition of Heart of Darkness, a previous owner underlined different passages and made notes in the margins. This person's marginalia on the passage above reads:

". . . is horror, horror out there or in here?"

A perceptive question and one that gets to an issue with Weird Tales #367, namely that the horror that many of its characters experience is not actually cosmic because it isn't "out there" but "in here." Their horror is about themselves and their own self-made voids. I would add that their inner voids are not very interesting. Kurtz's problems are more so. Kurtz is obviously the greater man. But in the end, maybe Kurtz, to match his small stature, is also a small man. He need not have descended into Nowhere or dived into his inner emptiness.

(Remember that the meaning of the word utopia is "nowhere" and that Samuel Butler had written a book called Erewhon, its title an anagram for nowhere, published in 1872. Remember the Beatles song "Nowhere Man," too.)

Later on Marlow says of Kurtz:

"But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad. I had--for my sins, I suppose--to go through the ordeal of looking into it myself. No eloquence could have been so withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity. He struggled with himself, too. I saw it--I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself." (p. 111)

Like the characters in the Cosmic Horror Issue--or they are like he is--Kurtz is a man without faith.

I have one more image of Kurtz, who now lies on his deathbed. Marlow remembers:

"His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines." (p. 114)

Kurtz has fallen into an abyss--is it a Nietzschean abyss?--and Marlow peers in after him. Marlow backs away from the abyss, but for Kurtz it's too late. And then Kurtz cries his last words: "'The horror! The horror!'" (p. 114)

To be concluded . . . 

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad was first in Blackwood's Magazine No. 1000, a "Special Double Number" published one hundred twenty-six years ago this month, in February 1899, the last February of the nineteenth century. The magazine is also called Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Heart of Darkness-Part Two

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899) can be read simply as an adventure story, even if there is more to it than that. Like much of the best literature, it can be read at more than one level. Good genre fiction works that way, too. Merely sensational things are soon forgotten. Things of substance and quality stick.

In Conrad's novella, a seaman named Marlow, beginning in England, sets off for the Continent to secure work, then journeys to the west coast of Africa to carry out his assignment. He soon finds that he is to repair a boat, then to take it upriver to a remote place where a mysterious and intriguing figure named Kurtz resides and appears to reign. Conrad spent nearly twenty years of his life as a seaman. Those years included a monthlong trip up the Congo River and other trips across the world. Many of his works are about men and ships at sea.

Again, not everyone can be Joseph Conrad, nor can everyone be Herman Melville or Jack London, who also went to sea, or Ernest Hemingway or James Jones, who went to war. But a writer ought to be able to draw from some other experience besides reading comic books, watching TV shows, and playing video games, which is how many of the authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales seem to have spent their lives. Their characters follow their lead. Too many of them seem wrapped up in themselves. The lead characters in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" and "Night Fishing" are prime examples. Kurtz is one wrapped up in himself, too--everything to which he refers is his--but Marlow recognizes him as a great man. And he is (possibly), though great in a terrible way. One difference between Kurtz and too many of the characters in the Cosmic Horror Issue (their authors, too) is that he has gone somewhere and done something. They apparently have not. They have remained where they are, wrapped up in themselves, turned inward upon themselves like the worm uroboros. The old saying is that a man wrapped up in himself makes a small package. That is too evident in the pages of Weird Tales #367 and apparently, too, in the lives of its contributors. There are exceptions, but perhaps only barely. I will add that you don't have to look into your own navel and pick at your own little scabs--you don't have to examine your self-made inner voids when there is a whole world out there brimming with mystery and adventure. Even if you are bound to a place and a way of life, you might still turn loose your imagination and let it wander freely in the larger world. Good authors do that.

* * *

Another problem with the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales is that it is shamelessly, perhaps thoughtlessly, commercial. Its authors place the names of commercial products in their stories as if they had been paid to do so. In contrast, there is only one brandname in Heart of Darkness, Martini-Henry, the name of a rifle. That's a concrete detail. It's not product placement. In general, I think using the names of weapons, cars, cigarettes, and alcoholic drinks is probably okay in a work of fiction. The list of acceptable brandnames used after that must be, I think, pretty short, especially in a short story.

Joseph Conrad was conservative in an old-fashioned sense, meaning that he was aristocratic, perhaps reactionary, certainly skeptical of progress, and suspicious of liberal values. People seem to have forgotten that what they call capitalism is a liberal rather than a conservative institution. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow shows his disdain for commercialism and the relentless chasing after money that he witnesses in Africa. Most of the commercial products in his tale are cheap and lousy, or useless, like the pieces of brass wire used to pay African natives. There is one exception: ivory.

"The word 'ivory' rang in the air [Marlow remembers], was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from a corpse." (Dell, 1960, p. 53)

That "imbecile rapacity" is seemingly everywhere in our world of today--even in the pages of fiction. That's just how it is, I guess. We are all human and so necessarily broken, warped, and twisted, at least in our worst moments and by our worst instincts. Art is supposed to rise above these things, though, and when an author of fiction uses a half-dozen or more brandnames in as many pages of his or her story, you can't help but smell the whiff of the commercial corpse. People have forgotten God, yet still they pray to the golden calf of money and material objects. And not just material objects but specific commercial objects, in other words products with brandnames. Many of those branded products have become not material at all--they are called services instead--yet still have the same taint and whiff of the commercial corpse. And now human beings seem to want to transform themselves into branded products, to make of themselves mere objects, to objectify and commodify themselves, a recipe, I should point out, for disquiet and unhappiness in the self-objectifying person. (As my philosophy professor, Mr. Pedtke, pointed out a long time ago, we are not things.) Anyway, I think that authors should cease with the product placement and the thoughtless and shameless deployment of brandnames. And editors should make sure that they do. Let fiction be art rather than advertisement.

To be continued . . .

The Heart of Darkness in a Signet edition, date and cover artist unknown. I have altered this low-resolution image from one I found on line. Whatever you do, don't take this as a true representation of the original book cover. (I wish people would scan their images instead of taking pictures of them.)

This cover illustration is misleading. It doesn't really represent a scene from inside, at least in Heart of Darkness. But when I saw it, I thought of King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard (1885), especially the character Foulata. Once I thought of Rider Haggard's book, I considered the possibility that Heart of Darkness is a kind of inversion of King Solomon's Mines, that it is a story set in a more nearly real world rather than in a fantasy world. Even if that's a worthwhile interpretation, we should remember that H. Rider Haggard lived in Africa, too, and would have had no illusions about the place or its peoples, including its European peoples.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Art in the Cosmic Horror Issue

Most of the art used in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales is unsigned. I presume it to be the work of the design director, Jeff Wong. I believe this is the same Jeff Wong who has worked in television and feature film animation, as well as in product design. If this is he, then all of this fits the pattern in Weird Tales #367, which is that the contributors to this issue are mostly movie, television, and comic book people and not primarily writers or illustrators of prose fiction. Jeff Wong has his own website. He lives in Pasadena, California.

Most of the art here appears to be digital. One exception is the cover art by Mike Mignola. Mr. Mignola's original art is for sale on line. In looking at an image, I see that it is real art on paper, drawn in the dimensions of a comic book page. I see also that his design has been expanded to more nearly squarish dimensions for the audiobook version of this issue. If I had to guess, I would say this was done so that the audiobook version has the same dimensions as a record album cover.

There are other illustrations in the interior. Five are previous covers of Weird Tales, from the original run of the magazine, 1923 to 1954, including one by Joseph Clemens Gretter, aka Gretta (1904-1988). He was a fellow Hoosier. He also assisted on or ghosted Ripley's Believe It or Not!  I mentioned Robert Ripley the other day. The only other interior illustration that is not a Weird Tales cover or a new work is an uncredited illustration of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

That lack of giving credit to artists is and always has been a problem. An artist is a creator equal to (or even greater than, in commercial terms) an author or poet. Not crediting artists for their work should be a crime. Being an artist, I admit my bias.

I wouldn't rule out that some or all of the digital works in Weird Tales #367 were actually created by artificial intelligence or AI. As an artist of real works on paper, which are created by the human mind, heart, and hand, I have to object to AI-created artwork. But the world seems to be rushing towards AI. The dinosaurs, Luddites, and Jeremiahs among us are not going to stop that from happening.

At least two of these presumably digital illustrations incorporate images created by others. One is a television screenshot of actor John Mills in the British show Quatermass (1979). I neglected to mention that the plot of that show involves the harvesting of human beings by outer-space aliens. As in other stories in the Cosmic Horror Issue, this idea--that we are property--is Fortean.

The other sampled image is of the painting Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth (1948). That one accompanies another story in which an alien presence, originating in the Void, exploits humanity.

Finally, there is one illustration that refers to the work of another artist or designer. This is the final illustration in the magazine, a takeoff on the Nirvana album cover Nevermind (1991). I wrote about that the other day, too.

Here and Hereafter by Ruth Montgomery (Fawcett Crest, 1969). The cover artist is unknown. This is obviously an homage to Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth. You might also call it a swipe from Wyeth's work. And maybe it's a swipe of Frank Frazetta's cover illustration of Kavin's World by David Mason, also published in 1969. But then Frazetta's cover may also have been a swipe of a comic book cover by Malcolm Kildale, from 1941. You can see those images by clicking here.

I'll close by once again pointing out that there are pyramids on the cover of the first-anniversary issue of Weird Tales, from May-June-July 1924, and there are pyramids here in (almost) the last entry I have on the 100th-anniversary issue of May (supposedly) 2023.

Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

An Eyrie for the Cosmic Horror Issue

"The Eyrie" began as a way for the editor of Weird Tales to communicate with his readers, for the readers to communicate with him, and for them to communicate with each other. The first installment was in the first issue of March 1923. It continued for decades after that, but at some point, "The Eyrie" became just a place for the editor to speak his mind, with no longer any input, responses, or opinions from the readers. I wish it were different. I have always liked reading letters from readers, whether they be in comic books or magazines. Letters of comment seem to have become things of the past.

Fortunately, there are places on line where readers can leave and have left their comments on Weird Tales #367. In the interest of making an "Eyrie" for the Cosmic Horror Issue, I would like to quote from comments left on the Internet. I know I'm taking some liberties here. If anyone I have quoted below objects, please just leave me a comment. I am happy to remove your content at your request.

On a Lovecraft Reddit, VelociraptorAHH wrote:

I'd love to order from them [Weird Tales] again but absolutely horrible in terms of communication. I ordered the first 2 issues back when that's all they had. Took them a full month to ship them, no communication, not "expect to ship on this day", nothing. Just took my money then a month later emailed me they're shipping it. I emailed them, even asked on their Facebook page. Customer service is nonexistent. Which is a shame, it's a real nice magazine and good stories, just warning what you're getting into. Seems like whomever bought it almost has no interest in running it.

Believe me, VelociraptorAHH, I can sympathize. I would continue to advise anyone who might want to buy from Weird Tales to look elsewhere for your merchandise. The business behind the magazine is absolutely terrible. It seems to exist as a scam. The people behind the business will very likely take your money and deliver you nothing, or at least not everything you ordered. It's not worth the effort or the headache. Heed what Reesha wrote below.

On Amazon, a Kindle Customer gave this issue five stars and wrote:

It's Weird Tales and a superb collection of top-notch stories as usual. I'm glad to see the magazine continues to be published when so many have fallen by the wayside.

On a GoodReads page, Tony Ciak gave this issue five stars and wrote, very briefly: "nice stories." On the same page, Ben Jahn gave it three stars and wrote: "Read the hellboy story, it was pretty good though I think the ending was kind of lacking."

On another GoodReads page, there are the following comments:

Joshua Begley (four stars): This was a very solid collection of cosmic horror stories. The Hellboy tale was fun, but the real standouts were Caitlin Kiernan's "Night Fishing" and Ramsey Campbell's "Concerto in Five Movements." They were both creepy, disturbing, and I think best captured the feel of things in the unmaking, and the terrible, cruel forces that occupy the universe.

Reesha (three stars): As with every collection of short stories, it's difficult to rate this as a whole, because some of these stories deserve 5 stars while others are just okay. There are also a couple of articles (both worth a read) and some poetry. I don't think anything in here is truly terrible, so I'd put it at maybe 3.5 stars, given the option.

Some of my favourites are the single Hellboy story (he's on the cover, but there's just the one), The City in the Sea; a psychology-based horror called Night Fishing that ended very differently than I'd expected; a story of an isolated and hyperfocused artist, Mozaika - this was my absolute favourite and I'll reread it for sure; and a story of a grieving and directionless photographer, Call of the Void - L'appel du Vide.

I also liked The Traveler a lot at first, as it read like the introduction to a really fascinating novel, but then it turned out to be only three pages long! It was way too short to be a stand-alone, in my opinion, and the lack of anything more to it soured it for me.

This issue is worth a read if you're into cosmic horror, but I wouldn't suggest going out of your way to find it.

Michael Thomas (five stars): The entire edition was excellent, and the cover art is fantastic. I was a particular fan of "The Forest Gate," which surprised me since I don’t usually like poetry. Such an excellent blend of enchanting imagery with cosmic mystery. The language gave me wonder and fear with themes of lust, curiosity, and the unknown. Really left a lasting impression, pondering the mysteries and consequences of too(?) easily following someone into the unknown.

Nick Watts (four stars): Some great Lovecraftian fiction. Loved the bear story ["The Traveler" by Francisco Tignini].

Each of these readers liked the Cosmic Horror Issue a lot more than I did, but you probably knew that already. Again I'll say: writing about this issue hasn't been much fun. That's for a number of reasons, one of which is that cosmic horror comes from a dark, depressing, negative, and even nihilistic worldview. There is almost nothing in these pages that is positive or uplifting. Human triumph is a possibility in the face of horror, but there isn't any triumph in this issue, and no hope or happiness. The main characters are mostly unchanged by their experiences--if they survive their experiences. They remain unchallenged in their beliefs, relationships, and life choices. Like Gloomy Gus in Happy Hooligan, they go on, never steering themselves towards better things.

If I had to give the Cosmic Horror Issue a number between 1 and 5 stars, I would probably just give it 2-1/2, or plumb in the middle. Or maybe just two. I think that, over all, this is a pretty thin issue. Most of the stories are not really fully developed in my opinion. There could have been more in most, and more content over all. I have the impression that this was a rushed effort. I think the editor could have done better than to go around to his friends in search of stories, poems, and essays. The cliquish nature of this issue is off-putting.

The cover art by Mike Mignola is very good. I have a feeling he was invited to contribute so that there would be some good art on the cover. Now I find that his original art is available for sale on line at more than $12,000. I have a feeling that no one will earn more for his or her work on this issue than Mr. Mignola. As an artist I think: that's only right.

"The Forest Gate" by Samantha Underhill is the best of the three poems, I think, while "Cosmic vs. Abrahamic Horror" by F. Paul Wilson is the best of the three essays. The other two aren't really necessary in my opinion. As I wrote the other day, I think that "Concerto in Five Movements" by Ramsey Campbell, "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson, and "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan are the best, most interesting, most complex, and most entertaining stories in the Cosmic Horror Issue. Two of these three authors were born in 1946. I think there's something to that, something that points to a larger issue in writing, reading, fiction, books, and the culture of books. But that's a topic for another day.

I invite further comments from you, the readers of this blog. Please leave your comments below for this version of "The Eyrie."

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley. All other content is the intellectual property of its respective authors, and they must retain all rights to their work. I have reproduced it here under the doctrine of fair use. I do not gain monetarily from my work on this blog.

The Last Picture Shown

Many years ago, author Jeff VanderMeer wrote an essay called "Moving Past Lovecraft" in which he objected to what he called the adulation, imitation, fetishizing, and commodification of H. P. Lovecraft. He wrote that soon after his wife, Ann VanderMeer, resigned as editor of Weird Tales magazine. There was a controversy and some conflict in all of that. One of the principals, Marvin Kaye, has since died. Mr. Kaye was without a doubt an admirer of Lovecraft and the old Weird Tales. He was born less than a year after Lovecraft died. You could say that he had come to contemporary weird fiction from out of its past.

The 100th-anniversary issue of Weird Tales, published in 2023, is a themed issue. The theme is cosmic horror. Wikipedia, that fount of all knowledge, lets us know that cosmic horror is a synonym of Lovecraftian horror. All three essays in the Cosmic Horror Issue mention Lovecraft. One of the essays and one of the stories begin with epigraphs from his pen. Several of the stories have Lovecraftian themes, content, props, motifs, and so on. Although Jeff VanderMeer urged us to move past Lovecraft, we never have. It looks like he failed in his effort . . .

Except that there is an illustration in Weird Tales #367 that seems to acknowledge one of his complaints against contemporary authors who continue to admire, imitate, fetishize, and most especially commodify Lovecraft, his works, his concepts, and his approach to weird fiction. The unsigned illustration is the last to appear in the Cosmic Horror Issue and occupies the last page. It has the look of a trompe-l'œil painting and shows an album cover resting on a woodgrain tabletop. The album cover is a takeoff of Nevermind by Nirvana. It shows a larval Cthulhu swimming after a hundred dollar bill on the end of a hook. The illustration is ironic, even cynical. It's curious that the editor and publisher of Weird Tales would print it. They seem to recognize that they and many of their authors are chasing after Cthulhu cash and Lovecraft lucre. Evidently they don't feel any shame or embarrassment in that. They would be laughing to the bank except that I don't think Weird Tales is much of a moneymaking operation. Maybe I'm wrong.

I'm not exactly on Jeff VanderMeer's side in this, but you have to admit that an awful lot of writers, artists, and other creators, not just now but for the past many decades, probably going back to the 1940s, are milking a cash cow and will no doubt continue to do so for as long as they can. It would be better, I think, if writers would put the cow away and create something new and original. But again, I don't think they're up to it. It's a lot easier to copy and imitate things created by others and to go on doing that for all of your life. And that's what our popular culture has become, a mix of imitation, adaptation, remakes, sequels, prequels, pastiches, and, worst of all, shameless copying and outright theft of other people's ideas. It's no wonder there is so much product placement in the Cosmic Horror Issue, for the fiction itself and all of its themes and content have become commercial products. Cosmic Horror, like so many other genre names, has become a brand, and the authors writing in these genres have seemingly become hucksters and exploiters.

Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Call of the Void -- L'appel du Vide" by Carol Gyzander

Carol Gyzander is a poet, author, and editor. Her story "Call of the Void -- L'appel du Vide" is the last in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. I think she's an American, even if her story has a Canadian-style bilingual title. The English half of her title echoes that of "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft. That's probably not a coincidence. The Nietzschean void is right there in the title, too, also probably not a coincidence. Word must have gone out to prospective authors for this issue that they would get extra points if they used void (or abyss) in their stories and titles.

"Call" is five and a half pages long, with a full-page illustration on the main title page and a one-third page snippet of it reused in the interior. The font in this story is pretty large, needlessly so, I think, unless you're an editor running short on material but still trying to fill out 96 pages of your magazine. If you're an editor relying on your friends to write stories for you, and you find that you're running short, you might need more friends. Either that or the ones you have should write more sustained works. I wouldn't count on that very much, though. I'm not sure they're capable of it. More than one of the stories in this issue falls short of full development. They start out with a good germ but fail to reach their full potential. Anyway, the large font used in "Call" is just another indicator of the thinness of content in this issue of Weird Tales. I don't plan on reading any future issues, though, and so I will probably never find out if this thinness is a trend.

"Call" kicks off with product placement in its first paragraph. The lone character Ellen doesn't just have a camera. She has a Nikon D850. Some product. If I look at this magical Internet, I find that a Nikon D850 is a $2,000 piece of equipment. That's not just product placement. It's very conspicuous consumption on the part of the author. And already I have a bad taste in my mouth. Then there is another high-end product, Keurig, placed in the story. There are still other proper nouns in "Call." Some are place names, but even they seem like product placement. The author seems to be saying, "Look at me. These are the places where I have been and with which I am well familiar," translated (by me) into, "I have insider information. My use of these names will substitute for any and all description of the places they represent, what they might signify in my story, or what they might mean to my character. If you don't know what or where they are, well too bad for you."

I won't single out Carol Gyzander here. Several of the authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue have done the same kind of thing, and I wonder why. Why put your knowing in front of us? Why not put yourself away and tell your story? Why are you drawing attention to yourself when the attention of the reader should be on your story, its characters, and its events? Anyway, I remember going to a lecture at a university not many years ago. Before the lecture began, I heard a woman in the audience (I didn't know her) talking about going to Syria, as if going to Syria were a bullet point on her resume. Are we supposed to impressed by these things? I'm not sure. Anyway, there is even a name--Alzheimer's disease--for what killed the main character's mother in Ms. Gyzander's story. I take this as a kind of product placement, too. I guess if you give a thing a name that everyone can simply look up on the Internet, you don't have to do any explaining, meaning, you don't have to do any writing. The reader can just open another window or tab on her screen as she's reading. She could even have a tab for every commercial product you have mentioned in your story and make her purchases along the way. Put another way, in using the names of products (Alzheimer's disease and Arches National Park being, essentially, the names of products) you have relieved yourself of the responsibility of writing. I guess that's what brandnames are for. They're a kind of shorthand that gets right to the knowing, impulsive, status-seeking, and commercially or materially acquisitive part of the brain, wherever that might be. No thinking is really required. I could go on complaining, but I guess we have to realize that this is just how people talk these days, and the way people talk creeps into the author's prose. And here I thought prose was supposed to rise above the level of everyday talk.

I'll finish up. The main character Ellen, a photographer, goes alone into the desert. She has a kind of vision-quest. People have done this for a long time. Jesus did it. He refused the vision or temptation placed before him, though, by Satan. Ellen on the other hand goes for it. I say "main character," but really Ellen is the only character in "Call," for once again, as in "Mozaika," we have a woman alone, an artist, absorbed in the things that, I guess, fill and overfill the thoughts of countless numbers of women in this western world. Ellen's mother is on her mind, just as Myrna's is in "Mozaika." Both characters are lone artists, caught up in their careers and activities. Are these things the main themes in women's literature? In the lives of western women? If so, "Call of the Void -- L'appel du Vide" is made for readers of a certain type. I would say that it has narrow appeal, but then much of what appears in the Cosmic Horror Issue is written from a narrow viewpoint and may have narrow appeal. If you're an atheist or materialist, if you have a dark view of life and the world, if you're wrapped up in yourself and your own thoughts, if you're a fanboy or an ardent consumer of American popular culture, you'll probably find much here to like. What is there for the rest of us, though? Anyway, too many of these stories are too much like a TV show or a movie, and one of them is actually a comic book story. The best, most complex, and most interesting or entertaining stories in this issue--"Concerto in Five Movements" by Ramsey Campbell, "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson, and "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan--are not TV-like or comic book-like. They are real fiction, despite any product placement or other flaws or shortcomings they might contain.

Fiction is supposed to be more and to offer more than a script, a screenplay, or a treatment for some medium or form other than real prose printed on the pages of a book or magazine. But authors of today seem to have watched too much TV and too many movies over the course of their lives. They have probably also read too many comic books and played too many countless hours of video games. Reading and the craft of writing seem to be in decline, probably as a result of these things. (Nancy Kilpatrick may be onto something in her story "Mozaika.") Reading takes effort, as does writing. Maybe readers and writers aren't up to the task anymore, even though the results of both reading and writing can be so very richly rewarding. Only a couple of the stories in the Cosmic Horror Issue seem to have been written by authors whose imaginations were formed primarily by reading. Few of them seem to be dedicated writers of fiction in prose. I can't imagine any of their stories--or possibly only a couple--ever being anthologized or reprinted except in the authors' own collections. But then many such collections are essentially vanity publications. In fact, Weird Tales itself, in its latest incarnation, seems to be a vanity publication, a resume builder, or a little sandbox in which a little clique of authors--seemingly all friends of the editor, some talented, some far less so--have gathered to play.

The world has changed since the first Weird Tales of one hundred years ago.

Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Laid to Rest" by Tim Lebbon

"Laid to Rest" by Tim Lebbon is the only outright science fiction story in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. It takes up nearly eight pages of text, plus a full-page, illustrated main title page and a snippet of that illustration in the interior. Mr. Lebbon is British. He was born on July 28, 1969, in London, England. The date was propitious for a future author of science fiction stories, for only a week before he was born, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. Although he writes novels and short stories, Tim Lebbon is like nearly every other author in this issue of Weird Tales in that he has written works tied to movies and television series, and his own works have gone back the other way by being adapted to the screen. That kind of work probably explains why his story reads like a screenplay. It also must explain the presence of some of what I call twenty-first century inanities in "Laid to Rest."

I might as well get those out of the way. They include: "over time" and lines of dialogue, "Talk to me" and "Here, now!" There isn't any "Let's do this" or "I got this," but there easily could have been. There are also vulgar exclamations that stand in for actual dialogue. These things are done so that a writer can appear edgy and with it and even transgressive, I guess. Mr. Lebbon uses span as the past tense of spin. I have learned that this is an archaic but generally acceptable form. More than one of his characters uses the first-person future tense shall instead of the more informal will. Mr. Lebbon also goes back and forth between the present and past tenses. So there is a mix of styles, tones, tenses. I found only one misused word, comprised, but that's a tough one for a lot of people.

The narrator of this story is Jon, a scientifically minded and analytic technician on another planet where some terraformers have discovered a dozen large ancient alien structures, like immense eggs in the carton of the planet's surface. Jon investigates, accompanied by the voice and spirit of his departed lover, Maria, who was, in contrast to him, artistic, emotional, and spiritual. This is an almost clichéd dichotomy, especially in genre fiction, but it also reflects real life. I think it can stand, especially when the analytic male has as his goal a desire to be more like his artistic lover, as Jon does in this story. I'm not sure that he gets there, though.

Jon enters one of the structures and hears Maria's voice. She tells him about the terrible place in which she has found herself and urges him to leave, warning that he will be noticed. He does leave, in fact, but remembers how close she was to him, even though she was also far away. Is she alive? Or is she a ghost communicating with him from beyond? And now that I think about it, I think that "Laid to Rest" can be interpreted as a spiritualist/spiritualism-type of story, with the alien structures as a kind of medium or Ouija board, allowing contact and communication with the dearly departed. One hundred years ago, we had séances, mediums, ectoplasm, and automatic writing in Weird Tales. Maybe now those things have come back but in a scientified (my invented word) way.

Significantly, Jon is a nonbeliever, an atheist, I guess. So how does he explain his contact with Maria? Maybe the structures are a kind of transportation device, and he has come close to her, or she to him, wherever she might be in the universe, through them. As for any change there might be in his belief system, well, we just don't know, or I don't anyway. Materialists change in weird fiction. Maybe they don't so much in science fiction. On the other hand, Paul Cornell's lead character in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" clings stubbornly to his non-belief and seems to be unchanged by his terrifying Christmastime experience, unlike Ebenezer Scrooge, who seems to be his original and who has a change of heart, like the Grinch, or Saul on the road to Damascus, in his encounter with the supernatural. Jon doesn't seem to be changed, either, by his experience. He actually comes up with a materialistic explanation for it, and so he is not forced to change, and his belief system is not threatened.

A main character who doesn't change or grow over the course of a story can't be a very likable or sympathetic one, especially when he is given every chance. What is the point of a man's story or journey if it isn't to change or grow, to learn a lesson or become a better person? But then if the author himself doesn't give his character a chance, whose fault is that exactly? Maybe it's the author himself who refuses growth. If he won't change, how can his character? Anyway, the essential message from Maria, from beyond, stays with Jon. They are the last words in the story. They are printed in italics, the way so many last words are in weird fiction, but the italics here have a different purpose.*

Pyramids appeared on the cover of the first-anniversary issue of Weird Tales in 1924. Mention of Howard Carter and his discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922 appear in the 100th, in "Laid to Rest." That makes a nice symmetry or the closing of a circle, I think. The cosmic horror in "Laid to Rest" has to do with an implied alien presence. Not all alien presences are Fortean in origin of course, but when you detect an alien presence in a story, you might start to think of the man behind the adjective. But again, Maria's warning is like that of the spirit of the dead person speaking from beyond the grave. Jon's entry into one of the alien structures is like a descent into a tomb. And the alien presence is a science-fantasy kind of presence, like Cthulhu or one of H.P. Lovecraft's other material aliens that embody supernatural horror.

Talk of a supposed curse on Howard Carter and his crew are also in this story. Charles Fort wrote about things like that, too (Robert Ripley was like the newspaper comics version of Fort), but any well-read person should know that there was no such curse, just as there was never any such real thing as Vril, as in the first story to appear in this issue. Authors should learn to differentiate between genuine mysteries and things that are not mysterious at all and might actually be hoaxes.

-----

*Maria's communication with Jon makes me think of the situation in Frederik Pohl's novel Gateway (1977). It's as if the character Klara in Gateway (a character I think is supposed to represent Pohl's ex-wife, Judith Merril) is able to communicate with Robinette from her decades-long descent into a black hole, except that Maria's message is one of love and caring, even if, like Klara, she is lost forever. I would hate to be Robinette on the other end of the line if Klara were talking. Or maybe she would actually understand and forgive him, and so no need for a robot psychiatrist.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Inkblot Succubus" by Nicole Sixx

"Inkblot Succubus" by Nicole Sixx is a one-page poem with a red-and-black illustration of an inkblot in the background. The black inkblot looks like a cross-section of a brain. Ms. Sixx's lines of verse are centered on the page, and so they are as symmetrical as their subject. There is imagery in this work of rot and decay, murder, too. In the lines: "I take a drag/The drag takes me," there is a faint echo of the famous Nietzsche quote:

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

We haven't had either Nietzsche or Fort for a while in the Cosmic Horror Issue, but with the appearance of the unexplained lights in the sky in "Mozaika"--is there an extraterrestrial invasion going on?--and the echo of Nietzsche here, maybe those two men haven't gone far from the thoughts of these two women. As for cosmic horror, this poem seems to be of the "Hell is other people" variety.

Nicole Sixx is a writer who has worked in the movie business, so again there is a movie-and-TV connection with the authors in this issue of Weird Tales. In 2022, she had a book or "book" of poetry published called Slow Burn. Before that she had a book of short stories with a vulgar title. You can look for that one on your own, as I do my best to avoid words like that on my blog.

Ms. Sixx's name is misspelled in the table of contents as Nicola Sixx. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database calls her Nikki Sixx, but I'm pretty sure she's not the bassist for Mötley Crüe. It sounds like she needs someone out there making corrections for her and to better represent herself in the world.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Mozaika" by Nancy Kilpatrick

Though born in Philadelphia (on May 6, 1946), Nancy Kilpatrick is considered a Canadian author. She has written short stories, novels, and non-fiction. Among her books are tie-ins to the Friday the 13th movie series. She also writes under the name Amarantha Knight. She lives in Canada and teaches short story writing at the George Brown College of Applied Arts and Technology in Toronto. Her story "Mozaika" takes up six and a half pages in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. There is also a full-page main title page with an illustration, one that is used again to fill the last half page of the story.

There isn't any product placement in "Mozaika." That's a relief. The story is set in the present or near future. It's about a woman named Myrna and her attempts to assemble a mosaic as the larger world falls apart outside of her tiny house on its remote half-acre lot. Myrna lives alone, in the boondocks, mostly cut off from the world. That's how she wants it to be. In her isolation, she is like the main characters in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" and "Night Fishing." Unlike those two men, though, she stays in. They go out. Her tiny house is her safe place until it isn't anymore.

Myrna is an artist. Her work on her mosaic is a creative act, an attempt to bring order into the universe and to counteract decline and decay. There is imagery in this story of the forces that oppose her. In a "contusious" sky she sees countless lights. What are they? What do they represent? (If this story were happening now we could say they are drones.) Her grout is "necrotic black." She wipes her tiles with a chamois "like a caring parent tending a child's wound." The only other living characters in her story are her overbearing mother and her sister. As living characters, they only talk on the phone from three hours away. "Mozaika" is almost completely about Myrna and her very detailed work on her mosaic.

Something is going on in the outer world. Living in isolation and working on her art, Myrna is unaware. But her mother tells her that people are dying all over . . . and that they're coming back. Neighbors die. Her sister's baby and husband die, then the sister herself and the mother, too. All of them show up at her door, and they want in. They are like zombies. Like the wider world and humanity in the grip of history, they are in a state of decay, or "decline and fall," as she remembers a departed friend saying. Her work has been to counteract all of that. In that she fails. The creative act, an attempt to emulate God and to impose order against chaos, fails. And what is the horror, the cosmic horror? Entropy, which is horrifying enough in all of its implications.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Concerto in Five Movements" by Ramsey Campbell-Part Two

There are cellphones in the world of today, and so they must also be in fiction. Many writers don't know how to handle this fact, but Ramsey Campbell does, at least in his story "Concerto in Five Movements." Instead of going to ancient libraries and consulting dusty tomes, his character Claudia carries out her researches in the comfort of her own home, or on the bus, with all of the world's knowledge (except for the source of the Lovecraft epigraph) in the palm of her hand. Mr. Campbell is also good in writing about music, which is not an easy thing to do.

On the opposite end of technology in this story are a pair of "prehistoric monoliths known as Adam and Eve," so again there is Lovecraftian content in "Concerto in Five Movements." More follows: the singing of "solo themes in an unknown language"; visions of strange "asymmetrical" and "out of proportion" landscapes; dark forests, copses, mountains, caves; a fictional author of the occult, Gahariet le Bon, and a grimoire, the Book of Daoloth; a very oblique allusion to "The Rats in the Walls" by Lovecraft; and words such as shamble, pallid, gibbous, foetal, and so on.

The cosmic horror in this story comes from a legend among some Medieval cultists that they could summon an entity that had arisen in the infancy of the cosmos, in other words at--or was it before?--God's act of creation. There are references or allusions to Adam and Eve, Calvary and the Crucifixion, to God and Christmas, but no one in this story seems to be much of a believer in God or Jesus Christ. Maybe they would rather spell it cruci-fiction. Ramsey Campbell himself is supposed to be an atheist. It's no wonder, then, that these people feel horror when contemplating the universe. This weekend we will have the last full moon of the year and an occurrence of the Geminid meteor shower. For any reasonable person--for any fully human person with a soul, a heart, and a mind--there can be only awe and wonder and feelings of great mystery in contemplation and witness of this vast, beautiful, wonderful universe. Horror is, I think, an inappropriate response, as is the cosmic loneliness so often expressed by astronomers.

An old god returns in "Concerto in Five Movements" to lure away children and to destroy not just a concert hall full of musicians but also any random member or members of humanity as it afterwards wanders loose upon the earth. Mention of "solo themes in an unknown language" makes me think of Lovecraftian gibberish, or gibberish as the language of the void. Reference to the origins of this old god in the infancy of the cosmos makes me think of the void as that which preceded and was banished by God's initial creative act. Somehow this old god survived, though, or, like Cthulhu, it lay sleeping until being revived or resurrected by occult forces. Only Claudia in her sensitivity seems to be aware of its return. On the other hand, she is the only survivor of the disaster at the concert hall. By the way, one of the movements of the title is "Tanz der Geburt Gottes"--"Dance of the birth of gods."

There appears to be a vast pun in "Concerto in Five Movements." A cult can be called a movement, as can, of course, a division in a musical work. The composer in the story is named Keppel. I wonder if his name is a play on that of Johannes Keppler, who, as it so happens, further developed the concept of musica universalis, or the music of the spheres, which "regards proportions in the movements of celestial bodies." (Quoted from Wikipedia, emphasis added.) Note that in Ramsey Campbell's story, there are descriptions of the moon as "asymmetrical" and of a moonlit copse as "out of proportion." There appears to be, then, a contrast made between the ordered and proportionate music of the spheres, and the asymmetrical and disproportionate music of the world inhabited by that nameless old god originating in the early universe.

There may be significance in names. Keppler refers to a maker of cloaks or hoods. It comes from the old German word kappe, "cloak," which still exists in Danish. Kappe is no doubt a cognate of our word cape. The name of the composer Keppel would seem to indicate, then, a diminutive form, in other words, a small cloak. His is a small cloak, while the nameless god from the beginning of the universe wears a large one, for in the story Claudia dreams "of a shape cloaked by clouds above a wooded hill." This is a "colossus restless with anticipation," a phrase that makes me think of Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," which closes with these two lines:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

There is in "The Second Coming" a description: "A shape with lion body and the head of a man," in other words, a sphinx. Enkidu, from the Epic of Gilgamesh, may also be part man and part beast, a chimera. Claudia has a similarly named friend, Ekondu. Their names are practically anagrams. Finally, there is reason to believe that Yeats was inspired by Shelley in his composition of "The Second Coming," and so that long-ago British Romantic poet shows himself again in this two-part series on Ramsey Campbell and his story for Weird Tales.

There is far more involved in this concept of the music of the spheres. I'll let you look into that on your own. I'll point out, though, that the phrase "the music of the spheres" is in "The Horror of the Museum" written by Hazel Heald and revised or ghostwritten by H.P. Lovecraft:

     He wished that his senses were not so preternaturally keen. Something in the darkness and stillness seemed to have sharpened them, so that they responded to faint intimations hardly strong enough to be called true impressions. His ears seemed at times to catch a faint, elusive susurrus which could not quite be identified with the nocturnal hum of the squalid streets outside, and he thought of vague, irrelevant things like the music of the spheres and the unknown, inaccessible life of alien dimensions pressing on our own. 

In this, Hazel's and Lovecraft's character Rogers is like Claudia, or vice versa. Both are like the sensitive artists in other works by Lovecraft, too, including "The Call of Cthulhu." The next paragraph after the one describing Claudia's dream begins with Finley the conductor's announcement of the movement "Tanz der Geburt Gottes." As for Claudia, her name means "lame" or "crippled." In other words, she cannot dance: she cannot take full part in the concerto in five movements, each of which is in the form of a dance. Maybe that's what saves her, that and her sensitivity to disturbances in the proper order of things.

"The Horror in the Museum" was published in Weird Tales in July 1933, or ninety years before the Cosmic Horror Issue of the magazine--if you can call them the same magazine. That's a really big if. "Concerto in Five Movements" is the most Lovecraftian of the stories so far in this issue and one of the least Nietzschean or Fortean. In fact it's not Nietzschean or Fortean at all as far as I can tell. Ramsey Campbell may be immune to the influence of Charles Fort.

Updated on December 16, 2024.
Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley 

"Concerto in Five Movements" by Ramsey Campbell-Part One

"Concerto in Five Movements" by Ramsey Campbell takes up nearly eight pages of text, plus a full-page illustration on the main-title page. There is also a small illustration in the interior of the story. This one seems out of place in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales in that it was not created by the artist who did all or most of the others. This small interior illustration is of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It also appears to be very old and probably in the public domain.

There is an epigraph at the beginning of "Concerto in Five Movements." This is the third in the Cosmic Horror Issue and the second from H.P. Lovecraft. I carried out an online search for the text of this epigraph but did not find it. Maybe it's from an unpublished work. The closest thing I found to it is actually from Percy Shelley's poem "Adonais," specifically in the forty-fourth stanza, in which these two lines appear:

And death is a low mist which cannot blot

            The brightness it may veil.

The epigraph used in Mr. Campbell's story:

"The lighter the legend, the darker the truths it may veil; & the most innocent tale told to children may disguise dread secrets."

You could almost break that sentence in prose into lines of verse. In any case, there is significance in the epigraph considering the events of the story, also the inclusion of an image of the Pied Piper. There may also be significance considering Ramsey Campbell's signing of a letter four years ago in support of transgenderism, which is, as we know, very much about grooming and recruiting children into its numbers by giving them puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, most especially by cutting off their breasts and genitals in a ghastly and horrifying attempt to change them into the other sex.

You could consider transgenderism an "innocent tale" that disguises "dread secrets." It's worth noting that, this week, Mr. Campbell's native country indefinitely banned puberty blockers for children. Health Secretary Wes Streeting called the use of the drugs "a scandal." I should point out that transgenderism is also a movement, thought not in the same sense of the word Mr. Campbell uses in his title. However, like the Pied Piper with his music and his piping, transgenderists lead children to tragedy and grief. In "Concerto in Five Movements," the Pied Piper is in fact referred to as "a recruiter."

* * *

Ramsey Campbell is the most well-known and accomplished of the authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue. He was born on January 4, 1946, in Liverpool, England. That was the same year in which F. Paul Wilson was born. I don't think it any mere coincidence that the two best stories in this issue were written by men born in the 1940s. I'm from a later generation, and I have to say that there is something largely missing in creators of our generations. We just don't seem to have what it takes, and I don't have an explanation for that. One possibility is that those born in the 1940s grew up with little exposure during their formative years to television. Maybe Newton Minow was right when he called television "a vast wasteland."

* * *

"Concerto in Five Movements" is set in the present day, presumably in England. There are proper nouns in the story, but no product placement. That's refreshing and perhaps reflective of a lack of early exposure to television on the part of the author. These nouns are the names of composers and places and other cultural things. In fact, Mr. Campbell's story is cultured, a welcome relief from one story in particular in this issue, which is, unfortunately, practically dreck and too much influenced by television.

The main character in the story is a cellist named Claudia. In addition to being a musician, she is an investigator of sorts. The subjects of her investigations are the legend of the Pied Piper and a musical work about the Piper composed by a man named Keppel, whom I presume to be fictional. She finds that "[o]ne commentator maintained the musician [the Pied Piper] had belonged to a cult that had led the children deep into the forest to use them in a secret rite of sacrifice," thus a Lovecraftian undertone arises in the story. But I can't help noticing a parallel with transgenderism, too, which is also a cult and which also leads children away for purposes of sacrificing them. It's not their hearts that are cut out, though.

Claudia has a friend named Ekondu, an African name with a favorable connotation. I couldn't help but think of the pre-Christian name Enkidu when I read it, though. Maybe allusions to the non-Christian world or to pre-Christian times is part of Ramsey Campbell's purpose.

To be concluded . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley 

Reaching Outward and Falling Inward

In Angela Yuriko Smith's poem "Lost Generations," the people of the title are flying through outer space, their mission to populate the galaxy. They come to grief when they fall into a black hole. They and the greater humanity they represent reach outward: this is a mission of hope and positive purpose. They are to be progenitors of a new star people.

Contrast this with the despair and negative purpose of the three previous fictional works by men, "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson, "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan, and "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell. In Mr. Wilson's story, his title character, Dwight Bonneville, has encountered an outer abyss. In reaching outward, though, he has gained the means by which to prevent his fellow men from doing the same. He enforces the quarantine of Earth, imposed by "Our Owner." He heads off "the mission of Man" as in Angelo Yuriko Smith's poem. Bonneville is at cross purposes with her "lost generations."

In "Night Fishing" and "A Ghost Story for Christmas," the lead characters fall inward into their own abysses. There isn't any reaching outward at all, or if there is, their reaching is thwarted by their own inward purposes. Both men are more or less in despair, separated from themselves, from God, and from the rest of humanity. Instead of in an outward star, they have black holes within themselves.

There may be autism in Mr. Cornell's lead character. There may be solipsism behind Mr. Kiernan's. I have written about the worm ouroboros, or uroboros, as Camille Paglia spells it. Ouroboros is solipsistic. It completely encloses itself and is wrapped up in itself. The image of ouroboros is of a snake swallowing its own tail, like the hoop snake of folklore, or Friedrich August Kekulé's dream of the benzene molecule. (That's Kekulé, not Kukla, and Kukla is the clown, not the dragon.)

So ouroboros takes the form of an open circle. In the middle is a hole, a void. The solipsistic person is also a self-enclosing circle. Inside of him there may very well be a void. A two-dimensional representation of a black hole, the star that swallows Ms. Smith's "lost generations," is also circular. Although it's called a hole, it isn't really a hole. It's not nothing actually but everything, all swallowed up and smashed together. In the movie The Black Hole (1979), the star of the title is actually a hole, the entrance to what we would now call a wormhole. Inside that hole, the surviving characters have a diabolical vision in the form of the red robot Maximilian swallowing up and encasing his master Reinhardt. At the end of the wormhole there is a bright light, as in a near-death experience. The characters fly through a chrystaline Gothic archway to reach it and emerge, reborn, on the other side.

Information does not escape from a black hole. We know nothing of what lies inside. In contrast, a black hole knows everything of what lies outside of itself, for everything falls into its limitless mass. Nonetheless, you could say that, because it is completely enclosed on itself and wrapped up in itself, a black hole is a solipsistic star. It is the star of its own show. Its favorite movie is The Black Hole, which is about itself.

As I said before, "Lost Generations" by Angela Yuriko Smith stands apart from the stories by men so far in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. Their visions of cosmic horror are more or less the same, a combination of Fort and Nietzsche, an inward kind of horror of ownership and abysses. Hers is outward, with no Nietzsche or Fort in sight, the cosmos itself, in the form of the black hole, being the source of that horror.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Lost Generations" by Angela Yuriko Smith

Angela Yuriko Smith was born on November 21, 1968, in Madisonville, Kentucky. She is a journalist, author, editor, poet, teacher of creative writing at Northwest Florida State College, and publisher of Space and Time magazine. In 2023, she had a book published, its title, Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror. Her co-editor was Lee Murray, about whom I wrote on August 13, 2020. Ms. Smith, I think, has an admirable list of activities, occupations, and accomplishments. Her birthday just passed, so I would like to say Happy Belated Birthday to her.

Angela Yuriko Smith has a poem in Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue. It's called "Lost Generations," and it takes up two pages in a large typeface with the image of a star field in the background.

"Lost Generations" is in eleven stanzas of three lines each. These are haiku-like tercets, and they are centered on the page such that they have the general appearance of the double helix of the DNA molecule. The acronym DNA appears in the poem, in fact, in the third stanza. So there are three lines per stanza, five and seven syllables per line (mostly, and possibly ideally), and eleven stanzas all together. These are prime numbers, four out of the first five in fact. Where is the missing two? In the pairs of "Adams and Eves" on board the intergenerational spaceship of which she writes, I guess. Or are they the paired, twisted, and intertwined ladders of the DNA helix? And does the use of these prime numbers signify anything?

In the first tercet in "Lost Generations" there is the word Hyades. That makes me think of Robert W. Chambers, who wrote of "the songs that the Hyades shall sing" and "the mystery of the Hyades" in his collection The King in Yellow. In the fifth, the eyes of the awakening voyagers are described as "shining in the abyss." And in the last, there is darkness, for the voyagers are swallowed by a black hole before they can fulfill their mission. So there is abyss and there is darkness and blackness. The people who go into the black hole are the lost generations of the title, a phrase that recalls the men and women who were born during the decade in which The King in Yellow was published, a generation that included, oddly enough, H.P. Lovecraft. This is a different kind of cosmic horror, and I think we can be grateful for that in this issue. 

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

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

We associate the image of Dionysus with that of Pan, the piper. Pan appears in an early work of cosmic and pagan horror, The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen (1894). There is madness and despair in that story, just as there is madness and despair in The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and the short story "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson. This madness and despair, as well as murder, horror, and death, are brought on by seeing and hearing things that are supposed to be beyond human ken, by peering into abysses, and by close encounters with Chaos, the Void, and Evil itself, incarnate. There is piping in Lovecraft, too. It is associated with his god Azathoth, the so-called daemon-sultan who is seated at the center of "Ultimate Chaos."

In The Great God Pan, there are many strange and terrible events. One of these is a bizarre and horrifying transformation undergone by a woman, among other things of woman into man. The passage describing this transformation is too long to give here. You will find it in Chapter VIII, The Fragments.* People who believe the human body can be altered in its fundamental form should read this passage and recognize the kind of horrors they're trying to bring into our world. In the story of Genesis, read from around the Moon on Christmas Eve 1968 by the Apollo Eight astronauts, God said, "Let there be light." The creation of life follows. In this scene of transformation from Machen's story, there is "the negation of light." That negation is followed by death.

There is in The Great God Pan a reference to Nodens, "the god of the Great Deep or Abyss."** Abysses are elsewhere in Machen's story. So is void:

"[. . . ] the voice of articulate-speaking men echo in the waste void that bounds our thought."

Articulate and intelligible speech, then, pushes back the bounds of the void, just as God spoke his Word, thereby banishing it. Word is positive and creative. Being atheists and probably many of them nihilists, authors of and believers in cosmic horror want instead for us to be bound ever more closely by the void, for it to encroach upon us until we are annihilated. They want, I suspect, Creation to contract and Chaos to reign. The language of the Void, then, is gibberish to us. If we translate it into our language, we go mad, or we lose the will to live. Remember that in the essay preceding his story, Mr. Wilson describes cosmic horror as a genre in which "Chaos reigns." (p. 49)

The Great God Pan has been, I think, an inspiration for much weird fiction and horror fiction, from the works of the devout, such as William Peter Blatty, to those of the skeptical, such as H.P. Lovecraft. F. Paul Wilson mentions The Exorcist and Lovecraft in his essay "Abrahamic vs. Cosmic Horror." He also writes that The Great God Pan "can be rightly viewed as a paradigm of cosmic horror." (p. 49) He seems to have looked to that paradigm in writing his own story. So did the other authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue look to The Great God Pan as well? Or did they consult with Mr. Wilson before they began?

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One more thing: In The Great God Pan, there are the names Helen and Mrs. Beaumont. Another Helen is in the Iliad, just as Dwight Bonneville's given name is originally from Ancient Greece and refers to Dionysus. As for his surname, it echoes Mrs. Beaumont's, for Bonneville means "good town," while Beaumont means "beautiful mountain."

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*The description of that final transformation makes me think of a similar scene near the end of The Thing, John Carpenter's film adaptation of John W. Campbell's story.

**There is also this, from a letter quoted in the story: "I am like a traveller who has peered over an abyss, and has drawn back in terror." Is this the source of the title of Francisco Tignini's story "The Traveler"? Dwight Bonneville in "The Last Bonneville" could say the same thing except that he has embraced the abyss instead of being terrified by it.

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I think "The Last Bonneville" is the best story, or the most enjoyable, so far in the Cosmic Horror Issue. Part of that is because of its humor and its tone. Also, we don't have to get ourselves wrapped up in an author who seems wrapped up in himself. Mr. Wilson's story moves, whereas the others are more nearly static. That's what happens when you put Americans into their cars. I guess I should point out that Mr. Wilson is an American, whereas Paul Cornell is British, and Caitlín R. Kiernan, though now an American, was born in Ireland.

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Finally, a couple of things that are wrong. One has to do with the story, in which the authorial voice duplicates in some places the voice of the driver De Groot. We need only one subjective voice. The other is in the Wikipedia entry on F. Paul Wilson, in which he is first described as a "medical doctor," then as a "Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine." It's not his fault or the fault of Weird Tales magazine that there is a lack of precision in his Wikipedia biography. I will point out, though, that the practice of osteopathic medicine grew out of osteopathy, which was just another in a long line of nineteenth-century pseudosciences, some of which still plague us. Can't we be done with pseudosciences, especially when it comes to the practice of medicine? Can't we be done with the lies, hoaxes, and propaganda, the money-grubbing and status-seeking, most of all the Mengele-level experimentation and butchery of what is supposed to be prevention, treatment, cure, and care of the human body and the human soul?

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One last question in regards to "The Last Bonneville": who is in Nevada?

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley