Fritz Leiber (1910– 1992) was an influential, award-winning American writer of fantasy, horror and science fiction. H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Graves, and Carl Jung all helped inspire his fiction. Although perhaps best-known for the swords-and-sorcery Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, Leiber also wrote several sui generis macabre novels and stories. Our Lady of Darkness (1977) is among the best-known of his horror novels and, like much of his later fiction, includes autobiography by way of his real-life struggles with depression and alcoholism. Along with such novels, stories like ‘The Girl with the Hungry Eyes’ (1949) and the classic reprinted in The Weird, ‘Smoke Ghost’ (1941), made Leiber a key forerunner of the urban weird of writers like Ramsey Campbell. In this latest installment of 101 Weird Writers, returning contributor Elwin Cotman pays tribute to Leiber and “Smoke Ghost,” documenting the strange, haunting power of both.

– Adam Mills, editor of 101 Weird Writers

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One evening toward winter he noticed what seemed to be a shapeless black sack lying on the third roof from the tracks. He did not think about it. It merely registered as an addition to the well-known scene and his memory stored away the impression for further reference. Next evening, however, he decided he had been mistaken in one detail. The object was a roof nearer than he had thought. Its colour and texture, and the grimy stains around it, suggested that it was filled with coal dust, which was hardly reasonable.

Grit has a kind of currency. There is grit as in sediment, and there is grit as an admirable character trait. Then there is grit as authenticity, an important motif to contemporary genre writing. Grit symbolizes all that is realistic: the kernels of cynicism, frustration, and nihilism that show the reader, “See? This is more than just monsters and ghosts! There’s reality here!” Over the years, there has been a move to “dirty up” fantasy and science fiction from their pastoral and epic origins. Lauding genre stories as “gritty” has become a well-worn marketing tool.

Fritz Leiber, most famous as the creator of the Lankhmar stories, was one of the first horror writers to move the genre from its 19^th century Gothic trappings to noir elements. Many of his short stories focus on the urban, and engage with the city in all its seediness, filth, and exploitation. Issues like alcoholism, poverty, and racism are dealt with matter-of-factly. While his stories are “gritty” in content, grit/sediment/dirt as physical substances repeatedly come into play. Take, for instance, this section from his story “Gonna Roll the Bones”:

Above the ovens was the wall-set mantelpiece … set with all sorts of ancestral curios, but many of them that weren’t stone or glass or china had been so dried and darkened by decades of heat that they looked like nothing but shrunken human heads and black golf balls.

Dirt is used to indicate decay, a perfect ambience for the wife-beating gambling addict who serves as the story’s protagonist. In Leiber’s work, darkening indicates corruption, disease of the soul. This theme of infestation is central to “Smoke Ghost.”

First published in the October 1941 issue of Unknown Worlds, “Smoke Ghost” is the story of Catesby Wran’s obsessive need to avoid being “darkened” by the world around him. Over the course of the story, the neurotic urbanite sees the ghost described in the opening passage, and feels it is pursuing him, all leading to a rooftop confrontation with the dirty creature. Wran describes the ghost as having: “A smoky composite face with the hungry anxiety of the unemployed, the neurotic restlessness of the person without purpose, the jerky tension of the high-pressure metropolitan worker, the uneasy resentment of the striker, the callous opportunism of the scab …” It is the city he fears, with its restless human energy. However, in this opening scene, he is trying to rationalize the boogeyman in order to ease his fears. Wran is the quintessential man of reason, eager to describe his visions as “hallucination,” “that damned mental abnormality.”

Leiber’s most evocative language pertains to the city: “A dingy, melancholy little world of tar paper, tarred gravel, and smoky brick. Rusty tin chimneys with odd conical hats suggested abandoned listening posts … He always saw [the ghost] around dusk, either in the normal smoky half-light … covered by ghostly windblown white sheets of rain-splash, or patched with blackish snow …” The city is the all-encompassing universe of this story, and it is a dirty place. A world of railroads, mills, and, most of all, pollution that dirties everything.  The sky is gray and only gray. This world births the smoke ghost, symbolizing for Wran “the frustrated, frightened century in which he lived, the jangled century of hate and heavy industry and Fascist wars.” For a ghost, it is an atypically physical thing, leaving proof of its presence wherever it goes. It is entirely natural to the city; Wran at first mistakes it for a piece of litter. From another perspective, it evokes a homeless person sleeping on a rooftop.  As a supernatural being, it recalls the paramentals born of “city-stuff” in Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness, who take their power from blight itself. Wran can only safely experience the city from skyscrapers and the elevated train, needing these constructs to shield him from the “hate and heavy industry.” He fears the city and the times he lives in. Hatred is spreading over the world like a cloud of soot (the story was published only two months before Pearl Harbor).  Wran, and Leiber himself, are trying to make sense of man’s place in this world, and do so through superstition.

Lieber is significant in being one of the first writers to envision a cosmology based around cities. He would explore the theme more thoroughly in Our Lady of Darkness, in which the occult science of megapolisomancy gains power from the energy of San Francisco. The crafting of urban mythology would go on to become a genre staple, and today’s city-dwelling supernaturals owe a debt to Leiber’s soiled ghost. The weird aspect of this monster is that, as the story progresses, its true nature becomes more abstract. At first passive, it turns active, and the final confrontation blurs power dynamics, fantasy and reality, gender and race, while avoiding the definitive answer that both Wran and the audience seek. The smoke ghost exists beyond what Poul Anderson described as “a phantom that is and of the corrupted air pervading a modern industrial city.” Its possible interpretations speak to the ever-evolving dynamics of the modern world of which Catesby Wran, a white male, finds himself incapable of navigating.

Grit as Feminine Power

“I know you’ll think I’m being romantic and trite, but I’ve always felt that women were more primitive than men, closer to ancient feelings.” So says Tansy Saylor, the titular character in Leiber’s 1943 classic Conjure Wife. Her interest in the supernatural, undertaken in order to aid her husband’s career, is met with naked condescension by the intellectual Norman Saylor. He forces her to give up her conjurings, taking the wards off their family, leading to the calamities that occur later in the novel. His tip-off that his wife has embraced superstition? Finding jars of dirt in her drawer, “like a geologist’s soil specimen.”

Dirt becomes indicative of feminine agency, a soiling of the patriarchal world. This is as true in “Smoke Ghost” as it is in Conjure Wife. The story opens with misogyny. In a scene that could have come straight from the TV series Mad Men, Wran is in his office, describing the ghost in order to scare his stenographer, Miss Millick. As he is constantly self-analyzing, he is also aware of his motivations, seeking “to relieve his nerves by making jokingly serious remarks about the supernatural to Miss Millick, who seemed properly mystified.” His behavior does scare her, the reader learns, because the story opens from her perspective. The reader also learns that she is an everywoman, more focused on doing her job than these concepts. During the exchange, Wran fails to realize two things: first, when he questions whether she has ever seen a ghost, she automatically answers yes. Wran doesn’t even note that she has agreed with him, and maybe even shares his experience with the supernatural; she is there as a sounding board for his self-therapy. Second, Miss Millick is not scared of soot. Seeing some on the desk, she perfunctorily wipes it off and remarks on it to her boss. Wran, on the other hand, is incapacitated to the point of being feminized. “Everything he touched seemed gritty, and he found himself mopping and wiping at his desk like an old lady with a morbid fear of germs.” It is telling that behaving like a stereotypical woman feeds into his phobia.

The growth of cities in the early 20^th century offered new opportunities for women, particularly single women. It is not surprising that the women’s liberation movement found its hotbed in urban areas. That Miss Millick becomes the vessel for the ghost, avatar of the urban, speaks to Leiber’s recurring exploration of patriarchy, and the double-edged quality of the male gaze. In his stories and novels, women are often forced to represent male fantasies. They are hated and brutalized for their femininity. A prime example is the story “Coming Attraction,” in which future-America sexualizes women’s faces to the point they are forced to wear masks, this Taliban-like repression mirrored inversely by cults that worship the female. Leiber views lust as the cause for much of this love/hate.

His work is overt about sexuality as a cultural force. Starlets, streetwalkers, burlesque girls, call girls, and cigarette girls feature prominently, catering to male lust. This is not so much for titillation as to explore the complications that patriarchy creates between men and women. Another story is “A Deskful of Girls,” which I would posit is creepier than “Smoke Ghost” through the virulent misogyny of its characters. The narrator of theorizes, “Sex opens up the unconscious mind, which isn’t exactly a picnic area. Sex is a force and rite that is basic, primal; and the caveman or cavewoman in each of us is a truth bigger than the jokes and cartoons about it.” The fetishization of women is dangerous for men in that it leads them further from the rational, modern world, into the primal one.

In “A Deskful of Girls,” misogyny is represented by Dr. Slyker, a corrupt and insane psychiatrist. He steals the ectoplasmic essence from women, creating “ghosts” of them that he literally hoards in his desk. The image of the mask comes to symbolize the identities women adopt in order to please the male gaze. In reference to the objectification of Hollywood actresses, Slyker says, “In the Twenties it was … Garbo the Free Soul—that’s my name for the symbol she became; her romantic mask heralded the Great Depression. In the late Thirties and early Forties it was Bergman the Brave liberal; her dewiness … helped us accept World War II.” Note that the women have no control over the masks they put on. (Leiber himself was in the Garbo film Camille, perhaps admitting feelings of complicity in these deceptions.) When the actress Evelyn Cordew comes into the story, she mourns having to adopt “ever-changing faces that were gossamer masks of madness, drunkenness, desire and hate.” Conforming to the male gaze robs her of self. This is upended in “Smoke Ghost,” in which Miss Millick terrorizes Wran while literally masked in the grit of the city.

He witnesses her transformation: “the flesh of her face was beginning to change color; blackening until the powder on it was a sickly white dust, rouge a hideous pinkish one, lipstick a translucent red film.” When the smoke ghost cannot follow Wran into his skyscraper sanctuary, it possesses Millick instead. She dirties the sanctuary, “her high-heeled shoes le[aving] neat black prints.” Millick literally becomes one with grit, and in doing so makes a claim of authority. Wran’s reaction is one of fear and abjection.

Being female, she is locked out from the world of the rational due to her “vacuous mind,” as Wran puts it. The lust ascribed to her by the male gaze pushes her into the realm of the primal. Thus, it makes sense that Millick is open to the supernatural effects of the ghost. As in Conjure Wife, the feminine is the space where the rational is rejected precisely because man has reserved that space for himself. This upending of the power dynamic is also shown in “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes,” in which men become so enamored by the image of an advertising model that she, in turn, gains vampiric power over them. In “Smoke Ghost,” the mask of grit grants power in the urban environment, the brave new world in which social barriers are eroding. In this world, there are two types of people: those who embrace the inevitable soiling, and those who cower from it.

White Man in the City

There is a racial component to the themes of blackening, marring, ruining. During the Northern Migration of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, American cities were infused with many blacks from the Southern U.S. and Caribbean. This upheaved the social structure of cities. Leiber’s work deals frankly with racism, and in “Smoke Ghost” it is the white urbanite’s fear of dark faces. In addition to being litter, the ghost is characterized as a Negro:

Then he saw that the doctor was not looking at him, but over his shoulder. Color was draining out of the doctor’s face and his eyes did not seem so small. Then the doctor sprang to his feet, walked past Catesby, threw open the window and peered into the darkness.

As Catesby rose, the doctor slammed down the window and said in a voice whose smoothness was marred by a slight, persistent gasping, “I hope I haven’t alarmed you. I saw the face of … er  … a Negro prowler in the fire escape …”

There is comedy to how the possibly supernatural force is automatically assumed to be a black man. This speaks to white racial fears; the growing black population is “the unmentionable face pressed close against the window, smearing it with wet coal dust.” The second time blacks are mentioned, they are a child’s fear, related by Wran’s wife regarding his son:  “Ronny just had a scare. It woke him up. He was pointing to the window saying, ‘Black man, black man …’” There are, in fact, no black characters in the story. It takes place entirely in controlled environments made for middle- to upper-class whites. The inherent soiling is that of other races in their sanitized world, and this fear is passed through generations.

The dread of miscegenation echoes Conjure Wife, in which Norman Saylor is disgusted to find his wife employing powders, “the sort that Negro conjure doctors used.” In his viewpoint, black religion is automatically mere superstition. The greater fear is that blackness has found its way into his house via his wife, a race-mixing that is anathema to him. The black face on the other side of the window is the face of danger.

In “Smoke Ghost,” race-mixing comes to a head on the rooftop. Standing at the precipice, Wran cowers from his stenographer. “The black, coarse-grained face came nearer, a focus for the worst in the world, a gathering point for poisons everywhere.” The sexual implications of a white woman being “soiled” by blackness are clear. Millick’s darkened face also calls to mind the burnt cork used for minstrel shows. While minstrel shows are associated with virulent racism, they were also a means in which black culture was made known to white culture. The popularity of black theater with white audiences paved the way for integration. On the roof, two groups who have been othered—the black man and white woman—become a composite enemy to the white man’s authority.

These dynamics are not the only ones represented by the ghost. Over the course of the story, Leiber tackles intellectualism versus superstition, 19^th century spiritualism versus 20^th century psychoanalysis, the desire for normalcy, and pacifism versus war. After all, one has to wonder why Wran is so obsessed with the war—perhaps Leiber is dealing with his own pacifism, the smoke ghost of global war that would ultimately convince him to help fight fascism. The nature of the ghost becomes more abstract paragraph by paragraph. Is it real? Hallucination? A prank played by the vengeful Miss Millick? Either way, it represents everything Wran wishes to hide from, and all he can do is surrender. To the spirit of the 20^th century he says, “I will obey you. You are my god … You have supreme power over man and his animals and his machines. You rule this city and all others.” This seems to quell the beast, and the darkness leaves Miss Millick. The social order is restored, but Wran’s worldview is shattered. The question comes: how can he escape the smoke ghost if it is all around him. And in the 20^th century city, where blacks and women have found ways of ascendance, who is now the outsider?

Leiber is rooted not only in the urban, but the contemporary. His works are cultural products with timely references. Author and characters are facing the second total war in twenty years; it had to feel like a time of apocalypse. The nerve gas of World War I had to be in the author’s mind when developing his poison motif. If anything, the mid-century anxiety of “Smoke Ghost” would prove prophetic in the cancers caused by pollution and the leukemia-suffering survivors of Hiroshima. In such a world, change gets below the skin. After his experience, Catesby Wran is still philosophizing, rationalizing: “[He] knew that mankind had once again spawned a ghost world, and that superstition ruled once more.” It seems that the true reaction to the desolate rooftops, silent commuters, and fire-spewing mills, is the same answer that came to Norman Saylor at the end of Conjure Wife.

“I don’t know. I don’t really know.”

The post 101 Weird Writers #31 — Fritz Leiber appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

This post is part of an ongoing series on 101 weird writers featured in The Weird compendium, the anthology that serves as the inspiration for this site. There is no ranking system; the order is determined by the schedule of posts.

George R.R. Martin (1948 — ) is an American writer of fantasy and science fiction best-known for his Song of Ice and Fire epic fantasy series, which contains its share of weird supernatural elements. According to myth, he began his career selling monster stories to other neighborhood children for pennies. Subsequent work has won many awards, including the Hugo and World Fantasy awards. Despite readers’ strong association of Martin with fantasy fiction, Martin’s devotion to the horror field has been life-long. Classics in this mode from Martin include the truly terrifying “Nightflyers” (1980), the disquieting “The Pear-Shaped Man” (1987), and the stunningly weird SF story reprinted in The Weird, “Sandkings” (1979), winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards. 101 Weird Writers is proud to present this appreciation of Martin and “Sandkings,” written by returning contributor Elwin Cotman.

- Adam Mills, editor of “101 Weird Writers”

The whites, his favorite, had carved a cruel idiot god.

A nation in economic downfall, its great cities turned to cesspools of crime. A humiliating defeat in a far eastern war. A leader exiled in disgrace. Meanwhile, the civil insurrections of recent years have descended into ennui, the hope they once offered turned to complacency. This is the United States in the year 1979, an atmosphere rife for the gritty media that defined the period. George R.R. Martin, though a young writer, proved adept at capturing this zeitgeist.

Before his two-decade sojourn in Westeros, Martin was an author of genre-bending science fiction, set in a universe called the Thousand Worlds. Like his influence Robert E. Howard, he built this universe story by story, every piece adding scope and history. Humanity has reached the stars, bringing along our greed, avarice, fanaticism, and crime. We have also brought our alienation, our inability to relate to others. Many of these stories focus on the struggles to colonize planets where both the inhabitants and landscape are inhospitable. The Dying Earth scenario, reminiscent of Jack Vance, is a recurring theme, most notably in Martin’s novel Dying of the Light. The planets we discover may be wastelands where winter has come, but we colonize them, anyway, if for no other reason than pure hubris. As Martin is writing in the nuclear age, he has the same cynical view towards technology. In “Meathouse Man” and “Bitterblooms,” futuristic tech only exacerbates the characters’ loneliness and isolation.

Then there are stories like “And Seven Times Never Kill Man,” in which the encounter with the indigenous population wreaks havoc on the missionaries who try to convert them. Or the natives of “The Stone City” who won’t let the explorers leave. Or the vampires and windwolves who make life hell in “Bitterblooms.” Or “The Way of Cross and Dragon,” in which the brutality of the Catholic Church cannot sway the indigenous from their spiritual views. As happened in reality, the church has to offer high-ranking positions to aliens who they secretly despise. No matter their intentions, the arrogance of the colonists is always met with resistance from the planets’ original occupants. The era in which Buck Rogers or John Carter could conquer a world with fists and flashing swords was long gone.

Martin’s open-eyed look at colonial failure is representative of post-Vietnam American literature. The war itself was a remnant of French colonialism, inherited by the US from the dying French empire; the long, slow defeat in Vietnam is still a black eye for America. First published in Omni, “Sandkings” deals with the colonial nightmare: that of the colonized rising up to take back their land. It is filled with the dry humor and cynicism that would later define Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series.

“Sandkings” is a tale in the EC Comics tradition, in which a Bad Person suffers a moral comeuppance that is both ironic and fatal. Martin establishes that Simon Kress is a rotten sort by the way he treats his pets, setting the scene with noir-like proficiency:

The shambler Kress simply shooed outside and left to fend for itself; the little monster would gorge on slugs and birds and rock jocks. But the fish tank, stocked with genuine earth piranha, posed a difficulty. Finally Kress just threw a haunch of beef into the huge tank. The piranha could always eat one another if he were detained longer than expected. They’d done it before. It amused him.

Inevitability is the crux of horror. When the protagonist is sympathetic, the reader fears for their safety, knowing the inevitable is coming for them. This is true for many of Martin’s early stories, where the sadness of his characters is magnified by the inevitability of fate. Many stories, but not “Sandkings.” Martin can famously make the vilest characters sympathetic. Not in “Sandkings.” Simon Kress is a villain through and through; the fun is in seeing how much he is punished before the end.

Yet he is also, in his way, as romantic as other Martin protagonists. He yearns for the exciting, the exotic, but wants it in a way that he can control. This is shown when he goes to the city of Asgard. Everything about alien cultures is commoditized: “The big corporate emporiums had impressive long windows, in which rare and costly alien artifacts reposed on felt cushions against dark drapes … Between them were the junk shops—narrow, nasty little places whose display areas were crammed with all manner of off world bric-a-brac.” Colonists can only experience the Other if it is turned into a product, something they can safely put in their homes. Actually respecting these planets they steal resources from is unthinkable.

The arrogant and thoroughly unlikable playboy has a taste for exotic pets. At the establishment of Wo and Shade, he is introduced to the sandkings: insect-like pets who come in colors of red, black, orange, and white. Sandkings wage sophisticated war on each other. They are hive-mind creatures birthed from a queen called the “maw.” They also worship their owner, building his or her image on the towers of their sandcastles. Seizing the opportunity to play god, Kress buys them for his fish tank. Kress is bored. He is petty. He doesn’t think things through.

The world of “Sandkings” is not dying, but desolate. Kress’ existence is an isolated one, taking place between the fortress-like security of his mansion and the starport of Asgard. The land itself is filled with volcanoes and arid deserts, forcing businessmen like Kress to hole up in their mansions. When Kress is finally forced to leave his house, he finds the climate itself as deadly as any monster. Despite living on an alien world, he can only experience the alien as a condescending voyeur/master. Tellingly, the only bipedal aliens who appear in the story are laborers.

Martin uses pulp elements to describe a colonized world, one of them being orientalism. While this would later become a source of criticism towards his writing, here the Asian references are at service to the story. Besides Jala Wo’s vaguely Asian-sounding name, the way Martin describes the emporium brings to mind narratives of Chinese curiosity shops. Jala Wo plays the part of the mysterious proprietor, at turns both sinister and obsequious. Martin populates Asgard with junk shops and brothels, like a pulp version of Shanghai. Only this time, the curios are genuinely alien. The sandkings are aliens among aliens; an off-world beast that there is no information on. They are the colonial nightmare represented as a literal nightmare, an inhuman thing we can’t possibly understand. In many ways, they inhabit stereotypes of native peoples: horde-like, violent, worshipful of their conquerors, perpetually breeding. Martin appropriates the colonial narrative to explode the whole situation in Kress’ face.

In the confines of his home, Kress plays god. The whites flourish, the oranges are the lowly underdogs, and the reds and blacks prove resilient warriors. He starves the sandkings to make them fight. He invites friends to witness the battles. He makes bets, pitting his sandkings against spiders, snakes, and dogs. All the while, they carve Kress’ face into their castles. Martin draws humor from the dry detachment of Kress’ evil. “He knew some of [his guests] would be discomfited and even offended by his sandkings … He customarily considered his parties a failure unless at least one guest walked out in high dudgeon.” There is a critique of religion in his cruelty; humans are incapable of envisioning a god who is unlike us. Kress is as petty and narcissistic as the Old Testament Jehovah. The sandkings’ carvings reflect his degeneracy:

The face on the wall was still his. But it was all wrong, all twisted. His cheeks were bloated and piggish; his smile was a crooked leer. He looked impossibly malevolent.

Uneasy, he moved around the tank to inspect the other castles. They were each a bit different, but ultimately all the same.

The oranges had left out most of the fine detail, but the result still seemed monstrous, crude; a brutal mouth and mindless eyes.

The reds gave him a satanic, twitching sort of smile. His mouth did odd, unlovely things at its corners.

The whites, his favorites, had carved a cruel idiot god.

As a short story writer, Martin is adept at developing his high-concept scenarios, following them through to the end. He lovingly describes the evolution of the sandkings and how they wage war, setting up his Chekhov’s guns. In order to stay entertained, Kress escalates the abuse, and, once freed, the sandkings escalate. Like any failed conqueror, Kress uses violence to maintain control. His “vengeful god” moment, in which he shoots pesticide on the united black and red armies, has a wonderful punchline when the sandkings bite through the hose. The human’s drunken actions grow increasingly illogical, while the enemy’s grow more sophisticated. It is not the viciousness of the sandkings that creates horror, but their gradual increase in strength and power. They get bigger. The iron sword that Kress uses to kill a human only wounds the maw. By the time the white maw is psychically controlling Kress’ emotions, he has been thoroughly outclassed.

There is an element of fun to the way Martin blends science fiction and horror. The futuristic elements come fast and furious, but are never overwhelming. Martin never describes what a “shambler” is, or how “joysticks” work, or how to fly a “skimmer,” or the exact mechanics of a “skinthin” suit. In other stories, he elaborates on his futuristic concepts. “Sandkings” deliberately keeps to the vague science of a Flash Gordon strip, so that the horror is ever at the forefront.

The story is also a parody of the aristocracy in colonized lands. The “friends” who attend Kress’ parties are silly, narcotized bourgeoisie who delight in cruelty for cruelty’s sake. Every word out of their mouths is affected. When Kress starts using them as bait for the white maw, it becomes pure slapstick. For instance, when he kills one of his girlfriends: “She screamed as she tumbled down the stairs. Kress closed the door and began to nail it shut with the boards and air hammer he had left for that purpose.” This hurried construction is straight out of Looney Tunes. The wealthy colonials are vain and stupid, the colonial police are corrupt. The story’s sole semi-heroic act from its sole sympathetic character—Cath m’Lane’s liberation of the sandkings—is even played for laughs. Cath comes across as more histrionic than righteous when she takes vengeance for Kress sending her a video of the sandkings eating a puppy. In the EC Comics tradition, Kress engineers his own downfall, the bumbling murders part of the irony. This fool is as oblivious as the courtiers who Poe fed to the Red Death.

Bringing horror into the home is the greatest breach of social contract. This is especially true when that horror is the Other. The sandkings overrun Kress’ manor, building castles in his wine cellar and swimming pool. The Vietnam parallels become strongest when Kress’ hires hitmen to deal with them, and his lawn turns into a battle with flamethrowers, foxholes, and aerial bombings. All the technology at their disposal cannot defeat the sandkings, who are part of the earth itself. The conquest of the master’s home is quintessential to the colonial nightmare. First, the slaves are freed. Then, the plantation is overrun. Finally, the greatest fear of the colonist: usurpation.

The idea of humanity viewing its own evolutionary obsolescence appears in several Martin stories, such as the human-alien hybrids in “Fast-Friend” that enable space travel. In going to space, we have made ourselves more isolated, more despondent, and ultimately outmoded. Questions of humanity arise. Is evolution a step up, or usurpation by a superior force? Thanks to Kress’ personal intervention, the sandkings evolve, and it is a horrifying prospect for humanity’s future. “One of the sandkings had split open. Four tiny hands covered with pinkish-yellow blood came up out of the gap and began to push the dead skin aside.” They are stronger than humans, and certainly smarter. The revenge of the oranges—with its nightmare-inducing final image—is nothing less than the emergence of a new race.

To the colonizer, the colonized will always be frightening. Even defeated, they will be there, plotting, waiting to take back the land. Martin has famously said that writing is about the heart’s struggle with itself. I would posit that Martin’s work is about the romantic versus the pragmatic; how we maintain our illusions in the face of reality. The illusion of religion. The illusion of magic. The illusion of our own place as in the universe. “Sandkings” is a sad slog, not only towards usurpation, but obsolescence. A vision of our possible future in space, told through these strange pets, their evolution, and the cruel idiot they wreak havoc on.

The post WFR’s 101 Weird Writers #22 — George R.R. Martin appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Elizabeth Hand (1957–) is an American writer of cross-genre fiction who grew up in New York State. She has won the World Fantasy award, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, Nebula Award, and Shirley Jackson Award for novels and short fiction, and she is the Author Guest of Honor for World Fantasy Convention 2012. Hand has long had an interest in outsider artists, and even her mainstream novel Generation Loss (2007) deals with that subject matter. As for her story “The Boy in the Tree,” a unique blend of the supernatural and science fiction reprinted in The Weird, it has its inspiration in real life: ‘I had my own encounter with the numinous in… 1974, when I had an epiphanic vision of a Dionsyian figure I named The Boy in the Tree’. The result is a tale both disturbing and beautiful, given more than capable tribute by our newest 101 Weird Writers contributor, Elwin Cotman.

- Adam Mills, editor of “101 Weird Writers”

***

Our heart stops.

A moment I float beneath her, a starry shadow. Distant canyons where spectral light flashes: neurons firing as I tap into the heart of the poet, the dark core where desire and horror fuse and Morgan turns ever and again to stare out a bus window. The darkness clears. I taste for an instant the metal bile that signals the beginning of therapy, and then I’m gone.

The very structure of the paragraph disorients the reader. They are lost, cast without a net into a scene that could start any work of literary fiction, were it not for the disquieting double consciousness. The recurring themes of Elizabeth Hand’s prolific career are apparent in this opening: the tortured mentality of the artist, the melding of horror and desire, the need for intimacy. This is a poet’s memory, redacted through a voyeur, the stomach-wrenching sickness of the experience equaled by the pleasure of knowing another’s intimate thoughts. This strange (im)balance forms the crux of the narrator Wendy’s existence. In “The Boy in the Tree,” the young artist Hand interweaves themes of art, interpersonal relationships, the Dionysian, and the traumatic.

I was intrigued to find Elizabeth Hand’s work in a weird fiction anthology. The weird functions on the unexplained, yet I find Hand to be one of fantasy’s most grounded writers. Her novels, often contemporary, put such emphasis on the characters’ psychology that, no matter their self-destructive or outwardly destructive actions, the reader always understands what lead them to that point. Horrific? Yes. Sickening? Yes. Inexplicable? Only as far as the human mind is so.

Part of this psychology is desire, the obsessions that excite us. The other part is trauma, the hurts that define us. When desire and trauma meld, art is created, and it is these polar ends that guide Wendy through the story. Wendy is an empathy (or empty): an autistic woman raised in a laboratory, wiped of her own feelings, and trained since the age of three to share the painful memories of others. She can engage with traumas the way someone with feelings could not, with the stated goal being to extract these memories and lead patients toward better lives. It is established early on that the whole affair is funded by the distant, dystopian government, serving some devious purpose. More important, do humans want to lose their traumas, or does the loss of hurt signify a cruel amputation? Far from a benevolent enterprise, Wendy’s world is one of cold scientific logic, over-medication, and casual cruelty.

The act of neurological sharing is physically harmful in ways that Hand describes explicitly. At the onset of the story, Wendy is trying to make the poet Morgan forget a childhood memory of when she saw an infant killed: “Retching, I strive to pull Morgan away, turn her head from the window … A technician pulls the wires from my head while inches away Morgan Yates screams.” The pain is equally great for empath as well as patient, especially since the patient refuses to let go. It is the empath alone who benefits. “I’d siphoned off their sicknesses and night terrors, inhaled phobias like giddy ethers that set me giggling for days afterward.” She enjoys emotion for emotion’s sake, happily recalling “Morgan wailing as she stood at the window.” The pain of others not only gives her meaning, but provides the delight in her detached world.

As in later works like Glimmering and Mortal Love, there is a strong element of the Dionysian, of unchecked desire, equated with the titular Pan-like figure. This stems from Dr. Harrow, the monstrous mother figure who imprisons her empaths in a Garden of Earthly Delights. “Dr. Harrow believed that exposure to sensation might eventually pattern true emotions in her affectively neutered charges.” Thus, they live on the secluded Linden Glory estate, where “we had a minor Botticeli and many Raphaels; the famed pre-Columbian collection; antiquarian coins and shelves of fine and rare Egyptian glass.” It is a claustrophobic Eden. Here they live like the Lost Boys, shrouded in gaudy robes, discussing their ominous business over luncheons at the bistro-like dining area. The extravagant, and sexual, Renaissance paintings are complimented by imagery of the natural/pagan, “the brass door folded into a lattice of leaves and pigeons,” “an arch crowded with gilt satyrs.” What is meant to be a scientific atmosphere is, in fact, a revel culled from Harrow’s disturbed mind. Desire has bled into the very landscape of the lab, and its danger lurks under every page. The Boy in the Tree, representative of desire, first appeared to Harrow when she was a girl:

In the lower branches of the willow tree, the lone willow that feeds upon a hidden spring beside the sloping lawn, there is a boy. His eyes are green and lucent as tourmaline, and silvery moths are drawn to them. His hands clutch the slender willow-wands: strong hands, so pale that I trace the blood beneath, and see the muscles strung like young strong vines. As I watch he bends so that his head dips beneath a branch, new leaves tangling fair hair, and then slowly he uncurls one hand and, smiling, beckons my brother toward him.

The moment in the story where Harrow shares this moment with Wendy is unsettling for the reader; an intrusion of the supernatural into what had been, up until that point, science fiction. The abrupt switch in genre creates an entirely new mystery. In a way, Hand is replicating for the reader what the intrusion felt like for Harrow. Her encounter with the sublime, and the tragedy that results, leads her to replicate emotional violence on children. The woman is sweet-natured to Wendy one moment, and the next “squeezed [my hand] so tightly that I knew she wanted it to hurt.” Hand is interested not in how trauma is averted, but how it is internalized and dealt onto others. In her cruelty, Dr. Harrow seems just as much the adolescent as Wendy.

Wendy’s character is formed by arrested development. The 17-year-old is sexual, but in a pubescent way, touching and giggling with a fellow empath as they share Morgan’s memories. When Morgan comes to accuse Wendy that she “stole her dreams,” the empath can only respond with child-like derision and bullying. Unable to live without the trauma that fed her art, Morgan shoots herself in the eye, leading to one of Hand’s most striking passages:

I knocked my chair over as I stumbled to her, knelt and caught the running blood and her last memory as I bowed to touch my tongue to her severed thoughts.

A window smeared with garnet light that ruddles across my hands. Burning wax in a small blue glass. A laughing dog; then darkness.

This is not the first reference to eating in the story. Hand focuses on the food they eat, on the ways they eat, on the characters’ mouths. This refers back to the suppressed Dionysian impulse, Dr. Harrow and the empaths like maenads in the way they gobble “goujonettes of hake with fennel and an aspic of lamb’s blood,” “a plateful of durians … the round fruit oozing pale custard and a putrescent odor.” Hand lavishly describes the sensation of eating: “I licked melting chocolate from my fingers and began to read …”,  “I picked up the remains of a brioche and nibbled its sugary crust.” As food is equated with the physical, each bite they take brings the empaths one step closer to the sublime.

Sharing memories is also equated with taste: “‘Ahhh–’ Anna nodded suddenly. Her eyes focused and she drew back. ‘Wendy. Good stuff.’ She licked her lips, tongue a little loose from the hit so that she drooled.” Just as pagan imagery creeps its way into the physical design of the complex, those who live there revel in earthly delights. Thus, it only makes sense that, when she sees Morgan’s lifeblood flowing onto the floor, Wendy’s first instinct is to receive her pleasure through her mouth.

Wendy is described by herself and others as a monster, and it certainly seems so as her emotional vampirism turns literal. If that is the case, she is a monster of the Frankenstein variety, fashioned that way by her creator. What makes “The Boy in the Tree” so scary is the clinical way in which Wendy describes her world. Dystopian stories often turn on revelation; a secret revealed or a change in character that leads to rebellion against the oppressive system. That is true for similarly-themed stories such as Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Wendy, however, is entirely aware of her history, and her purpose; she talks blithely of the child test subjects killed to create empath technology, of the patient suicides this technology has caused, and of the pain fellow empaths have dealt her while on drugs. She matter-of-factly describes the science done to her body: “Every evening doctors administer syringes and capsules and tiny tabs that adhere to my temples like burdock pads, releasing chemicals directly into my corpus striatum.” In a world of absolute truth there can be no redemption, only a deeper spiral into emotional violence. It is there, in Dr. Harrow’s tortured psyche, that the Boy in the Tree meets Wendy, and lays his claim.

However, if Wendy is a monster, she is also a canvas. She is a literal blank slate onto which emotions are painted. Hand is a first-class poet, and her lyrical powers are on full display here, reminiscent of Angela Carter in the sensual quality of her descriptions, the way every little part of her world is moving and alive. Her lyricism is most potent in the present-tense scenes where Wendy shares memories.

There is nothing there. The willow trembles, but only the wind shakes the new leaves. From the marsh the ringing chorus rises, swells, bursts as the peepers stir in the saw grass. In the old house yellow light stains an upstairs window and our father’s voice calls out sleepily, then with concern, and finally bellows as he leans from the casement to spot us below. Aidan glances at the house and back again at the willow, and then he turns to me despairingly. Before I can say anything he punches me and runs, weeping, back to the house.

This is a first-person narrative. Hand makes a conscious choice as to when Wendy displays her eloquence. By knowing when to use her lyrical abilities, and when to go for more clinical descriptions, Hand gives the impression of Wendy as someone who gains artistry by osmosis. She cannot bear to look at her own reflection in the mirror surface of a robot, for fear of seeing how blank she truly is, but in experiencing others’ memories she senses the full breadth of the world, and signifies her feelings through poetic language. Thus, a question: what happens when the canvas takes its own initiative? When the blank slate, too, wants to experience the sublime instead of mirroring it? The results are certainly reminiscent of Shelley.

Ultimately, what Wendy desires is to feel. Sensation is ever-present in the story, from “the cold sting of electrolytic fluid where she strung the wire” to “the fumes that strip the skin from my gums.” It is important to note that, when she hooks up with others, Wendy as an individual consciousness disappears, erased by the more dominant psyche. For her, empathy equals erasure of the self; her desire for touch so strong that she needs to be annihilated by another. This can be directly correlated to the “touch” of Dr. Harrow who, when faced with the possibility of the military shutting down her project, forgets all decorum and seeks out Wendy for her own personal therapy. Wendy is forced to become canvas, sharer, and therapeutic voyeur to her most painful memory. It is ironic that the search for nothingness leads the empath to the sublime. There is a military threat in the story, a typically apocalyptic narrative device by Hand, but the most present dangers are from within. “The Boy in the Tree” is a horror story, unique in that it is the characters who guide, shape, and create its horror. Within one short story, Hand explores the intersections between art and trauma, trauma and empathy, empathy and parasitism.

And I still have not delved into the Boy himself, the Peter Pan whose primal presence infuses the tale. Let me just say that his role in the story deals deeply with transgression, and the Other, and the dangers of desire. He jumps from Dr. Harrow to Wendy, obsessing the young empath’s mind, and can do so because his urges are present in all of us. His history with Harrow illustrates the fickleness and entropy of nature, and how human beings handle these realities. He is the insertion of desire into a world where (unlike many dystopian stories) it is not suppressed, but disguised.

Themes of trauma reoccur in Hand’s books. The rape victim in her story “Cleopatra Brimstone” kills men through turning them into butterflies. The internalizing of trauma is also true for Cass Neary, the aging and self-destructive heroine of Generation Loss and Available Dark. The tragic relationship in Illyria reflects that of Harrow and her brother Aidan. Secluded communities and their dissolutions are explored in Mars Hill and Glimmering, the pagan is expounded on in Waking the Moon, the nature of the artist in Radiant Days. The idea of metaphysical extraction is reflected in her DC Comics superheroine Anima, who gains powers by siphoning energy from the elderly.

Part of Hand’s mastery is her willingness to delve into her obsessions. When faced with the dark places, she enters them, torch held aloft. “The Boy in the Tree” is a glimpse into many of the themes that would come to define her career.

Aniline lightning. Faculae stream from syn­apse to synapse as ptyalin floods my mouth and my head rears instinctively to smash against the headboard. She has not tied me down. The hyo­scine lashes into me like a fiery bile and I open my mouth to scream. In the instant before it begins I taste something faint and caustic in the back of her throat and struggle to free myself from her arms. Then I’m gone.

The post WFR’s 101 Weird Writers: #15 — Elizabeth Hand appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

A wide shot of four skyscrapers, pitch-black silhouettes. The camera pans back, revealing the clouds that cling insignificantly to the buildings, while below the city spreads out endlessly. It is daytime. It will be night soon enough. Over the ambient soundtrack, a voice narrates the precarious situation. Our world coexists with another: the Black World. For centuries, a truce has existed between the two, but now the terms must be renegotiated. There are those entrusted to protect the human race from Black World radicals and the war they desire.

Cut to a nighttime street. Cars locked bumper to bumper, honking. An underground after-hours club. An average-looking Japanese salaryman is having a scotch at the neon-lit bar, conversing with a suave bartender. Cut to a restroom: closeup on a woman’s mouth, a hand with lilac nails sharpened to points filling in her lips with red lipstick. Before the mirror she stands, pearl-white skin, her black bangs forming a straight ridge above her eyebrows. Her too-perfect hair falls straight down on either side of her angel’s face. She smiles at her reflection, puts the lipstick in her purse and leaves the ladies room. The camera pans down to a hand on the floor, in the front of the shot, the fingers clutched and rigid. The woman approaches the man. This is a quiet bar, on a slow night. They are the only customers. Small talk is exchanged before they leave together.

Last year, I was a panelist at the inaugural FOGcon (Friends of Genre) convention in San Francisco. The theme was “The City in Science Fiction and Fantasy.” As an urban fantasy writer, I loved this. For many years, the prototypical fantasy setting was the pastoral, medieval Europe pastiche. However, there were always writers who bucked the trend, looking for magic in the crowding, filth and stagnation of the urban. Fritz Lieber is a notable old master. Nowadays, the city is seen as an ever more viable location for weird fiction. I don’t know what it’s like to be a squire riding around Europe on a horse, but I know what it’s like to be within the majesty and mystery of New York City or San Francisco.

It’s a blast to write supernatural scenes that take place in apartment complexes and abandoned warehouses, neglected playgrounds and parking lots and highway underpasses. I grew up in an industrial city, so to me these landscapes are beautiful. When it comes to appreciating the city’s place in dark fantasy, one director had as much of an impact on me as any writer: Yoshiaki Kawajiri, creator of Wicked City, Ninja Scroll and Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust.

From the early days of his career, Kawajiri shared an almost symbiotic relationship with weird author Hideyuki Kikuchi, creator of Vampire Hunter D and one of the most unabashed pulp writers working today. Kikuchi’s novels are typically post-apocalyptic, filled to the brim with chimerical monsters and spaghetti western plots. Kawajiri’s second adaptation of a Kikuchi novel was Demon City Shinjuku (1988), in which the ruins of the Shinjuku district are the setting for an epic battle against the forces of Hell. Armed with a bokken sword, the young hero descends into this dungeon to defeat an evil sorcerer and complete the monomyth. Naturally, as a child watching it (courtesy of Blockbuster) I loved the fight scenes. What really grabbed me, though, was the detail of the city itself. With a photographic eye, Kawajiri transfers Shinjuku locales straight to the film, only now they are the desiccated corpses of what they once were.

This all fits with his dark vision. Cities are man’s greatest shrine to himself. Instead of living within nature like other animals, we destroy nature and replace it with edifices of our own construction. They are the ultimate statement of our dominion. So what happens when these places are wrested from us by creatures out of nightmare—the man-crab who the heroes battle on the subway, or the serpent-woman in the bar—then molded to reflect the hells they come from, and we’re forced to hide like rats in the sewers?

Simply looking at Kawajiri’s titles let’s you know his obsession: WICKED CITY. DEMON CITY. CYBER CITY. His directorial flourishes are instantly recognizable: breathtaking fight scenes, graphic sex, monsters, body horror, apocalyptic imagery, and a focus on urban areas. His character designs are distinctive: realistically rendered human characters, by anime standards, with square-jawed men, porcelain-skinned women, gangly villains with aquiline features and widow’s peaks, and brilliantly detailed monsters. These are demons of the medieval variety; they represent the forbidden feelings of lust as well as avarice. In olden times, witches were thought to gain powers by sleeping with Satan, and this association of black magic with sex has lasted through the ages.

The director does nothing by half measures. Every single setting in his films is gorgeous, be it gorgeously ornate, gorgeously futuristic, or gorgeously decayed. What his movies lack in plot they make up for in some of the most fully rendered cityscapes put to animation. His cities are monstrous things, black buildings reaching ever higher, streets that seem to descend into the earth’s bowels, the powerful observing their domain from Towers of Babel. Demon City Shinjuku is one of those movies where I can turn the sound off and just enjoy the power of the visuals.

Kawajiri directed three movies based on Kikuchi’s books. He also wrote the screenplay for A Wind Named Amnesia (1990), another Kikuchi adaptation, a science fiction road trip where the heroes battle demons genetic, cybernetic and, scariest of all, human. The mix of action, science fiction and the dark supernatural in Shinjuku and Amnesia set a precedent for Kawajiri’s later work.

Kawajiri’s heyday was the ‘80s and early ‘90s, when anime was hyper-violent. I don’t think I’m being nostalgic when I say that, no, they really don’t make them like this anymore. Sometime in the last fifteen years the anime industry toned down the gore significantly. Kawajiri is working within the same body horror genre as his contemporaries John Carpenter and David Cronenberg. Because he is making cartoons, he can take his exploration of the grotesque to lengths they could not. Kawajiri is interested in the way the body can be mutilated, infected and destroyed. Humans get eviscerated in all kinds of ways, but the greatest danger is from within. The idea of the body turning against itself is only appropriate for films in which civilization is attacked from the inside. In keeping with the subject matter, Kawajiri’s color palette is dark, with light and shadow combining to eerie effect. The use of music and diegetic sound gives a feeling of creeping dread. These are movies made by someone who understands horror.

In his films, the city is usually a staging ground for good versus ultimate evil. There are casualties. Tokyo often takes a beating. He is interested in the destroyed city, the megalopolis turned anarchic. The dead city where most of the population are corpses, turned into a playground for devils. At the heart of his films is the message that there are other things out there. They’re older than us, stronger than us, and they’re ready to strike.

Take for example, his 1987 adaptation of Kikuchi’s Wicked City, the film whose intro I described in the first paragraph. It takes place in Tokyo in the 1980s, and focuses on a member of the Black Guard, a Men in Black-style organization fighting to maintain the truce with the Black World. He and a Black World woman are charged with guarding an ambassador from otherworldly terrorists. In true anime fashion, the ambassador is a lecherous old dwarf. This film was one of my earliest introductions to “hidden society” fantasy. You don’t have to go through a magic portal to find otherworldly things. They’re hidden in plain sight, in that girl giving you the eye at the bar, or that perfectly normal-looking hotel you drive by. Magic is in the city, and it’s dangerous. Those who fight black magic also live in the city, their mystic temples situated amid the modern buildings.

I’ll always remember the scene in Wicked City where the heroes are driving through a tunnel, and strings of giant spider web appear across the windshield. Before they know it, they are tangled in a giant web in the middle of the tunnel. Or the battle on the airport runway, when airplanes taking off and runway lights glowing through the fog accentuate the kung fu and gunshots. Every train yard, parking garage and construction site can be the scene for a Sergeo Leone-meets-Dario Argento showdown. There is a playfulness to this approach. Kawajiri elevates his pulp material through the integration of setting.

Wicked City is also a prime example of his erotic excesses. His most explicitly pornographic film, its demonic bestiary includes a spider-woman with a fanged pelvis, a prostitute whose body melts to entrap the dwarf ambassador, and, for the operatic climax, a mesmerist whose whole torso turns into a pulsing vagina. These demons are portrayed as powerful villains who constantly get the drop on the heroes, and their particular ways of entrapment say as much about visions of sex at the start of the AIDS era as does Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction. Also, for all the molestation she is put through, the female protagonist Maki is a respectable fighter and integral to the plot. The hentai elements are less excusable in his other films (in Ninja Scroll they’re downright distracting) but it’s something that has to be mentioned when talking of his oeuvre, the same as with Cronenberg or Miike.

In other hands, Cyber City Oedo 808 (1990) would be a forgettable shoot-‘em-up. Instead, it’s a masterful cyberpunk actioner, thanks to the beautiful animation and Kawajiri’s well-defined sense of place. The premise of the OVA is tense enough: three convicted felons are fitted with exploding collars, and are employed to hunt down cyber-criminals in exchange for years off their life sentences. If they fail, the collar blows up. This OVA perfectly demonstrates the genre-bending nature of Kawajiri’s work. In the second episode, one of the heroes battles a military cyborg made from the remains of a dead man, but the way it is filmed the robot might as well be a demon from Hell. In Kawajiri’s hands, the skyscraper becomes a tower where a knight goes one-on-one with a dragon in a blood-drenched fight to the death.

The “scientific demon” motif occurs throughout the series; the villain in the first episode is a dead architect whose conscious inhabits a skyscraper’s computer mainframe, a nightmare vision of a decaying corpse surrounded by electrical wires. The villain in the third installment is a biotech-based vampire. This is Lovecraftian scifi. Kawajiri loves molding the accoutrements of the contemporary and/or futuristic to fit his horrific visions. I can recall no less than four movies in which the despotic overlord rules the city from the largest building, looking down like Sauron over his domain. Thus, the natural hierarchy of the city, in which the powerful occupy shining towers, is taken to mythic levels. Cyber City Oedo 808 is unfortunately only three episodes, but Kawajiri packs enough mystery and action into them for a whole series.

The urban landscape doesn’t mean there isn’t a larger world in his films. Ninja Scroll starts with the hero roaming through feudal Japan. Cyber City Oedo 808 starts in space. However, the heroes inevitably end up in urban areas, fighting Boschian cyborgs and yokai in abandoned Shinto shrines and mountainous skyscrapers. The city becomes a version of the labyrinth; if these desperate characters ever want to leave, they have to battle their way out. Kawajiri bucks this trend in Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, which is a quest story, the titular hunter tracking his quarry across a post-apocalyptic landscape. In Kawajiri’s earlier movies, the city has been invaded, occupied, stricken with plague, and reduced to ruin. In Bloodlust, it’s wiped out entirely. The freaks who the Black Guard fought against have taken over.

His arguable best movies are Ninja Scroll and Bloodlust. One is mythic steampunk in the Tokugawa era, the other is post-apocalyptic. It’s interesting that the definitive director of urban fantasy anime had to move away from the contemporary to do his best work. His movies are daring, horrifying, and, to this day, he is the only person on Earth to direct a good Highlander sequel. We’re lucky to have him.

The post Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Urban Hells appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.