Rynosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) was a Japanese writer active in Taish period Japan and often called the ‘father of the Japanese short story’. His name loosely translates to ‘Son of Dragon’, as he was born in the year, month, day, and hour of the Dragon. He published his first short story, ‘Rashmon’, while still a student and wrote over one hundred more in his lifetime. Depression and hallucinations hounded him and he eventually committed suicide at the age of thirty-five. His dying words in his will claimed he felt a ‘vague uneasiness’. The story analyzed here, ‘The Hell Screen’ (1918), is a masterpiece, with the ‘weird’ always ever a glimmer in the background.

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When Sartre wrote “Hell is other people”, he echoed a sentiment expressed in 1927 by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa that “Life is more hellish than hell itself”^[i]. You’d be forgiven for thinking the life of the Japanese author resembled the pages of a gothic novel. His mother, declared insane in the year of his birth, lived the rest of her life hidden upstairs. Bullied and sickly at school, he dedicated his short life to literature, living through periods of great social upheaval in Japan. His adult life was marked with turmoil, including house fires, failed suicide pacts and affairs. In 1927, following ongoing mental health issues, he committed suicide by barbiturate overdose, falling “asleep while reading the Bible.”^[ii]

Yet to reduce Akutagawa’s life to the comparison of a literary genre is to do a disservice to his contributions to literature, both in Japan and abroad. His writing explores the liminal spaces, where the supernatural creeps into our world, a world where the devil transforms into a flying book, dragons appear from lakes, and a man awakes from the afterlife with his legs replaced by those of a horse. ‘Hell Screen’, published in 1918, epitomises this encroachment of the underworld into art, and offers us a heartbreaking metaphor for Akutagawa’s own life.

‘Hell Screen’ follows the classic horror narrative where moral degeneracy leads to punishment. In this case, the artist Yoshihide paints blasphemous images of the gods. His virtuous and beautiful daughter Yuzuki is the only person he loves. When Yoshihide is commissioned to paint a folding screen depicting the eight Buddhist hells for the Lord of Horikawa, Yuzuki is quickly offered a role in court; while Akutagawa leaves her story to subtext, her loss of virtue and fall from favour screams between the lines.

Told from the perspective of a servant who is quick to uphold the character of his master, Akutagawa contrasts this obsequious voice with the actions of the Lord. The Lord of Horikawa is acknowledged by the servant as a man with a “kind and generous heart”, yet when a bridge was damaged, “he offered his favourite boy attendants as human pillars to propitiate the gods.” This is listed alongside reprimanding spectres, walking among ghosts and a man giving thanks for being trampled by the Lordship’s ox. It’s written in such a praising manner that we can easily skip past the horror of the Lord of Horikawa. Who is this man who commands spirits and offers human sacrifices? Does not human life mean anything to him?

It immediately sets up the biased narrator, who praises his master, completely ignorant of his character failings. Only one other novel has captured this same repressed voice of servitude, which makes excuses for the master’s terrible transgressions: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. When the servant witnesses the sexual-assault and possible rape of Yuzuki by the Lord of Horikawa, he claims “On account of my inborn stupidity, I only understand what shines as clear as daylight under my nose,” and proceeds to sanction his master’s terrible crime by ushering the Yuzuki back to her room. In Akutagawa’s consistency with voice, he never explicitly outlines the crimes of the Lord of Horikawa; there is the untied nightgown, her unwillingness to name her attacker, and the receding footsteps of a man into the dark. Later, the Lord of Horikawa refers to her as a sinful woman, yet how would he know her sin unless he was a participant in it?

While his young daughter lives at the palace, Yoshihide continues his work on the hell screen. He is not convinced of the evidence of the spiritual world; he’s a cynic. When a woman delivers a horrifying message during spirit possession, he merely uses her as model for his paintings.

“Yoshihide did inconceivably sacrilegious things. In picturing the goddess Kichijoten, he copied the face of an abject courtesan, and in picturing the King of the Magical Science Fudo, the god that destroys all demons, he copied a thief’s figure…”

It is Yoshihide’s rule that he can only paint what he has seen. The supernatural encroaches on his waking and sleeping in the form of fox spirits and infernal torturers. Yoshihide abuses his apprentices for the sake of authentic illustrations; he chains one up until his circulation is cut off and “his thick body, face, chest and limbs had become red and then livid in no time.”  Another apprentice is mauled by a horned owl as Yoshihide sketches the scene. On discovering rotting corpses in the street, the artist sits down and paints them.

Yet these horrors are not enough for Yoshihide. There is one thing missing from the screen: a woman in a flaming carriage falling from a bridge. While you can see the end coming, it is in the intense detail of Yuzuki’s death as the Lord of Horikawa and Yoshihide watch on, that Akutagawa demonstrates his mastery of the short story. Details such as the “the length of her black hair intertwined with flames as she tried to shake off the spreading fire, the beauty of the cherry-blossom-coloured Chinese dress… among the red flames sprinkled with golden dust appeared the girl, biting on her gag and writhing to the point of breaking the chain that bounded her.” Akutagawa is willing to linger on this moment, to see it from every perspective. The reader feels the heat of the flames, Yuzuki’s cries and the shrieks of the monkey as they are both burned alive.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a horror story without a moral. In witnessing the final hell screen, the great priest expresses “Whatever talent they may have in any branch of learning or art, those who did not live according to the five virtues of Confucius, benevolence, justice, courtesy, wisdom and fidelity, are to be condemned to Hell.”

But Akutagawa’s messages are subtler; Yuzuki, the embodiment of purity, lives hell on earth. By the end of the story, the Lord of Horikawa sits on his throne, admiring the horror of his hell screen, unpunished by the evil he has commissioned. The servant still refuses to believe the rumours that the murder of Yuzuki was “vengeance for the Lord’s thwarted love,” despite witnessing first-hand evidence to the contrary. Having survived his daughter, Yoshihide hangs himself and is left to an unknown grave, covered in moss. Therein lies the horror; neither the pure can escape hell on earth, or the evil, hell in death.

It would be amiss not to compare ‘Hell Screen’ to Akutagawa’s later work, ‘Spinning Gears’, which offers insight into his own perspective of the story, and the impact of his mental health in writing ‘Hell Screen’. The narrator laments that “Politics, business, art, science: all seemed just a mottled layer of enamel covering over this life in all its horror.”^[iii]

Later he reflects that despite peaceful places of refuge, there is no escaping the real world. “I knew all too well what sins and tragedies had occurred here in the space of one short year. The doctor bent on murdering his patients by slow poisoning, the old woman who set fire to the home of her adopted son and his wife, the lawyer who tried to snatch his younger sister’s assets: for me, seeing the homes of such people was always like seeing hell in human life itself.”^[iv] His insistence that he has witnessed hell on earth infiltrated his stories; there are few with his ability to capture the borderline spaces where the supernatural infringes on everyday life. In knowing his struggles with mental health and suicide, his stories embody a melancholy sadness at such a tragic loss of life.

Haruki Murakami writes “What Akutagawa chose to do was to cloak human shame in the artifice of storytelling and a sophisticated stylistic technique: this was how he lived and this was how he wrote.”^[v] His influence on literature and art is not to be understated. He is most well known in the west through Akira Kurasawa’s film Rashômon, based on Akutagawa’s short story ‘In A Bamboo Grove’. The Akutagawa Prize, established in his honour in 1935, is one of Japan’s premier literary awards. Aside from this, his short stories are some of the most accomplished works of brevity, surgical detail and subtext in the 20^th Century.

In fiction, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa stands as Virgil, our guide to hell. Only this time the gates open inwards to our lives.

____

[i] p. 219 Ryūnosuke, A., 2006. Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories. (J. Rubin Trans.) London: Penguin Classics.

[ii] Ibid. p. xvi

[iii] Ibid. p. 216

[iv] Ibid. p. 233

[v] Ibid. p. xxx

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In The Last Days of New Paris, failed surrealist revolutionary Thibaut wanders a shelled out 50s Paris filled with “devils and fascists and errant art.” After the explosion of the S‑Bomb, the city becomes an enclosed warzone where Nazis fight to harness the power of surreal manifestations to win the war. Art becomes reality: women riding sentient bicycles, exquisite corpses come to life from illustrations, Arcimboldo’s fruit faces stalk marketplaces, demons are raised from hell by Nazis. Thibaut rescues Sam, a photojournalist, from pursuit by Nazis and trained wolf-tables (yep you read that right, these wolf-tables are based off artwork by Victor Brauner. It’s a China Miéville novella, what did you expect?).

At heart, The Last Days of New Paris is an exercise in Situationist dérive, drawn from the origins of flâneurie. Indeed, Miéville has taken the metaphysical metaphors of Baudelaire and planted them firmly in surreality, with demons raised through the gates of hell prowling the streets of Paris. Lauren Elkin’s recent work Flâneuse: Women Walk The City makes an excellent companion piece to Miéville’s novella. She writes “A more politically engaged descendant of Baudelairean flâneurie reigns today, one that operates by dérive, or ‘drift’. A mid-twentieth-century group of radical poets and artists calling themselves Situationists invented ‘psychogeography’, in which strolling becomes drifting and detached observation becomes a critique of post-war urbanism.” Paris becomes a psychogeography of surrealism; Thibaut and his revolutionary group, Main à Plume, are the precursors to the Situationist movement, where avant-garde art collides with Marxist politics.

He writes of Thibaut’s wanderings: “And if you go on walking like that and stay safe and keep out of sight then you will come some time to be alone again and there will be a stretch of window and bricks untouched by war and you could, for an instant, believe yourself back in old Paris.” Later, the great fear is that Paris will become an “empty city of charming houses.” Miéville takes on the role of post-war psychogeographer by placing himself firmly in the novella as the vehicle for Thibaut’s story.

Here is a novella ticking the boxes of expectation of Miéville’s work. There are monsters, cities, politics and supernatural flâneurs. There are concepts the reader will recognise from his collection Three Moments of an Explosion: mystic playing cards, sinister art and the trade in illicit magical artefacts. Like many of Miéville’s protagonists, Thibaut is an observer. He watches history unfold and ruminates on that which has already unfolded. At times, it appears the story belongs to Sam who is most active in the fight against the Nazis; Thibaut seems impotent and frozen by his past, ever the drifter surviving in Paris.

Since Italian photographer Felix Beato documented the Second Opium War in the late 1850s, photojournalism has played a significant part in the documentation of war. Photojournalist Sam takes on the role of documentarian, and later in the novella, so too does the author and reader as witness. Like surrealist art made of found objects, The Last Days of New Paris is both a book left to be found within and without the novel.

However, it is in the depictions of Sam where the worldbuilding becomes flimsy. While it’s clear from the outset her camera is not usual, nor is her appearance at the edge of the wood while being pursued by wolf-tables and Nazis, it was jarring that the camera and its use would be portrayed so inaccurately for the period when he insists that it is a real camera. “That camera is a camera. But it has other uses too,” says Sam. Most jarringly for photographers, Miéville writes: “She hands him one [film canister] and nods permission. Thibaut unspools it a little, lets a streetlamp outside the window shine through it. He squints at the tiny images. Occluded streets in negative.”

But film and negatives are not the same thing. Did he mean negatives? For to pull a roll of film from a canister and expose it to light would destroy it. Film becomes a negative once it has been developed. And what sort of camera was she using? If this is a continuation of World War II, a lot of photojournalists were using the bulky Speed Graphic, which did not take rolls of film. Or is she using a Contax II, like Robert Capa?

It wouldn’t matter if the world was less detailed, but Miéville’s work is consistently detailed with depictions of surrealist art, so much so that there’s even an appendix. It seems that the practicalities of creating art have been ignored. And when the images Thibaut sees from her “film” affect his actions, it becomes a major issue for me when the plot device is incorrect, no matter how magical the lantern.

However, it’s hard not to admire a writer who can use the words sastrugi, glossolalic and pleromic correctly in a sentence. There’s some beautiful language amidst the destruction of Paris, most notable the description of the epicentre of the S‑Blast at Les Deux Magots. “A whimper, a shriek, the burr of insects’ wings, the tolling of a bell, a city-wide outrushing, an explosion, a sweep and stream and a nova, megaton imaginary, of random and of dreams.”

While critics may complain about the absurd ending, it’s also a nod to the pulp influence in Miéville’s work. The Nazis mostly take on the role of cannon fodder; when named they are in anonymous groups, ready to be destroyed by an exquisite corpse, a surrealist gun and a magic camera. This is referenced later in the appendix as the anti-Nazi propaganda campaign ‘The Soldier with No Name’ by Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe. I’ve written previously for WFR about the desire to attribute Nazi behaviour to supernatural occurrences; it works for me in this book because it ties into their search for superweapons, regardless of how real or unreal they might have been.

There’s a high level of detail in the references to surrealist art, particularly in the use of the Exquisite Corpse as both a vehicle for creation and a monster itself. Exquisite Corpse, a game played by surrealists who drew elements of an image then passed the folded paper on for someone else to add to it, becomes an integral part of the New Paris story when these papers come to life. In fact, there are so many complex ideas brought up by the relationship between these images and the city, that this review can hardly do them justice.

Following the chains of influence, from surrealism to the 70s, with its pulpy-arty mélange The Last Days of New Paris is also reminiscent of comics magazine Métal Hurlant. Although drawn from surrealist imagery, the floating Eiffel Tower suggests another floating pyramid over Paris, that of Enki Bilal’s Nikopol Trilogy. Apocalypses are not new to Paris, nor to the bande dessinée. The surreal and supernatural is a reaction to the reality of the destruction of war; especially visible in Japanese manga Akira. With its rich visuals of surrealism, I wonder if The Last Days of New Paris would have worked better as a graphic novel.

But our time in New Paris feels too short. Names are listed, dropped and left in a roll call of city places. If you haven’t been to Paris, you may find yourself wondering about the Bois de Bologne and the Prison du Cherche-Midi. The unnecessary author intervention at the end serves to emphasise the continuing theme of bearing witness, even in fiction. I would have rather lingered a little longer in the surreal city, like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, where an unhinged survivor recollects the events which led up to his entrapment in a decaying world.

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William Sansom (1912–1976) was an idiosyncratic English writer known for applying a surrealist’s sensibilities to the weird tale. Obscure today, Sansom enjoyed a brief period of acclaim in the 1940s and 1950s, when the fresh originality of his stories earned him a place in leading British literary magazines. A firefighter in London during the Blitz of World War II, Sansom managed to transform his experiences in a way that garnered him comparisons to Franz Kafka. Sophisticated yet passionate, his stories reward repeated readings. ‘The Long Sheet’ (1944) was published before the English translation of Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’ and yet in their use of weird ritual to illuminate society the two stories share some similarities.

— David Davis, editor of 101 Weird Writers

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“Have you ever wrung dry a wet cloth?” begins William Sansom’s “The Long Sheet”. “The muscle of your arm swells like an egg – yet the wet drop remains a pinhead!”

Well have you? Have you truly felt the pain of drying clothes by hand, so that not a drop remains? Only then can you begin to feel the dizzying pain, the torture and absurdity of the “captives at Device Z”.

With an innocuous beginning reminiscent of 1940s advertising copy, an anonymous narrator describes the task of wringing a long wet sheet in a humid room. Once the captives have wrung the sheet dry, they are assured of their freedom. Divided into four groups, each takes a different approach to their work. What begins as a simple exercise becomes a nightmare of human demoralization.

The wardens make the process as difficult as possible, pumping hot steam into the rooms to moisten the sheets. “Daily they encouraged the efforts of the captives with promises of release; but daily they turned on the steam cocks.” This Sisyphean effort bears comparison to Albert Camus’ classic work of absurdist philosophy: The Myth of Sisyphus.

Camus’ philosophy is integral to readings of the weird, particularly work from the first half of the 20^th century. Many influential works delight in the absurd, with Kafka’s work inspiring part of Camus’ philosophical treatise. While The Myth of Sisyphus wasn’t published in English until 1955, absurdist philosophy emerged into English speaking culture during the 40s and 50s. The period during and directly proceeding World War II marked a shift in philosophy; a denial of God and search for meaning in a world marked by the crimes of a totalitarian state.

Although “The Long Sheet” was published in 1944, it is not improbable that Sansom could have read Camus in the 1942 French edition, as Sansom worked in Germany and also wrote a biography of Proust. Despite authoring six novels, and more short stories, little biographical detail is available on Sansom.

Throughout “The Long Sheet”, Sansom addresses the same question that Camus poses at the start of Sisyphus: suicide. Camus’ posed that “judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy,” and it is this question at the heart of “The Long Sheet”. What defines a quality life? Is it action, or the attitude towards those actions? And why do these captives not simply cut the sheet into strips and hang themselves?

Like a documentarian observing his subjects from on high, Sansom objectively reports the living conditions at Device Z, noting the number of people in each cubicle, their genders and their attitudes towards work. Claustrophobia perpetuates the story, from his detailed description of the wringing chambers, six-foot wide, six-foot tall and a hundred-feet long, divided into four metal cubicles.

Room Three contains “those who sought outside”, two married couples and a young Serbian grocer. “That the task was unproductive did not worry them,” as they were used to regular working hours. “It was as if they commuted regularly from their suburbia (the steel sleeping corner) to the office (the long sheet).”

Problems arise in Room Three when the workers wish to take an afternoon off for good behavior, allowing the sheet to get wet. They allow routine to “predominate the work itself”, not putting enough effort into the wringing of the sheet.

Room Two, “those who sought in and out and around”, contains five individualistic men, who set about their work with individual mindsets. There is the excuse maker, the quiet worker, the shortcut taker, the fumbler and the pervert. Their inability to work together means that the sheet will never be wrung dry.

Room Four contains “those who never sought at all”, with seven people including a twelve-year-old child. These people languish and refuse to work. Sansom writes that:

“Perhaps the real tragedy of these dispirited people was not their own misfortune, to which they had grown accustomed, but that their slackness had its effect on those whose ambitions were pure and strong.”

Room One, full of “those who sought inside”, represent the pursuit of philosophical freedom through manual work. The successful group strives for seven years to wring the sheet dry. Once dry, the sheet is drenched with water again. When asking for their freedom, the omnipotent warden replies:

“You already have it… Freedom lies in an attitude of spirit. There is no other freedom.”

This line is most emblematic of the absurd, where to rebel against futility creates meaning. Camus writes:

“Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences which are my revolt, my freedom and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death – and I refuse suicide.”^[i]

There is the revolt, the decision to wring the sheet in spite of the alternatives; the passion, the effort with which they approach the task; and freedom, the final gift of obtaining consciousness through futile labor.

In discussing Sisyphus, Camus makes a point equally applicable to “The Long Sheet”. The gods, or in this case the wardens, believe that there is “no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”^[ii] The tragedy comes from the consciousness of the hero. “If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?”^[iii] The great trial is not the first wringing of the sheet, but the second and the third, to pursue the end goal despite the futile conclusion.

Comparisons have also been made between “The Long Sheet” and Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony. While the stories deal with similar themes of dehumanization and torture, Kafka’s story is very different in approach. Kafka takes a ground view perspective, with the Traveler observing and interacting in the situation. Sansom’s story is perpetually removed from the subjects, so far that they do not have names. Kafka’s story is meandering and overly long, with terse monologues from the Officer. Sansom’s story is short and swift, expertly edited and executed. While Sansom’s stories have not held the same longevity as Kafka’s, some of Sansom’s short stories and books have been re-released through Faber Finds.

While Camus’ concluded “the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart,”^[iv] there is no such hope at the end of “The Long Sheet”. Although the reader affiliates with the pain of the captives, Sansom’s cold voice never wavers, simply leaving us with the cutting remarks of the wardens, “You already have [freedom]”. Only one sentence remains. “And the skylights silently closed.”

_____

[i] Camus, A. (2005). The Myth of Sisyphus. London: Penguin. p. 62

[ii] Ibid. p. 115

[iii] Ibid. p. 117

[iv] Ibid. p. 119

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With an author line up featuring Karen Joy Fowler, Caitlin R. Kiernan and Karin Tidbeck, you’re in fairly safe territory (or should I say, weird waters) in expecting high-quality stories from the collection. From the opening imagery of floating purple flowers made of bleached human heads in Nathan Ballingrud’s The Atlas of Hell, this collection doesn’t disappoint.

Where weird fiction can often fall down is in treading the line between maintaining an undisclosed threat and slipping into vagueness, so the stories that stand out have a strong sense of voice and the confidence to deliver it. Stories such as Carmen Maria Machado’s sinister The Husband Stitch, which caused me to visibly shiver in my seat when the stitch in question is revealed. Or Hidden in the Alphabet, where Charles Wilkinson skillfully unpicks the strands of family relationships and memory, leaving just enough for the reader to break down the events that came before.

While the quality of stories in this collection is high, sometimes there is that one rare story that stands above the others. In this collection it is Julio Cortázar’s tale of mancuspia farmers Headache, translated by Michael Cisco. By bombarding the reader with vertiginous sensations, Cortázar produces the kind of sophisticated storytelling where the sensation experienced by the reader reflects that of the narrator. Headache perfectly captures that sideswiping feeling weird fiction should deliver, the glancing back saying “What was that?” as something shoots past faster than vision.

Also of note is Amanda C. Davis’ masterclass in flash fiction, Loving Armageddon, where a husband has a hand grenade for a heart. While the heart replaced with a mechanical item is not a new concept, her execution is succinct and demonstrates depth in only a few pages.

From other stories, it is a single line that will haunt me. “This is the blue hour. The ravenous night.” Siobhan Carroll, Wendigo Nights. “Someone once told me dust has no religion.” Usman T. Malik, Resurrection Points. Or the original imagery in Isabel Yap’s A Cup of Salt Tears, of throwing an engraved cucumber into the river to prevent the Kappa from stealing you away.

In examining the collection as a whole, a number of themes stand out: women young and not-so-young manipulated by sinister forces (Nanny Anne and the Christmas Story, The Girls Who Go Below, Bus Fare, A Cup of Salt Tears); amputation and limbic damage (The Husband Stitch, So Sharp the Blood Must Flow, A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide); and monsters, always monsters.

Each year a new editor takes on the challenge of Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and this year’s best table of contents has been released here. Michael Kelly is the series editor, who read a whopping 2,800 submissions for this book alone. The wider value of these ongoing collections is gathering an understanding of movements in the contemporary weird, so that in future years they can be compared. It’s always wonderful finding a collection twenty years later, and recognizing the achievements of those names in the years since.

Here’s to many more weird years.

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Perchance to Dream is a new collection by Penguin Classics of Charles Beaumont’s work. Veering between horror, science fiction, dark fantasy and the weird, Beaumont’s stories examine grand themes of death, humanity and sex, all with a sinister and malevolent echo through 1950s America.

With an introduction by Ray Bradbury and afterward by William Shatner, it’s clear that Charles Beaumont bounded enthusiastically towards fiction, taking small ideas and spinning them into stories with sharp endings. He was a remarkably prescient writer, forecasting everything from internet dating to curved televisions in homes to wearable devices. The importance of the collection is not to be understated; Beaumont died tragically in his 30s from what is thought to be early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Before this collection, it was difficult to find many of his stories in print or online.

There’s a quote on the back of the book from Dean Koontz which rings true, that the stories “provide a clear window into the fears and hopes of his time.” No more is this evident in the preoccupation with status and legacy, evident in the desire to memorialise a city in The Jungle, or the obsession with a beautiful car in A Classic Affair, and the fear of nuclear destruction in Place of Meeting.

The fears strike closer to the male psyche in the recurring themes of sexual performance, masculinity and impotence, the driving force in one of the stand out stories, The New People, where an impotent man, his virginal wife and strange son move into a new neighbourhood. In this story, suburban boredom is the impetus for deviant behaviour, which escalates to horrific proportions, forecasting Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby to be published nine years later. The other stand out is In His Image, the disorienting story of a man who takes his fiancé back to his home town, only to find out that no one remembers him.

His stories are overtly sexual, and focus on the transgressive nature of sex in the 50s, with direct discussion of orgies, virginity, sex outside of marriage and even a brief (albeit unhappy) queer character in Night Ride. The Howling Man, featured in The Weird and this collection, ties sexual transgressions to the release of the devil (for a more detailed analysis, read my essay in the 101 Weird Writers series on Charles Beaumont).

Then there are the flat out weird stories, with the bizarre hybrid monster of Fritzchen reminiscent of China Mieville’s recent short story Sacken. Or the deliciously disturbing necroaudiophile Mr Goodhew in The New Sound. And the deftly written Mr Aorta in Free Dirt, a character familiar to readers everywhere as the man who won’t pay for anything.

It is in these short, almost flash fiction stories, where Beaumont’s concision in creating a world and a mythology shines. Familiar elements anchor the reader in the formula that works: set up the situation, the protagonist reminisces how he got there, and punch out the reversal. And where the reversal style of story from the 50s and 60s can often come out cheesy in contemporary analysis (We were on earth the whole time? NOOOOOOO!), there were moments where I gasped in delightful surprise when a twist caught me off guard. But to tell you which stories they were would spoil it.

Beaumont also demonstrated a humorous side, with his time-travelling tale Father, Dear Father, psychologically frustrated vampire in Blood Brother, or the prescient The Monster Show. While not all of the stories in the collection are supernatural (The Music of the Yellow Brass, Night Ride and A Death in the Country), they all discuss facing death in different ways. Like a toreador flagging a bull, driving violently towards it or falling towards despondency.

My favourites from this collection are those that deal with the obsession with self-image and representation, most well known in The Beautiful People. In a dystopian future, a young woman refuses to have a transformation from her current, ‘ugly’ body to a beautiful body like everyone else, after filling her head with notions from books (heaven forbid those books full of dangerous ideas!). In this society, beauty is associated with peace, and is enforced by constant videos of war, colonialization and politics. Like Bradbury’s famous Fahrenheit 451, Beaumont’s story echoes the sentiment that books are essential to an open and free society, where TV is a tool of enforcement and control.

This story turned into an episode of The Twilight Zone as Number 12 Looks Just Like You. Scott Westerfield acknowledges this episode as a childhood influence over his bestselling YA series Uglies, where teenagers are forcibly transformed into “Pretties”.

However Beaumont’s representation of women is directly contrasted in You Can’t Have Them All. A ladies man uses a super-calculator to meet his ideal woman. Unfortunately there’s 563 of them. To ensure his conquest of each woman, he uses a love potion of “herbal tea” to make them sleep with him. This story has major issues with consent, made even more shocking by the protagonist’s frivolous attitude towards the women in the story.

Given the ongoing discussions of representation across speculative fiction, two of the more problematic stories in the collection — The Jungle and The Magic Man – deal with racial issues. While The Jungle has the best intentions to decry colonialism and invasive development, the tribe in the story is made up of one-dimensional Kenyans, who beat drums in their village, fighting off developers with “guns and spears and arrows and darts” (p 16), and use magic to eventually scare off the obsessive designer. The Magic Man is the weakest story in the collection, partly for its unlikeable protagonist, who tells tales of cannibals from the Sandwich Islands, which distracts from the story’s conclusion.

Despite my issues with the stories above, this is a worthwhile and important collection, preserving an author’s work for a new generation of readers. Read them. Get angry. Be shocked. Laugh. Charles Beaumont’s work will certainly provoke your imagination.

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Marc Laidlaw (1960–) is an eclectic American writer of science fiction and horror whose long career has included a stint in the cyberpunk movement and significant contributions to the popular Half-Life video game series. Laidlaw first started publishing idiosyncratic, hard-to- define short fiction in the late 1970s, but is perhaps best known for writing Dad’s Nuke (1985) and The 37th Mandala (1996), which won the International Horror Guild Award. “The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio” (1993), his story selected for inclusion in The Weird, is one of a series of stories by Laidlaw with photographic themes. Laidlaw had “always loved Arbus’s photography and was inspired by her sad but gripping biography. The story uses the weird as an entrypoint to appreciating Arbus’s work, as Kat Clay ably demonstrates and then some in her latest contribution to 101 Weird Writers.

– Adam Mills, editor of 101 Weird Writers

***

The father of modern photojournalism, Henri Cartier-Bresson, popularized the idea of “the decisive moment”. He emphasized the instantaneous split second that photography can capture, the moment of interest that disappears with the flick of an eyelid. A hidden doorway revealed, a secret path to a parallel universe, the shadowy villain that is seen and unseen. These things are both true to photography and the realms of the fantastic, where a brief climax is momentarily illuminated only to finish in darkness.

In the decisive moment, the heroine drops down the rabbit hole.

The hero walks into an alternate London.

A moment before or after, and these chances are lost. The story goes untold. The protagonist is left unchanged.

It was an idea that proved influential on another great 20^th century photographer, Diane Arbus. Like a great ouroboros, art will always influence art. Her photography came from a childhood filled with gothic fantasy, her photography influenced the next generation of photographers, writers and filmmakers. In “The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio”, Marc Laidlaw’s story explores that decisive moment and embraces the mythical side of Arbus’ photography. While this story can be read and enjoyed without knowledge of Diane Arbus’ life, to discover the significance of this weird story, we need to delve into the past of its subject..

The Enchantress

The child of wealthy Jewish fur retailers, Diane Arbus impacted the world of photography through her startling portraits. Arbus’ subject matter embraced the margins of 50s and 60s society: circus freaks, pinheads, nudists, the mentally handicapped, transgenders, drag queens, prostitutes. While remembered mostly as a “freak photographer”, she was reluctant to be pigeonholed and also shot celebrity portraits, fashion, and children’s catalogues. Arbus captured a realm of New York that few of the privileged entered, like a fantasy heroine reporting from the hidden worlds of the city. Her photography polarized viewers, with responses ranging from revulsion to reluctant admiration. At the time of her MOMA exhibition, her photography was so challenging staff needed to wipe the spit off her images on a daily basis.

Her childhood was perpetuated with fantasy; she had a predilection for Gothic novels, mythology and graveyards. This mythology embodied her work to the extent that she engendered a mystique around her person that caused observers to compare her to “an enchantress” . She believed photography was “sinister and mysterious” because it could capture the soul of a person.

After suffering from prolonged depression, Arbus committed suicide in 1971 in her bathroom. “He [Marvin Israel] found Diane dead, with her wrists slit, lying on her side in the empty bathtub. She was dressed in pants and shirt – her body was already “in a state of decomposition.” On her desk her journal was open to July 26, and across it was scrawled “The Last Supper”. Her death was due to the cuts on her wrists, although she also had acute barbiturate poisoning.

There was speculation after Arbus’ death that she had photographed her suicide, in a final act of artistic free will. These claims have been fervently denied; no film was found at the scene of her death. That these questions were even asked hints that it was not beyond the realm of possibility and these apocryphal rumors are the basis for Marc Laidlaw’s story.

It is at the police investigation of her death that “The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio” begins.

The Negative

Diane Arbus once said that, “The contents of someone’s bathroom is like reading their biography”. In the story, Marc Laidlaw dissects the bathroom of Diane Arbus to capture slices of her personality and imbue them with the supernatural.

Throughout, Laidlaw subtly inserts details of Arbus’ character. The pinned photographs around the apartment, her propensity for making spontaneous appointments. Schaeffer’s lewd comments asking, “What do you think, she slept with that dwarf to get his picture?” captures not only the whisperings of her photographic viewers, but the impossible intimacy Diane Arbus achieved with her subjects. People speculated how she could get so close to often forbidden subjects.

It should be noted the author has taken liberties with the manner of Arbus’ death. While Arbus died in the bathtub, it was not full of water as in the story. However, this slivery water becomes a haunting metaphor that draws on the silver gelatin printing process, the main technique for black and white printing. The process involves exposing the negative onto light sensitive paper that contains silver halides. The bathroom becomes a darkroom, a swelteringly hot chamber of dripping water. After Arbus’ death, she takes on the characteristics of a negative. “I’m eager for those pictures,” she says, “but I won’t risk exposure.”

The negative is the polar opposite; where Arbus saw photography as an art, the police photographer Brovnik views it purely as a job: “He clutched his camera gratefully to his face, confining vision to one small window on a distorted tunnel with suicide at the far end.” Where Arbus sought intimacy with her subjects, Brovnik creates distance through the barrel of the lens. Through his interactions with the soul of Arbus and her work, the work he has distanced, capturing murders and suicides on camera, suddenly becomes too close and he must escape.

The mirror has always been a literary image for self-reflection. Cameras require mirrors to function (although the single lens reflex may soon become obsolete through technology). Yet the portrait is often used to confront the subject with their own image. Biographer Patricia Bosworth writes that “what people want is an image of themselves that is acceptable to themselves”. The photographer can take a confrontational role in producing an unflattering image of the subject, or simply an image that does not conform to the subject’s concept of themselves. The supernatural negatives take on this function, as the spirit of Diane Arbus challenges Brovnik’s view of photography as art: At the beginning, Brovnik is described as “a cop first, a photographer second”, and later “he’d never thought of photography as ‘art’”.

He appreciates her photography, viewing Arbus’ “Albino Sword Swallower ”, an image that draws to mind the crucifixion in not only the structure of the image but the cross shaped sword hanging from her mouth.

Albino sword swallower at a carnival, Md.; 1970

The photos laid out on the couch foreshadow the events in the story. Brovnik considers whether these were the last images she saw.

“A picture of Death standing in a freshly mown field; Death as a woman in a Halloween skull, clutching a white sheet around her. Hell, she’d gone rattling around with a head full of death, hunting it with her camera .”

This is referring to one of Arbus’ untitled photographs, an eerie and disturbing portrait of a woman wearing an askew Halloween mask, the masked invader playing out in countless horror films from John Carpenter’s Halloween to the latest offering You’re Next.

Untitled (3); 1970–71

Yet when he returns to the lab after photographing her suicide “he looked over his own photographs with a more critical eye”, analyzing the exposure, the burning flash, comparing his police photos to Arbus’ flash-bulb style. “Her curled prints were always tacked up in his memory, examples of an ideal he’d never known to strive for until now.” He goes through his back files to analyses the quality of his work images.

At this point, Laidlaw mentions Weegee, a photographer famous for turning up at crime scenes before the police, and there are great unspoken comparisons between the work of Brovnik and Weegee throughout the story. Arbus, Weegee and Bresson are amongst the more notable names in street photography, a genre now populated by hipsters carrying Holgas. Where crimes were once forbidden, they became exhibited in the public eye, first in the press, then in galleries. Weegee’s “Their first murder” is a photo of children watching a murder scene originally juxtaposed next to a photo of the bloody body in his book Naked City. This image is now in the Getty museum and copies of his art have sold for over $40,000 in auctions. (http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=61129)

When Diane Arbus’ negative calls on the phone, she appeals to him as an artist and photographer.

“Who said I was an artist?”

“You photographed Diane in death. Your eye has been changed… touched.”

Instead of rushing the duplicate prints, Brovnik takes “more care in the darkroom than ever before”, burning in details and extracting tones. “Gradually he found the glossy bright snaps of death becoming utterly strange to him, unlike his other photographs which became more commonplace as he worked them over.”

He creates immortal beauty from death, just like the perfect capture of the decisive moment. Brovnik begins to view photography as his life beyond the job, after the “brutal repeptitive ugliness of his day-today… he needed something a little fantastic…”

Yet this art traps him in a netherworld, in the “tombs of Manhattan”, the “crypts of Brooklyn”, where only he can view the souls of the dead, trapped in the decisive moment until he exposes them to light. His transformation into artist is complete when he realizes he was posing the corpses of the dead in order to get a better shot. Until now, art was an elusive echo; he escapes with “his camera tugging like bloodhound on the trail of everything that had ever eluded him.”

The Exhibition

Both Marc Laidlaw and Diane Arbus have influenced the Weird in significant ways. Arbus’ photographic influence reaches far into culture. Her “twins” became the poster children for horror in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Arbus always longed to photograph Borges, a foremost influence in weird fiction, and did so eventually for Harper’s Bazaar. Motifs from her photography have surreptitiously filtered into the weird: evil twins, Halloween masks, unaccepted outsiders, eccentrics in a lost city. Arbus brought the American underground into visible light; breaching the line between the city of the elite and the marginalized is a constantly reoccurring plot in genre fiction.

Identical twins, Roselle, N.J.; 1967

Meanwhile, like Arbus and her photography, Laidlaw’s fiction often embodies ideas of mortality and the afterlife, blending the supernatural with 1970s art and music. Whether it is the humorous desire for an end to a sugary obsession in “Sweetmeats”, the horror novel The 37^th Mandala, about the hidden darkness of the new age movement or The Orchid Eater, where two brothers interact through gang crime and murder, notions of death perpetuate his writing.

His work embraces the surreal, blurring lines between drug-induced hallucinations and reality in “The Black Bus”, a homage to the cult of the Grateful Dead. Even the gargoyle-afflicted eduldamer-playing Gorlen Vizenfirth is something of a medieval rocker. However Marc Laidlaw’s most influential contribution to popular culture is his writing for the Half-Life series and Portal, both regarded as some of the greatest video games ever produced. In Half-Life, unethical science experiments lead to the invasion of earth and the death of many, with some weird monsters to boot.

The Final Print

In Diane Arbus’ obituary in The Village Voice A.D. Coleman wrote:

It has always seemed ghoulish to me to speculate as to the motives behind a suicide, particularly so in attempts to correlate the act with an output of major creative work. Suicide can be either a confession of defeat or a hymn of triumph, an admission of one’s inability to confront the pitilessness of life or a defiant refusal to tolerate it, a self-erasure or a self-definition, but it is always a private act, a final Mind-your-own-damn-business hurled into the teeth of the universe, and anyone who takes that irrevocable step has earned his or her privacy.

Should Marc Laidlaw have written this story, given the intensely private wishes of her family and friends? It’s almost a literary Death of Marat, creating art from the moment of death. It honors her memory by expressing it in another artform. “The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio” manages to capture a wisp of the mysterious enchantress that embraced the supernatural qualities of a portrait. In writing about Diane Arbus, Marc Laidlaw has played on the inextricable links between art and death, in Arbus’ own work and the greater art world. And in the end, death is the decisive moment.

References

Bosworth, P, 2006. Diane Arbus: A Biography. W. W. Norton & Company.

Coleman, A.D., 1971. “Diane Arbus: The Mirror is Broken.” The Village Voice, 05 July. 7.

The post 101 Weird Writers #32 — Marc Laidlaw appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Margo Lanagan (1960–) is an Australian writer primarily known for her dark fantasy short stories, some of which are influenced by folktale. Although Lanagan has been a published author since 1990, she first came to the attention of readers outside of her own country with the collection Black Juice (2004), for which she won a World Fantasy Award and a Michael L. Printz Honor Award. Subsequently, Lanagan has become perhaps the most critically acclaimed contemporary Australian fantasist, and her novel Tender Morsels (2008) also won a World Fantasy Award. New work includes the novel Watered Silk (2011) and the story collection Yellowcake (2011). The horrifying ‘Singing My Sister Down’ (2005) is Lanagan’s most anthologized story and one of several standout weird ritual stories included in The Weird. In this latest installment of 101 Weird Writers, returning contributor Kay Clay profiles Lanagan and her haunting, unforgettable story.

– Adam Mills, editor of 101 Weird Writers

***

In 2001, Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, requested that his execution be broadcast on television across America. This last request ignited a furious debate in the media at the time: Should executions be broadcast on television?

Both those for and against the death penalty favored broadcasting the execution. Anti-death penalty campaigner Sister Helen Prejean argued that by watching one execution it would polarize people against the death penalty, bringing home the reality of capital punishment. Others spoke against broadcasting the execution on the basis that inmates deserve humane treatment, even in death.

In the end, McVeigh’s execution was not broadcast nationally, but on a closed circuit television to approximately 250 grieving family members and journalists.

Should the once public experience of watching people die become public again? Or would it simply become schadenfreude, taking pleasure in the misfortune of others?

In Margo Lanagan’s “Singing My Sister Down”, a young boy watches as his sister Ikky is publicly executed, not by lethal injection or firing squad, but by slow submersion in a tar pit. Ikky’s crime is never explicitly discussed, although it is inferred that she killed her husband with an axe (which calls to mind Lizzie Borden, the supposed female murderer who has become a part of American folklore and the public imagination at large). An intimate moment with family becomes a public event, as Ikky sinks further into the deeps, and a young woman accused of murder becomes fodder for the eagerly watching crowds.

“Singing My Sister Down” is an incredibly layered story, requiring several reads to process the complexity of what seems like a simple tale of a girl’s death. Lanagan is a master of “show not tell”, which adds to the puzzle of the characters’ backstories.  It is in part a mystery, a horror story and a truly weird tale.

At first, the setting for the story seems almost primitive. Tar pits evoke images of wooly mammoths and sabre tooth tigers descending to their doom in ancient Los Angeles. Chief Barnarndra orders the punishment and presides over the execution, although his involvement in the story is merely as an authority presence. There is a tribal ritual, with a wreath of flowers laid over the disappearing girl’s head. Yet there are hints that this is not an old story but a dystopian present; Lanagan weaves in zipper slippers, ice-baskets, glitter, trucks, axes and guns with silencers. This is no primitive society.

There is a clear element of performance in the ritual; while Ikky’s execution appears to be an intimate moment between the family members, there are many people watching. The attempt to make Ikky’s last moments bearable becomes a performance for the audience, doing innocuous things like eating, dancing and singing, to avoid mentioning the inevitable: that the girl will drown in the tar pits.

The narrator insists, “But today we had to go out, and everyone had to see us go.” Not only do the viewers watch the execution but the family’s process of grieving.  When the mother and child grieve together, the performance reaches its climax. The narrator writes:

That was when I realised how many people were watching, when they set up a big, spooky oolooling and stamping on the banks, to see Mumma grieve.

The dissonance between the grieving mother and the pleasure of the audience is reminiscent of the German idea of schadenfreude.

To drown out the sound of the watching crowd, the young boy comments to Dash:

‘There never was such a crowd when Chep’s daddy went down.’

‘Ah, but he was old and crazy… and only killed other olds and crazies.’

Yet the family is not allowed to embarrass the audience with their grief, trapped in a silent mourning. When the narrator breaks down once his sister has died, he says:

I made an awful noise that frightened everybody right up to the chief, and that the husband’s parents thought I was a very ill-brought up boy for upsetting them instead of allowing them to serenely and superiorly watch justice be done for their son.

With the method of execution comes a lack of responsibility on behalf of the community. Lanagan points out that the tar pit:

“…doesn’t require any violence on anyone’s part to bring on a person’s death… So it looks as if they kill themselves, really, and no one in the village needs to feel guilty, or to have any harrowing memories (except, of course, the family of the accused, who have to watch their family member’s agonizingly slow death).”[1]

That a life can be taken with such callous disregard for the emotions of the grieving family and the process of death, going as far as the aforementioned feeling of schadenfreude, is one of the most sinister elements of the story.

Associated with the public execution is the shaming of the surviving family. When so many people come to watch the event, the narrator asks, “Is that an honour, or a greater shame?”

Shame is a powerful reoccurring theme in Lanagan’s work, which is often coupled with children coming of age through abuse and violence. It is this overcoming of shame that allows Lanagan’s characters to grow and move past the traumatic events of their childhoods.

In her novel, Tender Morsels, a young woman flees to a fantasy realm to escape the shame of both her father’s repeated rape and gang rape by a group of young men. In Sea Hearts, also known as The Brides of Rollrock Island, the hidden history of the selkies is referred to as “our greatest shame”. The young sea witch Misskaella shames her parents by having the ability to raise the selkie women from the ocean. She then seeks revenge on the men of the village by returning the shame to them.

When the family in “Singing My Sister Down” follows Ikky out to the tar pit, the narrator writes it “was like being punished, too, everyone watching us walk out to that girl who was our shame.” Auntie Mai doesn’t come to the death ceremony at first because she is too ashamed. Mumma says, “[Auntie Mai] sees shame where some of us just see people.”

What is the “shame” the girl has brought upon her family? As with many of Lanagan’s tales, “Singing My Sister Down” is a story that poses more questions than answers. It is up to the reader to examine the evidence and use their imagination to find the answers. Ikky’s crime is made complex by Lanagan’s subtle hints. Murderer seems a strong word for this girl, drowning in mud. Is she guilty? At first glance, yes. But Lanagan elicits sympathy for her plight by placing the viewpoint in the hands of her brother.

The relationship between Mumma and Ikky implies that Ikky is not yet an adult — she defers to her mother for aid and comfort, her mother calls her nicknames like “baby chicken”. Even the name Ikky hints at a child or teenager. And if Ikky is not an adult, she is a child bride.

If the mother kills Ikky while she is going down, she will also be executed.

‘You’d better not give me any teas, or herbs, or anything,’ said Ik. ‘They’ll get you, too, if you help me.’

The society strictly enforces the death penalty for anyone involved in the killing of another person, be it murder, manslaughter or euthanasia. Despite these consequences, the mother is willing to kill her daughter. Moral ambiguity surrounds the girl’s crime. If it were so heinous, wouldn’t the mother disavow her daughter? Would she really bring the family to see her? And would her Aunt mourn so much that she could not watch the girl die? This is a loved girl. Yet within the society murder is not a defensible crime.

While the readers may never know the reasoning behind Ikky killing her husband, the mother understands. As Ikky descends to the depths, Mumma says, ‘You could’ve let that handle lie,’ referring to the handle of the axe. Ikky’s response is:

‘No, I couldn’t, Mumma, and you know.’

‘I do, baby chicken. I always knew you’d be too angry, once the wedding-glitter rubbed off your skin.’

After the death of Ikky, Mumma says to her young son that execution is something the society needs and that the only way to protect against falling into the same fate is to be careful in the placement of his love. “Make sure it’s not someone who’ll rouse that killing-anger in you…” It is the only hint to the motive of the murder. What the husband did to inspire the “killing-anger” is only speculation, but it partially absolves the girl’s guilt.

Lanagan carries the torch left behind by Angela Carter, turning fairy tales to their original horrors, promoting the role of women in fantasy from beautiful trophy to the complex center of her stories. She is a daring writer – who else could place a tale of virgin/unicorn bestiality into a YA collection entitled Zombies vs Unicorns?

Awards come to her writing as if they contain electromagnetic particles in the text. “Singing My Sister Down” won two Aurealis awards, a Ditmar, the World Fantasy Award, and was nominated for both a Hugo and Nebula. A sample of her award shelf includes four World Fantasy Awards, two Printz Awards and a Locus Award.

Despite her high stature as a fantasy writer, her work is not without controversy; Tender Morsels was criticized in the UK for being too “adult” for a YA audience, particularly looking at themes of rape, incest and abortion. The Daily Mail referred to her work as “sordid wretchedness”[2]. While “Singing My Sister Down” addresses complex issues such as public execution and violence towards children, this has not stopped it from being studied in Australian schools.

Lanagan has described herself as an honest writer, not shying away from difficult issues just because she writes for a younger audience. She is careful that any violence or sexual abuse is inferred and not explicitly described[3], as is the case in “Singing My Sister Down”. Anything confronting or disturbing in her work – and it seems, in the work of others with similar criticisms – is often assumed by the reader but blamed on the author. In defense of her work, Margo Lanagan expressed her view on what fiction should be:

“Fiction is a means to make parts of the world visible in all its complexity and ambiguity, not cover up its nasty bits and hope they’ll go away. Fiction (particularly fantasy fiction) provides a safe place where uncertainties can be considered and explored.”[4]

By challenging what is expected of Young Adult writing, she has opened up new horizons for future stories. Her voice is entirely original, providing fresh evidence for the old arguments against genre being literature.

It’s this attraction to strong voice and unique perspectives that make Margo Lanagan an integral part of the weird movement. Her writing is an intersection of the literate and the fantastic, where families are entwined in supernatural transgressions, clowns shoot guns, men become bears, witches summon seal women and sisters are sung to their deaths.

The post 101 Weird Writers #30 — Margo Lanagan appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Charles Beaumont (1929 — 1967) was a prolific American author who established himself as a script writer in Hollywood and died of a brain disorder at the tragically young age of thirty-eight. In addition to his macabre short stories, he wrote several Twilight Zone episodes, but also penned the screenplays for cult films like 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, The Intruder, and The Masque of the Red Death. The classic story reprinted in The Weird, “The Howling Man” (1959), was adapted as a screenplay for Twilight Zone. In the episode, a reference to a cross was changed to “staff of truth,” out of fear of a backlash from Christian preachers. In its approach, the story oddly evokes Decadent-era writing and spotlights Beaumont’s stylistic prowess. And, as argued by our newest 101 Weird Writers contributor, Kat Clay, “The Howling Man” provides a provocative look at the nature of evil.

- Adam Mills, editor of “101 Weird Writers”

***

Forget shagging backpackers and pot smoking fogies, the Abbey of St. Wulfran’s is quite possibly the worst literary hostel in the world. Set in a picturesque German valley, the Abbey boasts dirty floors, straw beds and eccentric monks who refuse to answer your most basic questions. Stay for long enough and you might hear the howls of the Abbey’s longest residing guest…

In Charles Beaumont’s “The Howling Man”, a Bostonian named David Ellington bicycles his way across Europe during the inter-war period. In Germany he falls ill and is taken to a monastery where a “howling man” is locked in a prison. While the monks tell him not to release the man because he is the Devil, the man cries that it is only because of his sexual transgressions that he has been imprisoned. The young man is faced with a crisis of conscience; does he release him or do nothing, which would surely mean the man’s death?

“The Howling Man” is an effort to come to terms with the individual’s role in releasing evil into the world, using weird elements to explain the rise of Hitler in Europe. Beaumont, an existential Christian, plots a thinly veiled allegory of the Christian account of creation, where sin enters the world due to the temptation of man by the devil. Ellington’s desire for the knowledge of good and evil is his downfall; in doing a perceived good he brings evil into the world. It is a perfect illustration of the adage that the “road to hell is paved with good intentions”.

Beaumont sets up the allegory by establishing pre-war Germany as Eden. His casual account of bicycling through Belgium and Germany draws the reader in like a travelogue. It’s almost pleasant: “The Germany of that time was a land of valleys and mountains and swift dark rivers, a green and fertile land where everything grew tall and straight out of the earth.”

The story is permeated by a sense of nostalgia for the pre-World War Two Germany. Beaumont begins the story by referring to “The Germany of that time,” and he later writes, “I feel it’s quite important to remember how completely Paradisical [sic] the land was then.” Beaumont equates pre-war Germany with a fairy tale paradise; he refers to his crossing of the Belgium-German border as moving through an “invisible door, into a kingdom of winds and light”. Yet post-war Germany will never return to that beauty; like Eden, the garden has been spoiled by sin.

Why did Beaumont choose historical Germany for his setting and not a futuristic world like many of his other stories? Was it to make a very clear point about his opinions on World War Two? It’s difficult to speculate where Beaumont developed his pacifist ideals. During the war years Beaumont was a bedridden teenager with spinal meningitis and he spent this time discovering science fiction. Despite having a clearly anti-war agenda in his stories, he enlisted in the army in 1947, but was discharged after three months for medical reasons. Science-fiction and war became inseparable for Beaumont. “The Beautiful People” opens with a young woman watching television in a waiting room:

Mary sat quietly and watched the handsome man’s legs blown off; watched further as the great ship began to crumple and break into small pieces in the middle of the blazing night. She fidgeted slightly as the men and the parts of the men came floating dreamily through the wreckage out into the awful silence. And when the meteorite shower came upon the men, gouging holes through everything, tearing flesh and ripping bones, Mary closed her eyes.

In “Elegy,” a group of desperate spacemen seeks refuge in a galactic cemetery, only to be refused by the groundskeeper on the basis of their violence and prejudice.

When from the moment of your departure you had wars of your own, and killed, and hurled mocking prejudice against a race of people not like you, a race who rejected and cast you out into space again!

It’s not surprising then that Beaumont’s twist is that the released “man” becomes Hitler.

When the pictures of the carpenter from Braunau-am-Inn began to appear in all the papers, I grew uneasy; for I felt I’d seen this man before. When the carpenter invaded Poland, I was sure. And when the world was plunged into war and cities had their entrails blown asunder and that pleasant land I’d visited became a place of hate and death, I dreamed each night.

Hitler is the embodiment of the Devil, the serpent that tempts David Ellington to release him into the world.

“The Howling Man” is not the only weird story to attribute the Nazis’ power to supernatural forces; more recent incarnations include Raiders of the Lost Ark and Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics. It would be easier to blame Hitler’s actions on a supernatural, demonic power, because explanations of his behavior would then be beyond human comprehension. Sadly, Hitler was but a man, indicative of the extreme depths of human perversion, the horrors that only man is capable of.

While there are no women in the story, except for the reminiscences of the Abbot, sexual transgression becomes a metaphor for Eve. Although the original Creation story does not explicitly reference sex as a temptation, countless historical reinterpretations have associated Eve with the femme fatale and temptress archetypes.

“The Howling Man” was written for Rogue, and many of Beaumont’s short stories were published in men’s magazines such as Playboy and Esquire. His short stories often contain underlying sexual themes. Yet Beaumont seems to be advocating Christian morals in a pornographic magazine. Is Beaumont preaching? Or was he simply approaching the available markets at the time for science fiction and horror?

In “The Howling Man” the narrator dreams of bagnios filled with Islamic virgins (houris). It’s not clear which definition of bagnio Beaumont meant; it could either be a bathhouse, prison or brothel, but either way it sounds like an exotic fantasy.

It is Ellington’s erotic desires that lead him to Paris and straight to the red light district of the Rue Pigalle. He only lasts a month before his health wanes and he decides that the celibate solitude of riding a bicycle across Europe is the antidote for any sexually (or otherwise) induced illnesses.

Sexual transgressions are the reason that the locked up man gives for his imprisonment:

I was in the village, lying with my woman, when their crazy Abbot burst into the house and hit me with his heavy cross… I have sinned but who has not? With my woman, quietly, alone with my woman, my love.

It is his own experiences with sex that make Ellington empathize with the imprisoned man and not the monks. The Abbot is aware of Ellington’s beliefs and elaborates on what outsiders often think of the clergy. “Monks are misfits, neurotics, sexual frustrates and aberrants. They retreat from the world because they cannot cope with the world.”

Ellington remains suspicious of the Abbot, simply because a man cannot possibly be normal if he is celibate. Yet the monk’s argument for containing the “Howling Man” is that their village was turned into “a resort for the sinful” after World War One, associating sexual impropriety with war. “Forsaken, fornicators paraded the streets,” and “The orgies were too wild, the drunkards much too drunk.” The Abbot attributes this change not to man but the very presence of the Devil. This echoes the Biblical post-sin world, where God sent a flood to destroy the corruption on Earth, indicating that this release and recapturing of the Devil goes in cycles.

In an effort to exorcise the Devil from the village, the Abbot was tempted by a woman in a passage rife with sexual innuendo:

He said his wife was dying and begged me to give her Extreme Unction… A woman lay upon a bed, her body nude. “It is a different Extreme Unction that I have in mind,” he [the Devil] whispered, laughing. “It’s the only kind, dear Father, that she understands. No other will have her! Pity! Pity on the poor soul lying there in all her suffering. Give her your Sceptre!” And the woman’s arms came snaking, supplicating toward me, round and sensuous and hot…

Of course, the principle of Occam’s Razor applies; if caught between a man claiming he was locked up unfairly for sex outside of marriage and an Abbot claiming he’s captured the Devil incarnate… it’s no wonder Ellington decides to release the Devil.

Brother Christophorus represents Christ, and the story takes on the tone of a morality tale when Ellington’s refusal to believe results in the Devil entering the world. Brother Christophorus, like Christ, is forgiving of Ellington’s mistakes.

After Ellington realizes the consequences of his choices, Brother Christophorus says, “My son, don’t blame yourself. Your weakness was his lever. Doubt unlocked the door.”

The young man’s weakness? Sympathy, induced by mutual understanding and empathy for sexual transgressions.

Michel Foucault in the History of Sexuality argues that sexuality, while not the most important factor in power, is the most flexible. It is “useful for the greatest number of manoeuvres and capable of serving as a point of support, as a lynchpin, for the most varied strategies.” And such is the Devil’s nature, to use any sort of power to strategize his escape. Sexuality is a “dense transfer point for relations of power,” particularly between priests and their laity. The priest is able to resist sexual temptations, making him a morally superior person, but as David Ellington is not a particularly religious man, the Abbot has no power over him.

Despite writing prolifically, Beaumont’s books are now out of print and only a few short stories are available on e‑readers. His Twilight Zone scripts remain in various formats; from 1960 The Twilight Zone won three consecutive Hugos for Best Dramatic Presentation. In these years Beaumont contributed at least 15 scripts. Although Beaumont did not write the script, “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” was based on “The Beautiful People”. Sadly, Beaumont contracted either early-onset Alzheimer’s disease or Pick’s disease in his thirties, rapidly decreasing his mental faculties. Many of his friends ghostwrote his later credited Twilight Zone scripts to help him meet his commitments.

Due to his untimely death at the age of 38, Charles Beaumont does not receive the same recognition as his contemporaries Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury. Bradbury commented that because Beaumont died before the moon landing, he wasn’t able to promote himself in the way that other science fiction writers did (p19, Prosser).

Charles Beaumont’s ideas were well ahead of his time; his other stories included progressive ideas on homosexuality, gay marriage and racism. His stories are often about people standing up for what they believe in, but with the consequences of their integrity being negative. While somewhat neglected as a writer, his stories are important in the timeline of weird fiction, for their progressive content and their significant role in contributing to The Twilight Zone.

“The Howling Man” is a warning that one man’s good intentions can wreak havoc on the world. But if all we aspire is to be good without heeding the advice of others, we cannot help but release the devil.

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References:

Running from the Hunter: The life and works of Charles Beaumont by Harold Lee Prosser

The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction Michel Foucault, Vintage Books.

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