— The Editors

The Collector of Treasures

The Collector of Treasures

The Collector of Treasures has clever arms to hold you. The frozen chamber reeks of mice. At the witching hour, the Collector dons a fur-trimmed cloak. The Collector of Treasures drinks a tisane. The night is long, the Collector’s labor hard. The universe will not lie still.

FIGURE OF A COLT WITH A MAN’S FACE

FIGURE OF A WINGED MONSTER

You are inferior as a Coloured.

FIGURE OF A MONSTROUS PIG, BORN IN METZ IN LORRAINE

PICTURE OF A TRITON AND A SIREN, SEEN ON THE NILE

London, a Tube station, the year 197_. A strange Englishman grasps my father by the shoulders. He kisses my father on both cheeks. The Englishman is ecstatic. “Ah, are you Abyssinian? What a magnificent species!”

FIGURE OF A CHILD, PART DOG

TWO FIGURES, ONE OF A FURRY GIRL, AND THE OTHER OF A CHILD THAT WAS BLACK BECAUSE OF THE IMAGINATION OF THEIR PARENTS

They maintained their attractive character throughout, and under the trying conditions of the Yorkshire climate behaved in a most creditable manner.

The Collector shakes the universe and makes it lie down flat. The universe cries out like an injured child.

FIGURE OF A CHILD WHO HAD A LIVE SNAKE IN ITS BACK

FIGURE OF THE HORNED OR HOODED MONSTER

Ambroise Paré was a French barber surgeon born in 1510. He pioneered new techniques in battlefield medicine. He was especially good with wounds, which he treated in the old Roman way, using oil of roses, egg white, and turpentine. He was also a great collector. His book Des monstres et prodiges is an illustrated compendium of the monsters of his time. His goal, explains his translator, was to discover, through the accumulation of data, why the normal has failed to occur.

FIGURE OF A GIRL HAVING TWO HEADS

I think Ambroise Paré would have liked me. I am pretty good at French. I think I would have impressed him. “Why has the normal failed to occur?” is, after all, a question that has preoccupied me since childhood. I think Ambroise Paré would have served me one of his tisanes while I behaved in a most creditable manner. I think he would have asked me to have a seat on his little table. I think he would have done something awful to me with tongs.

According to the logic of collection, the monster always belongs to others.

FIGURE OF A VERY MONSTROUS ANIMAL THAT IS BORN IN AFRICA

I am afraid Ambroise Paré would have liked this book.

In the realm of language, the opposite of a monster is a catalogue.

Nameless

Nameless

In the fields of Soinoe she went slaughtering flowers. She said she could take me with her. I said yes. I explained that this is what monsters say to themselves in the mirror: yes. yes.

It’s very tender outside right now.

White fog filled the valley. She explained that it was a river of floating seeds. The seeds have been waiting to sprout for five hundred years. Several white birches stood among them, and the ruins of a little building, perhaps a shrine.

There are absolute places where time stops. Nothing is good about them. You can’t breathe. Against them we raise a defiant reverence for the body.

Hold your breath, she whispered. The night was blue and perfectly still. I realized that we were passing through a bad place. The fortune, the heavy good fortune of passing through. In a lighted window a child in goggles was giving a lecture from a podium made of crates.

When we had reached the other side I told her a story:

“Everyone was drunk. They were trying to figure out if I was métisse or chabine. Métisse is dark-skinned with European features, chabine is light-skinned with African features. Trees sighed in the night behind the bar.”

Such detailed racial cartography. Sometimes, I told her, the storms were so violent, you would have thought the whole island would sink under water.

She took me to see her favorite spot, a wall the color of artichokes. Wherever she went she glistened like fire and snow.

Holy holy holy is the Lord who preserves entire the conflicting element of my being.

And the vivid lake. And the pink butterflies of the horizon. The hills that smelled of apples and milk. The chill beneath the stone portico. The bridge. The train in the night like a necklace of tourmalines.

THIS IS MY NAME:

She had written those words and her name on the artichoke-colored wall, many years ago, when she was afraid to travel. She used to be so afraid, she could hardly stand to leave the house. A few petals dotted her flanks, bright as human blood. “Don’t you want to know what they decided to call me,” I asked, “métisse or chabine?” “No,” she laughed. In the evening she took me to meet the train. I wore net gloves to disguise my bandaged hands.

Her breathing lit up the whole street.

Light is a thing but lighting is a relationship.

The Doctor

Monsters of Compassion

It became necessary for me to visit a doctor. His office lay behind a great wooden door in a district known as the Swoon. The door was so heavily carved it took me some time to find the handle, turning my head from side to side to peer underneath the planes of light. “I have a cough,” I explained, “and these pink planes of light are following me everywhere.” I waved my hand in the light. The flesh turned red. Through the rays I could see the doctor’s face, immemorial and sad, a carapace much like the carvings on his door.

 “Pity me.” He instructed me to lie down on the carpet. While he brewed his herbs I thought about compassion. Cries on the wind for two hundred years. Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?

The grotesque confuses categories. One of the ways this can happen is through time compression. Think of a larval creature with fully developed eyes. Imagine youth crushed into age, a misshapen life story. A giant baby, or one that looks like a little old man.

In the eighties there were all those photos of starving Ethiopian children. Long fingers, heads as fragile as blown glass. Usually the grotesque creates a reaction of nausea or prurient attraction but the little-old starving children were supposed to produce compassion. I guess it worked. I always had a feeling of panic when I saw them, they were so close to me. A kind of survivor guilt. Compassion, yes, but revulsion too, and shame like a bridge between them. A feeling like a needle in my eye.

We Are the World. What an awful song. There’s grotesque for you. For some reason, we always cracked up when Willie Nelson came on. My brother could mimic his voice perfectly.

We were very joyful kids, as I recall.

The doctor approached with his bowl, rosy in the light.

“Feed me.” A child is dying. My friend protested against the deaths of Palestinian children. Someone replied: “You wish Israeli children were dying.” “That is monstrous,” she answered him, “a monstrous thing to say.” For a long time I tried to think of a word that could replace “monstrous.” Terrible? Vicious? Cruel? But only “monstrous” really expressed where he had placed himself with his words: outside the wall. By suggesting that she would not feel compassion for a child, that she would desire the death of children, he had become someone for whom we could never feel compassion.

I began to drink from the bowl. A prickling started under my skin. I understood that I was having a reaction.

The monster evokes, in equal measure, both compassion and its opposite.

I understood that I would have to drink it all.

Notes

Capitalized text comes from the list of illustrations in Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels. 1573. Translated by Janis L. Pallister, University of Chicago Press, 1982.

You are inferior as a Coloured. Bessie Head, A Question of Power. Heinemann, 1974. p. 127.

They maintained … creditable manner. Exhibition Manager’s Report. Great Bradford Exhibition, Bradford, England, 1904. Quoted in Anne Bishop, “Cartwright Memorial Hall and the Great Bradford Exhibition of 1904.” The Bradford Antiquary, third series, vol. 4, 1989, pp. 26–38. The report refers to the inhabitants of the “Somali Village,” the exhibition’s most popular display. About a hundred Somalis lived at the Bradford Exhibition from May until October, giving daily shows of dancing, archery, and spear throwing.

why the normal has failed to occur: Janis Pallister, introduction to Ambroise Paré, Of Monsters and Marvels. 1573. Translated by Janis L. Pallister, University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. xxvi.

Holy holy holy … being. Eliot Weinberger attributes these words to an angel made of snow and fire in An Elemental Thing. New Directions, 2007, p. 167.

Accursed creator! … in disgust? Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. 1818. Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003, p. 144.

The post Excerpt: “Monster Portraits” by Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Inter: between. Sistere: to stand.

What is interstitial art? According to the website of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, it is art made in the interstices between genres and categories. It is art that flourishes in the borderlands between different disciplines, mediums, and cultures. It is art that crosses borders, made by artists who refuse to be constrained by category labels.

When I think of the interstitial, I become more interested in verbs than nouns: to make, to flourish, to cross, to refuse.

Ellen Kushner, one of the founders of the IAF, once described the interstitial as “a moving target.” There’s no final definition, she said, because categories keep changing: genres split, subgenres arise, culture moves. She’s right: you can’t ever give a detailed definition of something that exists because two other things are not the same—something that comes to life in the gap between two (or more) distinct, describable things. The interstitial is utterly relational.

The interstitial, as used by the IAF and its magazine, Interfictions, also has a history. It’s a history of the divide between literary and genre fiction, and the rules of each, which have made it hard for writers to find an audience for certain work. Again, we’re talking about relationships here: relationships between writers and readers, and between writers and publishers, and all that comes with them—the deadening dynamics of branding, the pressure to sell big, to reproduce oneself, to be “accessible,” that is, easily consumed. “[I]n reality,” wrote Alastair Fowler, “genre is much less of a pigeon hole than a pigeon”—but it doesn’t always feel that way. Genre is a cloak. Sometimes it allows readers to recognize you and provides you with community and delight. Sometimes it just itches.

This is one place where I see an affinity between interstitial art and weird fiction: in the attempt to carve out a space for work that takes fantasy, science fiction, and horror seriously, that isn’t trying to use genre fiction in an ironic way or be “meta” or cute, but that also has a special, often oppositional relationship to genre fiction’s rules. Both weird and interstitial fiction refuse to stay in the box. They warp, they mix. They might play with the tropes and conventions of genre fiction, stretch them, take them in unexpected directions, exaggerate them, break them. They’re looking for borders, but only so they can get across.

Sometimes interstitial and weird fiction are perceived as breaking a trust. Blending genres can look like betrayal. These experiments can provoke angry comments on speculative fiction websites: “This isn’t science fiction!” Sometimes these relationships are sad.

Source: Wikipedia

At Interfictions, we’re interested in all kinds of in-between spaces: between myth and the everyday, between music and photography, between essay and poem. There are other magazines out there working in these spaces; what distinguishes us is our warm relationship with the genres of speculative fiction. This doesn’t mean that every piece we publish has something speculative about it, but speaking for myself, there’s an element of the strange or otherworldly in most of the pieces I accept, from Sunny Chan’s feathered dinosaurs to Nancy Hightower’s peeling skull to Ashon Crawley’s desire to imagine Ferguson, otherwise.

Mostly I’m interested in objects in relation to one another. The mesmeric power of Borges’ Aleph. The space between animate and inanimate, one of the countries of childhood, where we can grasp K.J. Bishop’s Gleeful Horse.

I’ve mentioned nouns and verbs, but prepositions are even more instructive: they’re often the hardest things to learn well when you study a foreign language. I don’t want to put too much weight on this little curiosity, but it does suggest to me that it’s easier to translate objects than the relationships between them. Relationships are particular and volatile and relentlessly weird. Weird fiction opens us to the strangeness of our relationships with one another, our relationships with nonhuman entities and ways of being, our relationships with time and space. In emphasizing these relationships, weird fiction is always, to me, interstitial. It shares interstitial art’s preoccupation with the spaces between objects, the blank strip of paper between items on a list, the darkness between the stars, where you can reach in, slip, fall, find yourself somewhere else, and decide if you want to come back.

The post The Spaces Between Objects appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Octavia Butler (1947– 2006) was an American writer who became the first science fiction writer ever to receive the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. At the time, Butler was also one of the only African American women in the science fiction field. In 2010, she was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Butler’s novels include Kindred (1979) and Parable of the Sower (1993). ‘Bloodchild’ (1984) is her most famous story, winning both the Hugo and the Nebula Award for best novelette. Although ‘Bloodchild’ might be the best example of weird science fiction by Butler, she often included horrific elements in her work. Butler wrote the story as a way of overcoming her fear of bot flies. Butler’s birthday was June 22, two days ago; she would have been 66 years old. 101 Weird Writers is honored to present the following appreciation of Butler and her work, as written by returning contributor Sofia Samatar.

 — Adam Mills, editor of 101 Weird Writers

***

1. Torn

“Bloodchild” is not about slavery. It’s about symbiosis.

Octavia Butler’s 1984 story, which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novelette, is narrated by Gan, an adolescent human boy whose family lives with a community of aliens called Tlic. Human beings, or Terrans, are immigrants to the planet: the Tlic allow them to remain because Terrans make excellent incubators for Tlic eggs. The Tlic lay their eggs inside human men, because the process is dangerous, sometimes fatal, to the Terran carriers, and human women are needed to produce more humans.

In the story, Gan becomes fully aware of the role he will play in the Tlic reproductive cycle. “Bloodchild” opens with a scene of near-perfect domestic harmony: Gan and his mother and siblings laugh and chat with T’Gatoi, the three-meter-long, insect-like Tlic who intends one day to lay her eggs inside Gan. Gan is used to T’Gatoi: he’s comfortable with her, and he loves her. We see him cradled against her body, sipping on a sterile egg: the eggs make humans mildly high, and give them increased energy and longer lives. As for T’Gatoi, she enjoys Gan’s body heat. She is also able to lull humans into a deep state of relaxation with her stinger. Terrans and Tlic seem made for each other. Yet a sense of unease haunts even the early pages of “Bloodchild.” Part of it comes from the fact that a giant insect who loves you is even creepier than a giant insect who wants to kill you, and part of it comes from the inexplicable unhappiness of Gan’s mother and older brother, and part of it comes from emerging hints about the political climate of Gan’s planet. We learn that Gan and the other Terrans live on a Preserve, to protect them from Tlic who are desperate for living incubators. We learn that Terrans and Tlic were once at war.

The unease becomes full-blown horror when Gan sees a man being devoured from the inside by Tlic grubs. But horror is not the primary effect of “Bloodchild.” The story melds love and revulsion into a single nameless emotion, a feeling as frightening and intoxicating as the touch of T’Gatoi’s stinger. This emotional resonance brings “Bloodchild” into the territory of the weird: because Butler never resolves the tensions she creates, the reader of “Bloodchild” is left with an experience of the impossible, in whose afterglow certain aspects of our lives can be seen more clearly.

“It amazes me,” Butler writes in the afterword to the story in her 1995 collection, Bloodchild and Other Stories, “that some people have seen ‘Bloodchild’ as a story of slavery” (30). It’s an interpretation she consistently resisted: “Bloodchild” is about love, symbiosis, male pregnancy, and botflies, but not slavery. I am torn about Butler’s resistance. On the one hand, I respect her account of the story’s development, and acknowledge that works by black writers are often too heavily interpreted through the lens of race. On the other hand, there is something decidedly colonial about the society depicted in “Bloodchild.” Terrans have no political voice: they depend on T’Gatoi, a well-meaning Tlic, to plead their case with the wider Tlic community. The Terran “Preserve” recalls the “reserves” and “reservations” where indigenous people in places from Kenya to the United States have been required to live at certain times in our history.

“Bloodchild” may not be primarily about slavery, but it is about power and physical suffering and difficult choices that take place where the personal and the political meet. I think it’s all right to be torn about how to interpret it. I think we’re supposed to be torn: torn open, like so many of Butler’s characters, by the alien, by unfamiliar emotions, by history, by love, and by the possibility of change.

2. Devil Girl from Mars

Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California, on June 22, 1947. Her father died when she was young, and she was raised primarily by her mother, who encouraged Butler’s interest in writing, and eventually made it possible for Butler to attend the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop. Butler studied at Pasadena City College, California State University, and UCLA, and participated in the Open Door Program of Screen Writers’ Guild of America, West (1969–1970) as well as Clarion in 1970. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. Butler’s interest in the otherworldly started early: at the age of twelve, she was inspired to try writing science fiction by a dreadful 1954 movie called “Devil Girl from Mars.”

“As I was watching this film,” Butler explained, “I had a series of revelations. The first was that ‘Geez, I can write a better story than that.’ And then I thought, ‘Gee, anybody can write a better story than that.’ And my third thought was the clincher: ‘Somebody got paid for writing that awful story’ ” (“Devil Girl from Mars”).

In preparation for writing this essay, I watched “Devil Girl from Mars.” It is terrible. Many twelve-year-olds could do better. It’s easy to imagine the young Octavia Butler’s disgust with the awkward, unfocused plot, the canned dialogue (“Come, Earthman! It is Time!”), and the fact that the Martian looks like a human dominatrix rather than an alien life form. But what strikes me about “Devil Girl from Mars” is what never gets onto the screen, and that is the movie’s very Butlerian premise: sex with aliens. The Devil Girl has arrived on earth seeking men, because there aren’t enough on Mars: like the Tlic, she wants human beings for reproductive purposes. Similarly, the Oankali of Butler’s Xenogenesis novels have sex with humans to obtain new genetic material. “Bloodchild” and the Xenogenesis books take the idea of sex with aliens–an idea which is just a titillating way of getting the action going in “Devil Girl from Mars”–and delve inside it. They pry it apart. What might sex with aliens actually be like? What would it mean? How would it affect our survival–and theirs? Butler’s imaginative leap makes “sex with aliens” a site for examining adaptation, survival, and body politics. Transformation is key: if, in weird fiction, “some other element, like weird ritual or the science fictional, replaces the supernatural while providing the same dark recognition of the unknown and the visionary” (VanderMeer and VanderMeer Loc. 283), then for Butler this “other element” is change. “God is Change” is the central tenet of Earthseed, the new religion of her Parable novels; in “Bloodchild,” as in many of her works, the change that enables visionary recognition takes place in the inescapable center of identity, the body.

“After a while,” Butler said of her teenage years, “it seemed that everything I’d ever wanted to write about had already been condensed and trivialized on television” (Francis 15). Later, she’d learn it didn’t matter. Time travel in Kindred, dystopia in the Parable novels, vampires in Fledgling: Butler took them all on. She revived tired tropes with her curious, demanding imagination, and she used black female protagonists who never would have appeared in a film like “Devil Girl from Mars.” Writing about marginalized bodies, alien and hybrid bodies, and bodies in the process of change, she permanently altered the body of science fiction.

3. The Kid in the Back of the Room

“Nobody can see how long their books will last or how much influence they’ll have, so I just assume that at least I can make a few people think. I don’t know what will come of that, possibly nothing, but you never know what that one kid, for instance, sitting in the back of the room is going to wind up doing.” — Octavia Butler, interviewed by Marilyn Mehaffy and AnaLouise Keating, 1997 (Francis 116)

I read “Bloodchild” for the first time last year, in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. I can’t remember another story that’s had such an immediate and powerful effect on me. I spent two days in a kind of trance, writing my own symbiosis story called “Honey Bear.” It wasn’t the creepiness of “Bloodchild” that set me spinning, or the idea of alien conquest, which has been around longer than “Devil Girl from Mars.” It was the love. It was the passion between the characters: a passion bought and paid for and expressed in blood. “I’ll take care of you,” T’Gatoi tells Gan–and we want it to be true, and we know it can’t be true, because both Terrans and Tlic are at the mercy of their bodies. There’s nothing alien about that. It’s got nothing to do with slavery, either. It’s how we live.

There’s no way of predicting or even precisely following this kind of influence, the literary kind. We can’t know who’s going to be possessed by Octavia Butler’s work in the future, or who’s writing Butler-influenced stories right now. But there’s another type of influence that can be estimated to some extent, and that is the increasingly visible presence of women, people of color, and many other traditionally underrepresented groups, in the field of fantasy and science fiction. When Butler attended her first science fiction convention in 1970, there was only one other black person there. While it’s still correct to refer to people of color involved in speculative fiction as “minorities,” times have changed. Some of the most visible change has taken place under Butler’s name: the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund, created after Butler’s death in 2006 and administered by the Carl Brandon Society, enables writers of color to launch or advance their careers though the Clarion writing workshops. This is one sign of the literary landscape Octavia Butler helped create: a landscape in which nobody will ever be asked what it’s like to be the only black woman writing science fiction. Whatever new struggles come with these changing demographics, and whatever work remains to be done, the change itself is an important part of Butler’s legacy. Her use of black and female protagonists, and the diversity of her fictional worlds, invites others–especially those who feel they’re sitting way in the back of the room that is science fiction–to imagine themselves into the future.

Octavia Butler often said that she had a three-part audience: black people, feminists, and science fiction fans. Her vision, however, is for everyone. Her work shows no interest in separatism, but rather a sustained and daring examination of how we come together. In Butler’s worlds, we come together because our survival depends on it. We are joined in blood, bound for a future marked by traces of the past. “Bloodchild,” with its heady mix of beauty and terror, offers one variation on this theme: community as paradox, as dissonance, as mystery, and as symbiosis.

Works Cited

Butler, Octavia E. Bloodchild and Other Stories. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995. Print.

—. “ ‘Devil Girl from Mars’: Why I Write Science Fiction.” MIT Communications Forum, 2004. Web. http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/butler.html

Francis, Consuela, ed. Conversations with Octavia Butler. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Print.

VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer, eds. The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. New York: Tor Books, 2012. Kindle ebook file.

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Mervyn Peake (1911 — 1968) was a visionary English writer, poet, and artist named to The Times’ list of “The 50 Greatest British Writers since 1945.” Peake is best-known for the phantasmagorical Gormenghast series (1946 – 1959). Parkinson’s disease robbed Peake of the ability to complete the later novels in the cycle. Early influences included Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson, but the weirdness that permeates his work also demonstrates knowledge of Decadent-era literature and, in art, the Grotesques. Much of his short fiction is collected in Boy in Darkness and Other Stories (1976, revised 2007), including “Same Time, Same Place,” chosen for inclusion in The Weird. Our newest contributor to 101 Weird Writers, writer and scholar Sofia Samatar, has lent her considerable insights into Mervyn Peake and his work, in the process discovering several threads running though his unique aesthetic sensibilities and charting where they weave together.

- Adam Mills, editor of “101 Weird Writers”

***

1. The House of Darkstones

Titus is seven. His confines, Gormenghast. Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes, a labyrinth of stone: and yet within his body something other—other than this umbrageous legacy. For first and ever foremost he is child.

Gormenghast, the second volume of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy, opens with an extraordinary series of portraits in words. As if walking through a gallery in the somber halls of Gormenghast Castle, the reader views each character for a brief time before moving on to the next. The portraits form a bridge between the action of the first volume, Titus Groan, and that of the sequel. In describing the characters, Peake revisits key episodes of Titus Groan; as such, the word paintings can serve as a reminder for the returning reader about to begin Gormenghast, or an introduction for the new one. This practical function, however, in no way explains the richness of the portraits, or the way Peake dwells on certain aspects of his characters as though darkening them obsessively with his pencil. That avid concentration, out of all proportion to the obvious goal, produces both lushness and a sense of enclosure approaching to claustrophobia. These qualities are the hallmarks of Gormenghast—both the castle, and the literary phenomenon.

“There was a library and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble” (1). The word paintings do possess plot: these lines, from the section devoted to Titus’s father, recall the burning of the library in Titus Groan. Yet each character portrayed exists alone, as if enclosed in a frame, preoccupied only with his or her own particular part of the story. Some, of course, are cut off from the others by death, and appear as ghosts, but even the living are depicted in isolation. In the chapters that follow, the living characters will interact, but the portraits that open Gormenghast speak to their essential condition. They are marooned in the massive edifice that is Gormenghast, just as Gormenghast itself is marooned in an inclement countryside, or—to extend the discussion into another of Peake’s worlds—as the ship The Black Tiger tosses on an inhospitable sea in his picture book, Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor.

The impulse is to compress as much as possible into a very small space. We can see the same impulse in Peake’s fascination with naming: if the word portraits are novels writ small, the names of characters are writ even smaller, each distilling an entire personality into a single word. Peake’s playful names—Steerpike, Swelter, Flay—are so evocative they serve as identifying badges for the characters. Of course, no actual personality can be so reduced, and Peake’s characters are deformed by the process, so that Swelter the chef is all heat, sweat and suet, and Flay, the Earl’s devoted manservant, is so narrow and fleshless he creaks. These signpost names and their grotesque bearers recall the work of Dickens, but transpose Dickensian humor into a grimmer key. Where Dickens offers whimsical sketches, and reserves his more extreme distortions for villains and minor characters, Peake delivers Goya-like charcoal portraits, and remains faithful to the grotesque. All of his characters, major and minor, are informed by the grotesque aesthetic, as they are formed—or, perhaps more accurately, deformed—by Gormenghast Castle, which exerts a terrible pressure of ritual, masonry and age. “Gore” and “ghastly” are both present in the name of this castle which, in an early draft, Peake called “The House of Darkstones.”

2. “As a picture it must be lived with. But where?”

The popular story of Peake that has come down to us, and which is only beginning to be challenged, is of an artist who fell to pieces. The Gormenghast Trilogy is too often read as the literary expression of this unraveling. Such an approach renders the third book, Titus Alone, very much alone, separate from the first two novels: by subjecting Titus Alone to a sort of clinical reading, as if it were a record of Parkinson’s disease, it stymies any attempt to discover what Peake may have been trying to accomplish in the novel. Michael Moorcock has written of the exploratory nature of Titus Alone, and this avenue deserves further study, as do other aspects of Peake’s life and work. The “umbrageous legacy” of the Gormenghast novels—the brooding Gothicism that has become synonymous with Mervyn Peake—is important, but it is only part of the story.

Mervyn Peake was born to missionary parents in China in 1911, and spent his early years in Tianjin. G. Peter Winnington’s biography, Vast Alchemies, mentions several elements of Peake’s early life that may have found their way into his art, such as the flooding of Tianjin in 1917, which likely inspired the flooding of Gormenghast Castle. Even more significant to Peake’s writings and drawings was the landscape of Sark, where he spent time both before and after his marriage to Maeve Gilmore. Sark is, of course, an island, and therefore in a sense an enclosure, sharing some of the attributes of a ship or a castle; its cliffs entered Peake’s illustrations for Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and it provided the setting for Peake’s novel Mr. Pye. Peake was a painter, and made a living as an art teacher and illustrator. His service during World War II included a brief term as a war artist. He was, as the writings of those who knew him assert again and again, a person of enormous humor, generosity and exuberance.

And this is the Mervyn Peake we may have trouble seeing through the massive shadow cast by the Gormenghast books, and by his illness. The piratical Peake, scandalizing the inhabitants of Sark with his gold earring and scarlet-lined cloak. The Peake who clambered up the cliffs with a fledgling cormorant in his pocket. The Peake who, having failed out of school and thus forfeited the opportunity to exhibit the Gold Medal painting he had been working on, flipped it over and painted another picture on the other side. The Peake who drew inspiration from the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan as well as the plays of Marlowe.

If we find it hard to associate this merry and dashing figure with the author of the Gormenghast books, we won’t be the first ones to have trouble placing Mervyn Peake. Throughout his life, observers struggled with the combination of playfulness and darkness in his work. His picture book, Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor, was deemed “quite unsuitable for sensitive children” by the Times Literary Supplement, due to its “rather horrific gallery of portraits” (2). In 1944, he exhibited, among other works, a large painting called “Mr. Brown’s Resurrection,” said to portray a scene from everyday life with a “nightmarish” quality. The painting, unfortunately, did not survive. We are left with the bemusement of a reviewer for the Sunday Times: “As a picture it must be lived with. But where?” (3).

Where can we live with Mervyn Peake? The tension between restriction and excess in his work certainly suggests a Gothic sensibility, and the gloomy atmosphere of Gormenghast Castle undoubtedly allies it with Otranto, Udolpho and the House of Usher. I would like, however, to offer another way of approaching his work, one that may embrace both Gothicism and play. This is a road that begins not with Marlowe or even with Dickens, but with another of Peake’s influences: adventure fiction.

3. Oh, Crystal Worlds!

Although Mervyn Peake was never very good at school, he was an enthusiastic reader. As a child, he read News from Afar, a monthly children’s magazine distributed by the London Missionary Society, and submitted letters and drawings to it. His imagination was captured by Treasure Island to the extent that he learned most of it by heart, and wrote a story of his own about a boy named “Hugh Silver.” His fascination with pirates continued into adulthood, flickering in his gold earring and in the Captain Slaughterboard drawings. Drawing was his earliest and most consistent passion: a friend of his parents’ in Tianjin recalls that he “simply drew, all the time… It was difficult to get him to bed simply because he stuck to this drawing” (4). A similar image surfaces during Peake’s war years: Philip Best, who served with him, remembers how, wherever and whenever possible, “Gunner Peake” would take out his stub of pencil and draw, “[i]n complete happiness and wrapped within himself,” and with “tremendous purpose and concentration” (5).

“That,” Best adds, “was Peake’s discipline.” But the image of Peake here suggests a person in the grip of something altogether more spontaneous and satisfying than discipline. The combination of purpose, concentration and “complete happiness” fits both art and play. The page is a little world, an enclosure to be filled by the artist’s design; imaginatively, the artist enters this space, so that to an outside observer he appears “wrapped within himself.” Without trivializing the artist’s work in any way, I want to suggest that the enclosed space of the work of art shares an affinity with the pirate ship, which is bound upon adventures but is also a little world, of which the pirate captain is the absolute ruler. “Her name was the Black Tiger,” Peake writes of the ship in his picture book, “and Captain Slaughterboard ruled her—every inch!” (6). This type of enclosure differs from the Gothic type, which is imposed from the outside. This enclosure is built, and claimed, from within a larger structure, as a child’s pirate vessel is constructed of living-room chairs. The dangers and mishaps of adventure fiction are pleasurable in part because of the enclosures created in opposition to them: the cave, the campsite, the boat.

Here, then, is a way of reading enclosure and compression in Peake’s fiction: as a form of play. The joy of the game glimmers in Titus’s marbles: “Oh, beautiful marbles! Oh, blood-alleys! Oh, clouded ones, aswim in blood and milk! Oh, crystal worlds, that make the pockets jangle—that make the pockets heavy!” (7). These pocket worlds inspire more than a passing delight: Fuchsia Groan’s love for her private universe, her attic, “equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply” (8). The child’s love for the secret enclosure is the love of all human beings for “the world of their centre where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame.” It is the diver’s love for the sea, the farmer’s love for the earth, and also “[t]he love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great coloured surface he is making” (9).

A different way of reading enclosure; and also, perhaps, a different way of reading excess. For all their preoccupation with compression, the Gormenghast novels are sprawling, unwieldy things, with an organic feel, like shrubs allowed to grow wild. This is the complement to scribbling small: doodling out of proportion. Again, I don’t wish to trivialize Peake’s work by the comparison. Doodling, a form of play using pencil and paper, is also a type of improvisation, of experimentation, yielding unexpected and sometimes striking results. The impulse toward embellishment, toward drawing outside the lines, gives the Gormenghast novels their fascinating bulges and extra appendages, such as the stream-of-consciousness monologues of the chapter “The Reveries” in Titus Groan, or the elaborate preparations for Irma Prunesquallor’s party in Gormenghast. Doodling, less controlled than drawing, allows for humor and transgression. Far from being too adult for the eyes of “sensitive children,” the “horrific” portraits of Captain Slaughterboard, bristling with the energy and wickedness of doodles, may be too childish for sensitive adults.

The child’s secret world, where joyous grotesquerie proliferates, is for Peake the center of life. To betray it is a crime. This is what gives his story “Same Time, Same Place,” reprinted in The Weird, its atmosphere of loss. On the surface, “Same Time, Same Place” is the story of a youth who escapes a ghastly bride; underneath, it concerns a child’s loss of his secret world. Though the narrator is nearly twenty-three years old, his childish character is obvious from the first sentence: “That night I hated Father” (10). It is equally clear that he is right to hate the “dark, smug mortality” of his parents’ home (11), and to escape to Piccadilly Circus. He goes there in search of adventure, which he imagines taking place in a private enclosure: “How wonderful it would have been to have known of some apartment, dimly lighted; of a door that opened to the secret knock…” (12). His dream comes true, not in a dim apartment, but in a crowded restaurant, where he meets and falls in love with a majestic lady. The enclosure appears later, as the window that frames the narrator’s view of the office where he is to meet and marry his love. Within that frame, the hand of a diabolical doodler has been at work: the horrified husband-to-be sees a bearded lady, a man with “the longest neck on earth,” a tattooed man, a man with a cloven hoof in place of one of his hands, and lastly his diminutive bride, who resembles “a mechanical doll” (13).

These grotesques are portrayed as absolutely malignant. Yet the young man’s return to his parents’ dull home reads as tragic. Terror shares space with romance (same time, same place); in fleeing the apparently horrible, the young man has closed the door on his private world, and betrayed both his bride and himself. “Since then I have never left the house,” he declares: an image of a perverted enclosure, where the child-narrator will always belong entirely to his parents, and where transgression and art are impossible (14). Mr. Slaughterboard, an early iteration of the Captain, loathes the thought of such cowardice: “If I ever disobey the artist within me, may my eyeballs turn to blood, and my tongue become a fungus” (15).

The work of Mervyn Peake was made possible by his absolute fidelity to the closed space of art, a fidelity so difficult to sustain that we see it only rarely, and which will always result in works that are sui generis. His oeuvre is a legacy both umbrageous and quicksilver-bright, full of glowering portraits that always retain a hint of the absurd, and lugubrious halls in which a child has fashioned a hidey-hole and is enjoying a feast of seed cake and dandelion wine. Although the exquisitely vile Steerpike steals most of the scenes in Gormenghast, it is after all Titus Groan who is the hero: Titus with his pocket full of crystal worlds, whose true home is not Gormenghast Castle but a castle in the air. For first and ever foremost he is child.

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(1) Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast, in The Gormenghast Trilogy (Woodstock, NY: 1988), 400.

(2) G. Peter Winnington, Vast Alchemies: The Life and Work of Mervyn Peake (London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2000), 115. All biographical details are drawn from this source.

(3) Winnington, 173.

(4) Winnington, 37.

(5) Winnington, 133.

(6) Mervyn Peake, Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2001), 2.

(7) Gormenghast, 462.

(8) Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan, in The Gormenghast Trilogy, 58.

(9)  Titus Groan, 59.

(10) Mervyn Peake, “Same Time, Same Place,” in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (New York: Tor Books, 2012). Kindle edition, loc. 11180.

(11) “Same Time, Same Place,” loc. 11196.

(12) “Same Time, Same Place,” loc. 11210.

(13) “Same Time, Same Place,” loc. 11280–7.

(14) “Same Time, Same Place,” loc. 11314.

(15) Mervyn Peake, Peake’s Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings of Mervyn Peake, ed. Maeve Gilmore (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 69.

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