Thomas Ligotti (1953–) is an iconic American writer of weird short fiction whose oeuvre has been as ground-breaking as, if not always as well-acknowledged as, that of Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and H. P. Lovecraft. His first collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1986), is an outright classic in the field. His subsequent compilation, The Nightmare Factory (1996), won both the Bram Stoker Award and the British Fantasy Award. The influence of workplace experiences infused Ligotti’s fiction with fresh energy, resulting in the masterpiece “My Work Is Not Yet Done” (2002).

Jon Padgett is a professional—though lapsed—ventriloquist who lives in New Orleans. His first short story collection, The Secret of Ventriloquism, was named the Best Fiction Book of the Year by Rue Morgue Magazine. Padgett is the creator of the Thomas Ligotti Online website and is the Co-Editor-In-Chief of Vastarien, a source of critical study and creative response to Ligotti’s work.

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“The Town Manager” illustration by Jason Van Hollander for Weird Tales #333

“But even if I know what governs their trajectory, if I know the rules of the movement of things and how things are organized and how certain mutations, transformations, gestations take place, even if I know all that, I shall only have learnt how to get along after a fashion in the enormous gaol, the oppressive prison in which I am held. What a farce, what a snare, what a booby-trap.”

- Eugène Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal

Thomas Ligotti’s mid-career story “The Town Manager” takes place in what he elsewhere calls “skeleton towns”: isolated, semi-rural hamlets that are many years beyond their best days.[1] Prior examples include the gothic setting of “The Tsalal,” the town and its people featured in “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World,” and perhaps a dozen or more Ligotti tales set in such decrepit locales. “The Town Manager,” however, stands apart from previous, similar stories for several reasons: 1) the deconstruction of this fictional town’s corporate governing system is highlighted, 2) humor—specifically of an absurdist nature—is utilized to more devastating effect than in previous stories of its kind, and 3) the physical degradation and corruption of the landscape featured in “The Town Manager” mirrors a kind of self-indicting rottenness that infects the narrator himself.

The Story

“The Town Manager” opens during a significant change in the town’s leadership. The unnamed hamlet maintains a simple, corporate form of government in which the populace is led by a single individual, traditionally called “the town manager.” As the story opens, the latest town manager has disappeared—a not unusual but always mysterious occurrence that marks the end of one manager’s administration and the beginning of another’s. The action required of the populace during this leadership changeover (a bogus search for the former manager) has gone on since time immemorial, set in stone via a shoddy and oblique town charter.

The new town manager, who remains an invisible and possibly supernatural entity throughout the story, leads the town to an unprecedented phase in its history, as strangers come in from outside and redevelop the whole area, transforming the hamlet into “Funny Town,” a kind of sideshow tourist trap. All the inhabitants are assigned new, often humiliating and thankless jobs.

The transformation of the town turns out to be nothing more than a huge moneymaking scheme, as for a time it is filled with tourists who pay exorbitant fees to buy the narrator’s soup or visit the other sideshows offered there. The residents do not benefit from this economic windfall, though, the money they generate collected multiple times a day by armed guards (outsiders) who leave only the most meager funds for the workers.

Eventually, the tourists stop coming to town, and the townsfolk realize that the latest town manager has disappeared. The narrator, however, doesn’t wait to witness further degradations. He leaves for other towns and cities, working odd jobs. After his travels reveal a similar political framework everywhere he goes, the narrator decides to kill himself, but is finally approached by a well-dressed man on commission to find new talent. He tells the narrator that he may be town manager material. The narrator, who sees only two options ahead of him (suicide or town management), replies, “I’m listening.”

The Ritualistic Politics of a Skeleton Town 

Ligotti observed that “[‘The Town Manager’] was meant to be against the world… an anti-governmental story.”[2] The story presents a municipal government that operates much like a big corporation. Towns, like business departments or agencies, are run by a single manager, who presumably is supervised by a higher authority (nameless, out-of-town entities).

Like many legislators or workers, managers or not, the town manager who vanishes at the beginning of the story has become almost entirely non-productive in the weeks leading up to his presumed resignation: “[H]e spent the whole of each working day asleep behind his desk.” The town managers, the narrator tells us, have been declining in overall quality for some time, but each of them during their tenure (not unlike new mayors or other executive leaders) introduces “some element of change” to the community. A new opera house, far inferior to the old one, is built as part of a push for “civic rehabilitation.” [3] An unneeded trolley is created that runs from one end of the small town to the other in no time at all. These changes lead to work for the residents, of course, which seems their only true purpose. Unfortunately, the changes also lead to instability and uncertainty.

As in our world in certain times and places, administrative overhauls and reorganizations are the most disruptive aspects of the residents’ lives:

The difficult part was waiting for new administrators to reveal the nature of their plans for the town and then adjusting ourselves to whatever form they might take. This was the system in which we had functioned for generations. This was the order of things into which we had been born and to which we had committed ourselves by compliance. The risk of opposing this order, of plunging into the unknown, was simply too much for us to contemplate for very long.[4]

The town itself appears to be run through poor memory and superstition, via the Town Charter, “now only a few poorly phrased notes assembled from recollections and lore…”[5] The residents are resigned to the ritualistic precepts enumerated in this ancient document, except during the limbo-time between town manager administrations. The townsfolk, of course, have little free agency and will to change the system in any meaningful way:

Our only concern was to act in such a way that would allow us to report to the new town manager, when he appeared, that we had made an effort to discover the whereabouts of his predecessor. Yet this ritual seemed to matter less and less to each successive town manager, the most recent of whom barely acknowledged our attempts to locate the dead or living body of the previous administrator.[6]

Here are people not even motivated by fear of noncompliance (at least until the trolley operator’s death). They are simply brainwashed into action and obedience by tradition. Leeman, the Barber, comes closest to progressive thinking by suggesting that “it’s time to find out just who we’re dealing with,” but that line of thinking dissolves once the new town manager makes its presence known.[7] The townsfolk are trained by previous administrations to follow the directives of the Town Charter and go through specific motions when the town manager disappears. In this case, they have to search for the old town manager, whether or not they know for certain that he is gone for good. According to the narrator, “these searches were performed with increasingly greater speed and efficiency whenever one town manager turned up missing as the prelude to the installation of another.”[8] In this twisted world, again, not so unlike ours, speed and efficiency are paired with illogic and absurdity – the paradox of moving through red tape like clockwork via ritualistic activities.

Many of these rituals carry a peculiarly occult feeling, from the lamplight being turned off to symbolize the passing of the old manager to the new. “He has left us,” someone says, suggesting the town manager as a temporary, shabby savior.[9] The sinister, unseen, new town manager—who communicates with slashing, all-capped, often misplaced, malformed words containing no vowels except for “A,” “U” and “O,”—suggests both illiteracy and the occult. Communication with the new manager, as with the monstrous manager in Ligotti’s “Our Temporary Supervisor,” has become a wholly esoteric process. Directives are found on floating pieces of paper, or, when they are not followed in a timely manner, burned or scratched into mutilated flesh. The previous town manager was simply lazy and incompetent. This new town manager is alien to the residents on a different level, operating in a gloomy locale out of town limits.

Things had always been moving in that direction. At one time the town manager conducted business from a suite of offices in the town hall and lived in a fine house in The Hill district of town. Now this official would be working out of a weather-beaten shed next to a ruined farmhouse. Nothing remained the same for very long. Change was the very essence of our lives.[10]

The town managers have become despotic but are themselves subject to some kind of outside direction and rules. Their own bosses are invisible and unknown entities. It is rule by proxy. The search for the old town manager, even when the residents know he is gone, suggests the absurdity of certain religious rituals. In “the new epoch” of the town’s management, excuses are no longer made for the ridiculous pet projects the managers enact.[11] Immediate compliance is expected under the penalty of death, a kind of Old Testament operation. Again, though, the town managers themselves are a part of outside, corporate (and perhaps globalized) forces—a fact highlighted by the workmen and construction crews from foreign locales who transform the town. The new town manager may be uneducated and is certainly deranged (even homicidal), but is nonetheless successful in transforming the town (temporarily) into a moneymaking operation at the expense of the townsfolk, who are used like raw materials. They are dehumanized to the point where they, like the town managers, literally live in their work facility and, presumably unlike the town managers, do not profit for their efforts. Armed guards and spies from outside of the area ensure that no resident takes more than the meager amount that they are allowed to keep. The townsfolk are given just enough to survive and are often humiliated and starved in the process. The corrupt municipal government alone is allowed to thrive even as it degenerates further into madness.

At the end of the story, the narrator realizes to his dismay that every other community in the country and presumably the world is ruled by the same principles and order as his skeleton hometown. There is no escape from this system of dissolution that pushes citizens to follow insane edicts and treats them as cogs in a great machine that no one individual, town manager or not, can fathom.

Horror Hilarity

“What drew us to [‘The Town Manager’] was a kind of dark sense of humor underlying the story,” the Weird Fiction Review interviewer of Thomas Ligotti comments.[12] Elsewhere, in a separate interview, Ligotti addresses this point:

The particular town manager of the title reflects an advanced stage of the town’s degeneration and derangement. States and circumstances of degeneration, derangement, ruin, decay, etc. have a tremendous attraction for me, whether they are incarnated as a decrepit urban area or a worn-out small town. And sometimes the result of this attraction is humorous.[13]

Use of humor has always been a feature, often understated by critics, of Thomas Ligotti’s work. Even early tales, like “The Chymist,” are infused with dark humor. That story’s first-person, present-tense narrator engages in continuous, sardonic wordplay while waxing poetic about the degenerating city in which he lives. Later works, like “The Bungalow House” and Ligotti’s novella “My Work Is Not Yet Done,” include grimly and often absurdly funny moments from narrators who are also obsessed, like Ligotti, with bleak and ruined landscapes.

Illustration by Jason Van Hollander for Weird Tales #333

The humor in “The Town Manager” is of an absurd (or, rather, absurdist) flavor, from the useless trolley to the murder of the trolley operator by possibly supernatural means via the semi-literate town manager. In the pivotal book, The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin quotes philosopher Apuleius, describing ancient mime plays in which “serious, even horrifying matters are miraculously mingled with the… humorous.” [14] This is of a kind used by Ligotti, humor that might be found in a Beckett or Ionesco play – a hilarity that reinforces and deepens rather than defuses the horror of existence.

This grim absurdity reaches its comical apex in Ligotti’s story when the new town manager transforms the hamlet into “Funny Town.”[15] The hardware store becomes “Comfort Castle,” a maze of nonfunctional lavatories, putting Ritter—formerly the hardware store owner—in the position of Attendant, a job with no apparent function. The progressive-minded barber, Leeman, is the subject of a worse humiliation, being forced to wear infant clothes, sitting day by day in the middle of a giant playpen, formerly his barber shop, which is christened “Baby Town.”[16]

The whole community becomes likewise transformed into a series of sideshows, some “whimsical,” like the aforementioned shops, but others surreal and sinister and oppressive. The narrator himself is set to selling soup (actually only bouillon cubes in water) and is confined, day and night, to “tunnel-like arcades” behind main street, “where it was perpetually night.” The alleys sometimes end up “in someone’s kitchen or living room” or just peter out or transform into a “big city” façade, in which street noises (“screams and sirens”) are piped in through speakers.[17]

The artificial nature of the new town is, at its height, where the narrator is stationed, inside of “painted theatrical backdrops of tall tenement buildings with zigzagging fire escapes [rising] up on every side…”[18] The narrator is forced to subsist on his product, working and living there on a flimsy mattress day and night. This kind of black humor bolsters the material that might be too bleak to ingest without it.

Ligotti’s narrator ultimately abandons his hometown to escape the insanity, humiliation and injustice of his plight. What he finds is more of the same, everywhere. The state of the outside world, so like that of the degenerating skeleton town, leads the narrator to the brink of suicide. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus explains how such epiphanies can lead the individual to similarly existential depths:

…in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. [19]

“Even though I’m writing a weird story,” Ligotti writes, “I want it to be all of a piece. I wouldn’t want anything humorous in the story to undermine the story as a whole, which is definitely not supposed to be funny.”[20] Ligotti has succeeded here. Though notable elements of “The Town Manager” are indeed humorous, nothing about the story as whole is (a hallmark of successful absurdism in literature).

Illustration by Jason Van Hollander for Weird Tales #333

Degeneration of Landscape, Degeneration of Self

In a recent email conversation with Ligotti, I asked if there was a connection between “The Town Manager” and the Detroit area, in which he was born and raised, and where he lived for many years. Ligotti replied:

[T]he sub-prime mortgage scam is often cited as having its beginnings in Detroit, where poor were preyed upon by greedy lending institutions. That didn’t sit well with me. The ruination of Detroit had begun long before that, though. During the late sixties there was a co-called “white flight” to the suburbs that contributed in a major way to the deterioration of Detroit… However, Detroit did become particularly interesting afterward… It wasn’t the “great ruins,” such as the train station, that attracted me so much as the houses on backstreets by the railroad yard that you couldn’t tell were inhabited or not, old car repair places and other such left behind businesses, and abandoned lots that came to be used as dumping yards for sofas and large appliances. Those weren’t ruins of a city but of people’s lives.[21]

In the story, the town itself is shrinking as its “decrepitude” (and that of its residents’ lives) worsens:

The buildings and houses comprising our town were now far fewer than in my childhood and youth. Whole sections that had once been districts of prolific activity had been transformed by a remarkable corrosion into empty lots where only a few bricks and some broken glass indicated that anything besides weeds and desiccated earth had ever existed there.[22]

Paradoxically, the growth of the systematic machine comes at the cost of the living and working space of the townspeople.

When the perspective changes from first-person plural to first-person singular for the first time, the narrator describes his “youthful ambition.”[23] Namely, he had always wanted to live in a prestigious neighborhood known as The Hill, which had at some point in a previous administration been razed level with the rest of the town and was now an “empty stretch of ground.”[24] Perhaps it is this ambition and unwillingness to accept his situation that sets the narrator apart enough to be later considered managerial material. Ligotti writes:

In “The Town Manager,” the town’s continued decrepitude was the result of a succession of outside business and political interests that gradually sucked the life out of the place while enriching themselves in increasingly odd and nonsensical ways. I experienced that madness from the inside in the form of new ownerships that bought out a family company that published a modest series of quality books. The number of titles subsequently published grew rapidly while the quality of the books went into the toilet, and I lost my place in the company by my reluctance to work longer and harder for entities located outside the U.S. It’s a familiar story now, but at the time it was new kind of hell wherein formerly decent people went rotten before my eyes.[25]

Why does the narrator of “The Town Manager” go “rotten” in a community that mirrors Ligotti’s own degenerating work experiences, where quality “went into the toilet?” Or rather, other than his “youthful ambition,” what is it about the narrator that sets him apart?

A clue comes early in the story after Leeman the barber voices the townsfolk’s complaints about the useless search for the missing Town Manager. The narrator pipes up:

I referred him and the others to the section of the town charter, a brief document to be sure, that required “a fair search of the town and its environs” whenever a town manager went missing. This was part of an arrangement that had been made by the founders and that had been upheld throughout succeeding generations. [26]

This perhaps highlights a willingness on the narrator’s part to at least speak for an appeal to tradition—a trait that would be valued in any managerial capacity. When Leeman rebukes this defense of the Town Charter by suggesting that “’it’s time to find out just who we’re dealing with,’” the narrator observes, “Others agreed with him. I myself did not disagree.”[27] The political savvy of the narrator is obvious. He is knowledgeable but knows when to speak up and when to keep his mouth shut.

Later in the story, we are given to know that the narrator, like other townsfolk, has endured a series of job changes due to various town managers’ directives over the years. The narrator had initially cultivated a successful delivery business and had ended up sweeping the barber’s floors and doing odd jobs about town. We are told that his drive “was all but extinguished” (my emphasis) once The Hill in which he had wanted to live “had eroded to nothing.”[28] Now the reader knows that there is some ambition left, which perhaps can be cultivated later at the right time and in the right place.

Near the end of the story, when the narrator is forced to sell bouillon cubes in water, he realizes that the town has been transformed into a successful, if dreary and fascistic, tourist destination:

I was in awe of the town manager’s scheme. Not only had this faceless person taken our last penny to finance the most extensive construction project the town had ever seen, from which there was no doubt a considerable amount of kickback involved, but this ingenious boondoggle had additionally brought an unprecedented flood of revenue into our town.[29]

Again, the narrator, cleverer and more observant than his fellow townsfolk, reveals his proto-managerial chops. He understands that the whole scheme is an “ingenious boondoggle.” One wonders how much, or whether, the tourists appreciated “Funny Town,” or if they had any choice at all in the matter – perhaps having been directed by their own town managers to take a vacation under strict specifications.

In any case, once the boondoggle and the latest town manager’s tenure have reached an end, the narrator leaves his hometown (as Ligotti left his longtime job and home in the Detroit area) only to realize the system that has ground him and the rest of his fellow citizens down also rules elsewhere in the world—everywhere else in the world. There is, in fact, no escape from the humiliating degradations of the individual by a degenerating, totalitarian, corporate form of government, in which quality goes “into the toilet” in a never ending quest to make the most revenue at the least possible cost. The narrator decides, in light of this soul-crushing revelation, “to make an end of it.”[30]

Before he can take any action toward suicide, though, the narrator is approached by “a well-dressed man,” who is on commission to find people like the narrator for town management. In the end, it seems like the narrator will go that route, since “It was either that or make an end of it.” [31]

How does the “well-dressed man” know that the narrator is indeed managerial material? He asks him, “’You’ve been some places, am I right?’”[32] In the world of this story, extensive traveling likely connotes both a greater awareness of the form and function of the system at large and an ambitious, paradoxically unsatisfied nature—traits that would suggest managerial promise. Perhaps, also, the powers that be have been watching the narrator (maybe for many years in some esoteric and/or technological sense).

Finally, why does the narrator choose town management, the very process by which he has been ruined, over suicide? Ligotti writes:

In “The Town Manager,” the narrator who speaks for both the town and himself ultimately goes rotten in a way that’s quite apparent by how the story ends. It wasn’t his plan to go the way he did. It was the fact, as he discovers, that the whole world as well as the town he knew had become unsalvageable and his options had run out. That’s the “realistic perspective…” This situation can be seen in plenty of zombie movies and TV shows: you either become realistic or die, by the bite of a zombie or the savagery of other humans.[33]

Conclusion

“The Town Manager” is a singular piece of fiction within Thomas Ligotti’s remarkable oeuvre to date, even among the subset of his “skeleton town” tales, thanks to its incisive dissection of governmental systems, its perfect application of absurdist humor, and the self-eviscerating, moral degeneration of its narrator. The story, among the best examples of literary weird fiction, is a sardonic, subtle indictment of corporate rule and is as fiercely humane and uncanny as the best of Thomas Ligotti’s work.

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[1] Noctuary, Thomas Ligotti (Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2012), 79.

[2] Thomas Ligotti, e‑mail message to author, October 23, 2017.

[3] Teatro Grottesco, Thomas Ligotti (Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books, 2007), 30.

[4] Ibid., 31.

[5] Ibid., 27.

[6] Ibid., 27

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 25.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 29.

[11] Ibid., 31.

[12] Thomas Ligotti, interview by Jeff VanderMeer, “Thomas Ligotti on Weird Fiction,” Born to Fear, ed. Matt Cardin (Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2014), 202.

[13] Thomas Ligotti, interview by Daniel Ableev, “Interview Nonsense with Thomas Ligotti,” Born to Fear, ed. Matt Cardin (Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2014), 156–157.

[14] The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2004), 159.

[15] Teatro Grottesco, Thomas Ligotti (Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books, 2007), 36.

[16] Ibid., 34.

[17] Ibid., 34–35.

[18] Ibid., 35.

[19] Albert Camus, “An Absurd Reasoning” in The Myth of Sisyphus (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1991), 6.

[20] Thomas Ligotti, interview by Jeff VanderMeer, “Thomas Ligotti on Weird Fiction,” Born to Fear, ed. Matt Cardin (Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2014), 203.

[21] Thomas Ligotti, e‑mail message to author, October 23, 2017.

[22] Teatro Grottesco, Thomas Ligotti (Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books, 2007), 25–26.

[23] Ibid., 26.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Thomas Ligotti, e‑mail message to author, October 23, 2017.

[26] Teatro Grottesco, Thomas Ligotti (Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books, 2007), 27.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid., 30.

[29] Ibid., 36.

[30] Ibid., 38.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Thomas Ligotti, e‑mail message to author, October 23, 2017.

The post 101 Weird Writers #47 — Thomas Ligotti appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

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

The post 101 Weird Writers #46 — Ryūnosuke Akutagawa appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Stefan Grabiński (1887 – 1936) was a Polish writer of horror fiction who considered himself an expert on demonology and magic. Some critics have called him the ‘Polish Poe’ or the ‘Polish Lovecraft’, and suggested he believed in the supernatural forces in his stories. Known primarily as a novelist, he wrote many short stories, including those under the name Stefaen Zalny. Grabiński was popular in his day, until a trend toward more realistic fiction doomed him to obscurity. The importance of translations by writer Miroslaw Lipinski to bring Grabiński to an English-language readership – for the collection The Dark Domain (1993) – cannot be understated. The tale included in The Weird, ‘The White Weyrak’ (1921), exemplifies the writer’s talent for atmosphere and strangeness.

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One thing the sheer range of The Weird: A Compendium of Strange & Dark Stories demonstrates is that writers who feel the pull of the strange are a varied breed, divers in their backgrounds, in their races and ethnicities, in the parts of the world they hail from, in their social statuses, in their concerns and interests. But there is one trait a good many of them share, a trait writ large in much weird fiction: a horror of the quotidian round, a desire to escape the demands of humdrum daily life. Some writers of the weird fantastic seek to flee the mundane into the sensual realms of eroticism or narcotics; others look for solace and oblivion in alcohol; and for others, rationalism and scientific materialism are a bulwark against the confusing realities of ordinary life, its unfairness, its senselessness.

In Stefan Grabiński the longing for a flight from the everyday was especially pronounced. In his work this desire takes the form of a visionary hunger, a lusting after something beyond the material, and an attempt to mould and transform the material realm with his imagination.

He was someone with particularly good reason to wish for escape from the first. On February 26^th 1887, in Kamionka Strumiłowa, a small town in the eastern provinces of Poland, now part of the Ukraine, he was born, the son of a judge. But, though born into a reasonably well-off middle-class family, his childhood was not a comfortable one. He was a sickly child. His taste for the fantastic was nurtured early. Encouraged by his mother, who was a great lover of literature, the young Grabiński read whilst laid up in bed; his illness, a constant reminder of his mortality, and his introspective personality led him to dark fantasy and to an interest in the occult. He would later, while a student, find out he had tuberculosis; at first afflicting his bones, and later spreading to his lungs, it was to cause him pain for much his life. The disease was common in his family, his father suffered from it, and it was perhaps passed from father to son at a young age, a possible explanation for Grabiński’s childhood frailty. Whatever, though the discovery as a young adult he was fated a life of ill health might have darkened Grabiński’s worldview, it’s probable his gloomy and esoteric perspective was formed on his childhood sickbed.

Bruno Schulz

After Grabiński’s father’s death the family moved to Lwów, capital of Polish Galicia, which is where Grabiński, a little later, attended university, reading Polish and classical literature. After graduating in 1911, he began working as a teacher of Polish. He would remain a teacher the rest of his life, a job he was by all accounts very good at, but which he found frustrating as he felt it sapped his creative energy. He found work mostly in gymnasia in and around Lwów, though for a short while he did also have a job in Vienna, at a time when his contemporary from nearby Drohobycz, Bruno Schulz, was studying Fine Arts there. It’s not known whether the two great Polish fantasists of the early twentieth century met, but it is interesting to speculate on what they might have made of each other. Their approaches to the Weird were very different – Schulz, a writer of etiolated and strange nostalgia, Grabiński, much more brutal, and interested in the impact of modern technologies on contemporary life.

Lwów was a very cosmopolitan place, and the vibrant mix of cultures undoubtedly fed Grabiński’s writing. He began writing short fiction in 1906, supported by his mother, his first reader and critic. He self-published his debut in 1909, Twilight of Faith, under the pen-name Jan Żalny (Żalny means sorrowful). It disappeared. His second volume of tales, On the Hill of Roses, published in 1918, after the upheavals of WWI, had a more encouraging reception however. Karol Irzykowski, a Polish decadent writer and leading literary critic of the time, thought highly of it calling Grabiński a striking original.  Then in 1920, Grabiński published a collection of his railway stories, The Motion Demon. It was a popular, partly due to the interest in rail travel of the time, and was well regarded by critics. Irzykowski called it a perfect example of its genre and hailed Grabiński the ‘Polish Poe’. Irzykowski, a Marxist, perhaps saw in the milieu of the tales something of a critique of the industrial, but Grabiński is not thought to have been particularly politicized. His take on the railways was more personal, mystical.

The Motion Demon established Grabiński as a successful writer. It was followed by further collections, Pilgrim’s Madness (1920), and A Mystery Tale and The Book of Fire (both 1922). The latter, like The Motion Demon, has a unified theme, that of elementals, demons of the elements. It is in this collection ‘The White Wyrak’ appeared.

Grabiński never regained the heights of his early tales, and the fame and material comfort they bought faded quickly. He tried his hand at novels and dramas, but they lacked the tautness and economy that made his short fiction catch fire and were too dependent on obscure occult iconography and terminology. He travelled about outside of Poland, including a trip to Italy where he visited Venice, a setting that inspired his longest short prose work, ‘Passion’. But, during this time, his deteriorating health increasingly kept him housebound. He became bitter. In 1929, his tuberculosis spread to his lungs, with haemorrhaging. And his financial situation grew increasingly precarious. Still he continued to work, and in 1936, published a novel, Itongo Island. It received bad reviews. And was to be his last book.

On the 12^th November 1936, aged 49, he died. On his death bed, he complained bitterly about having been misunderstood and forgotten in his native land.

Grabiński may have been dubbed the Polish Poe and been an avid reader of the American’s work, but he was quite unlike Poe in many ways. Poe, though fascinated by what might lie beyond the limits of contemporary scientific knowledge, was averse to mysticism. Grabiński by contrast, rejected materialism and embraced Neo-Platonism and the esoteric. He was intensely spiritual throughout his life, a pantheist who read the Christian mystics, Eastern religious texts such as the Indian Vedas, and works of theosophy and demonology.

Polish decadence also influenced Grabiński, and there is certainly a decadent turn to his writings, but his explorations are much more insular than those of the decadents; though there are traces of licentiousness and eroticism in stories like ‘Fumes’, ‘Passion’, ‘Sarah’s House’, and ‘The Black Hamlet’, in them lust has terrible consequences. This facet of Grabiński’s work may be partly autobiographical. In 1917 Grabiński married Kazimiera, a music teacher, and they had two daughters together. But in 1921, at the height of his success, she left, taking their children with her. Grabiński returned to his mother, never to remarry. His close relationship with his mother and his disastrous marriage may have affected his attitudes towards women: in his stories they are sweet, pliant, or voluptuous, vampiric, and monstrous, very often all at the same time. But this is not to say that his femme fatales are conventional, or that he was a prurient but prudish misogynist in his work. Grabiński had an abiding interest in psychoanalysis and in plumbing his own psyche, and this informs some of the strange sexual currents in his tales; in the story ‘Szamota’s Lover’ for instance, the narrator and the woman who ruins him are finally revealed to be one and the same.

Grabiński termed his fictions ‘psychofantasy’ or ‘metafantasy’. His mode of the fantastic was turned inwards, to explore the psyche, the inner life, and the life of the emotions. It was also addressed to the metaphysical, the philosophical. Grabiński took influence from philosophy, from classical philosophers like Plato and Heraclitus, and from contemporary thinkers. He was a particular admirer of Henri Bergson and it may be that he saw in Bergson’s work something that chimed with his idiosyncratic take on the hidden world. Bergson’s philosophy could be said to lie somewhere between materialism and idealism, rejecting both, and Grabiński’s idiosyncratic worldview fused the material and the occult, creating a kind of mysticism of modernity. He saw in progress and scientific advancement a force that could reveal the world’s hitherto hidden weirdness – a prospect that held fear, but also a component of awe and ecstasy. In his stories Grabiński is modern, does not turn to the past, to the rich folklore of Poland. But he also had a notion that the modern world was a place where man’s original sense of self and of harmony with nature was being erased by machines, materialism, bureaucracy, advances in the study of the mind. There is dread in all this in his work, but also a revelling in what may come. In fact Grabiński wrote, in an essay on his writing, that his guiding motives were ‘wonder and fear.’

The fusing of demonic forces with aspects of modernity in Grabiński’s work is most apparent in his railway stories. Grabiński’s take on locomotives is mystical – based on an esoteric theory of motion. He merged Bergson’s theory of élan vital – the idea that the evolution can be explained by an internal vital impetus – with scientific theories of motion from Newton and Einstein. The British evolutionary biologist, Julian Huxley, famously mocked Bergson’s notion of élan vital by arguing that it no better explained life than the operation of a railway engine could be explained by its élan locomotif. In Grabiński’s cosmicism of motion, the idea of an élan locomotif is in no way worthy of ridicule.

The melding of the occult and technological may be most obvious in Grabiński’s railway tales, but it is also clearly the guiding principle of ‘The White Wyrak’. In this story, a master chimneysweep addresses his ‘boys’, his gang of sweeps, and tells them a grisly tale of the profession. As a young journeyman sweep, working for a man named Kalina, a literate, intelligent, and philosophical boss, he had a dread and strange experience. Two of his closest companions in the gang disappeared after being sent to clean out a chimney in an old brewery. This brewery had been for some time disused, thought cursed, blighted in the local imagination after its last owner hanged himself following financial ruination. This is a fine bit of sleight of hand on Grabiński’s part, hinting at a conventional ghost story, wrong-footing the reader. Then a gardener moves into the shunned brewery, having bought the place for nearly nothing.

The narrator and Kalina go out to the brewery to look for the missing boys. On the way there, Kalina waxes mystical, begins to talk of the preternatural qualities of soot. ‘Soot is dangerous,’ he tells the narrator, ‘particularly when it accumulates in narrow, dark spaces unreachable by the rays of the sun.’ He goes onto to describe soot as if it possessed a life force, something like Bergson’s élan vital. ‘Soot is treacherous, my boy, soot lays dormant inside dark smoke chambers and stuffy furnaces, and it lies in wait – for an opportunity.’ This is a potent odd moment, which fuses the occult and the material, and intimates that the realm of the material and seemingly inanimate can be malicious and inimical to humankind, in a way that anticipates later weird tales such as Fritz Leiber’s ‘The Black Gondolier’, a tale of the dim life and malefic will of crude oil.

At the brewery, the narrator and Kalina are directed to the chimney. The narrator insists on climbing and encounters within the wyrak, a creature born of soot, but ‘snow-white,’ ‘with a pair of huge, owlish yellow eyes,’ ‘part monkey, part large frog,’ a hideous being who has drained the life from the poor lost sweeps. The narrator cleaves the beast’s skull with a hatchet, and it drops down the chimney. Then, when the body is dragged into the light, it deliquesces, before reverting to ‘a large mass of soot – glittering and black like tar.’ Standing over this lump, Kalina pronounces, ‘From soot you came, and to soot you shall return.’ A parody of the biblical formula. But also suggestive of the transmutations that the alchemists believed in and sought to uncover.

The fuliginous has, sequestered away in the dark of the chimney, literally occulted, for a time become its opposite, pure, white as snow, yet evil, malicious. These sorts of complex reversals are characteristic of Grabiński.

Perhaps as a child, lying in bed reading Poe, Grabiński saw strange forms in the blacking on the inside of his oil lamp’s glass chimney. Perhaps he performed the homely alchemy of the silver egg illusion, in which an egg, coated in soot by being held over a gentle flame, appears to gleam when dropped into water. Whatever, clearly transmutation and soot were linked in Grabiński’s mind.

One of the substances the alchemists used in their experiments was white arsenic, arsenious oxide, a white powder formed by the sublimation of arsenical soot. Maybe this is the origin of the white wyrak.

The wyrak’s birth from soot and return to it anticipates the work of a later twentieth century inheritor of Bergsonian thought, Gilles Deleuze. For Deleuze the cosmos is one made up of vital fluxes and flows, in which all things have creative energy, and life is a tussle between ‘becoming’, transformation, and stasis, in which things rise up from and return to an originary chaos Deleuze terms ‘chaosmos’. Deleuze’s ‘chaosmos’ can be considered as analogous to the prima materia, or first matter, of the alchemists, which was thought to be a primeval formlessness from which all matter arises.

For some weeks after the incident of the white wyrak, the story’s narrator and Kalina are afflicted by a disease of the skin, large white pimples appearing all over their bodies. But in time these pustules fade leaving no trace. In another of Grabiński’s tales, ‘The Black Hamlet’, soot and illness are also linked, though the narrator of this story does not escape as lightly as that of ‘The White Wyrak’.

Having fallen asleep drinking tea in an armchair in his rooms, the narrator of ‘The Black Hamlet’ finds himself on a lonely road, walking through a barren landscape. He walks on, crosses a stream, then finds the terrain around him changes rapidly:

The grass disappeared, replaced by the glistening, metallic blackness of coal. Everything was covered with thick coal-dust, lumps of slag, dross and tarry soot.

He enters a gloomy hamlet of ramshackle black houses by a polluted lake, where ashes lie on the ground. There is a stench of sulphur and asphalt. There’s no greenery, save some sere bushes bearing putrid fruits that crumble in the narrator’s fingers into dust, ‘empty like a puff-ball.’ Strange black vultures circle overhead. The narrator catches sight of a group of people, hooded, shaking rattles. He then sees, in a doorway, an alluring woman. She takes him into her hut, which is luxuriously furnished. The woman is sensuous, and after a time the narrator and she kiss. She then bites him and reveals she is a leper, the daughter of the King of Lepers, and that she has possessed him for the leprous tribe. Seizing a dagger from the wall, the narrator stabs her, then runs, pursued by the village’s strange inhabitants and the evil black birds. He faints, before coming to in his rooms, the dagger in his hand, a bite on his cheek, and coal dust on his shoes and in his room. It is thought, when he tells others of the incident and hands himself over to the police as a murderer, that he has merely suffered a nervous breakdown, but he later develops the signs of leprosy.

At the opening of the story, before he tells his account, the desperate, cursed narrator ponders the difference between dreams and reality:

Is there another reality beyond this one? Can one, sometimes, in some exceptional circumstances, cross over to the other side? Can one bring back a ‘souvenir’ – ha, ha, ha! – a ‘keepsake’?

Grabiński’s work often touches on the blurred lines between dreams and reality, often concerns the power of the imagination to transform the world, to reveal hitherto hidden properties, for good and ill. He may have been, by a colloquial definition, a solipsist, but in the philosophical sense he is anything but. His stories betray a belief in an external reality, but one which is mutable to a mind potent and focussed enough. In the introduction to his Creative Evolution, the book in which he sets out his thesis of élan vital, Bergson, in an aside, as a counterexample to his thesis that consciousness is tied to the material, and thus to evolutionary processes, writes:

A mind born to speculate or to dream, I admit, might remain outside reality, might deform or transform the real, perhaps even create it – as we create the figures of men and animals that our imagination cuts out of the passing cloud.

It may be that Grabiński took a hint from this. In his story, ‘The Area’, he formulates a fictional counterpart, an obscure visionary writer, Wrzesmian, whose work, unlike that of other authors, which is always tied to the real world, is totally fantastic, disunited from reality and free from influences, allusions, and allegories. But even this leaves him unsatisfied and, led by a theory that any thought or fiction, no matter how audacious or insane, can one day be materialized, he abandons words as a creative medium. For many years he works on the projection of his thoughts, but with little success.

But then he begins, with his imagination, to create an unseen world within a gloomy abandoned villa across the street from his rooms. He calls forth from the eerie house frail figures. They grown in number, and in the degree of hatred apparent in their expressions. Then one night they beckon Wrzesmian over, and he obeys. When he enters the house, they demand his blood, to fortify them, give them a fuller life. They tear him apart. Afterwards something is born from a water butt in the house, a monstrosity that staggers out from the house heading for the treeline of a distant forest. But it dissolves with the first light of dawn, all Wrzesmian’s intense imaginings dispersed. This story can be read as an allegory of Grabiński’s own approach to composition, his fear his writings would somehow cause him harm, and his despair they would not last. But it also illustrates the transmutative principle that seems to have been at the bottom of Grabiński’s philosophy; a psyche intense enough can act on base matter and call forth life, though it may be a life both hostile and ephemeral. In the story Wrzesmian describes his ‘firm conviction that any thought, even the most audacious, that any fiction, even the most insane, can one day materialize and see its fulfilment in space and time.’

Grabiński’s highly distinctive worldview, his hope that through fiction he could act upon reality and transform it, was a powerful and unique addition to the Weird. In his stories, he is like the narrator of ‘The White Wyrak’ passing on the weird lore of his profession to his boys, to his successors, a lore that has made possible many subsequent strands of strange writing. And as Kalina, the narrator’s own master says:

Something vindictive resides in soot, something evil lurks there. You never know what will emerge from it, or when.

And what historically has been one of the most common substances used in the manufacture of ink? For handwriting and for printing? Blacking and ash. Soot.

The post 101 Weird Writers #45 — Stefan Grabiński appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

K. J. Bishop (1972–) is an Australian writer and artist. In 2004, her neo-Decadent fantasy novel The Etched City was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and she won the William L. Crawford Award, the Ditmar Award for Best Novel, and the Ditmar Award for Best New Talent. Her work has appeared in several publications including Leviathan 4, Fantasy magazine, and Subterranean magazine. Most infamously, her novella ‘Maldoror Abroad’ appeared in Album Zutique; the story riffed on the original Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) by Isidore Lucien Ducasse under the pen name ‘Comte de Lautréamont’. Her tale ‘Saving the Gleeful Horse’ (2010) shares affinities with Decadent modes of writing, including the Alfred Kubin excerpt that opened The Weird. More can be found from Bishop at her personal website.

“Saving the Gleeful Horse” by K.J. Bishop

“A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, “I” is expelled. The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you—it is now here, jetted, abjected, into “my” world. Deprived of world, therefore, I fall in a faint. In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away. The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.” (Kristeva, 4)

“Saving the Gleeful Horse” presents an interesting case of a story that is perhaps suitable to categorization as fable or, more specifically, the New Wave Fabulism subgenre; perhaps not. In it are “redemption” and strange bargains, magical women, princes, Rabelaisian gigantism and moments of the carnivalesque, and any number of other traditional landmarks that one might find. Molimus, the narrator, is 8 feet tall and lives under a bridge, where he collects refuse flowing downstream to sell and make something of a living. It seems the reader is invited to at least consider the possibility that the protagonist should be seen as a troll given these converging details; at the very least he is an abnormally large entity that in many other ways appears to be human. We know little of Molimus save through inferences we might make from his compassionate act of trying to save the “life” of the injured eponymous horse via extraordinary means and self-sacrifice. To do so, he seeks out a mysterious “woman or a woman-shaped thing” (174) with mysterious powers in a mysterious and secluded cloister—the Garth of the Aorist. There he engages in ritual and magical bargaining anchored in bodily exchanges that come at no small price to himself. The White Ma’at has goals of her own following her magical imprisonment by her enemy, Prince November, who operates at the periphery of Molimus’s desires and parodies the story’s pattern of bodily exchange and expulsion by drinking “knowledge from the vein on her forehead” (176). The landmarks and stage directions of a fable are all there, but there are more profound concerns than moral lessons at play, some of which are manifest even in the use of the phrase, “Garth (suggestive of containment and limitation) of the Aorist” (suggestive of being extensible and limitless). These concepts return later in the story as Molimus undergoes a transubstantiation into “the smoke of chimneys and bus exhausts” (180) and roams the town, untethered from both his bodily limits and his paltry living space beneath the bridge and the attendant debris collection.

Punctures

Apart from its fabulist qualities, “Saving the Gleeful Horse” can be read as a subtle and complex work of body horror, through which permeate anxieties of insertion, evisceration, corporeal dispersal, and the contingencies of bodily functionality, the narrative success of which follows from the use of convincing ambiguities of plot, setting, and character. The characters are divorced (but only partly so) from “real” human bodies by the use of carnivalesque pageantry, magical powers, unusual physical characteristics, and subterfuge in order to add complexity to the story’s formulation of corporeality, but, if nothing else, the motivations of the two main characters seem all too human even if they are in fact a giant troll and quasi-human witch. Bishop juxtaposes animate but ambiguous “persons” and inanimate (or should-be inanimate) items to create tension and purposely confound the reader’s sympathies in the incarnation of Molimus (either an impossibly large human or a troll) and the White Ma’at (either a “woman or a woman-shaped thing”). (174)

Our opening image in the story is that of a horse or horse-shaped piñata of sorts being bashed open and emptied of its contents by playfully indifferent children. Bishop takes care to explicitly note the action’s brutality as it is perceived by Molimus. The perception of vitality on the part of the story’s characters becomes an ordering of value. Soon, our narrator is introduced—an 8‑foot character who resembles a human but may perfectly well be a troll as we’re invited to suspect by his impossible dimensions. But before we find out anything about Molimus, Bishop has already set up ground rules that need to be traced throughout the narrative in an opening passage that might be easy to overlook but is nonetheless essential for understanding the story:

“Children are cruel. No one who has lived in the world need ask for proof of that. So it is nothing for them to beat a living creature—a rare, marvelous creature at that—to death. They do so in order to seize the treasure inside it, but one sees the pleasure they take in this assassination of life, even before the plunder starts. Their laughter bounces…until holes open in its body (emphasis added) and the prizes—caramels, toys, game money printed with pictures of wrestlers and cartoon characters—rain down into their hands”. (171)

What to the children is a mere lifeless object is, to Molimus, a living being that has been subjected to great violence and warrants his sympathies. Here, cruelty is both a normative and marginalizing force: it normalizes an order in which presumably human children occupy a privileged space in the world of the story while Molimus resides at the margins, sympathetic to the piñata/creatures the children perceive as inert. What the reader might likewise consider inert objects are assigned a vitality. Internal “vital organs” fall from the piñata bodies and are commodified “prizes” that carry a value for some but not others, the creatures’ evisceration a moment of delight to the children. When our protagonist discovers the Gleeful Horse, he describes it being “as full of holes as a sieve”. (172) (Though the sex of the protagonist is withheld and obscured through first-person narration, for the purposes of this essay the construction of Molimus’s name and mention of “men’s shirts” seem to suggest that the character is meant to be read as male. Yet there is certainly the possibility of reading the character otherwise or as purposely ambiguous.) Where an author like Ligotti imbues animation in things otherwise inanimate to make them supernatural, Bishop locates that which is dead or inert within the animate to explore anxieties about our mortality. At this juncture, it seems fruitful to turn to Kristeva’s discussion of the abject. The explicit connections in the story between refuse and vitality suggest that there are perhaps not so many distinctions as we’d like to think, and that there is a power exchange between them that creates a subject-object relationship. It is important to note that refuse, or “filth”, is “not a quality in itself, but it applies only to what relates to a boundary and, more particularly, represents the object jettisoned out of that boundary, its other side, a margin. Matter issuing from them [the orifices of the body] is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body. […] The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins.” (Kristeva, 69)

Molimus, who “has a foot in both worlds” (175), is empathetic to the horse regarded as an object of the children’s destructive cruelty, and, seeking to save its life after its injuries, which he feels will restore happiness to the area, he consults with a mysterious woman “or woman-like thing” that once held power—the White Ma’at. It’s worth noting in the context of these dual worlds that “Ma’at” refers, among other things, to ancient Egyptian conceptions of truth, balance, order, and harmony, which were often personified as a goddess regulating stars, seasons, and actions of mortals. Molimus’s desperate empathy for the horse manifests itself in a manner coherent with the structure of the story’s use of illness when he states, “I feel sick…not for my sake but for the sake of my horse.” (177) The Ma’at reveals to Molimus the secrets of the objects he perceives as living things, whose internal plastic “organs” constitute “starlike pieces” and are essential to their survival. But those secrets apply to Molimus as well. The White Ma’at is imprisoned in a cloister after being overthrown from her position of power by Prince November, and she seeks to reclaim her position, a goal into which Molimus’s desire to save the horse is subsumed. His agency is both realized but also subverted through their magical bargain.

“Nevertheless, does not fear hide an aggression, a violence that returns to its source, its sign having been inverted? What was there in the beginning: want, deprivation, original fear, or the violence of rejection, aggressivity, the deadly death drive?” (Kristeva, 38)

By the conclusion of the story, a structural balance has been achieved in which the ignorant cruelty of the children visited upon “inanimate” creatures has been reversed and revisited upon them by Molimus in the form of a hollowing illness that he has become. Ironically, he seems just as unaware as the children did when inflicting torments on the creatures for which Molimus feels profound sympathy. Although he has achieved his own ends, the darker implication is that the sickness he inflicts on them will continue for the indefinite future—the apparent aim of the White Ma’at’s bargain.

Shame

To interpret “Saving the Gleeful Horse” as a kind of body horror fable by way of the abject, it is crucial to understand the places where the reader can identify connections between the characters’ bodily limitations and hierarchical positions within the story. For the Gleeful Horse and other inert-but-alive objects, junk goes in and junk comes out. Vital innards are simultaneously cheap plastic and starlike matter. Animate bodies are pushed into inanimate ones both in specific individuals and en masse, such as when the White Ma’at pushes her losing armies “into the chalk hills like raisins in pudding, so that they all died in the white dark” (176). The expulsion and consumption of bodily parts and fluids are a system of power exchange throughout the story that creates the hierarchies of the story’s world. As either an unusually large human or a particularly humanesque troll, Molimus is in a position of superiority to the pet / companion he is caring for; yet Molimus himself is in a position inferior to that held by the mysterious and powerful woman in the Garth of the Aorist. However, after Molimus learns of the functions of the plastic parts, he is induced to experience a shameful realization of his own corporeal limitations in a mirror of the toys he expresses concern for in an act of regurgitating a plastic piece from his own body.

“Why does corporeal waste, menstrual blood and excrement, or everything that is assimilated to them, from nail-parings to decay, represent—like a metaphor that would have become incarnate—the objective frailty of symbolic order?” (Kristeva, 70)

Steven Van Wolputte provides a useful anthropological overview of the history of conceptions of the body in relation to self, society, polity, and ideology that provides some insight into this reading of “Saving the Gleeful Horse” as a body horror fable. Throughout the recent history of critical analyses of conceptions of the body’s significance and modes of operation, Van Wolputte identifies a number of distinctions within the field of medical anthropology that might be applied in different ways to the story. In summation:

“The individual (note this shift from the “natural”) body is the domain of phenomenological analysis as it studies the “lived” or embodied experiences people have of their bodies. The social body, in contrast, relates to the ways the body (including its products: blood, milk, etc.) operates as a natural symbol, as a tool at hand to think and represent social relationships such as gender, kinship, and mode of production (see Featherstone et al. 1991). A third dimension states that power and control are embodied as well. This is the body politic: the human body as tool or weapon of domestication and disciplination and of identification, subjection, and resistance. These three bodies also constitute three levels of experience and analysis. What mediates between them, what according to the authors interarticulates nature, society, and individual, are emotions. As proto-symbols or proto-rituals emotions affect experience most immediately. Hence they can bridge the mind/body divide and bring the three bodies together.” (254–255)

The story interacts with all of these conceptions of the uses of the body—the ritualistic bargaining and exchange of bodily fluids, the White Ma’at’s exploitation of Molimus’s bodily transformation to exercise power and revenge on her enemies, the identification of bodily cruelty and the “lived” experience of evisceration in the context of a setting in which the inert is subjectively viewed as alive, and in the deliberate usage of bodily organs/plastic trinkets as commodity and item of transactional exchange. It is also important to note Kristeva’s own distinctions between intimate suffering [la douleur] and public horror in articulating abjection (see Keltner) and how those conceptually cohere to the anthropological perspectives outlined by Van Wolputte. Keltner summarizes Kristeva’s distinction succinctly: “abjection is the shape that the border between the intimate and the public takes; or rather, abjection is the fate of intimacy in the historical context of an unavoidable interiorization of public horror.” The description seems apt in the context of “Saving the Gleeful Horse.” Molimus’s bargain with the White Ma’at occurs at the physical site of bodily consumptive exchange that unalterably subjects the protagonist to of the Ma’at’s power; he becomes a literal public horror in the form of a sickness-inducing smoke. The agency he exerts to seek a cure for the Gleeful Horse appears to be subsumed by the Ma’at’s payment of her “debts” or revenge during this process.

Returning to Van Wolputte’s point that emotions “interarticulate” among these different levels of bodily experience, we must note that in Bishop’s story, there is a clear and explicit link between bodily mortification, emotion, and power relationships. The most readily identifiable indicators of emotional state within the story both involve bodily expulsion through tears and regurgitation, or exchanges of bodily fluid. We know little else of Molimus’s emotional life. Upon first encountering the Gleeful Horse, Molimus states:

“To see their poor empty bodies makes me cry into the water…the bodies last for very little time after they have yielded up the ghost.” (172)

Later, as he bargains with the White Ma’at for a way to save the horse and learns of the bodily fragility of both it and himself, there is a scene eerily reminiscent of the Kristeva passage that opens this essay. In this scene, Molimus encounters one of his own physical limitations, which establishes a set of conditions linked to shame and bodily expulsion under which the Gleeful Horse can continue to exist. The dual descriptions of these bits of plastic pieces and starlike matter echo the contradictions that underlie human waste as expelled (dead) matter and a byproduct of processes necessary for the continuation of life:

“I feel a qualm, as if conspiracy sits here with us…I am suddenly ill with a spasm that feels like shame (emphasis added). Whatever it is, here in the Garth of the Aorist it has the shape of a real, solid thing stuck in my gullet, making me gag around it. My tongue feels it as it comes up with a mouthful of bile. It is annular, with an embellishment on one side: a sort of ornamented sphincter. I spit the plastic ring out onto the floor…” (178)

What is shame if not a momentary realization of coerced submission to a learned order against which selfhood exists in spite of itself and that order, in this case that of animate over inanimate? Molimus’s expelled plastic toy is Kristeva’s expelled waste matter. We don’t know much about Molimus other than what we can infer from his motivations, but one of the few points at which there is an explicit statement of emotion occurs during this momentary realization of bodily limit. The discovery of the plastic ring in his mouth and its immediate expulsion induces a sense of shame, which serves as a subdued but cathartic reinforcement of his place in the story’s world just as such a private bodily expulsion serves as a persistent reminder of human limit and temporality.

“Nevertheless, does not fear hide an aggression, a violence that returns to its source, its sign having been inverted?” (Kristeva, 38)

While an exhaustive analysis of “Saving the Gleeful Horse” from Van Wolputte’s summarized anthropological perspectives is not within the scope of this essay, it is useful to identify these connections as they relate to the Kristevan abject. We can then understand why the story elicits a subtle horror in response to its pattern of bodily anxiety. Kristeva asks, “Why does corporeal waste…represent…the objective frailty of symbolic order?” And what better illustration of abjecting the self than the case of Molimus bargaining with body fluids and organs and thus becoming disembodied, his agency actualized in the shame of the realization of bodily limit and the subsequent process of subsumption into the larger will of the Ma’at, which recontextualizes the effects of his own agency in a manner not dissimilar from that which might occur through the catharsis of cosmic horror? In the order of power relations in the story, this moment of exchange subsumes his “person-” or “trollhood,” such as it is, by recontextualizing his agency. The transactional nature of bodily exchanges within the story subject Molimus to a process of sublimation; his corporeality is renounced in exchange for continuation in the abjected form of smoke. He seems to remain partly himself while transitioning to a form subjected to an order imposed by the White Ma’at as a condition of fulfillment. What might have been written as catharsis is instead subdued and anticlimactic, for Bishop extends the story beyond Molimus’s own body and to the bodily limits of the townsfolk from whom he pillages organs in an ironic structural parody of the callousness described in the opening paragraph of the story.

The theme of casual cruelty replays from Molimus’s new perspective as an incorporeal being whose consciousness is carried on wisps of smoke. In his conversation with the White Ma’at early in the story, he cannot comprehend how the children can be so cruel to creatures he perceives as living. To fulfill his bargain to save the Gleeful Horse, he must perpetrate the same kinds of acts upon others, seemingly unaware of his cruelty) Likewise, he does not seem to appreciate or have concern for the cruelty he in turn inflicts upon others even in service of preserving another life, and this seems a crucial point to identify. “…they say the smoke gives them (the Treasure Children) the dreams in exchange for their lives. The dreams…they confide about to friends and siblings before they are seized by the silence that comes with the hollowing (emphasis added) effect of the illness…” (181) The subjectivity of bodily value and perceived validity within a particular set of rules is precisely that which produces catharsis in a Kristevan interpretation, and it is a testament to Bishop’s restraint that she subdues this catharsis to conclude the story with the indefinite continuation of Molimus’s infliction of sickness upon the children. He is “the future” and represents a new ordering of the rules of this world.

“There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself.” (Kristeva, 1)

Sick

Much of Bishop’s work is preoccupied with themes of disease and bodily hybridization, of “having a foot in both worlds” in some way or another. These notions ask questions common to all effective art: what is the self and its relationship to corporeality? What are the limits of existence? What are the conditions under which those limits might be tested? Often, the borderlands between differing species, living and dead, deformation and bodily integrity, sickness and health, are disputed territories entwined in transactional relationships with one another, as in “Saving the Gleeful Horse.” Disease also features in stories such as “The Art of Dying” and “Maldoror Abroad,” the latter of which suggests that illness consolidates impulses toward destruction of world and destruction of self into a united, disgusted rejection of the limits that have been prescribed by corporeality. And yet, even in a different story’s context, the bodily byproducts of illness are transactional:

“I’ve been on my knees in the toilet, vomiting all kinds of filth. These offerings (emphasis added) from my private ecosystem are flowing to the oceans of the world, and in time will enter the rain that falls everywhere. Close the entrances to your body; eat and drink nothing.” (“Maldoror Abroad,” 98)

In The Etched City, in which Raule, a healer and surgeon, encounters the transformative properties of illness juxtaposed with the transformative powers of art:

“…she had observed that in the view of the healthy, the sick often appeared as monsters. When the monstrosity was too extreme, whether in the form of disease, old age, madness, or deformity, the sufferer would be shunned regardless of whether their condition was contagious or not. She had concluded that it was human nature to superstitiously fear the transferral of misfortunate via some imagined, intangible but highly conductive medium. And now she knew that her own urge to study the frailties and failures of the flesh, and to understand their causes, was born of a primitive desire to immunise herself against them.” (61)

Sculptures such as Bishop’s Plague Doctor Bird distill the themes of human/nonhuman hybridization and illness.

Even as life has a value determined by social relationships in “Saving the Gleeful Horse,” illness and “the ill” as simultaneously a physical description and a social category are in constant conceptual flux—byproducts expelled by social and scientific process. Illness occupies an in-between borderland in a binary system of living and dead or animate and inanimate, perhaps not unlike Molimus’s bodily sublimation into an ephemeral smoke that seems to retain a kind of agency. To be ill is to be forced to directly confront, like Molimus and his plastic ring, the recursively vital and decaying conditions for life even as its embodiment necessarily moves toward death. To be ill is to be marginalized from life by being forced into a social category distinct from health and its implications of full participation, and the “hollowing” plague visited upon the Treasure Children becomes a balancing act for their own prior acts of marginalization of the Gleeful Horse and its kind. The asymmetry between the continuous flux of illness’s effect on the body and the static categories of “healthy” and “ill” is as rich a mine of anxiety to examine as any other, and the particulars of the social context in which illness exists, whether real or fantastical, leave open seemingly infinite ways in which this relationship might be presented. Even as Molimus seems not entirely aware of what his bargain means, the White Ma’at tells him, “The future will work through you.” (177) That future, for the Treasure Children, is illness and the marginalization it entails. In Dodie Bellamy’s mediations on illness, she states: “Julia Kristeva: There are lives not sustained by desire, as desire is always for objects. Such lives are based on exclusion.” (79).  As Molimus once was relegated to the space beneath a bridge, so now are the children confined to the margins as victims of the illness he brings to them. Perhaps, as Bellamy puts it elsewhere in a litany of prophesied power inversions exchanged between the healthy and ill through the mediations of language, “When the sick rule the world mortality will be sexy. When the sick rule the world, all writing will be short and succinct, no paragraphs will be longer than two sentences so we can comprehend them through the brain fog (emphasis added) the well bring to us daily.” (36)

______

Works Cited

Bellamy, Dodie. When the Sick Rule the World. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2015. Print.

Bishop, K.J. The Etched City. New York: Bantam Spectra, 2004. Print.

Bishop, K.J. “Saving the Gleeful Horse”. That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote. Self-published, 2012. Print.

Keltner, Stacey. Kristeva. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.

Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Print.

Van Wolputte, Steven. “Hang on to Your Self: Of Bodies, Embodiment, and Selves”. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 33 (2004), pp. 251–269. Annual Reviews. 2004.

The post 101 Weird Writers #44 — K.J. Bishop appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Stephen King (1947–) is one of the most prolific, best-selling, and influential living authors of American horror fiction. Born in Portland, Maine, King’s father left the family when he was just two years old, and he was raised by his mother alongside his adopted older brother. Inspired significantly by H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and Richard Matheson, King knew from a young age that he wanted to write horror fiction. After earning a B.A. in English from the University of Maine in 1970, he began selling short stories to men’s magazines and his debut novel, Carrie, was acquired by Doubleday in 1973. He married author Tabitha (Spruce) King during this period, and they have since raised three children: Naomi, Joe, and Owen, the latter two of which have become successful authors in their own right. King subsequently published several novels that have become classics of supernatural horror, such as Salem’s Lot (1975) and The Shining (1977).

Since these beginnings, he has published 55 novels, 6 works of nonfiction, and approximately 200 short stories, many of which have been adapted for film or television. He has won all major awards associated with horror and dark fantasy, in addition to numerous others that include the National Medal of Arts and the O. Henry Award for “The Man in the Black Suit” (1994), reprinted in The Weird. King has also frequently shown an interest in experimentation with publishing media and form, releasing The Green Mile in serial installments and Riding the Bullet digitally before it was common. He has long resided in his birth-state of Maine, a setting that has become famously associated with him due to its frequent appearances in his work. His most recent book is End of Watch, the concluding entry in a trilogy of crime novels.

— Christopher Burke, editor of 101 Weird Writers

***

When I was twelve years old, I was afraid—desperately, morbidly afraid—of horror flicks. My best friend in grade seven was a girl named Steph Melnychuk. We played softball together back in Sarnia—a small town in Ontario maybe double the size of Bangor where Stephen King grew up—and her throw was something to be reckoned with. I was the only one willing to catch for her (badly at that) and I still remember the hot sting when the ball went blazing into my clumsy glove. She was taller than me by about five inches, smart, effortlessly cool. She liked to throw slumber parties at which we’d dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” and one night on a dare we locked ourselves in the basement bathroom to paint our faces with glow-in-the-dark nail polish. But it was her idea, her deep-seated love of the macabre.

She was the horror fan, not me.

In the early 1990s, Steph invited me over to watch a made-for-TV flick called “Sometimes They Come Back” in which a reluctant high school teacher returns to his hometown only to be harassed by the ghosts of the school kids that killed his brother. I was nervous from the get-go, and true to form the thing—schlocky as it was—stayed with me. In a recent conversation, the writer Sam J. Miller suggested that every horror writer has a personal monster, something that scares the bejesus out of them. For me, that monster is—and always has been—the ghost. Ghosts are like a warning about mortality, and at twelve years old I was only just beginning to grapple with those fears. No one in my family had died. I had never been to a funeral. The idea of dying fascinated me: it was repellent, awful, but it wasn’t unnatural. Precisely the opposite.

That was my first experience with Stephen King.

In Danse Macabre, King lays out his theories surrounding the purposes and practices of writing horror:

Terror—what Hunter Thompson calls ‘fear and loathing’—often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking. If that sense of unmaking is sudden and seems personal—if it hits you around the heart—then it lodges in the memory as a complete set.

What I experienced as a twelve-year old was a profound sense of the possibility of unmaking, the possibility that a bunch of kids a little bit older than me could do hideous things—that kids my age were vulnerable; they could be murdered, they could drown, they could be struck by trains that seemed to come out of nowhere.

When I was in my final year of high school, a tanker truck smashed into the side of my dad’s car on an icy stretch of road within sight of the chemical plant where he worked. My mom was in South Africa at the time, clearing up the effects of my grandmother who had recently passed on, and my older brother Justin was living just outside of Toronto, a good three hours’ drive away. So it was my younger sister and I who were driven to the hospital—I don’t remember by whom—while my dad was in critical care. My dad had always had a definite vitality about him. He used to regale us with stories of his childhood growing up in Rhodesia where he set scorpions and matabele ants to fight; later, he barely missed an opportunity to be on the South African fencing team. He had, he told us, a pet chimpanzee. But when we saw him it was like meeting a stranger. He was badly bruised, black wires everywhere, and I couldn’t make out much of what he was saying, only enough to know he didn’t recognise me, not in that moment.

That moment brought about a sudden understanding that someone I loved could come undone. Could be unmade.

The power of ghosts is the power of memory, or at least that’s what I’ve always thought. Memory is what gives us a sense of continuity, a sense of self. And ghosts are the most vital form of memory, just as haunting is really just a different kind of remembering.

My dad survived. The bruises healed. And although he was always frailer after that, prone to losing both his balance and his mental equilibrium as many who suffer traumatic head injuries were, I didn’t lose him. But his memory suffered. Some part of that continuity—who he had been, who he was after—had shifted.

My second moment of unmaking occurred more recently. Six months ago I took up a permanent position at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge as Lecturer of Creative Writing and Publishing. It meant leaving Canada for good. But I had felt it was worth it. The job was a good one, a dream job in fact, and there were people I loved whom I didn’t want to leave. I was prepared to make England my home.

But after my first semester had passed, a semester which had mostly masked for me the bitter campaign of misinformation and demagoguery that was raging in the background, the United Kingdom voted by a narrow margin to break away from the European Union. For those of my generation it had seemed an unthinkable outcome. Like so many others, I had gone to bed early that night, unwilling to watch another hour of political mayhem, feeling relatively secure that reason would prevail… and the pre-voting polls had backed me up.

In H is for Hawk, the nature writer Helen MacDonald speaks about the origins of the word bereavement in the Old English bereafian, which means “to deprive of, take away, seize, rob.” She writes that the death of her father felt like that:

Imagine your whole family is in a room. Yes, all of them. All the people you love. So then what happens is someone comes into the room and punches you all in the stomach. Each one of you. Really hard. So you’re all on the floor. Right? So the thing is, you all share the same kind of pain, exactly the same, but you’re too busy experiencing total agony to feel anything other than completely alone.

This image stuck with me on the day that Brexit was announced. It felt as if everyone I knew and loved had been damaged by what had happened—had been punched in the stomach—and yet I felt totally alone. I remember my partner telling me to come out for drinks in the city—to commiserate in company—but I didn’t want to because I was crying and I wasn’t sure if I could pull myself together enough to be presentable. And when I walked outside a week of grey skies and rain had perversely cleared to sunshine, so there were tourists walking along the canal; everything seemed strangely normal, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that the world had changed irrevocably overnight. I felt untethered, unprepared for what was to come next.

The world has become a scary place. On July 14, less than two weeks before I write this, a 19-tonne cargo truck was driven into the crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France. 84 people were killed. I don’t like reading the news much right now.

King writes about a similar feeling after JFK’s assassination, how those three days of grief which followed “is perhaps the closest any people in history has ever come to a total period of mass consciousness and mass empathy and—in retrospect—mass memory…Love cannot achieve that sort of across-the-board hammerstrike of emotion, apparently.”

But horror can. And that’s the point, really.

As I write this, I’m sitting on a bus headed from Portland to Bangor for a research project about the publication of Carrie (1974), Stephen King’s first novel. My own first novel was sold to Random House Canada this year, but that isn’t what the project is about, only an excuse, really, to understand the origin of a writer whom I have come to respect and deeply admire.

The Hunt for Red October, streaked with static and all its buried Cold War anxieties, is playing on the overhead monitors, and outside everything is pure black. If the sun were shining, then perhaps I would recognise the landscape. Many do; there are fans who say that when they first enter Maine it has an instant recognisability, as if they’re coming to a place they have always known. For me, it’s a bit different. What hits me first are the smells, the thick scent of pine. My family used to vacation in nearby Kennebunk when I was a child.

They say that you’re more likely to die in a car accident than in a terrorist attack.

I lied earlier, about my first encounter with Stephen King. Or rather, I misremembered.

I have a vague recollection: perched in the backseat of my parents’ station wagon, someone was pointing into the distance, saying, “That’s where Stephen King lives.” My dad was driving. I felt completely safe. Untouchable. We had been fishing. I had got nothing but two-inch long feeders, but my brother kept telling me about how he had been going after a big one, a pike with crazy teeth set in a jagged old grin. I was seven or eight years old, I think. My brother was always telling me ghost stories, telling me whoppers. But I didn’t believe them much. When you’re that age it’s still possible to feel completely safe.

Much of this is prelude, so forgive me. On to the matter at hand.

“The Man in the Black Suit” is typical in many respects of King’s oeuvre. It’s a good story, a solid story—so good, in fact, that it won the O. Henry prize in 1996. The narrative has a nostalgic quality to it; it is retrospective, a single memory that is offered up without explanation or even the hope of belief:

I am now a very old man and this is something which happened to me when I was very young—only nine years old. It was 1914, the summer after my brother Dan died in the west field and three years before America got into World War I…. What I might have done yesterday, who I might have seen here in my room at the nursing home, what I might have said to them or they to me … those things are gone, but the face of the man in the black suit grows ever clearer, ever closer, and I remember every word he said.

It is a tale, however, that is about transitions, about how life can slip away from you and how the grave is always waiting. King’s writing has an undeniable charm to it. His stories drift along almost lazily, glinting with a touch of malice, maybe, but soothing too. His stories are like fish hooks, and once they catch you, struggle as you might, he’ll reel you in all the same.

“Is horror art?” King asks in Danse Macabre. “The work of horror can be nothing else; it achieves the level of art simply because it is looking for something beyond art, something that predates art.”

This particular story has always struck me as one of those which looks outward, beyond, before. As a narrative about an encounter with the Devil, it has a certain timeliness to it; yet King’s Devil, despite his fancy suit, isn’t urbane. He isn’t a charmer. He’s pure madness all the way through, and the tale he tells the narrator is perhaps one of the scariest of all: “‘Sad news, fisherboy,’ he said. ‘I’ve come with sad news….Your mother is dead.’”

What follows is a harrowing account in which the Devil taunts the narrator with a story about a fatal bee sting. The same allergy, the same weakness in the blood which had killed his brother Dan, was also shared by his mother, the Devil says, and that very day, only a few minutes ago, a bee flew through the window and caught her by surprise:

‘You need to hear this, Gary; you need to hear this, my little fisherboy. It was your mother who passed that fatal weakness on to your brother Dan; you got some of it, but you also got a protection from your father that poor Dan somehow missed….So, although I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, it’s almost a case of poetic justice, isn’t it? After all, she killed your brother Dan as surely as if she had put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.’

The narrator resists, of course, but the tale is terrible precisely because it has the ring of truth. We’ve all inherited from our parents a terrible mortality. And at the same time the tale hooks deeply into the narrator’s secret fear, the fear we all share about our loved ones: that while we were sleeping, while we weren’t paying attention, something terrible might have happened…

In June, 1999, Stephen King was walking eight feet to the side of the road in North Lovell when a van hit and seriously injured him. He sustained an assortment of broken bones, a punctured lung, and a head injury. When I began reading The Dead Zone for the first time earlier this month, I was struck by the description of Johnny Smith in his coma. I had thought it was one of those filched autobiographical bits that often show up in King’s work (“Write what you know,” he says, and boy, does he!). But, of course, The Dead Zone was one of King’s early novels, published in 1979, twenty years before the accident. And my point is not the supernatural but the hypernatural; after all, it’s easy to imagine your own death when you’re a horror writer. We do that kind of thing all the time.

The story is interesting in that it comes with very little moralizing. This is not a Devil eager to trick a man in order to steal his soul. The Devil here is malice, pure and simple; he is hunger; he is a grinning set of jaws that will devour you whole simply because you are there. It is old school religion, that, a religion of black and white in which the Devil comes, not because of a sin committed for which he might legitimately be feared, but simply because the Devil is and that is exactly what he does: he comes, and he comes, and he keeps on coming.

“The Man in the Black Suit” is a story about fishing; this is appropriate because fishing has such Biblical overtones, certainly, but also because it’s a sport born half out of hunger and half out of playfulness. The narrator hooks himself a big one, a nineteen-inch brook trout. Quite the accomplishment for such a young boy. It is that fish alone that saves him, for it is enough to distract the Devil, who eats the thing whole with jaws that open up like a snake’s.

In a recent interview following the publication of Revival, a Lovecraftian novel about a minister who loses his faith, King said he believed “in evil”, but he has for all his life “gone back and forth about whether or not there’s an outside evil, whether or not there’s a force in the world that really wants to destroy us, from the inside out, individually and collectively.” The Devil of “The Man in the Black Suit” is an outside force, but it isn’t purely religious, to my mind, nor is he the accrual of bad forces, of crimes and transgressions, manifested in novels such as ‘Salem’s Lot (1975) or It (1986).

The Devil here is a kind of sudden badness that comes out of the blue.

Like a bee sting when you’re allergic.

Like a truck coming out of nowhere in the darkness.

And there is a part of me that is thinking about this story as I sit on the bus, thinking about what it means to write about memory and to write about the fear of death. Outside, the world around me has fallen into darkness. I can’t see my way clearly. Sometimes it seems as if the only lights are headlights.

Perhaps the end of the story isn’t where we should be focusing. Because “The Man in the Black Suit” ends as all horror stories end: with a tremor, with that sinking feeling of “what comes next and do I really want to see?” But another way to look at the story is this: it’s a fishing story, and all fishing stories are about lies, aren’t they? Big whoppers. Tales that grow bigger in the telling.

And the Devil lied.

The narrator survived two World Wars, the atomic terror of the 60s, and God alone knows what personal tragedies that have come his way. He was born in 1905, and he has lived out his ninety years, suffering losses, yes, but living all the same. Maybe this fear has always been clawing at him, the image of that terrible grin—relentless as oncoming headlights—and the hungry words, “Biiig fiiish!” chasing all the truths of the moral world into ruin.

Except it is just a fear, a fear we all have.

Our man is still kicking, even after everything.

He may not be strong enough to run much more. He may not have fine large brook trout.

He may be old, and his creel may be empty.

But the Devil lies. And our man is still alive.

____

Bibliography

King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 2006. Electronic.

King, Stephen. The Dead Zone. New York: New York: Doubleday & Company, 1979. Print.

King, Stephen. It. New York: Viking Press, 1986. Print.

King, Stephen. “The Man in the Black Suit.” In The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Ed. Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer. New York: Corvus, 2011. Electronic.

King, Stephen. Revival. New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 2014. Print.

King, Stephen. ‘Salem’s Lot. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1975. Print.

MacDonald, Helen. H is for Hawk. London: Vintage, 2015. Electronic.

Sometimes They Come Back. Dir. Tom McLoughlin. 1991. Based on a short story by Stephen King: “Sometimes They Come Back.” Cavalier. March, 1974. Reprinted in Night Shift. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1978.

The post 101 Weird Writers #43 — Stephen King appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Ramsey Campbell (1946–) is an award-winning horror-fiction author from Liverpool, England, mentored by Lovecraft protégé August Derleth. In his stories, largely evoking working- or middle-class settings, Campbell manages to update the weird tale and apply his keen ability to evoke both subtle supernatural horror and portraits of modern life in England. One of the preeminent writers of his generation, Campbell has also edited influential supernatural fiction anthologies; three of his top ten favorite stories are reprinted in The Weird (‘The Willows’ by Blackwood, ‘Smoke Ghost’ by Leiber and ‘The Hospice’ by Aickman). ‘The Brood’ (1980), as noted by the anthologist when first published, ‘has the cumulative effect of a nightmare from which one cannot awake’.

Grady Hendrix is a frequent contributor to Tor.com and author of the recent 80’s-inspired horror novel, My Best Friend’s Exorcism. In this contribution to the Weird Writers series, Hendrix examines a story by an author who influenced him as a horror writer.

— David Davis, editor of 101 Weird Writers

Ramsey Campbell’s fiction is crazy. Not in the sense that it’s arrow-through-the-head wacky, nor in the sense that it’s over the top, but in the clinical sense of the word. Campbell writes horror that gets its mileage by deploying the effects of mental illness. His characters are gripped by depression, their perceptions can’t be trusted, inanimate objects are conscious, living creatures behave like automatons, personalities are overridden and replaced, consciousness is detached from physicality. More than that, Campbell seems determined to induce these symptoms in his readers. His style is his substance.

Born in Liverpool, much has been made of his childhood devotion to H.P. Lovecraft and his early career as a Lovecraft impersonator. His first published story, “The Church in High Street,” was set in the Cthulhu mythos, and his first collection of short stories, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, contained nothing but variations on Lovecraft, with their locations changed from New England to plain old England. But Campbell was done with Lovecraft by the age of 23. A far more fruitful way to think about his writing is to take seriously what he wrote in an essay at the end of his second novel, The Face That Must Die, “The object of writing is to tell the truth.”

Campbell writes the way schizophrenics think. His descriptions are crazy-making, full of visual miscues and the confusion of organic verbs with inorganic nouns. Porches “sprout tubular metal scaffolding,” and doors and suitcases are invested with agency (“The porch door had opened. When it had displayed its gap for a while, a suitcase emerged.”) and usually the narrative voice is linked to the distorted perceptions of characters who are delusional, dreaming, or mad:

“The clock was chanting: see you on Jan, see you on Jan. His mind listed places he must wipe, over and over. Had he forgotten one? The door. The doorknob. The table. The chair in which he’d sat. The cup — he must wipe all the cups, to make sure.”

All of the examples above are taken from his first two novels, The Doll Who Ate His Mother (1976) and The Face That Must Die (1979), both of them slim volumes about psychopaths, neither of which was a financial success. Campbell was writing a lot of short stories at the time but his agent was convinced that all the money was in big fat novels, like the ones Stephen King was writing. In 1980, all the horror guys were publishing 400 and 500 page books and getting rich. Didn’t he want to get rich, too? And so Campbell wrote The Parasite, a big fat horror novel about a woman who experiments with astral projection and winds up becoming possessed.

There’s nothing wrong with The Parasite, but you get a much more concentrated dose of Campbellian terror in his short story “The Brood,” published that same year. Blackband is a depressed veterinarian, well on his way to total dehumanization by the vast metropolis where he lives, spending his days with pet owners he loathes, spending his nights staring out the window at the homeless people who shamble down his street like lost souls. He’s fascinated by The Lady of the Lamp, his nickname for a woman who trudges in circles around a streetlamp all night long. When she disappears he tracks her to her squalid home and enters her ruined basement where he finds disgusting worms, hatched from nearby eggs, feeding on a cat that may or may not still be alive (Campbell is typically vague on this point). Blackband goes to fetch gasoline and returns to burn the place down, but he winds up becoming food for this newborn brood.

The one Lovecraftian trick Campbell still uses is keeping his monsters offstage. When Blackband sees the creature that laid the eggs, Campbell describes it as “a stain” an “inverted coat” and he tells us what it doesn’t feel like (“something that was not flesh”) rather than what it does, much as Lovecraft prefers to go on about “indescribable horrors” rather than describing them. Which would seem to be the job of a writer. But Lovecraft, and Campbell, want to invoke a feeling in their readers, and Campbell had decided that the best way to do that is to mess with their minds.

“I do value the shift of perception fiction can achieve,” he said in an interview. “Within the narrative and within my mind.” If Campbell believes that “the object of writing is to tell the truth” then the fact that all perception is untrustworthy is the truth as he lived it. As he writes in an afterward to The Face That Must Die:

“For as far back as I can recall my mother showed signs of paranoid schizophrenia: she was convinced that radio programmes and newspapers contained secret messages for her; she would recognise people as someone quite different and insist that one was disguised as the other.”

He writes that this experience taught him, “That one’s perception of reality (or, in this case, my mother’s) need not be the same thing as objective reality.” Never was this more obvious than when he writes about his own experiences with altered states:

“At times my own indulgence in this [acid] brought me unnervingly close to my mother’s condition, especially when I suffered a protracted nightmarish flashback not long before I began to write this book [The Face That Must Die]. As I penned the tenth chapter I saw the words start to writhe on the page and found it difficult to continue, but I did.”

Campbell doesn’t want to describe actions, he wants to alter perceptions, and giving oneself over to his writing feels a bit like losing one’s mind. Sounds are heightened, perceptions are warped, hallucinations loom. Reactions are divorced from their causes so that they become alien and strange, and his descriptions of horror go hand-in-hand with descriptions of squalor. Reading his books, one begins to feel strongly that their room needs to be cleaned and that bugs are crawling over their skin.

Philip K. Dick

Seen in this light, Lovecraft pales as an influence and some of Campbell’s other favorite authors seem much more relevant. Philip K. Dick played with reader perceptions in some of the same ways and Campbell praises several of Dick’s stories for how they monkey with notions of reality and identity. Campbell’s twisting of words comes from Nabokov whom he cites as “a crash course in how much more you could do with language.”

The problem with Campbell’s work is that it’s hard to sustain this kind of effect for long without driving readers mad. The Parasite begins with a heady seance set piece in which a bunch of children lock a little girl in a dark room along with something unwholesome. By the end of this prologue the reader is wrung out, stressed out, and a little bit burned out. As Campbell said in an interview about this book:

“The problem I’d set myself, which I don’t think you can sustain for novel length, is that it’s from the viewpoint of the character to whom it’s all happening, and she’s aware of what is happening to her. All I think you can do is convey her sense of mounting terror and panic, but there’s a limit to how much you can do that.”

Campbell’s novels are good, but his style really shines in his short stories, each of which feels engineered for maximum intensity, to make the reader feel off-kilter, unable to trust his or her own perceptions, unable to trust the perceptions of the characters, unable to even trust the language on the page. They’re designed, in other words, to make you feel crazy.

The post 101 Weird Writers #42 — Ramsey Campbell appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–1942) was a Japanese writer known primarily as one of the foremost poets of the Taisho and early Showa periods, movements substantially influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, and others within the Decadent and Symbolist movements. Hagiwara also published criticism and aphorisms, co-founded multiple magazines, and created a mandolin orchestra after having received one of the instruments from his parents in his teens. Many of these avenues came about against the context of struggling in and dropping out of university, as well as battling ill health and alcoholism.

The 1917 publication of his poetry collection, Tsuki ni hoeru (Howling at the Moon), is considered by critics to have broken ground for new, freer forms by using language that had a notable contrast to the intellectual, traditionally structured verse that dominated Japanese poetry. Hagiwara published numerous other collections of poetry and criticism until his last major collection in 1934, after which followed ‘The Town of Cats” (1935), his only short story. He taught at Meiji University from this period until his death in 1942 of “acute pneumonia,” which, however, may have been misdiagnosed lung cancer.

With ‘The Town of Cats,’ Hagiwara examines disorientation and the illusory nature of reality, an intersection of related topics that he explored throughout his career. Madness, hallucinations, obsession, and abnormal psychology often figure in his works, and he conveyed these themes using techniques he’d pioneered in his poetry: a rejection of naturalism, colloquial language, impressionistic images, a sense of personal intimacy, and subject matter contemporary to the time period. The concepts and problems that drove much of Hagiwara’s writing continue to resonate with today’s readers and writers, such as Thomas Ligotti, who has cited ‘The Town of Cats’ as among his favorite stories.

— Christopher Burke, editor of 101 Weird Writers

It’s a landscape as melancholy as a cat
a lonely balloon rises straight up
and see, there’s a flicker of personages wearing linen.
Already for quite a long while
nobody thinks about a wharf like this.
And from the sea-corner with stunned cranes
many various organism-consciousnesses have faded
    away.
Besides, the sailing ship gets loaded with cotton
and it’s in the offing fluffy and plump thinking isn’t it.
These are all indescribable
memories that make your hair stand on end   give you
    gooseflesh.
Ah God   there’s no way of getting it back anymore
and for worm-eaten recollection like this   I’ll always
    be weeping like an infant.

Hagiwara Sakutarō, “A Melancholy Landscape” (Trans. Hiroaki Sato)

Welcome to Japanese writer, poet, and critic Hagiwara Sakutarō’s cat-prowled grounds. Today we circle the Weird-collected tale of “Cat Town”. Hagiwara’s literary world is an assortment of marginal places, “a landscape as melancholy as a cat.” But this isn’t a kind of anthropomorphic feline world enmeshed within everyday human affairs such as Sōseki Natsume’s I Am a Cat (1905–6) or E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr (1819–1821). Nor is it akin to the viral web media popularizing Japanese “cat islands” Tashirojima and Aoshima. Such spaces displace the human from socio-political vision; they certainly seem like fascinatingly inhuman communities. However, “cat islands” are no posthuman utopia, just as Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” is no fable for the future. In any case, technocultural utopias are too sleekly silvered for the weirdly inclined. Give us the blood’s recoil, the ineffable terror, the cat’s piercing eyes.^[1] Unlike these places and tales, “Cat Town” conjures up a history of weird displacement in which the Anthropocene finds its conceptual feet by confronting an abyss of the real. As it does so, it offers a way for us to see the constructed symbolism of the contemporary world: a world of cats!

Written after a prolific career in which he published many books of poetry and criticism, “Cat Town” is Hagiwara’s only short story. His vision of a world inhabited by cats reveals something other than clickbait-chum. Here are some lines from his earlier poem, “Blue Cat”:

What’s asleep in this large city night
is the shadow of a single blue cat
the shadow of a cat that speaks of the sad history of mankind. (Sato 75)

The cat’s shadow displaces specifics of urban colors and forms but also “speaks” of history. What lurks in a cat’s shadow? What is “the sad history of mankind”? To begin answering these questions, this instalment of the Weird Fiction Review’s 101 Weird Writers series will examine Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” and its later echo in Haruki Murakami’s “Town of Cats”. To complement these sites of prose exploration, I will also look at Hagiwara’s poetry and criticism. A modern city’s nightmares yield strange sights. Cats, squids, and even a dog will appear as we travel through Hagiwara’s melancholic landscape.

Weird literature and poetry’s febrile expression often react in a crucible shaped by madness and illness. Intense periods of mental disorder interrupted Hagiwara’s writing, most evidently from 1913–1915 in the years immediately before his first book of poetry was published in 1917. He even attempted suicide during this time. “I clearly see and hear with indescribable terrible memories the lips of a faintly white woman who laughed after copulation and my abominable act and language that I uttered while drunk,” Hagiwara wrote to a close friend in 1915. He continues, “each time I have the terrible pain that seems to tear up my nerves, because I dashed my head against a column many times yesterday it still hurts this morning, I even thought I was going mad” (qtd. in Rothenberg and Joris 159). Parsing the images of reality become nearly impossible when everything seems too real—hyperreal. Perhaps this “terrible pain” sensitized Hagiwara to the “metaphysical problem” that his protagonist in “Cat Town” later describes, namely, “that a given phenomenon can possess a ‘secret, hidden side’” (Angles 235)? Tracing the disappearing edge of the chasm between images reveals the fracture that the weird often takes as its familiar guise.

The conspiracy between madness and the weird invokes a history of art’s opposition to reason. Names such as Cervantes, Bosch, and Bruegel should provide sufficient evidence. But this is also a very modern relationship that continues to influence contemporary ideas about identity and subjectivity. In many ways, the modern person continues to be a Romantic subject, someone thought of as individual, emotional, and confessional but also as an ill or ailing body. Susan Sontag points out that, for the German Romantics in whose time this tendency became apparent, “[s]ickness was a way of making people ‘interesting’—which is how ‘romantic’ was originally defined” (35). Think Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, or even Rainer Maria Rilke, whose work upholds an “extreme and passionate defense of the romantic image of the creative soul as a thing apart, a solitary, suffering, and preternaturally sensitive organism” (Scott 75).

Without question, Hagiwara’s poems are written in the shadow of a past that was, as their author writes in the preface to his first collection Howling at the Moon, “a painful memory […] an ominous nightmare of frustrations, inaction, and a suffering body and flesh” (1917 [Tsuki ni hoeru], Sato 7). Wilson links German Romanticism with Hagiwara by observing that the Japanese poet’s work demonstrates a similarly “pure but desperate lyricism” (16–17). How to then proceed? When the narrator in “Cat Town” asks readers for their trust, we can recognize that he, like his author, knows his hallucinations. Illness has given him insight. The story is no delirium; it is something else—something more real. That’s why it’s so weird.

We must be careful not to fetishize madness, especially since, when it comes to weird fiction, the parallel discourses of weird aesthetics and biographical madness or illness are often accompanied by patronizing assumptions of literary training and merit. Japanese poet Hinatsu Kōnosuke, for instance, observed that “Hagiwara has no literary training, that’s the fellow’s strength more than anything else” (qtd. Sato xxi).^[2] To say that an author’s work is powerful because it is the product of madness, illness, or idiot savantism debilitates critic and author alike, but we can certainly recognize the influence of madness. Along these lines, more generously than Hinatsu, Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Loris observe that while “poetry & illness were not the same for [Hagiwara], there was a constant interplay between them [in his work]”, lending his language a jagged immediacy and vivid power of imagistic fervor (159).

I leave for another time the topic of how weird writers negotiate their literary territory against the mental and physical illnesses that sometimes mark their lives—we could discuss Leonora Carrington, H.P. Lovecraft, or Unica Zürn.^[3] At present, it is enough to say that, when words such as “hallucinatory” are applied to Hagiwara’s work, readers recognize not only how he keenly understood reason and hallucination, but also that he aimed for more than symmetrical alternations between the two. In Howling at the Moon, Hagiwara wrote that the “purpose of poetic expression is not simply to express an atmosphere for the sake of atmosphere […] Nor is it to describe a hallucination for the sake of hallucination” (2014: 3). At its best, the weird dispenses with an alternating play of realist description and fevered hallucination.

Before we look directly at the material, a brief note on translations is necessary. In addition to Jeffrey Angles’s translation of “Cat Town” in The Weird, I am aware of two major translations of Hagiwara into English. Most recently, Hiroaki Sato has revisited Hagiwara’s work for the New York Review Books Poets series (Cat Town, 2014) and New Directions (The Iceland [Hyōtō], 2014). Graeme Wilson’s adaptations for the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works in 1969 remain the volume that introduced Hagiwara to many English readers.^[4] Below, I cite Sato when referring to his NYRB translation, Wilson when referring to his UNESCO translation, and Angles when quoting The Weird. Poems will occasionally be given in each translation so that readers can draw their own conclusions.

“Cat Town” to “Town of Cats”: Travelers in the Modern City

Hagiwara’s world is riddled with the decisions of urban travel—crossroads, intersections, meeting places, and so on (Sugimoto 31). It is also suffused with the ghosts and hauntings that constitute modern life and in their own right “make up the strange and immense silent vitality of an urban symbolics,” to quote French theorist Michel de Certeau (137). So, with the narrator of “Cat Town”, let’s get lost. In the forbiddingly massive Tokyo, arranged in compact units interpenetrated by mass and individual transit with competing “big picture” strategies for getting around, navigation becomes a challenge. But travel offers a way to perceptually map our surroundings and helps us understand the world in which we live. Walkers in the modern city observe and define its practical existence. As de Certeau elaborates in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), walking around a neighborhood allows a person to read the symbols of urban culture from the ground up. If you become dislocated in networks of urban disarray while walking, you might see something new—perhaps something disconcertingly different to what the normal, everyday world usually offers. You might see something irreducible to reason.

Artificial aids have long offered the ability to redefine existence through “trips.” The narrator of “Cat Town” knows well the travels induced by drug-induced hallucinations. “As for the countries I traveled in the ecstatic dreams induced by narcotics, I don’t have enough room to detail them here,” he says, sounding much like a fellow flâneur, French poet Charles Baudelaire. (Baudelaire’s chosen drugs included opium, hashish, and wine; Hagiwara reputedly loved beer.) The narrator lingers on well-travelled dreams: “Even after returning to normal, I would cling to those visions and relive them again and again in the world of reality” (Angles 234). But be on guard for the explanations that return even courageous thinkers to normative life. William Tyler argues that Hagiwara’s narrator numbers among a turn of the century series of Japanese figures all “seduced by visual illusions” and “intrigued by tricks created by prisms, binoculars, mirages, illusions, and hallucinations” (328). If you need an escape hatch, this is it: morphine flashbacks cause the strange sights in “Cat Town”. Nothing weird to see here. Move on.

Such an escape does “Cat Town” an injustice, however. Hagiwara’s story describes the lived perception of urban spaces with great psychological clarity. For instance, the first half of “Cat Town” exemplifies the phenomenon of jamais vu, the eerie sense of seeing a familiar situation as so completely new that nothing can be recognized. When this happens in language, it is called “semantic satiation” or word collapse: all you can see are strange letters that look weird or wrong. Accordingly, linguistic stability dissolves when symbols become “hyperreal” and dislocated from their usual symbolic coordinates. Have you ever walked into your home and thought “this isn’t where I live at all”? In jamais vu, familiar perceptual reference points are lost and, as a result, you see something as if you’ve never seen it before. No hallucination necessary.

The phenomenon extends to navigation within the city. It starts with getting lost. The narrator explains that, while “walking through the usual area around my home, […] I slipped into an unfamiliar alley, and going the wrong way, I lost all sense of direction” (Angles 234). The result of becoming lost? He sees a neighborhood of dreamlike beauty. There are two easy explanations for this vision. First, the narrator writes, “a fox must have bewitched me”; or, second, he may have fallen prey to “a disturbance of the inner ear” that disrupted his “sensing direction” (Angles 234). Jamais vu produces at first mystery—an unexpected vision—and then a sudden deflation. Unpredictably dislocated by the hyperreal, the vision known as “real life” reasserts itself with disappointing regularity.

The narrator’s first loss of perceptual control functions as an interpretive prophylactic. Once his mistake is realized, he shows himself capable of discerning his own fallibility. “The mysterious and magical transformation of this place into a beautiful town had occurred simply because I had mixed up my directions”, he admits (Angles 234). This realization normalizes the story. Strategic ideas about how to operate in the modern city are deconstructed when ground level tactics reveal unexpected sights, but the normal way of seeing things feels “natural.” Even the clearest maps may be turned upside down to look utterly bizarre. But few would keep them so inverted and, thus, in a transformational flourish, those alternate worldviews disappear. Similarly, “[t]he mysterious neighborhood that I had seen a moment before existed in some universe of opposite space where the compass was reversed” (Angles 235). Only after deflating estranged possibilities and reminding readers of his ability to discern between hallucination and the modern world will the narrator’s second and much more dramatic episode ring with enough truth to be truly weird.

The second spectacular episode in “Cat Town” deserves to be encountered in all its glory. The narrator loses his way on a “narrow road [that] continued for some time, then disappeared into the depths of the woods” (Angles 237). Be careful when walking into an unknown forest, especially when you’ve warned of nearby “possessed villages” (Angles 236)! Having become dislocated, the narrator finds himself in what seems the usual situation—an urban landscape too spectacular to be true. Knowing the alarming precarity of such visions, he tellingly describes the city as “a perilously fragile structure of thin crystal” (Angles 238). “This realization suddenly made me extremely anxious,” he remembers. Everyone is suddenly tense. “The air surrounding me was electrically charged, and in it I felt the anguish of the inhabitants’ nerves stretched to the breaking point” (Angles 238). A calm. Someone falls. Cue the explosion.

Terror’s revelation erupts with sublime thunder. Just like a joke, the timing of terror is crucial. In the fracture between a spectacular, beautiful vision and a recognizably dour urban modernity rushes the violence of the weird, a perceptual fissure that consumes the eye and the mind with its irreparable incongruity. “My senses had lost their balance. The universe was collapsing around me” (238). This dislocating revelation is neither jamais vu nor déjà vu, neither never seen nor already seen. Between the two opens an abyss: a sight of something more real than “reality.”

And also, for some reason, cats.

The curious are encouraged to see for themselves. Hagiwara’s narrator defends his story in the same way Hagiwara defends his own poetry. “People smile coldly at my tale. They say it is the demented illness of a poet or a nonsensical hallucination born of absentminded daydreaming” (240). He can only defend himself through testimony. I was there. I saw. I know madness, but this is different. Believe me. Fantasy often offers some elfin token for the traveler as “proof” of other realities; the weird is not so easily sated.

Let us turn to another modern traveler and another cat-ridden town. In Haruki Murakami’s “Town of Cats” (2009), a stand-alone excerpt from 1Q84 (2011) published in the New Yorker, narrator Tengo Kawana is another urban navigator. Like Hagiwara’s narrator and many of Murakami’s other protagonists, Tengo travels through Tokyo as if unconsciously. In general, “Town of Cats” revolves around alienated travel. Tengo’s father resides in a sanitarium, his vitality apparently drained through long employment for a Japanese transportation agency in addition to the severe disinterest of his own son, Tengo.

In turn, Tengo loves abstractions like language and math, which he compares to “a magnificent imaginary building.” He most prefers the “vast magical forest” of literature. Abstractions offer him a refuge; more than that, words have less structure and fewer solutions than mathematical theories. Literature allows him the belief that his “real father” might be different from the man he will visit in the sanitarium. It is disappointing that the virtual play of literary possibilities is constrained in an old Victorian straightjacket of inheritances and hidden orphans, but there it is.

Each character in “Town of Cats” is lost in a labyrinth of dislocations. While speaking with his father (in what might be code or madness) at the sanitarium, Tengo remembers a story called “Town of Cats” that Murakami describes as a “fantastical piece by a German writer”. In this remembered tale, a traveler gets lost in a town where cats emerge once the sun is down. Sound familiar? There’s a twist: although the traveler of “Town of Cats” is at first upset, he realizes that this is “the place where he is meant to be lost.” The thought is reassuring for Tengo in Murakami’s own “Town of Cats”, as he is desperate to settle the question of his paternal filiation. A similar revelation would suggest that his Sunday travels were “meant” for him to discover that his father is not his father, as he has believed all along. When Tengo and his father do talk, however, the mise-en-abymes of nothingness and vacuums occupies them. Questioning why the urban landscape of the remembered “Town of Cats” is populated by cats, his father says, “If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.” The story becomes its own cipher encoded in Oedipal handwriting.

What is most interesting about “Town of Cats” is that it redirects its affiliations with Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” through a purportedly German predecessor. Sure, Tengo could be misremembering the origin of his “Town of Cats”, but Murakami’s purposeful distance from Japanese antecedents is complicated by the remarkably strong precedent of “Cat Town.” Murakami walks us around but does not open the most interesting cryptic image: why cats, specifically? Once more: “If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.”

To move us to the next section of this argument, it is merely necessary to say that Hagiwara’s “Cat Town” is designated not a “short story” but instead a “Roman in the Style of a Prose Poem.” What kind of poetry is this?

Poetries of the Weird: Hagiwara’s Modanizumu Images

Hagiwara’s work is renowned for its role in modanizumu, the period of cultural activity in Japan between 1913 and 1938. In a statement that readers of “Cat Town” could attest extends to Hagiwara’s prose as well, critics argue that Hagiwara “invent[ed] a vernacular lyricism appropriate for a modern world filled with skyscrapers, consumer goods, mass culture—the new urban setting of Tokyo”—and to which the poet then applied the panacea of illness as a “remedy” to modernization’s many forms of alienation (Sugimoto 20–21). Cities are planned with a certain kind of rational urban symbolism that enumerates, commodifies and alienates individuals with nightmarish results. In this space, writing offers a potential tactic for liberation—or at least the recognition and abandonment of these late capitalist strategies as “occupied places” (de Certeau 196). For Hagiwara, poetry is a “heresy of the modern, a kind of corrupting illness” or, succinctly, “a symptom of madness in modernity” (Sugimoto 23, 25). Of the genres of writing, poetry’s affinity for madness allows it to challenge modern theories of Enlightenment rationalism and the oppressive real hierarchies that historically accompany them.

Poetry might be just the tonic needed, for it sharpens the pharmakon of writing: poetry’s subtle knife mixes the otherwise incompatible elements of poison and remedy, madness and rationality. In “Cat Town”, the narrator observes that the “universe that lies beyond common sense and logic—the universe that is known intuitively to the poet—belongs to the metaphysical” (236). It is difficult to argue with the material force of consumer culture and brutal skyscraper architecture, not to mention the violence of major urban highways, but the refuge of linguistic abstraction offers a tactical realignment and a new way of seeing things. Allow me to extrapolate from Hagiwara’s narrator’s observation: in narrative prose, traditionally anchored by realist discourses, the weird arrives to depart in an imagistic flash—a moment when the bottom drops out of your world. In poetry, however, an image can be held through an intensity of thought that extends the space of perception. An abyss may disclose a face for its subject.

At which point you might want to know about the specific kind of weirdness that Hagiwara’s poetry brings forth. One answer involves cats. Try Hagiwara’s “The Lonely Blue Cat” in Sato’s recent translation:

Here’s a blue cat. And a willow is being blown in the
wind, and over the graveyard the moon is up.

This is the weird with a finger to its lips: caution. However, This modern tanka’s brief lines unfold with images at once innocuous and uncanny, rational and mad. What moon is this? What willow, what wind? There’s a cat again, disappearing into the graveyard’s dark shadow.

Of course, reading in translated English is a problem. Comparing the work of Wilson and Sato reveals insoluble interpretive quandaries. Take Hagiwara’s “Green Flute”.

Wilson’s earlier adaptation of 1969 strongly emphasizes rhyme and image, while Sato’s later translation modulates its images with quieter language. Words such as “stagger,” “ghostliness,” or “death’s menagerie” become mannered: “lumbering,” “elephants,” and “an illusion.” What similarities exist seem cut from the same cloth as “The Lonely Blue Cat”. Each poem focuses on a graveyard in which its speaker wonders about tarrying too long; in each looms a cat’s inhuman presence. Look too close and a mirage will vanish, or you may see more than you bargained for—you may see something “more nasty as it nears.” Hagiwara’s images are decidedly weird.

To his contemporaries, Hagiwara disrupted formal shapes and sounded very modern. As a result, much criticism on Hagiwara (as well as his own critical writings) emphasizes the historical reception of European influences by Japanese writers during modanizumu. What is missing from this exemplary critical conversation? A new vision of Hagiwara’s work is as simple as wondering about poetic images—Hagiwara’s most exquisite delight and poison.

In this regard, weird thinking also profits from examining the criticism that Hagiwara himself wrote. Take, for example, the following passage, which Sato cites as proof of Hagiwara’s critical acumen. In it, Hagiwara reads a haiku by Japanese poet Yosa Buson (1716–1784):

Buson:
A squid-shaped kite: where yesterday’s sky used to be

Commentary: In the wintry sky where a northerly wind blows, a kite is up. In the same wintry sky, yesterday, too, it was up. The dreary season of winter. The wind blowing through a frozen dull sunlight, screaming sadly. The glassy cold blue sky. Up in that blue sky was a lonely kite yesterday, as it is today. Buzzing nonchalantly, boundlessly high, sorrowing in the globular sky, there’s always a single distant memory drifting!

In the poesy of this haiku is revealed the most Buson-like nostalgia and romance. Pay attention to the fact that all the poetic qualities are contained in the deep emotion of the expression “where yesterday’s sky used to be.” Yesterday’s sky is no longer today’s sky. Yet in that different sky the same kite is up, as always. In other words, in the space always changing, in the time always passing, a single kite—an image of memory—exists in the globular sky constantly, sadly, desolately. Viewed in this haiku, philosophically representing Buson’s leitmotif as it does, contrasts with Bashō’s famous “An old pond.”

I should add that attention should also be paid to the fact that the locution, “where yesterday’s sky used to be,” is wholly a symbolist technique shared by the poetry of modern Europe and that it is a distinct feature with no precedent in the Japanese literature of the past. Buson’s mastery is that he, like today’s poets, had a European lyrical method, born though he was in the Edo period when there was no intercourse with foreign countries. (trans. and qtd. in Sato xviii-xix)

Hagiwara’s rhapsody is a marvel of intense reading; it sustains the poem’s attention on images with logico-hallucinatory precision, teasing and pulling from the haiku’s density a world of complex emotion and literary tradition. The dangers that run like a live current throughout weird literature enliven this “image of memory”—remember that, for Hagiwara, “the past” rings with pain, and it is therefore not surprising when the wind blowing through frozen sunlight is “screaming sadly.” His finger still covers his lips, however, guarding his weirdest secret: the squid-shaped kite. A squid! Even if a common shape for kites in Buson’s or Hagiwara’s time, this apparition from the deep water reminds us that mysteries are aloft above. It is Lovecraftian, perhaps, but also a nostalgic, mannered return to a subject of shunga erotica, such as Hokusai Katsushika’s woodcut series Kinoe no Komatsu, or The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (1814).

As a kite, the shunga image (if that is what it resembles, a squid or an octopus) has lost its titillating, educational cache, but it has retained the sensuality of its original, namely its qualities of “unrestrained imagination, but humor too, and refinement” (Baucheron 99).

Things of the sea, extra-terraceous by definition, look odd in the sky but also along the shoreline where nebulous sea-bodies wash up to deflate and rot. Translating Hagiwara’s “Song of a Hermit Crab”, Sato gives us the following line: “it’s a cloud-like image   a lonely hermit crab’s ghost, / you see” (97). The mesh of images grows discomforting and timeless, lost in ever-fluctuating immensities. Reminders too rise up of Hagiwara’s “Moonlight and Jellyfish” in Wilson’s adaptation, where the titular jellyfish reflects itself as “A thing transparent, a chilly thing, / [that] Flows in the water, knows no end …” (69). The sea offers many such strange inhuman things. Another is the titular “thing most cold” in “Sea Shell” whose “teeth / Flow in the water, and its hands / Flow in the water underneath / Things colder than it understands” (Wilson 70). And then there is the shellfish of “Enchanted Graveyard” that appears alongside other weird creatures—a cat, a ghost—as the “common kindred of this sullen coast” (Wilson 62). Along this coast, assumedly, is the subject of another of Hagiwara’s poems, “Rotten Clam”, left on the beach flats “where sadness broods, / From entrails on the rot / The putrid breath protrudes, / Flickeringly” (Wilson 44). Not a pleasant place, these shores of shifting time. They collapse fate in space to leave revealed to sight things slimy, rotted, and weird. For Hagiwara’s poetry, shore and air alike are possible extensions of the abyss that “Cat Town” sees in urban and feline figures.

To search for the power of the weird is to discern in normal forms and images things unexpected and surprising. Examining signs and symbols for guidance, like the narrator of “Cat Town”, we sneak around the obstinacy of the work of art and modern life, using one to answer the other, asking questions, stealing glances, getting caught seeing images. Weird reading may not ascertain the whole picture. Should it? What is “whole” can only be individuated because it has been cut from the cloth of things with ration’s shears. “Cat Town” poses the weird as a dividing line-become-abyss plucked from a momentary sight, a descending bottomless image that, if examined too long, could cause a madness like and yet utterly distinct from hallucination or illness.

I want to return to cats but with a new twist, because figures can change in the night: they might be dogs. Is this portrait, an image of marginal life enters through our window. Should we look?

Concluding Thoughts: Toward A Weird Poetry

To my knowledge, there is no widely recognized tradition of contemporary poetry within genres such as fantasy, horror, or science fiction. Granted, contemporary awards and individuals are seeking to change this situation; examples include the Rhysling Award, Eric Basso, and, as Desirina Boskovich recently pointed out, Nancy Hightower. But it has been a long time since the enormously popular allegories of Edmund Spenser and Christina Rossetti. These are prose genres, no question. They unspool social philosophies and construct to examine scintillating structures of the mind and imagination. Thus does the weird Roman of “Cat Town” become Murakami’s “Town of Cats”: what is first a tale of dislocation’s hyperreal shock settles into a tale of comfortably dreamlike prose structures.

In contrast, the evanescent music of lyric poetry opens wounds in human subjectivity. Poetry’s concision grants its a song a sharp edge with which it allows us to keen. Such a statement sound romantic, even wistful, as indeed may the poetry it seeks to evaluate. But when it comes to a writer such as Hagiwara we can recognize a sharp insight into the hyperreal in his work, however depreciating its author might have been. “Someone like me is no more than a miserable blue cat’s nightmare,” Hagiwara wrote in his Preface to Blue Cat (1923 [Aoneko]). In the same Preface, Hagiwara observed that his poetry’s “essence […] lies in the pitifulness of yearnings with no apparent cause for the world of reality. Thus I breathe into the fife’s mouth hole, trying to play a mysterious and sensuous life” (Sato 63, 61). We don’t talk much about poetry and the weird because the language of poetry is already so unfamiliar and intense.

Prefacing his earliest poems, Hagiwara speaks to the desire to use language as a tactic for survival within a nightmarish world where late capitalist structures dominate urban life and push to the margins its shores and graveyards, its animals and alienated peoples.^[5] (Although “Cat Town” is weird, cat cafes, catering to urban bourgeoisie, are becoming de rigeur. All things can be sold.) For Hagiwara, language offers a way to pinpoint so as better to see and to escape the shadows that haunt him. “I want to nail my own gloomy shadow into the moonlit earth,” he wrote; “Lest the shadow follow me forever” (Sato 7). Affiliating himself with the nightmare of a blue cat and, before that, with a howling dog that sees its own shadow, Hagiwara’s images offer powerful and sensuous dislocations of identity wrenched from its human mask. All of which raises a last question: what do we look stripped of our symbols?

In Hagiwara’s literary remains we have a marvelous weapon that might shear humanity from its mad rationalisms, but also a flute that plays to the heart of a most surprising genre: a poetry of the weird. “Cat Town” exposes the hyperreal fracture between jamais vu and déjà vu; it cuts our eyes open with the same suddenness as a glass shatters. An image from the nightmare of an abyss explodes into view. In the debris, we see the ground on which strategic maps of the world are built. Nothing after is the same. At times the image, that thing looks like an animal: now a cat, now a dog. Now only a face.

Works Cited

Baucheron, Éléa and Diane Routex. The Museum of Scandals: Art that Shocked the World. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2013. Print.

Breton, André. What is Surrealism? Selected Writings. Ed. Franklin Rosemont. New York: Pathfinder, 2002. Print.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Print.

Lippit, Noriko Mizuta. “Tanika and Poe: The Grotesque and the Quest for Supernal Beauty.” Comparative Literature 29.3 (1977): 221–40. Print.

Murakami, Haruki. “Town of Cats.” The New Yorker. Trans. Jay Rubin. 5 Sept. 2001. Web. 3 Apr. 2016.

Nadeau, Maurice. The History of Surrealism. 1964. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: 1965. Print.

Norfield, Tony. The City: London and the Global Power of Finance. London: Verso, 2016. Print.

Rothenberg, Jerome and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Millennium: Volume One, From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Print.

Sato, Hiroaki, trans. Cat Town. Sakutarō Hagiwara. New York: New York Review Books, 2014. Print.

Scott, A.O. Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth. New York: Penguin, 2016. Print.

Sontag, Susan. “Melancholy Objects.” On Photography. New York: Anchor, 1973. Print.

Sugimoto, Mike. “The Illness of Prose: Hagiwara Sakutarō and the Status of Poetry in the Modern.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 4.1 (2002): 20–37. Print.

Tyler, William J. Introduction to Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938. Ed. William J. Tyler. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008. Print.

Wilson, Graeme, Trans. Face at the Bottom of the World and Other Poems. Sakutarō Hagiwara. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1969. Print.

____

[1] Cats, Japan, and weird fiction: it is worth noting that Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843) was quite popular in Japan. Poe’s influence extends to Natsume Sōseki, Ueda Bin, Iwano Homei, Baba Kocho, Hirata Toboku, Tayama Katai, and Nagai Kafu, all stemming from Aeba Kōson’s translation of the story in the November 1888 issue of Yomiuri Shimbun (Lippin 221). Hagiwara acknowledged a debt to Poe, as did Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, whose 1918 “The Hell Screen” also appears in The Weird, albeit with caveats for both writers (Lippit 223).

[2] Many critics objected to Hagiwara’s work with thinly-disguised prejudice. Wilson summarizes these criticisms: “the startling originality of its themes and imagery is no more than a direct reflection of the poet’s persistent physical ill-health and of his spiritual and intellectual neurasthenia. His poetry’s consequent aura of irremediable malaise, the argument continues, inevitably appeals to our own distempered times but it disqualifies Hagiwara from a major place in any healthy tradition” (26). However Wilson too wonders whether Hagiwara lost his edge through excessive alcoholic drinking. For a parallel case, see the slighted reputation of Irish writer Flann O’Brien. If weird criticism can make progress on this state of affairs, it must refuse to oppose the “healthy tradition” of normative health with the aesthetic fascination with the sickened, ill, or mad—the two are two faces of the same flipping coin. Instead, weird approaches put the coin on its edge; they make it disappear, mutter about old gods, and slip into shadows. (Your coin is a dream.)

[3] We could also refer to the Surrealists for whom, as André Breton and Louis Aragon wrote in La Révolution surréaliste, mental crises such as hysteria could “be considered a supreme form of expression” (qtd. in Breton 321). In his The History of Surrealism (1964), Maurice Nadeau argues that, with their poetry especially, Surrealists sought to prove “[t]hat there exists no barrier between the normal man and the so-called ‘ab-normal’ man; that there exists no state starting from which one can be certain that this man is mad and another rational” (188). The effort continues.

[4] Sato’s and Wilson’s versions read very differently. Such friction between translations recalls the twentieth-century English literary tradition’s fraught early relationship with translated East Asian literatures. W.B. Yeats’s creative adumbration of Japanese Nō drama and Ezra Pound’s appropriative usurpation of Ernest Fenollosa’s translations of Chinese poetry for his own Cathay (1915) represent warnings and seductions alike, proof of the alluring power of adaptive cross-cultural distortions.

[5] Ascertaining the role of finance in contemporary global capitalism and asking both “what kind of world works like this?” and “[w]hy should the lives of millions of people be influenced by the vagaries of financial market prices?”, Tony Norfield answers with the same logic that drives the nightmare of Hagiwara’s skyscraper-defined, consumer-driven modernist city: “This only looks normal, rather than weird, because we are used to it” (8).

The post 101 Weird Writers #41 — Hagiwara Sakutarō appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

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

***

“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

The post 101 Weird Writers #40 — William Sansom appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Alice Bradley Sheldon (1915 – 1987), more commonly known by the pen name James Tiptree, Jr., was a prolific writer of science fiction and other speculative tales. Born in Chicago to a lawyer and author, her interests and occupations ranged wide, including exhibitions in the visual arts, work in the U.S. Army Air Forces and CIA, and doctoral studies in experimental psychology. Her dissertation at George Washington University concerned the responses of animals to stimuli in various environments. This experience certainly informs the story, “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats”, anthologized in The Weird. It was during her dissertation phase that Sheldon began publishing science fiction stories as James Tiptree, Jr., choosing the pseudonym in order to shield her academic reputation from potential criticism. Her body of work went on to include two novels and ten collections of fiction and essays.

During the course of her prolific career, Sheldon/Tiptree received numerous honors for her writing, including the Hugo (2x), Nebula (3x), World Fantasy, and Locus Awards (2x), and induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012. Her choice of a male pseudonym is indicative of one of the most prominent themes in her work: complications of sex and gender. In honor of her contributions to speculative literature, authors Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler (whose own story, “The Dark”, also appears in The Weird) established The James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 1991, which recognizes current authors exploring and deepening our understanding of these topics. Recipients of the award have included such writers as M. John Harrison, Matt Ruff, Raphael Carter, Caítlin R. Kiernan, Shelly Jackson, and many others.

– Christopher Burke

***

Female authors have often worked under male pseudonyms; that’s nothing unusual. But in the case of Alice Bradley Sheldon, “James Tiptree, Jr.” was more then a pen name — it was a persona. Inhabiting her alter-ego Tiptree, Sheldon achieved a clarity of vision and prowess in storytelling that transcended her other work. Tiptree allowed Sheldon to step outside herself, and in so doing, find a clearer voice, a purer authenticity.

In her outstanding biography of Tiptree, Julie Phillips writes,

“… the male name turned out to have many uses. It made her feel taken seriously when she wrote about what she knew: guns, hunting, politics, war. It let her write the way she wanted to write, with an urgency that was hers. It gave her enough distance and control to speak honestly about herself.”

As an accomplished and eloquent letter-writer, Tiptree maintained an extensive literary correspondence with many other writers of the era, and through these interchanges his identity became fully-formed. (Although many of his stories were actually Sheldon’s; even before she became one of the hottest new sci-fi talents of the decade, she’d lived a remarkably varied and interesting life.)

So it comes as no surprise that the concept of identity represents a major thread underlying Tiptree’s work, and “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats” is no exception. Interestingly, the story features yet another alter-ego for its author — because its protagonist, the eponymous psychologist Tilman Lipsitz (“Tilly”), bears a striking resemblance to Dr. Alice Sheldon, Ph.D. in research psychology.

In a fascinating and extensively researched article titled The Psychologist Who Empathized with Rats, psychologist Alan C. Elms teases out many of the similarities between Tilman Lipsitz and Sheldon. For her doctoral dissertation, Sheldon studied “the reactions of rats to novel and familiar visual stimuli” – much like Tilly. There were further connections: the same rats (“the hooded strain”), the same basement laboratory, even a similarly named supervisor. And Sheldon also fretted about her lack of productivity and struggled against precarious funding.

Sheldon was a talented visual artist, with published work going back to her teens. Drawing on this talent, she accompanied her dissertation with illustrations. These same illustrations, only slightly modified, were published alongside “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats,” attributed to “Raccoona Sheldon” (another pseudonym of Sheldon’s). As Elms remarks, “If anyone familiar with her dissertation had seen this story when it first appeared, Tiptree’s true identity would have been obvious a year before it was publicly revealed.”

As alter-egos, Tiptree and Tilly were both a means for exploring masculinity. But unlike the manly, masculine men that populate many of Tiptree’s stories (and who Tiptree appeared to be himself), Tilly is sensitive and fragile, a foil for the toxic masculinity represented by his colleagues and embodied by his supervisor, Welch. The contrast represents an idea that underlies many of Tiptree’s stories: that humanity is fated to be cruel and violent; that we are, by nature, aggressors. Or perhaps not humanity, per se, but men. In a time when the word “Man” meant “Humankind,” it was even more difficult to tell the difference. But Tilly is an exception; in this world, his gentleness and empathy render him a kind of freak.

Sheldon was exposed to brutality early. As a child, her parents took her on two major safaris in Africa, long trips which took months and required an impressive African support staff. Her parents and their friends considered the trip part adventure, part research; the itinerary included big game hunting, and young Alice watched as the adults killed lions and gorillas. Along with the fierce gore of fallen creatures, there was also human suffering and human cruelty. Particularly on the second trip, as Alice began to understand how both the people and the landscape of the countries they visited suffered under the devastating effects of colonization. At an early age, Sheldon absorbed the grotesquery of cruelty, and it shook her to her core.

In “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats,” the imagery of violence is pushed to its limits. The story narrates in cold, casual language the unimaginable horrors inflicted on defenseless creatures in an underground torture chamber. The lighting is dim and shadowy in some places, glaring and punishing in others. The bare wire cages are coated with feces and “hanks of dead skin.” The animals rub themselves raw in an attempt to escape. There are rhesus monkeys “huddled on the steel with puffy pink bald heads studded with electrode jacks,” and paralyzed dogs “jerking with wire terrors” — when they’re not being flayed alive, dissected while conscious but unable to move. (“A ‘preparation’ is an animal spread-eagled on a rack for vivisection, dosed with reserpine so it cannot cry or struggle but merely endures for days or weeks of pain.”) And of course, there are the rats. Piles of baby rats, shivering. “Selectively shocked, starved, subjected to air blasts and plunged in ice water.” Finally, their heads cut off.

This research laboratory is more like a slaughterhouse. Or an interrogation room in an extrajudicial prison. Or a scene from Saw. It’s so extreme it feels fantastical, except it isn’t — because the real world is actually this cruel.

Perhaps that’s what makes weird fiction so powerful. Its proximity to the real, without actually being real, somehow makes reality easier to see. By looking closely at the real we can make it seem strange. By placing distance between us and the real we can see it for what it truly is.

In “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats,” our protagonist, Tilman Lipsitz, has found himself in this “charnel house” of a research facility, but unlike his colleagues, he is kind to every creature in the lab… even his impatient and unfeeling boss. He cannot help himself. Tilly is concerned for the rats and occasionally plies them with treats, handing out the treats equally so as not to confound his experimental results.

While his experimental subjects might appreciate Tilly’s kindness, his supervisor is less impressed. Tilly is called into his boss’ office to account for the untold hours he’s wasted. You see, Tilly prefers to quietly observe the rats, exploring “the capacity of animals to anticipate, to gain some knowledge of the wave-front of expectations that they must build up, even in the tiniest heads.” Instead, he is informed he must come up with a testable hypothesis, and soon, if he wants to hold onto his position; perhaps the “preparation” described above, vivisection under paralysis. They want him to

“Take some good testable hypothesis from somebody in the department, preferably something that involves electronic counting of food pellets, bar presses, latencies, defecations. And crank it all into printed score sheets with a good Fortran program.”

This mechanization is key, and foreshadows more explicit references to Nazi atrocities that appear later in the story. Tilly’s is the era of mechanization, and research must follow the same mechanical march. In fact, even Tilly’s teaching duties are mechanized, as we learn when he sits down to grade 81 tests. The tests are multiple choice — badly written and poorly assembled — but Tilly is intended to ignore this, simply marking right and wrong. He is meant to grade using a test key, a “theatrically guarded manila template he can lay over the sheets with slots giving the correct response.” But his students, like his rats, have discovered that he is sensitive to their plight; they’ve realized that he’s listening, and have begun leaving him notes in the margins, questioning the test’s wording, the meaning of certain underlying assumptions. Once again, his sensitivity and kindness have gotten in the way of the world’s primary pursuit: efficiency.

The goal, with both the students and the rats, is to remove any excess information. Blinders on, eyes forward, only the experiment, only the subject, only the button that delivers the shocks.

It’s an astonishingly effective way of perpetrating cruelty.

But back to that conversation with Tilly’s boss. In a moment of obliviousness, Tilly begins expounding on the subjects he’s actually interested in studying: psychologists, namely why they’re driven to do such terrible things.

“You’re not a member of the SPCA are you?” his boss asks, skeptically.

Tilly isn’t… although he did once give them ten dollars.

Chastened by this meeting, and by his apparent complete failure as a scientist, Tilly returns home. He grades those 81 tests — another trial hampered by his own compassion. He drowns his sorrows and frustrations in prodigious amounts of ale… followed by absinthe.

Fortified by these libations, he resolves to go kill all his rats, reasoning that if he could just start fresh, without those already-formed connections and accretions of affection and guilt, perhaps he could finally be the scientist his superiors want.

He returns to the lab, abandoned after-hours and even more eerie in the darkness. The animals are finally alone, finding a brief respite from their torturers.

Here, in Tilly’s thoughts, the unspoken analogy that’s been shadowing this story is finally made explicit:

“All over the country, the world, the spotless knives are slicing, the trained minds devising casual torments in labs so bright and fair you could eat off their floors. Auschwitz, Belsen were neat. With flowers. Only the reek of pain going up to the sky, the empty sky. But people don’t think animals’ pain matters. They didn’t think my people’s pain mattered either, in the death camps a generation back. It’s all the same, endless agonies going up unheard from helpless things.”

And there it is, the dark ugly truth, the hideous nightmare, the unconscionable sin that has informed every line of this story, just as it’s informed every chapter of human history since: there are some things too horrific to be real, and yet they are.

Tilly fumbles with the rat-killings, euthanizing them one by one, a slow and time-consuming process. Failing at this, as everything. Then: he glimpses the rat-king.

At first it’s this monstrous thing, all tangled limbs and writhing tails, both vulnerable and grotesque. Then it becomes something else. Noble, elegant, a true King.

He follows it into the tunnel. Here, he encounters his vapid and unpleasant coworker, Sheila, or a shadow of her; the good, kind part, the part that’s already been excised to allow her to exist in this cruel, shallow world. Then, as often happens when one is drunk on absinthe, following a gold-spangled rat into a dark tunnel, the conversation turns to Descartes. Sheila quotes the philosopher, saying,

“There is no error more powerful in leading feeble minds astray from the straight path of virtue than the supposition that the soul of brutes is of the same nature as our own.”

… ‘He started it all, didn’t he?’ Lipsitz says, or perhaps only thinks. ‘That they’re robots, you can do anything to them. Their pain doesn’t count. But we’re animals, too.’”

The delusion, of course, is not just Descartes’, the long dead philosopher. Even as late as the 1980s — well after the publication of this story — scientists and philosophers and yes, psychologists, were still arguing about whether animals feel pain. Some argued that to merely suppose that since humans experience pain, other mammals feel it too, was a presumption based on anthropocentrism, not scientific. Others argued that to suppose that humans, alone among animalkind, have somehow cornered the market on suffering, is not too scientific either.

And today, although our good scientists have come around to the understanding that animals are quite capable of suffering — and not just physical pain, but also more complex forms of pain such as loneliness, bereavement, grief — our society, our culture, and our typical meals do not quite reflect this understanding. As Michael Pollan put it in a 2002 article in The New York Times Magazine,

“For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history. … Yet most of the animals we kill lead lives organized very much in the spirit of Descartes, who famously claimed that animals were mere machines, incapable of thought or feeling. There’s a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig–an animal easily as intelligent as a dog–that becomes the Christmas ham.”

And once again, excepting the vegans among us, we find ourselves looking with uncomfortable intimacy at a dark ugly truth: very few of us are Tilly. For the most part we are, all of us, Dr. Welch, ignoring the injustice that surrounds us – injustice we enable, often support – so that we can get by within the hideous brutality of a system we’ve helped create.

They follow King Rat: Tilly, Sheila, and a parade of “lost things,” accumulating in greater number as they venture deeper into the tunnel. “All the abused ones, the gentle ones, are leaving the world.” The rat leads them to “the final refuge,” “the place where lost things go.” As Sheila says, it’s very beautiful, “…only it isn’t real.”

“Staggering after them through unreality,” Tilly longs desperately to follow.

“—And yes! For a last instant he has it. …And then he tries with all his force crazily to send himself after them, to burst from his skin, his life if need be – only to share again that gentleness.”

Then he wakes, in the cold sweat of an absinthe hangover, the dirt and filth of the lab floor.

For a moment, he wonders, “Did something of myself go too, fly to its selfish joy?”

He doesn’t know. But we know.

What’s left behind of this Tilly is just a husk, a shell. A soulless replica.

Perhaps he’s lucky. In this world, soullessness is exactly what’s needed to thrive. Tilly is suddenly a new man: powerful, pragmatic, vicious, the kind of man who buckles down and does what needs to be done, collateral damage be damned, the kind of man who believes you can smash things into submission and break them into being fixed.

He’s the kind of man that Tiptree profiled in story after story, a critique presented with dry cynicism, and often through the voice of a woman. As Mrs. Parsons says in “The Women Men Don’t See,”

“‘Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world.’

…. ‘All the endless wars …’ Her voice is a whisper. ‘All the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we’re just part of the battlefield. It’ll never change unless you change the whole world. I dream sometimes of—of going away—’ ”

In Tilly’s case, what needs to be done is the pampered rats must die: he pours the whole mess of rats, cages, and carrots into a barrel, and smothers it all in burning ether. His thoughts turn again to his coworker Sheila, but this time in crude sexual terms (the word that comes to mind is “rapey”); toxic masculinity is all about domination, in every sense of the word.

As God commanded Adam: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” Rats included, one supposes.

“A baby rat has run away hiding behind his shoe. Mechanical mouse, a stupid automaton. He stamps on its back and kicks it neatly under Sheila’s hamster rack, wondering why Descartes has popped into his thoughts.”

Did Tilly die? It’s an interesting question.

Often the first thing that stands out about Tiptree’s larger oeuvre is an obsession with sex and death, and the two often linked. (One of Tiptree’s most famous stories, of course, puts it all upfront in the title: “Love Is The Plan, the Plan Is Death.”) Tiptree was fixated on that brief moment of transcendence that leads inexorably to obliteration.

For example, as in “On the Last Afternoon”:

“He felt the wraith-wind of its going in his brain, the alien immensities opening to the imago… The longing rose in him, the terrified love toward what he could not imagine—…

—But he could not alone, no, and his useless death hung over him, the crashing was beating on his mortal ears.”

Or as in “Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death”:

“Stupefied with delight, I gazed.
And your huge hunting-limb came out and seized me.
Great is the Plan. I felt only joy as your jaws took me.
As I feel it now.”

These are just two examples out of many.

As Tilly moves deeper into that tunnel, he too feels a sort of overwhelming, full-body contentment, surrendering to the path of the King:

“…he has never known anything as wonderful as this communion, not sex or sunsets or even the magic hour on his first bike. It is as if everything is all right now, will be all right forever — griefs he did not even know he carried are falling from him, leaving him light as smoke.”

The first time you read this story, you might think it’s all turned out alright. Tilly, the real Tilly, Tilly the soul, is somewhere beautiful – even if it isn’t real. The Tilly on earth doesn’t know, doesn’t suffer, although he certainly causes suffering. You might think, it’s okay, Tilly, the real Tilly, he found transcendence.

But that would be wrong, I think.

The real ending is the devastating one: no one knows where souls go. The beautiful place, it isn’t real. Because the real world conspires to kill the souls of everyone, all but a few who escape by dying first. As Tilly thinks, in those last moments in the tunnel: “They have stood it as long as they can and now they are leaving. The pain has culminated in this, that they leave us — leave me, leave me behind in a clockwork Cartesian world in which nothing will mean anything forever.”

And Tilly lives.

Within Tiptree’s private mythology, I think this might be the worst outcome. Transcendence that ends in death – that’s a happy ending. But to glimpse it, to almost touch it, but then be forced to go on, with only the emptiness, nothing meaning anything – that’s horror, the darkest horror that Tiptree knew.

As most with an interest in Tiptree will already know, Alice Sheldon left the real world by her own hand in 1987. At age 71, she carried out a former suicide pact with her ill, elderly husband, shooting him as he slept, and then herself. It was not a spur-of-the-moment decision: her suicide note was penned eight years before her death. A life-long sufferer from depression, she’d anticipated this moment for years.

Like Tiptree’s Mrs. Parsons, Sheldon dreamed of going away. Who could blame her? To see with clarity, and live with empathy, is an agonizing task. Only a few make it out with souls intact.

The post 101 Weird Writers #39 — James Tiptree, Jr. appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

We’ve got an eclectic list of writers lined up for 2016 and beyond but for now we thought we should recap by compiling a list of the first 38 entries so that readers could peruse them at their leisure. These articles contain fantastic tidbits of knowledge about the Weird along with great insights and analyses so be sure to check them out.

1. Bob Leman: A Window into the Work of an Underrated Story Writer
2. Augusto Monterroso: A Journey Into the Weird World of “Mister Taylor”
3. Julio Cortázar: Examining the Strange Transformation of “Axolotl”
4. Dino Buzzati: Interpretations of Buzzati and “The Colomber”
5. Eric Basso: The Dissolving World of “The Beak Doctor”
6. Brian Evenson: Strange Salvation in “The Brotherhood of Mutilation”
7. Georg Heym: The Expressionistic Power of Heym and “The Dissection”
8. Mercè Rodoreda: The Weirdness and Estrangement in “The Salamander”
9. Margaret Irwin: The Monstrous Allure of “The Book”
10. Tanith Lee: The Triumph of the Unseen in “Yellow and Red”
11. Luigi Ugolini: Uncanny Nature in “The Vegetable Man”
12. Mervyn Peake: Umbrageous Legacy — Mervyn Peake’s Portrait Gallery
13. Jerome Bixby: Strange Survival in “It’s a Good Life”
14. Charles Beaumont: The Nature of Evil in “The Howling Man”
15. Elizabeth Hand: Trauma and Connection in “The Boy in the Tree”
16. Kathe Koja: Weird Bodies, Weird Language of “Angels in Love”
17. William Gibson and John Shirley: Strange Tribes in “The Belonging Kind”
18. Leena Krohn: Change and Transformation in Tainaron
19. Algernon Blackwood: Strange Wilderness in “The Willows”
20. Jamaica Kincaid: The Weird, Realism & Intensities of Language in “My Mother”
21. Caitlín R. Kiernan: The Slippery Reality of “A Redress for Andromeda”
22. George R.R. Martin: The Colonial Nightmare in “Sandkings”
23. Laird Barron: Stages of Horrific Vision in “The Forest”
24. Olympe Bhêly-Quénum: Dreams, Death & the African Weird in “A Child in the Bush of Ghosts”
25. Bruno Schulz: The Fragile Reality of “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass”
26. Octavia Butler: Strange Symbiosis in “Bloodchild”
27. Joanna Russ: Female Identity in “The Little Dirty Girl”
28. Gahan Wilson: Hearts Like Oysters in “The Sea Was Wet As Wet Could Be”
29. Michael Cisco: Elements of Degeneration in “The Genius of Assassins”
30. Margo Lanagan: Spectacle and Shame in “Singing My Sister Down”
31. Fritz Leiber: Grit and Social Dynamics in “Smoke Ghost”
32. Marc Laidlaw: Art, Death, and Strangeness in “The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio”
33. Stephen Graham Jones: The Metaphysical Prisons of “Little Lambs”
34. Amos Tutuola: “A Nightmare of Indescribable Adventures”: Style and “The Complete Gentleman”
35. Robert Aickman: May Bury You (On Robert Aickman’s “The Hospice”)
36. Saki: What the Weird Knows — Conradin’s Secret Arts
37. Kelly Link: Sex, Death and the Man-Omelet in “The Specialist’s Hat”
38. Leonora Carrington: Seeing Rabbits and Falling Fingers

The post Weird Writers Recap appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.