Asked to define her personal aesthetic as a writer here at WFR some time ago, Womack pithily responded that “Beauty is complicated.” An epigraph to “Orange Dogs”, the first story in Lost Objects, develops this sentiment further. It is ostensibly a quotation from an old German treatise on butterflies, and it reads “Sie warnen vor Giftigkeit”, or “They warn that they are poisonous.” For Monarchs and Pipevine Swallowtails, this is true. Beauty is complicated; so too are poisons, butterflies, the world. Womack attempts to shoulder that terrible awareness of apocalypse across this assembly of short stories. Some succeed; others, ambitious, stumble. On balance, they offer much to a generous reader. In the effort, they continue the response that weird fiction shapes to the question of the Anthropocene (Capitalocene? Chthulucene?), even while they broaden the ambit of weird fiction by introducing new spaces and settings for creative imaginations.

Womack is an Andalusian writer, graduate of the Clarion Creative Writing program, frequent editor, and co-founder of Ediciones Nevsky / Nevsky Books. These many filiations with the literary world yield a crop of diverse settings and characters in her stories. She cut her teeth in translating core texts of modern weird fiction from English into Spanish, including Karen Tidbeck’s Jagannath and Amatka, as well as the classics of gothic fiction from Mary Shelley and Charles Dickens to Lord Dunsany, and you can trace those influences in surprising fashion across the offerings here. The settings of Lost Objects range from an eerie Eastern Europe to a genetically-reinvented Scotland, and from a Thatcher-esque world of English mining to a frozen world of ice and storms. Her protagonists are intellectually curious but socially-marginal characters, children and librarians, old scientists and regretful scroungers. For a debut, Lost Objects looks to a great range of sources and shoulders an immense weight.

***

Lost Objects is divided into two sections. The first offers a number of shorter stories, of which one of the best is “Black Isle”, a story set in Scotland that concerns the generic reconstruction of entire species and biospheres. Other stand-outs are the mysterious “Marvels Do Not Oftimes Occur” and “Orange Dogs”, mentioned above. (You can also read “Orange Dogs” here on Weird Fiction Review if you are so inclined.) Across these stories, apocalypse and survival take on many faces, while human desires—and regrets—take flight in lyric moments of the imagination. Over and over again, the things humans make that will exist into the future are put in jeopardy. For example, “Black Isle” posits a mysterious company whose re-envisioning of the genetic sequence has allowed for massive changes to the ecological life and animal composition of the world after the sudden vanishing of birds and other animals. “Neo-Bio” has made artificial creatures such as blue bears and orange lizards possible—and also necessitates the laws against these aesthetic disasters. To the dismay of the scientists at the forefront of this change, however, all is not as it seems, and the recreation of the world according to XenoLab may not be as sustainable as claimed.

In contrast to the semi-recognizable corporate earth of “Black Isle”, “Orange Dogs” foresees a broken, limping world of scarcity wherein knowledge of the old world is rare and parcelled out, and where creatures that we may be familiar with have transformed beyond comprehension. What were once butterflies are now hunters that use venom, giant insects roam the world, seasons have changed, and floods have reworked the distribution of lands, cities, of lives. Anxieties over children and progeny of various kinds, natural or unnatural, recur in these stories, as do concerns with fraught relationships in the decay of social networks. Crucially, in these short stories, as in another of the more evocative tales, “Little Red Drops”, guilt and regret shadow each of the major characters. So too do acute if slightly akimbo one liners lodge themselves in the imagination. For example, see the one-line self-reflection provided by Olga, the narrator of the latter story: “What a fierce thing was she, a jilted woman.”

From the evidence provided, Womack prefers to frustrate resolution and the narrative impulse to tie up loose ends. Closure is clearly a relic of the past and can no longer anchor the lives of the people in her tales. Instead, climaxes frequently bring readers to a transformative awareness wherein the world itself—or at least the guilty, haunted visions of that we see through the eyes of Womack’s protagonists—seems to change. The first section of Lost Objects comes to a close with the book’s most intense effort to pay witness to change in its moment of world-altering gravity, “Marvels Do Not Ofttimes Occur”. Here, a “celestial phenomenon” leaves its prospective early modern viewer (placed in Nuremberg, 1561) astonished and alarmed. The pious recorder’s voice is particularly striking and plaintive—as poignant as a story of death, destruction, and disappearance can be. As the recorder writes there, “For all that we have suffered, and have deserved to suffer, may God grant us his help. I put my hand to this true account, at Nuremburg, the third anniversary of the death of Doctor Johannes Bugenhagen of Wollin. What would he have made of it I wonder.”

The second section of Lost Objects primarily consists of “Kingfisher”, a short story about a librarian whose relationship with birds, beauty, work, writing, and her husband result in a delirious turn of affairs. The beginning of this story is a blurred boundary between an initially recognizable world and a later turn toward something much weirder. Take this early passage, for instance. It in, the narrator-writer reflects on her sleepy life in a small village:

I was getting bored by then. Of the friendly faces, the easiness of it all. I started fantasising that I needed to deal with some obstacles in order to produce good material. That I needed to be a little bit uncomfortable, a little bit cold, a little bit unhappy. An excuse as good or as bad as any other, designed to clear my mind of the real fear: that I would never write again. My fellow classmates from the writing class I had attended were doing very well for themselves; some were doing incredibly well for themselves. I was ashamed of how jealous this made me: until then I had always thought I was a good person. I felt happy for them, but I also kept wondering why I could not be as successful as they were.

Given what follows, this passage suggests an uncanniness to the story in the sense that Tzvetan Todorov discussed years ago in The Fantastic. Its prosaic elements anchor the story in a world much like ours, one nervously familiar to that produced by the news headlines and deep-seated anxieties we all know too well. So too are the protagonist’s deep concerns with her employment and employability. The expensive education she has received has not prepared her for a living in a small village where fishing, farming, and small-holding are primary sources of economic and household sustenance.

Like those protagonists in the shorter stories, the narrator of “Kingfisher” feels intense regret when she reflects on the past. As she admits, “sometimes it felt as if all the sacrifices that my parents had made to provide me with a better future had been for nothing.” If the world of the past is one of capitalist expansion and sacrifice, one that foresaw only better tomorrows while it devoured the bone marrow of today, the new world is smaller and much reduced in ambition.

Possibilities that had been obvious to our parents even one generation back were now impossible dreams. Housing was unaffordable, so we would never own a place of our own, although at the same time there were hundreds, thousands, of houses and rooms empty up and down the country. They were just owned by other people, not us: banks and companies and trusts and corporations. […]  There were not many cars anymore, no air travel, although I was secretly happy about this. I remember flying once, when I was very little, how frightening it was, how miraculous it felt. But the wrong kind of miracle, like black magic. […] This brave new world was about wanting fewer things, not more things. There were no more certainties.

The disappearances that mark “Kingfisher” include those of animals and even children. Without tracing the story too closely, and following its dreams and nightmares, the revelations of the story yield perhaps less than the fact of the complex network that it is trying to harness into a coherent individual’s story during such transformative change. Womack’s book does not end there, however, but with the fleeting and yet majestic “A Place for Wild Beasts”. It might be the sequencing of the collection, but the opposition of the long and sometimes laborious “Kingfisher” with the brilliant snippet of “A Place for Wild Beasts” suggests that the best passages in Lost Objects are those in which the lyrical imagination is given room enough to take flight, at which point it—quicksilver—vanishes.

***

The contemporary imagination faces a plethora of near-unimaginable forces about which just enough is known for the mind to shy away in horror or disbelief. Among her inspirations from the gothic traditions of Spain and England, Womack cites newspaper material concerning climate change, social inequity, and the new Gilded Age culture. These things beggar the imagination, even as they are the creations of ordinary forces and human acts. Perhaps the most significant indication of this transformation is that the current geological epoch is named after human activity. In the time of the Anthropocene, telling stories about the future is fraught with anxiety. Merely imagining what a future might be like is difficult, both materially and emotionally. Historians Christophe Bonduel and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argue in their recent study The Shock of the Anthropocene that Anthropocentric imaginations must accept a “double reality”:

On the one hand, the Earth has seen other epochs in the last 4.5 billion years, and life will continue in one form or another with or without humans. But the new status that we are launching the Earth into will bring with them a disorder, penury and violence that will render it less readily habitable by humans.

Can this knowledge be incorporated into the vision of world-historical time that supplies literary fiction its material? Lost Objects suggests that it might be possible—maybe—in weird fiction. The multiple reductions and disappearances within Womack’s stories hint at what many people already know: society is unsustainable. As Andreas Malm notes with understated severity in The Progress of This Storm, “Expect more gifts of history to be withdrawn, one after the other, primarily from those who never received very many of them in the first place.” There is always more to consider. What is to be done when the intimate and everyday nature of work—its precarity for some and its meaninglessness for others—is “a scar across our collective soul”, in the words of anthropologist David Graeber. Perhaps, as the protagonist of “Kingfisher” wonders, our imaginations must catch up with our needs and desires, which must themselves freshly confront the world. As the editors of the recent book Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet point out, “Life has been monstrous almost from its beginnings.”

What a world. There will always be fiction to offer an interpretive lens, a prophetic augury. With the publication of Lost Objects, Marian Womack rises to the challenge. She offers stories of crisis wherein the nature of human work and our capacity to prepare for and live within the future as we understand it are put to the question. They bear that weight about as well as can be expected. Cumulatively, they suggest than that the human ability to create a future is failing, and that the “lost objects” of the title are the dreamt-of lives that would—that could—exist however many years from now. Whatever form they take, the prediction that Womack makes with certainty is always this: they will be almost unrecognizable.

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Editor’s note: The following is a review for the short story collection,

A little over seven years ago now, I read Steve Rasnic Tem for the first time. This experience came via his long short story, “The Man on the Ceiling,” which he co-wrote with his wife, Melanie Tem. To put it simply, this story helped broaden my idea of what horror and weird fiction could be. It frightened me and broke my heart in equal measure, this tale of dark shadowy presences, their status never fully literal or figurative but there nonetheless, affecting the Tems and shaping their lives whether they liked it or not. The writing was matter-of-fact and simple, but complex in the emotions it evoked; the strangeness of the story was strange, and the figure of the Man on the Ceiling clawed into my brain for years and resurfaced in my own moments of pain and sorrow.

Those strengths are ever-apparent in Steve Rasnic Tem’s Figures Unseen, published by the impressive Valancourt Books (who have been doing marvelous work bringing lesser-known Gothic gems back into print). These stories have been selected by Tem himself, taken from years of short story collections. After reading this new collection and reflecting on my own first experiences with Tem’s writing, I can say with certainty that he is a treasure for our field. His work, as I mentioned before, will haunt your imagination and your heart in equal measure, and it both expands and defines the genre.

If you have never read Tem’s work before, this would be an ideal place to start, since it crystallizes his strengths so capably. Tem has a knack for crafting believable characters that readers become easily invested in; we crawl inside their heads and feel their fears, sorrows, and desires as they try to make sense of their surreal worlds. We are so heavily embedded in his characters and how they feel about their circumstances that questions regarding the “reality” of these story-worlds ultimately become moot; what matters more is that they’re real to the characters, and therefore real to us.

“Out Late in the Park” is an emblematic story in this regard. I spent a fair amount of time trying to reconcile all of its disparate aspects: a group of senior citizens playing baseball in a park with childlike attitudes; a strange woman with a dark red tongue who always seems to have insects in her mouth and disappears when the protagonist looks away from her; the confusing, indeterminate passage of time in the story, where even the characters don’t know what will come for them from one day to the next; and more elements I don’t want to spoil. Suffice it to say, the struggle to understand is the story. Near the end, the protagonist narrates, “Each morning we awaken to find that life is a bit less understandable.” This statement doesn’t just provide the guiding principle for this story. It could very well provide the principle for the collection as a whole. More importantly, though, that struggle always feels very real and, more often than not, full of sorrow.

What really impressed me in Figures Unseen was the range Tem displays with regards to the severity and kinds of surreality in the stories. In “The Bereavement Photographer,” the specter of weirdness is subtle, only cropping up in the title character’s suspicion that dead children come alive for brief moments of flickering anger and sadness when he takes bereavement photos for families at the local hospital; beyond that detail, the story could easily take place in our own world. In “City Fishing,” though, it’s hard to find anything that does feel like it belongs in our world. There is a father-son hunting trip, which is something that happens fairly often. That trip takes the characters into the heart of a crumbling city, though, down a street that plunges into a darkness which feels otherworldly and scary to the characters (and, again, to readers). The nature of what they are hunting is ambiguous, but definite enough to set a reader’s teeth on edge.

This is one of those collections where, because of the variety of approaches and styles deployed by Tem, the reader will very quickly gravitate to certain stories based on their preferences. “Angel Combs” is a personal highlight, as are “Wheatfield with Crows” and “The Figure in Motion.” I also enjoyed “The Company You Keep,” which, without spoiling much, could be read as a perspective-flipped version of Ray Bradbury’s “The Crowd.” “A House by the Ocean” is a slippery, melancholy ghost story as only Tem could tell, and “The Cabinet Child” put me in the mind of a very delicate kind of Victoriana-inspired fantasy, with an ending revelation that will, again, break your heart. “Red Rabbit,” which is reprinted here on Weird Fiction Review, is another highlight. If that story is your first exposure to Tem, much like “The Man on the Ceiling” was mine, expect the imagery and the emotional dynamic of that story to stick to you like honey, or something much darker and redder.

I will also say: if you pick up this collection and read it — and you definitely should — don’t just rest here. Explore Tem’s other work, which includes hundreds of short stories and several novels. His writing is a treasure trove, and it will provide inspiration for many a budding artist or writer, much like it did for myself. Tem’s writing makes the weird and the horrific deeply personal, and it clings to our imagination not just for its uniqueness, but also for the recognition at the heart of it that the horrifying sorrow of his characters is our sorrow, too.

The post Review of Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Figures Unseen” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

I first encountered the work of M. John Harrison in the form of “Egnaro” when it appeared in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories.  I knew immediately that I had found something special, even if I was more than a little late to the party, and ever since it has served as a kind of model for what I think is meant by the term weird fiction at its most nuanced.   “Egnaro — in the beginning at least — hides itself in the interstices, the empty moments of your life.”  You Should Come with Me Now, the author’s latest collection, continues to explore similar territory with an eclectic group of stories united by a powerful imagination finely tuned to the inexplicable quiet forces that propel lives through their existence, often branching off unawares into another lurking nearby.

The collection’s subtitle is the deceptively unspecific, “Stories of Ghosts,” and ghosts in their most elusive sense are indeed a unifying element of the collection.  They’re not always the remnants of humans or other creatures that were once living, however.  Sometimes ghosts are architectures and pathways that have been or will be abandoned, hints of ideas yet to be breathed into life but which have a preternatural ability to be articulated, strange loops whose antecedents can never be traced, rootless leftovers of a deconstructed subject-object ourobouros.  The devil is in the details, as a brief flash of an image might show up that harkens to a prior story, expanding the world of each through allusion and serving to recontextualize events in profound ways.  Harrison consistently bends his prose style in service of confounding the subject-object relationship and holding a microscope to the uncertainties that come of it.  Passive voice, second-person, deliberately ambiguous referents, all are used effectively to tell tales whose effect is not only that of unsettlement but also sympathy, not merely strange but also familiar.  The story “Psychoarchaeology,” which follows workers surveying for remains of deceased British royals in parody of historical relic-selling practices, is one of the many interesting examples that purposely undermines the idea of the subject, cause/effect, and the historicity implied by such:

“It’s as if our obsession with dead Royals has in itself made them available in such numbers.  Why have we suddenly started digging them up like this?…It’s certainly not possible to learn from them.  All they mean to us is what we want them to mean.  To claim we can learn from them because they had, at base, the same emotions as us, the same satisfactions, the same fears, the same ‘needs’, is in itself a projection.  They aren’t the past in any material sense:  brought to light, they’re what they are now, not what they were then.  At best they’re a geological resource, not perhaps as valuable as coal, but more easily available…”

A Rain of Silent Objects

YSCwMN opens with “Lost and Found,” a vignette indexing items in a restaurant in a half-state of abandonment, cataloging objects that may have been left behind yet are still in use by persons unseen. A lively emptiness.  So much of Harrison’s work, particularly earlier in the 2010s with the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, has pushed the subgenre of the “Big Dumb Object” story into new territory, and the kitschy lack of obvious utility of the objects cataloged here and elsewhere hint at a history not to be uncovered but that shapes the ways the reader might uncover the selves that populate the stories. This piece and others of similar length, some a mere half-page, act as a chorus to set the tone, a kind of guidebook for a postcyberpunk hauntology through which move the stories’ human inhabitants.  Some of these vignettes feel incomplete on their own, but taken as a part of the whole collection they render more vivid the lengthier, character(ish)-driven stories.  One of the strongest, “Rockets from the Suburbs,” is a master-class in getting mileage out of each word and sentence.  It reads like a prose poem of sorts, with compact sentences describing a suburb until the author deftly shifts perspective in a way that recontextualizes not only the scene we’re reading about but also the medium itself.  His scene is set with brisk, compact phrases and directives, descriptions of noises ambient and specific, and “Against this, the tendency of things to be.”

Another vignette, “Places You Didn’t Think to Look for Yourself,” might well serve as a thematic centerpiece for the collection.  A kind of litany of missed opportunities and subjectless sentences, it kept returning to me as I was reading about the more robustly developed characters in stories like “Yummie” and “The Good Detective,” two of the strongest pieces.  “Yummie” follows the dreamlike life of a heart attack patient, Short, during his surgery and subsequent months, during which he has regular encounters with strange people who may be spirits that serve as a counterpoint to his inability to recount a cohesive narrative of his own life.  “When Short failed to answer — because this was not a past he could recognise, let alone own or identify with in any degree — he waved one hand dismissively and seemed to fade a little.”  “Yummie” is one of the more meditative pieces in the collection, and its success comes down to a quiet ambiguity that is unique to Harrison’s work and underscores many other stories in YSCwMN.

You Have to Get Away From It All

Characters living mundane lives that they’re unable to reconcile with themselves recur in most stories, but it’s a theme that does not end up feeling recycled.  “Cicisbeo,” another of the strongest works here and alluded to in “Yummie,” follows a man who gets drawn back into the life of a former romantic interest, who has since started a family while he still wishes to rekindle their passion.  Lizzie’s husband, Tim, has retreated to the attic and become steadily more withdrawn, even as a new baby arrives and the narrator is pressured into progressively more uncomfortable interventions.  As the story develops, Harrison succeeds at eliciting a sense of malaise that will show up in many other stories and which drives Tim to seek escape from the life he thought he wanted, and the author resolves this perpetual retreat in spectacular fashion.

Readers of Harrison’s blog will also find some dysfamiliar settings in Autotelia and the Ambiente Hotel, his oft-visited cousins-apparent of the Strugatskys’ Zone.  “In Autotelia” brings us what may well be a passing reference to “Egnaro” in its focus on two people seated across from one another on a train to a strange destiny/ation, a kind of alternate present divided from their England by a mysterious polluted zone that once was called Norwich. Autotelia, we learn, is populated in part by “teenagers dressed up as people who have an aching sense of how to be a teenager,” another relationship between subject and object confounded by their own verbing.  In Autotelia we find shops mostly empty, as in “Lost and Found,” save for sparse items dismissed as “kitsch” by outsiders.  In Autotelia, the narrator conducts required examinations to check for deformities and perhaps other unspecified maladies preparatory to Autotelians transitioning to “our side of things.”  But although the mysterious Autotelia is a strong presence in the background, it serves to highlight Harrison’s interest in the lives of “ordinary people” that shows up in so many of these fictions.

The most interesting exploration of Autotelia in YSCwMN is “Cave & Julia,” which concerns the relationship between a journalist and an actress whose brother was “lost” long ago at a mysterious site of significance to a culture long gone.  The brother’s disappearance at the site creates a paradox of identity that affects both of the eponymous characters, and is perhaps one of the best realizations of Harrison’s interest in the destabilization of identity.  The story’s main theme is carefully set up with a deceptively simple statement that doubles as part of Julia’s history: “They [people] knew her founding narrative — the loss of her brother and the subsequent prosecution for manslaughter.”  As she recounts seeing her brother’s apparition in the wake of his disappearance, he’s described as “just one of the fictions that lives here.”  As Cave grapples with his own inexplicable experience of ancient site, Harrison plots out a life from a telescoped point of view whose focal points now feel different from the life he was supposed to lead, and although this development stems from an encounter with something uncanny, its effects feel all too anchored to the real world.  In a sense, a new life has been constructed:

“He felt his surfaces change and soften, but detected beneath them a concreted layer of debris, an identity he could date very accurately to his struggle across the cloister, a condition of anxiety which founded not just his memories of Autotelia but of himself.”

Humor shines through more strongly in YSCwMN than in previous works of Harrison’s fiction with which I’m familiar, and it is often deployed to highlight rather than diminish the quiet strangeness that unites these stories. For all the subtlety found in these inner lives and routine pedestrian routes, we also have shocking and absurd dreams of decapitations en masse that may or may not be hilarious, and Elf Lord expats from forgotten secondary fantasy worlds flipping through cable TV channels.  Most of the time, the humor works, though on occasion it features more prominently in stories or vignettes in a way that causes them to feel a little underdeveloped in comparison to the bulk of the collection.

We Live in the Thinnest of Worlds

What interests me perhaps the most about Harrison’s fiction is his ability to craft a tale of unsettlement whose effects are rooted in processes of creation, transition, and recontextualization more so than suspense or the prospect of violence as a catalyst for change.  The architecture of a staircase of cosmic dimensions jutting into the ether, uncanny constructs exerting themselves on a person’s identity from deep in the past or future, “cultural stresses” leaping beyond the boundaries of their medium to transform the observer: such story elements all put me in mind of an Egnaro conjured into a state of probable-being by a bystander hearing its qualities uttered. These imaginative devices are skillfully written as mere half-steps from the architectures we pass without comment on the street every day, rendered all the more convincing by faithfully capturing the minutiae of human experience that we so often struggle to convey to one another but which comprise our “empty moments.”

Seldom are there straightforward problems and answers posed in these stories, but the enigmas within are rich, imaginative, and realized with a degree of precision and insight that is hard to find anywhere else.  I’ll conclude by returning again to “Egnaro” for the best summation I feel I could provide of You Should Come with Me Now:  “It is part of the universe of events which will never wholly reveal itself to you: a conspiracy the barest outline of which, once visible will gall you forever.”  Each story in YSCwMN reveals another small part of the outline, leaving just enough to allow the artfully unstated to thrive within and remain with the reader.  As Lucas says in “Egnaro”: “we all love a mysterious country.”

The post The Ghosts of Empty Moments appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

— The Editors

Monster Portraits, by Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar, explores the monster as a symbol of otherness. Through haunting, evocative language and fierce, enigmatic drawings, Monster Portraits examines with sympathy those who transcend boundaries and find themselves outsiders. “Like all monsters, we don’t belong, but our problem is time and not space. We got here too early. We have always had this sense of wrongful, unseemly arrival.”

This examination takes the form of a journey through the land of monsters, “that lasted an indeterminate length of time, which, outwardly, took the shape of five years.” We meet many monsters on this journey: bitter, beautiful, powerful, fierce, fantastic, exploited, misunderstood. We are allowed to see them as they see themselves. We learn what “monstrous” actually means—because there is none more monstrous than someone who would wield the epithet “monster” to banish another.

Monster Portraits comforts the monster, confronts the monstrous. Many of us see ourselves reflected in both. Exiles from the places we used to belong, born into the wrong body or skin or shape, here too soon or perhaps too late, unable to live as we truly are. But we are also monstrous in our ways; we laugh while somewhere else, our brothers and sisters suffer. We feast while elsewhere children starve. We have all been complicit in some way with this world’s cruelty.

In some ways, Monster Portraits reminds me of Leena Krohn’s exquisite Tainaron. Like Tainaron, Monster Portraits is told through the eyes of a narrator traversing the landscape of a foreign yet familiar place. It relays conversations with creatures we might consider strange, yet their uncanniness reflects the beats of our own lives. As in Tainaron, the land of monsters is obviously a physical place, a world that exists parallel to, concurrent with, or just beyond our own—but the geography never quite resolves. To me one of the most enchanting things about Monster Portraits is the names of all these fantastical places, neighborhoods and districts and lands where monsters dwell: Swoon. Soinoe. Fanderlee. Snimron. Crezhlorn. Names that have the faint ring of somewhere you’ve been, but can’t quite recall…

Unlike Tainaron, which is built from neat tidy entries of mellifluous prose, the poetry of Monster Portraits feels sprawling, discursive, meta. It’s a conversation with history, a reckoning with past monstrosities. The text is threaded with quotations from an impressively diverse selection of texts: Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Google, Arabian Nights. These quotations are cited with an academic’s authorial precision at the back of the book, an ingenious way of placing Monster Portraits within a web of allusions, anchoring it to the weight of the history it bears. I found myself flipping back and forth, reconsidering certain passages based on my new knowledge of the context they carry.

These references accrete around the text, but Sofia Samatar’s writing is powerful and original enough to support their weight. There are sentences so truthful, beautiful, and brutal they took my breath away. “Her heart bore a pair of claws that were useful for nothing, she told me, but scratching at itself.”  “Is there any love, I wondered, with the amazing color and vibrancy of the love between siblings bearing an incommunicable secret?”  “The one who acts remains elsewhere, out of sight, preparing a horror so obscene a monster could not look on it without bleeding.”

Art and words in this book are intimately intertwined, conceived in conjunction with each other, another secret between siblings. Imagery and language are in accord, and feel as if they’ve arrived hand-in-hand, neither one grafted on to the other as illustrated poetry (or poetry inspired by art) often feels. As the book says, “We would travel separately, but on the same ground.”

Del Samatar’s black-and-white drawings are arresting. Most are heavily shaded, with areas of inky blackness that set off an interplay between positive and negative space; everything is always defined in opposition to something else. The work resonates with traditional printmaking, etching, woodcuts; in its contrast that marries crisp lines with intricate design, it also feels inspired by the aesthetics of tattoo art. The visual vernacular connects to artists like H.R. Giger or M.C. Escher—weird, uncanny. There are repeating motifs of filigree, flowers and feather. And as befits these creatures: tooth and claw, carapace and bone.

Scattered throughout the book are also a few tentative sketches, process drawings. These felt equally at home. They brought a sense of movement and transition. Like the text, these works in progress are questioning and raw.

Monster Portraits doesn’t just reveal its process, but revels in it; so the work and the process become one and the same. This meta level tantalized and intrigued me, but left me wanting more. I desired a greater glimpse into the autobiographical aspects, the story anchoring the story. It seemed I was analyzing a sliver of something much deeper, broader, titanic even, buried beneath the surface. I wanted the metaphor to slink away and reveal the real, but it never quite happened.

This isn’t necessarily a criticism. I like a story that leaves me wanting more. This is after all the human condition.

There are moments where the book moves toward the fourth wall, in a threat to break it down. For instance: “At the last minute he told me, ‘We can’t use this one, it’s too real.’” Is the entry I’m reading too real, or is it another entry altogether, excised from this book? “The book I was trying to write…” Is it this book? Or another book, not yet written?

This is a book about monsters, but it is also a book about writing a book. And that second book is a ghost. The first book, the book I’m holding, feels haunted by a shadow version of itself, a second book that exists above or beyond this one, buried in the cracks.

Monster Portraits carries a weighty emotional heft for such a slim volume. It reads easily, but is not easily forgotten. Oblique, enigmatic, often fragmented, yet deeply true; I read this book like skimming a frozen lake, while its claws embedded in my heart.

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Today, the revival of interest in Anna Kavan is ongoing. The first Anna Kavan Symposium was held at the Institute of English Studies in London in 2014 and, in 2017, a Kavan-dedicated special issue of the journal Women: A Cultural Review followed. We now have Penguin Classics’ new edition of Ice. This revival is well-timed; Kavan’s unflinching vision still has great power. More and more, the world as we know it is ending; to some degree, it looks like this is our fault. In Kavan’s last novel, Ice, the apocalypse isn’t ecological—it is psychosocial, a premonition of the emotional actions that lead to a world’s end.

Kavan knew much from the painful and passionate events that punctuated her life. She knew solace too, of a kind; in the 1930s, Kavan took up a lifelong addiction to heroin accompanied by a syringe she called Bazooka. A lurking danger of weird fiction is the frequency with which its writers’ psychological distress can be championed in and of itself. What this tendency fails to attend to is the critical charge that attends the revelation of that distress as a product of repression or alienation. Kavan’s heroin addiction and psychological turmoil resembles the schizophrenia of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus insofar as the need to discern symptoms from subjects (or causes from corrosions) is not always undertaken with care. As Carole Sweeney suggests in her article “Keeping the Ruins Private”, heroin was not a crucial element of Kavan’s writing even if it may have been “essential” to her life. Insisting that Ice be read only through the lens of heroin addiction not only denigrates its author. It also misses the evidence provided by the novel itself. Nevertheless, and however it is read, this dark allure helps to draw Kavan’s texts into the terrain of the weird.

Along a different line of thinking, much can be made from Kavan’s decision to take up the name of one of her characters. She made this decision upon leaving a sanatorium in which she had been coping with the dissolution of her second marriage and a failed suicide attempt. Her name was legally changed in 1939. This act of auto-deictic fixation overwrites her societal identity with that of literary fiction. Yet to read her work following this act as complete auto-fictionalization is to miss the point she made in her destruction of all her journals and personal diaries before her death.

Kavan’s texts are a compound act of self-creation. They are replete with the tropes and entrapments of the written word but entirely composed as an ever-changing monument to the self-in-danger. As Kate Zambreno puts it, Kavan wrote as if looking in a mirror. She rearranged the usual divisions between subject and object, writer and character. This allowed her to see more clearly, to write more clinically. Or, as Jonathan Lethem puts it in his new introduction to this edition, “one feels at the mercy of an absolutely precise and merciless prose machine, one simply uninterested in producing the illusion of cause and effect” (ix). This machine is as capable of destruction as it is of creation. Both are subsumed under the general power of fiction which is not to make things happen but instead to make things seem and appear.

This writing strategy calls for a tactical reading of the novel’s agile code-switching where things are and are not as they are presented. The effect is much stronger than in literary realism’s tired gambit of the untrustworthy narrator. For Kavan, the structures on which common visions of the world are based are understood as already deceptive. What emerges is a whirlwind of symbols, a torrent of affective structures that parade, narrate, detonate. In a directly related effort, and much like surrealists as different as André Breton and Leonora Carrington, Kavan devotes herself to a vision of the female body as a contested site subject to patriarchal control, as Nathalie Ferris argues in her 2017 article “The Double Play of Mirrors”. The gambit of code-switching is perhaps nowhere as frequently evidenced as in the play of meaning attributed to women’s bodies from all directions. Ice examines the violence that women are subjected to from its most direct source: the male gaze.

There is more. In Kavan’s novels, much as in her life, people and characters travel without end. As Zambreno argues, major characters in her novels ceaselessly travel only to “stop in small, indiscriminate towns where rows of faceless houses are as closed-off as their inhabitants; finding strange faces and obstacles everywhere, the landscape one of silent hostility.” This is true for Kavan’s last novel, Ice. First published by Peter Owen in 1967, Ice has now been issued in a new edition by Penguin Classics.

Ice

The novel begins with a man driving along a dark road. It ends with the same man still driving, but now accompanied. Along the way, the man’s travels (no characters are named) take him from ship to plane across battlefields and over mountains, through networks of shadowy resistance fighters and into the ceremonial banquets of military overlords. In this world, society is ending, fragmenting as mysterious walls of ice encroach on human habitations and prise apart political and personal relationships. There are stranger things too: mutants, dragons, sacrifices. Amid all the action, it is difficult to tell what is real and what is otherwise.

Most apparent is the traveler’s obsessive need to control a woman with extraordinarily pale hair and a damaged past. At one point, the traveler had been “infatuated” with her, he admits. He was—is—drawn to her fragility and psychological damage. These are the residue of a sadistic mother but also, one suspects, the way she has been treated by her husband, briefly shown in the first chapter as an arrogant and controlling partner. She is described as glass-like. Think: brittle bones, shockingly white hair, and intense eyes. Think: someone you can see right through. Most strikingly, she rarely speaks. Celine Magot in a 2016 article for Miranda argues that she is a “voiceless body, the summation of external pressuring voices.” The woman tends to confuse the man, as if she were phantasmagoric, or perhaps a host of women or just an illusion born of fever, desire, and sadism. He confesses that “at times she hardly seemed real.” This ethereal transparency lends her image to a host of other women in the novel and whips the traveler on in his obsession to find her and, maybe, to protect her. Or perhaps to be the force of destruction in her life.

The man’s obsession drives his fantastical travels across war-torn countries and beats as the psychotic heart of his relationships with others. This is most true for his relations with other men who seem the caretakers of the woman as she herself flees, travels, and hides. She recognizes this strange conspiracy and, at one point, accuses the men of being “in league together.” The truth is nowhere near that simple. At another moment, he examines another man and sees almost a mirror of himself:

It was clear that he regarded her as his property. I considered that she belonged to me. Between the two of us she was reduced to nothing; her only function might have been to link us together. His face wore the look of extreme arrogance which always repelled me. Yet I suddenly felt an indescribable affinity with him, a sort of blood-contract, generating confusion, so that I began to wonder if there were two of us…

Over the course of the novel, the traveler’s major antagonist is another man known simply as the Warden with whom he feels kin and who early in the novel is shown in a sexually abusive relationship with the girl that verges on coercive incarceration. It is this spiraling proliferation of relationships between abusive and arrogant men contracted across the perceived possession of a tortured woman that the novel’s tracks move on, ceaselessly and patiently propelling itself into new variations that never propose an escape from this damaged cycle of relationships.

The man proves unable to tell hallucination and dream from his surroundings. At one point, the narrative admits that “the hallucination of one moment did not fit the reality of the next.” Some readers may find this frustrating; others, may find that, despite the horrors on display, the greater danger may be the unspoken gaps between recorded events. The protagonist realizes a strange syncopation between his fragmenting world and himself: “In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.” His search for the girl is cast into relief by these moments of apparent clarity, and he even calls this mad obsession a “senseless, frustrating pursuit.” He is put on trial—perhaps real, perhaps an elaborate and theatrical court of the mind—where he is called “a psychopath” and deemed “totally unreliable.” But at no point does this resolve substantially interrupt the novel’s tracking of the man’s obsession; his relentless pursuit is never truly threatened. This failure indicates something perverse in these moments of clarity. They may be acts of self-deception, mock resistance thrown up in ironic despair. Nothing successfully stops the man’s quest for long.

Ice is sometimes called science fiction or slipstream, given its premise of the collapse of society and the oncoming encroachment of ice. Yet the novel’s propulsive relationships take centre stage. In a weird light this apocalyptic vision becomes existential, epiphenomenal, and almost beautiful. Kavan’s writing is a howling Arctic wind. Her prose possesses a surgical precision that exposes both care and catastrophe, as in this passage that mixes urgency and obsession with a high imaginative capacity:

I should have to start searching for her all over again. The repetition was like a curse. I thought of placid blue seas, tranquil islands, far away from war. I thought of the Indris, those happy creatures, symbols of life in peace, on a higher plane. I could clear out, go to them. No, that was impossible. I was tied to her. I thought of the ice moving across the world, casting its shadow of creeping death. Ice cliffs boomed in my dreams, indescribable explosions thundered and boomed, icebergs crashed, hurled huge boulders into the sky like rockets. Dazzling ice stars bombarded the world with rays, which splintered and penetrated the earth, filling earth’s core with their deadly coldness, reinforcing the cold of the advancing sea. And always, on the surface, the indestructible ice-mass was moving forward, implacably destroying all life. I felt a fearful sense of pressure and urgency, there was no time to lose, I was wasting time; it was a race between me and the ice. Her albino hair illuminated my dreams, shining brighter than moonlight. I saw the dead moon dance over the icebergs, as it would at the end of our world, while she watched from the tent of her glittering hair.

Across its glittering, cool intelligence, this book remains a viscerally disturbing. It casually, almost repulsively knocks aside the usual notions that many modern readers hold regarding sympathetic characters, linear narrative plots, and liberal norms. Instead, it dedicates itself to confronting psychological violence and the heritage of trauma. Reading it, I often thought about how the video game Bloodborne carries a similarly disdainful, hideously compelling charge. In playing that game—if you are successful—you forcefully enact terrible and increasingly grotesque acts of violence that transform your own perception of the world. In this, the game shows its most genuinely brilliant and troubling feature: the consumer vicariously, viciously participates in the assault upon their sensual conception of the world. Likewise in Ice, where the protagonist’s unrelenting quest for the girl of his imagination calls upon the reader to inhabit that protagonist’s world and choices.

The comparison with Bloodborne is worth concluding. Where Bloodborne refers to a cosmic horror tradition descending from the Lovecraftian weird, Kavan’s Ice refers instead to a Freudian tradition of psychological childhood and early adulthood damage. In this latter case, a child’s upbringing sows the seeds from which the adult identity develops and flourishes. Thus, where Lovecraft imagines a perception of the universe exploding upon one’s realization of cosmic others, Kavan’s weird imagination destroys the coherence of the world the more one comes to understand the epistemological force of gendered violence and traumatically disturbed upbringings and intimate relationships. In addition to this difference, the two also differ in form. In a video game such as Bloodborne, the player vicariously commands the acts of their avatar; it therefore offers players an act of becoming. In a novel such as Ice, the reader constructively co-creates the world of the text’s progressive narration; it therefore offers readers an act of imagining.

Ice throws its creative reader to the brutal black dogs of masculine violence, again and again. It can be called weird or slipstream, apocalyptic or perhaps dystopian. All can be true. But for us, for now, it is also an act of illuminating brilliant, of devastating horror. Kavan is ruthless. That is her gift, for in it there is a deep emotional clarity that rejects easy depictions of violence and of victims and victimizers. Ice confronts its reader with the insidious violence that masculinity channels through the men whose travels perforate the world as they obsess over women in dangerous conditions. Kavan’s cool gaze reveals that the costs of violence are exacted on men and women: not equally, but associated, and in some ways alike. Reading Ice is to be thrown into the unblinking miasma of loneliness and confusion that abuse requires for its domination.

Thinking about contemporary gender politics and the way that Ice reads today in its new issue, I find myself returning to observations made by bell hooks in her book The Will to Change (2004). Here, hooks describes men very much like Kavan’s unnamed narrator and her violent icicle, the Warden. The narrator’s ambiguous fascination with the woman’s thin wrists—delicate, beautiful, and easily broken—recalled for me the following passage: “The fact that men often mix being caring and being violent has made it hard for everyone in our culture to face the extent to which male violence stands in the way of males’ giving and receiving love.” Men in Ice fixate on their shared need to control the girl and bypass any and every moment of potential real engagement or possibility of mutual care, which the novel indicates is improbable, if not impossible. There are clear connections to be drawn with today’s gender politics, without question.

As hooks goes on, in a frequently quoted passage, “the first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.” Ice pushes this theme further and makes a prediction of its diagnosis, thus showing the way best not taken, the world best not lived, the cost exacted by cruel, demeaning obsession. This is a point made also by Leigh Wilson: Anna Kavan’s fiction does not deny the existence of cruelty, obsession, and abuse; instead, it asks “whether they are inevitable, what the nature of their existence is, and what the possibilities for change are.” It is never crass but instead possesses a dangerous weight, the way a beautiful glacier looms above. Ice follows to conclusion its protagonist’s obsession and gender-based violence as a desire—not for sexual fulfilment—but for control, possession, domination.

Anna Kavan’s imagination finds a home in the weird. The traveler finds himself mirrored in other men. More urgently but never explicitly, his behaviour is compared to the crushing, alienating ice that destroys society and ruptures relationships at a global level. Foregrounded by Penguin’s choice of cover artwork, the woman appears and disappears from scrutiny. There is no hiding it: Ice is a difficult and demanding book. And yet it may be a necessary one, insofar as it leaves behind it a sense of quickened life and a powerful case to diverge from the dark course charted by its characters.

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The Bird Men of Burnley (1970) by Leonora Carrington

We finally made it to the end, my friends, and we have a lot to cover. As mentioned in Part 1, in addition to the republishing of Leonora Carrington’s short stories, a novella Down Below and a children’s book, Milk of Dreams, was also released by New York Review of Books Classics, and Virago published The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorhead. All are very important books that we are lucky to have available to us. Because we’re covering three books here rather than sections of one, the following reactions are going to be pretty cursory and will hardly do justice to each piece’s depth. Please forgive me.

The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington

The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington is a personal and authorized biography written by relative and Guardian journalist Joanna Moorhead. How Moorhead came to write the story itself is really cool—a curiosity pilgrimage to visit a long-distant, eccentric cousin lead to a decade of visits, conversations, and other explorations within Carrington’s world and surrealist perspective. These conversations are the basis of how Moorhead structures the biography, and as such, it is stripped of heavy academic interpretations that we’ve only had access to before. That doesn’t mean Moorhead doesn’t reference Carrington’s work, but she does so strictly as it pertains to life, including wonderful contextualization of her writing which was immensely enlightening during this read-along. It is pivotal to any and all study of Carrington, and is a must read for those interested in the lives of women artists.

Another aspect I appreciate is the treatment of Carrington’s romance with Ernst. Since the anecdotes were straight from the white horse’s mouth, it is devoid of the usual TMZ-gossip-style it’s often recounted in (or the academic, feminist outrage, however you want to look at it). It’s shown as a simple but seminal affair that Carrington remembers as the beginning of her realized life. While the essence of Carrington’s imagination was already swirling in her 20-year-old mind, Ernst was able to share and expose her to the knowledge she needed to give it shape. It’s not that Carrington wouldn’t have become Carrington without him, but like with any mentor, her relationship with Ernst probably rushed things up a bit. And it also pushed her further along the path towards independence. As integral and inspiring as Ernst was to Carrington, she also knew that any sort of sustained, long-term relationship would usurp her talents and she was smart enough to avoid any renewed vows of love.

While the strength of this biography is its focus solely on Carrington’s life, it also falters somewhat under that mission. Things like Carrington’s notion of free love are glossed over. I also at times wished for deeper readings into her symbology and its duality with her reality and that of the collective conscious. But, I recognize that this can be found in other academic tomes, so perhaps I am being greedy.

Even so, I have a lot of questions about the actual nature of Carrington’s madness as described in Down Below that weren’t exactly answered. Part of that (and of my minor complaints above) might be that Carrington herself refused to talk about it:  “What Leonora endured in the asylum was to be the pivotal experience of her life, with ramifications that continued even in to the long afternoons we shared together….Even in her nineties, Leonora was never comfortable with talking about what happened in Santander in 1940:  a shadow would cross her face if it was mentioned, and she would quickly light another Marlboro, inhale deeply, and suggest a change of subject.” (126). She does explain Carrington’s perception of her madness in Santander as a “fluid boundary,” which she would explore for the rest of her life, and gave me much to ponder while reading her ultimate travelogue of this fluid journey in Down Below.

Down Below

Down Below is an account of Carrington’s internment at the Covadonga insane asylum in Santander, Spain during 1940. She was committed after a slow onslaught of symptoms resulting from Max Ernst’s arrests and her fleeing of France that finally expressed itself as a schizophrenic break.

Algorithmically, Down Below belongs in the same categories that house The Bell Jar, Girl Interrupted, and Prozac Nation, but there are a few things that make it hard to actually classify. Unlike, say The Bell Jar, which is promoted as solely fiction, and Girl Interrupted and Prozac Nation, as nonfiction, Down Below straddles these two genres and rides it straight into a metaphysical horizon. You witness how her imagination overpowers her mind, and how the same surrealistic narrative she crafted to make sense of her life and art crossed over into the terrible, rational reality of  her existence. Because Carrington tells the story through the voice of her madness with very little backtracking to justify its logic, many people have dismissed it as fiction, and within academia great efforts have been made to defend it as fact.

I can see why some people might dismiss it as fiction because Carrington retells the entire account through the filter she experienced it in. From basically start to finish, she relays her visions and hallucinations, not to mention rape and violence, with very little editorial explanation and emotions to what was happening on the other side of reality. Not only does this show she has kept it as part of a personal, psychological belief system, but also that it holds a truth that anyone approaching this book with a rationalist or realistic approach will not be able to understand. She never lets up; the only way to make sense of it is to break with her.

The events in Down Below are recollected several years later, so naturally some things may have been distorted by time and memory, but all in all I believe the entire journey because it is the manifesto of Carrington’s entire artistic vision. I don’t believe she was permanently cured of her mental illness, but I do believe she knew how to harness the power of her imagination enough to stay grounded through episodes that guided her to deeper explorations of her art and life. She even states that writing this account of Covadonga was a way to keep her from relapsing into the madness, even though she worries revisiting it could trigger more hallucinations and disillusionments. I don’t see this as the fulfillment of a surrealist fate (the Surrealists considered madness the highest and most artistic state of mind), or the romanticization of hysteria, but the secret to how Carrington was able to stronghold her life, preserve her personal identity, and steer her own destiny.

Throughout her long life, she was always learning and never turning away from the “fluid boundaries” of fact or fiction. They both co-existed within her world, and as such, she was able to make sense of her life “un-jammed.” As horrible as all of her experiences were in the asylum, this surrender to her imagination ultimately saved her. It shows the power of finding one’s own myth, as Jung would have it, and it’s a lesson we all could use today to stay stable in an ever increasingly disordered world that sometimes feels like 1940 rather than 2017.

Milk of Dreams

If Down Below represents the darkest moment of Carrington’s long-life, Milk of Dreams shows us the light. She loved motherhood and poured her life into raising her two sons as much as developing her canvases or constructing her stories. Naturally, those worlds overlapped and her sons recollect being surrounded by murals she painted to illustrate the stories she’d tell them. This book, published by The New York Review of Books Children’s Collections, is what’s left of that time: facsimile doodles and images lifted from the notebook she kept to formulate these amusements.

As expected, it isn’t your typical children’s book. These tales follow, perhaps even more quintessentially, Carrington’s style of astonishing imagery with terse expressions that is very effective for children’s storytelling. Each sentence is almost an association to the next and thus follows its own logic to its conclusion. Typically, the stories involve the misadventure of wayward children, many of whom lose their heads either because their ears were too big or a mean old lady who hated children separated their bodies from them. Some examples:  a golden child is rewarded with crocodiles, and another named “Little Angel” entertains himself while recovering from the flu by peeing on people who pass under his window. The stories are pretty short and sweet, and for every yarn there are several vignettes that include a sketch and caption-like explanations for what the subject is doing. The rest is left up to the imagination. Milk of Dreams shows another dimension of Carrington’s inner world, one that was open only to her sons, and is now open to all of the weird children of the world.

Well, weirdies. That’s it. Thank you so much for joining me on reading through the Leonora Carrington read-along. I’ve learned a great deal as a reader and a writer with this project, especially how to excavate, evaluate, and evolve my own personal symbology. I hope you have found it as equally inspiring.

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After spending ten years running away from her childhood home and being shuffled from a few more by love and war, Carrington finally found her place in the world in 1942. Joanna Moorhead describes Carrington’s wonder the best in The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington:  “Everything, for Leonora, was new:  from the appearance and demeanor of the people, she said later, to the variety of foods, plants and animals, to the landscape and the contact with the dead….” (173). Even so, it wasn’t exactly a smooth transition. Her marriage to Leduc was nosediving pretty fast as he picked up his old social circle and left Carrington alone most of the time. While this dynamic was typical in New York City, she was able to distract herself with the French Surrealists living there in exile, including Max Ernst. Mexico held nothing but strangers.

Carrington wasn’t one to be thwarted, though, and soon located her own circle to revive. Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret had been in Mexico City since the end of 1941, and when Carrington reunited with him, she met his lover, Remedios Varo. Animal lover, mystic painter, and fiercely intellectual while intuitive, Varo and Carrington would become soul sisters, and Carrington found much strength in their burgeoning friendship, including leaving Leduc to go crash with Péret and Varo. There, Carrington met the other European expatriates, and also forged a lifelong important friendship with the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna.

The friendships with Varo and Horna were seminal to Carrington’s development during this period. For the first time, she had friends who supported her endeavors on equal grounding and without the competition and condescension of the Surrealist male gaze. As a result, the trio (both in their friendships and individualities) created a feminine artistic space built upon deconstructing religion and reconstructing alchemy, which has gone on to shape Feminism and the notions of the collective art sisterhood and mythos. These three women  would collaborate and synthesize their worlds together, and was the focus of Surreal Friends, exhibited in England during 2010, and also at the center of In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States during 2012.

Carrington would also meet her second husband and life-partner, Chiki Schwartz. Unlike Ernst and Leduc, this marriage would be one of understanding and support, and enhanced for Carrington by motherhood. The Schwartzes had two sons, and Carrington was as devoted to them as she was to her canvases. Family and friends finally found, Carrington lived out the rest of her days in Mexico, painting her best and most complex work, and outliving almost all the Surrealists until she died in 2011 at the age of 94. (Dorothea Tanning followed in 2012 at 102. There’s a really crass joke about the resource of longevity of Ernst’s lovers, but I like to think in their study of the mystic and arcane maybe, just maybe, the source of the Elixir Vitae that kept them alive for so long came from their devotion to their work.)

This is a pretty terse summation for the longest and most enriching part of Carrington’s life, but these key points all culminate in the reoccurring themes in the last ten stories. In this final batch, Carrington’s preoccupation with storytelling during this period seems to fall into a few categories: fables and farces in and around Mexico, dark and mystical conversations with aging and mortality, and some good ole time absurdities that read more like children’s stories akin to Roald Dahl, such as “The Sand Camel?” and “Mr. Gregory’s Fly,” written somewhere around the 1970s.

Bird Bath (Baño de pájaros) by Leonora Carrington, 1974

Only two of the ten stories here are blatantly set in Mexico: “A Mexican Fairy Tale” and “How to Start a Pharmaceuticals Business.” The latter is a satire about a far-future Mexico deprived of worldwide communication and the resulting society’s enjoyment of this new wave of silence. It is a typical Carrington story in that it features a female narrator (in this one, Carrington identifies herself by name in the dialogue) given a task from a higher-up, and just sort of waltzes into a bizarre chain of events while trying to complete her mission that includes grave-fitting and lottery winnings. However, the prize was not a cash pot, but a tiny coffin containing the shrunken and stinking embalmed corpse of Joseph Stalin, or possibly Rasputin. In either case, a rando pharmacist feeds her a strand of hair from the homunculus’s mustache, which acts as a powerful and instantaneous pain reliever. She distills its secrets and opens the largest pharmaceutical business in Mexico.

“How to Start a Pharmaceuticals Business” is misanthropic, grotesque, and introduces a new theme that characterizes almost all of the stories from her later life: death, aging, and rejuvenation. These tropes weave in and out of the majority of stories like “The Neutral Man,” “Et in Bellicus Lunarum Medicalis,” “My Flannel Knickers” “The Happy Corpse,” and “My Mother Is a Cow.” “My Flannel Knickers,” and “My Mother is a Cow” stand out to me the most because of their ambiguous but axiomatic preoccupations with immortality such as: “Anybody over forty and toothless should be sensible enough to be quietly knitting an original new body, instead of wasting the cosmic wool.”

The most interesting and quintessential tale from this period is “A Mexican Fairy Tale.” She riffs on Quetzalcoatl, the MesoAmerican primordial feathered serpent God, and mythpunks it with the Western notion of the chemical marriage in 1940s Mexico. Quetzalcoatl is a hard god to pin down, but I believe the version that spoke most to Carrington has to be his form as a vegetation god. Her love of food expresses itself through this version, and the pages are scattered with mangos, melons, maguey, tortillas, chilies, and corn. In between the fruits and vegetables is a new bestiary filled with North American animals like pigs, jaguars, lizards, black moles, and tropical birds whose wings spin so fast you “could see through them.”

It’s one of the longer stories in the entire collection and diverges from her usual formula to depict the tale from two perspectives: pig-herder Juan, and Maria, the daughter of a surly man (Don Pedro), who loans Juan a ladder. Juan needs the ladder to investigate the mysterious crying he hears from the nearby ruins, but to gain Don Pedro’s trust, lies that it’ll be used to pick mangos. When Juan doesn’t return on time, Maria runs away from her father’s home to find Juan.

Two young people are lured by various circumstances to an ancient ruin, and there they find all sorts of anthropomorphic gods that ultimately capture them, bind them, and throw them into a flame together to transmogrify the couple into a conjunctio and unifies the narrative into one voice. Carrington calls these united souls Quetzalcoatl, and then transforms the entire, strange ritual into that of a chemical marriage in which to be truly in love two must become one. It’s a sagacious romance, and I think it is one of Carrington’s best tales.

Now that we’ve reached the end of this reading experiment, I have to admit that I wasn’t pulled in by each and every tale. At times, certain tropes like being invited into a house, or being summoned by a superior, or always just sort of stumbling into a bit of weirdness became redundant to me. Obviously, this method of manifestation must have been very important to Carrington, perhaps symbolizing how life is dealt by chance and favor. But it almost took on the same tedium as when a story begins with someone waking up from a dream. Sometimes the stories’ conclusions were unsatisfactory to me, and at other times I was indifferent to the zig-zag logic of the surrealistic visions, perhaps because the language was so clipped and dry. But maybe it’s just you aren’t meant to read Carrington’s work one after another in a marathon fashion, as I have done. In any case, what is charming, and made me ignore these personal pet peeves, is that these weaknesses are also her strengths.  When they are utilized to their full potential, as in “White Rabbits,” “A Mexican Fairy Tale,” “The Sisters,” and “As They Rode Along the Edge” to name a few, they are unforgettable and haunting masterpieces of the auto-imagination, and show just how far art can go towards reinventing and empowering the individual throughout her life.

So with the collected stories concluded, we have one more round in this read-along. Next up will be the novella Down Below and her children’s book Milk of Dreams, both published by NYRB classics, as well as a look at Joanna Moorhead’s seminal biography The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington, which has been a valuable resource throughout these past three readings.  We will even have an additional giveaway, so stay tuned for further surrealistic explorations.

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^[1] Just to be extra nerdy, I did consult Silver Press and have placed “The Sand Camel” and “Mr. Gregory’s Fly” as having been written somewhere around the 1970s. In contrast, “Jemima and the Wolf” was written around 1941, which explains why it seems to embody all of the characteristics and motifs of her earlier fiction.

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Karin Tidbeck. Photo by Charlotte Frantzdatter.

Weird fiction is increasingly international even as it returns to traditional themes and concerns. It was not so long ago that Finnish fiction from authors such as Leena Krohn, Johanna Sinisalo, and Jyrki Vainonen became prominent in English-language discussions of the weird. WorldCon 75 is being held this August in Helsinki. There exists a palpable sense of excitement about the Nordic twist on weird writing. As Sinisalo wrote here at the WFR in 2012, where others might see and write about the world in straight lines, the Finnish weird is premised on “diagonal” relationships. In the hands of writers such as Sinisalo, fiction’s promise to readers is that, “when they open the book, anything could happen.”

At just about the same time as Sinisalo was advocating the diagonal properties of the Finnish weird, Karin Tidbeck’s startling and highly original collection of short stories Jagganath (Cheeky Frawg, 2012) emerged in English translation. The stories in Jagganath mark out Swedish territory in the Nordic weird tradition. Wintry and wise, they incorporate myths, mysteries, and familial histories. The recent English translation of Amatka follows on this early promise, although Swedish readers will know that Amatka was in fact released in its original language in 2012. Anglophone readers have had to wait some time for this book.

The novel we know of as Amatka originated as a shifting possibility of genres as long ago as 2007. At first it was a group of poems. Then it was a set of dream notes, a collection of flash fiction, and, finally, a long-form narrative. A set of simple yet profound questions oriented the novel’s transformation during its composition: “What is a world like that is ruled by language? How does a society survive in such a world? And what happens to the individual people who live in it?” Here, language holds a premier relationship with the construction of social, political, and individual visions of the world. Consequent on this contention is the power that something might have if it does not have a name.

In philosophy, a long tradition of investigating the central powers of language exists. Most recently, philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben or Daniel Heller-Roazen have forwarded similar constructivist theses about language in texts such as The Fire and the Tale (Stanford 2017) or No One’s Ways (MIT 2017). In Tidbeck’s Amakta, however, the thesis is posed in the sinuous shape of fiction’s eternal question to its reader. Language is gradually, unsettlingly slanted, made diagonal, and put to question. Reading the novel is a remarkable exercise in which the borders of perception and communication fluctuate and bend.

***

Like so many other weird stories, Amatka begins with its central character on a train to the unknown. Commercial researcher Brilars’ Vanja Essre Two, or Vanja for short, has been tasked with travel to an agricultural commune to do research about hygiene product. The novel presents its grey world as a desolate and repressive place. A centralized committee governs most social arrangements, relationships seem secondary to productive work assignments, and goods are generally rationed. The known world is made up of four specialized colonial settlements: one for administration, another for science, a third for industrial production and the fourth, Amatka, for agriculture. It only gradually becomes apparent that not much exists other than the colonists, their settlements, and the mushrooms from which most goods are made.

Once Vanja is in Amatka, many of the colonists find her research risible. Inevitably, however, the inquiry into hygiene becomes only the tip of the investigation in which Vanja finds herself engaged. Cunningly, the investigation is doubled: while Vanja is discovering truths about the community of Amatka, her world’s history, and herself, readers are learning the ostensible and strange facts of Vanja’s world. As it turns out, much of what the world is made of is not as substantial as it first appears.

Throughout the novel, readers are limited to seeing Amatka’s strange world through Vanja’s increasingly disillusioned but also tremulously uncomprehending eyes. While this makes for a gradual reveal of the lurking strangeness that anchors the plot’s explosive final turns, it also leaves gaps in the conceptual origins of how things came to be. The novel never reveals much information about the old world; nor is it clear how the colonists’ arrived in the timeless nowhere of their new world where few crops grow and animals are nowhere to be seen. Some hushed secrets remain unanswered by the novel’s end, including that of the collapse of a fifth. For these reasons, and given the spare prose that conveys mysteries as efficiently as it does information, the novel at times resembles a parable like those of Franz Kafka.

At the same time, weird elements make the story something much more unsettling than a straightforward fable or dystopia. One of the signature behaviors of characters is the activity of “marking”: most items seem to be labelled with their name. At first, this does not seem odd: items on the train are marked as “washbasin, pantry, table.” Society itself is set up to reinforce these markings, with a song sung by children and adults alike to remind them of the importance and implementation of such a textual inscription on the world. This naming of the world’s things even takes precedence over the regulated social relationships between people. For instance, at one point two girls sing “Bed! Chair! Cabinet! Lamp!” to themselves, even as their parents worry that the children may have forgotten them in the social housing that they required to live in.

Not all objects are created equal. Readers discover that “real” objects such as paper taken from the old world do not need to be marked. Those items remain themselves without repeated linguistic prompting. Other objects, however, dissolve into a viscous material that horrifies the colonists with its abject strangeness. Leaving an old suitcase too long turns it to a contagious unknown, a material with disquieting fluidity that Vanja describes as “whitish gloop” and a substance that may “spread to other objects if she didn’t ask fast.” Yet everything else is made from the same material—including the hygiene products Vanja means to catalogue and herself use. Ulla, an older woman whose presence is predictably catalytic for some of the story’s stranger turns, comments on this cognitive dissonance. Ulla’s words trigger Vanja’s perception of the world to mimic the discussion “almost as though the shape of the cup was starting to melt, as though the table was suddenly sagging.” Do words follow or proceed the illusion of material dissolution? And is it in fact an illusion only, this linguistic force?

***

In a radical charge, Amatka speculates on two distinct ways that language might construct the world: as an ossified and necessarily limited bureaucratic operation of textual power or, more speculatively, as a fluid and perhaps even disturbing interchange of desire and material. The more that the fundamental relationship between language and materiality becomes a pronounced element of Amatka’s world, the more strange and self-possessed that world becomes, both narratively and in terms of its own fulfillment. Much of the story’s intensity is generated by the affective relationship that this material possesses and from the sparks that fly from characters’ changing understandings sludge. Everything seems to be made from this abject ooze. The full extent of this “everything” develop a line of speculative horror as its characters dance with understanding, sanity, and social acceptance. The commune’s political organization is not only material but epistemological as well.

In general, one of Amatka’s most impressive features is how it melds social relationships, political organization, and the formative powers of linguistic making and unmaking. Tidbeck’s world depends on no outright forces of evil, no external animosities or sources of clear certainty for characters. Instead, the narrative treats the things that disturb it with complexity and thoughtfulness about how the ties that bind people together may be both more and less than they are thought to be. In an interesting strand of the story, Vanja sometimes finds poetry from a disappeared dissident named Berols’ Anna whose words seem to most beautifully give shape to reality. One private, handwritten fragment reads

we speak          of new worlds
we speak          of new lives
we speak          to give ourselves
to become

Simple and yet eerily profound in the context of the novel’s vision of power and transformation, the novel’s use of poetry makes efficient use of its particular linguistic intensity.

If there is one area where the novel is not always convincing, however, it is in the characters’ fullness. Nina, Ivar, Ulla, and Evgen, the most prominent of the Amatka residents, have specific relationships with the plot and with Vanja. They do not always emerge from the shadows of their roles. This holds true for minor characters as well, but the effect is more muted in their cases. The novel’s fabulist qualities in part militate against the “thickness” of character absent that is largely absent here. It is equally possible that something else is in play, more deftly associated with how possibilities of the un-named and the unknown play out emotionally. Connections between characters are clear but emotionally restrained

Readers will have to evaluate for themselves the novel’s final twists that depend on almost inhuman sympathies. If humanity is in part defined as the capacity for language, a “speaking animal,” Amatka generates its peculiar sense of deep disquiet as it questions the power and limitations of that definition.

***

There are significant precedents for the kind of story that Tidbeck is telling here. Such novels that delve into language are often the best that science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction has to offer. At times, I was reminded by the linguistic focus of China Miéville’s Embassytown (2011). Further back in the speculative tradition, the arid commune of Amatka and Vanja’s spare use of language reminded me of a strange half-dream of Anarres in The Dispossessed if Ged from the Earthsea novels somehow stumbled into that failing communal society. (Those novels too obsess over the political and existential elements of communication.) Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 (1966) pursued something similar in militarized space. These comparisons of fiction after the linguistic turn are only partially relevant, of course, and other influences could be discerned. It is unsurprising that Tidbeck has written about how LARPing was formative to her writing habits – in this kind of role playing, language most nakedly argues for its ability to transform the world.

Ultimately unique to itself, Amatka builds of its central fascination with the powers of language a world in which things are exactly as they seem. In its most cunning twist of all, the horror with which characters register the “sludge” from which their worlds are built reveals itself as an antagonistic relationship with the pure elements of material potential. But such antagonism is not necessary; it is consequent on the social traditions that shape the colonists’ perceptions of their environments. Language exerts an inhuman machinic force. The colonists have constructed homes in more than just the material world.

Stripped of language, the world’s constitutive things may be too abject to consider—or, just maybe, they might not. Perception is a fickle space in which to construct relationships, concepts, homes. The degree to which a reader may enjoy Amatka depends on their desire to speculate on linguistic power, to read in the textual capacity to create and hold intensities across the shape of the world—and the desire to decreate and permit those intensities to alleviate and disappear. Amatka possesses the qualities of a fable and the febrile brilliance of weird fiction at its most inventive and self-questioning. The novel reminds readers of Karin Tidbeck’s powers just as it marks out further ground in the Nordic Weird.

The post Dystopic Nordic Weird: Review of “Amatka” by Karin Tidbeck appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Green Tea (1942) by Leonora Carrington

We are back and shaking things up a little in this read-along. As I began reading further and further into the collection, I found I wasn’t reacting to the individual story, so much, as reacting to patterns and themes that were building upon each tale. So, since we are two thirds through, I thought I’d start grouping stories, and in the case of these ten, mark Carrington’s literary growth from the nascent and playful surrealist tales of 1937 and 1938 to the maturing, visionary, damaged fairy tales that characterize her work from 1939 to 1941. During ’37 and ’38, these last six stories read in Part I were all written during the brief but fecund period when Carrington was living with Ernst in France and expanding her artistic horizons and creating her own auto-mythology. Off the page, she was evading her family, protecting her lover from their threats, as well as fleeing Ernst’s past in the South of France. She also was making a splash among the Surrealists as a fiercely, independent femme enfant, and developing and honing her craft both within painting and writing. All at the age of 20 and 21!

But by 1939 everything changed. With the outbreak of WWII, Carrington found her idyllic new life in France torn asunder. Nazi Germany categorized the Surrealists as Degenerate artists #1, and many Surrealists were persecuted, arrested, or exiled. Ernst was arrested several times, and the abandonment and helplessness would send Carrington over the edge.

She sold their house and fled to Spain and grew even more erratic. Her parents had her committed and she underwent horrific treatments with cardiazol, which was suppose to be the pill form of electric-shock therapy. She documented this dark time in the novella Down Below, which I will be reviewing here by Part IV.  When she was finally released, she was chaperoned by her childhood nurse, who was tasked with making sure Carrington was brought back to England. This was unacceptable to Carrington, and at the last minute, found an old friend, Mexican Ambassador, Renato Leduc, and married him for safe passage to New York City and eventually Mexico.

Portrait of Max Ernst (1939) by Leonora Carrington

In Lisbon and New York City, she is reunited with Max, and participates in something of a love rectangle between Renato, him, and Peggy. However, she’s not in love with Max anymore, and finds his legend might overshadow her own career, which she very much wants to develop. It was a period of strife and hard decisions, and so naturally the next ten stories from this period are darker, cursed, and blooming with a poignant emotional range.

Expanded Bestiary

While horses, bats, birds, and hyenas are still present, her bestiary has expanded to include boars, peacocks, rabbits and cats to both poetic and terrifying effects. Peacocks aren’t so much sentient in these stories as ornamental. In “The Sisters,” a dead peacock is draped over a King’s head as an ironic totem of the triumph and immortality of the vampiric Juniper.

They also mark a pregnant pause in “Cast Down By Sadness,” which is very subtle and clever because the peacock has had long associations with the eternal, and “Sadness” treats a bizarre family dynamic that makes the Bates look like the Clevers. Likewise, the draping of the dead peacock over King Jumart’s head could be an ironic totemic triumph of the immortality of the vampiric Juniper.

Perhaps the most memorable animal in this set is Igname the Boar in “As They Rode Along the Edge.” Virginia Fur is a feral woman who rides through the forest on a wheel followed by fifty black and orange cats. She has wild, untamed, and be-twigged hair and a repugnant smell that recalls descriptions of the “The Debutante” hyena. Even in this uncivilized state, she’s still very beautiful and catches the attention of the proverbial king of the forest, Igname the Boar as well as a Saint Alexander, who wants to save her soul and civilize her.

The boar is described as transcendently beautiful, perhaps more of a God than what the local convent worships which makes sense because the boar is regaled in Celtic myth as a fertility and strength symbol. Rejected, the Saint is jealous of Fur’s choice in the Boar’s love over God’s, and scoops some hunters onto Igname’s whereabouts. Once murdered, his flesh is offered up to the Saint’s convent as tithe from a woman trying to save her marriage through divine intervention. As the rich and pious sit down to feast on Igname, Virginia and all of the other animals bust in and presumably kill everyone in sight to avenge the boar.

Was Ernst the boar, and Fur Carrington busting in on the Gestapo to avenge her broken love? The disillusionment and positioning of nature over divinity and notions of divine right at least nod to Carrington’s developing perspective of people who try to heal and meddle in other’s lives. It transcends simple father-daughter relationship. This is government, and as personified by Saint Alexander, God that Carrington is now taking on.

Banquets and Bones

There is a large emphasis in almost every story of decadent feasts and dishes. And some of it is actually food. In Joanna Moorehead’s biography, it is mentioned that Carrington became interested in historical cooking, and many of the dishes she lists off definitely seem like decadent repasts of old. In “Monsieur Cyril de Guindre”:  “…a plump fat chicken with stuffing made of brains and the livers of thrushes, truffles, crushed sweet almonds, rose conserve with a few drops of some divine liquor. This chicken…had…been suffocated in vapors of boiling patchouli:  its flesh was as creamy and tender as a fresh mushroom.” (p. 84). Emm, delicious?

I have a hard time determining from these culinary descriptions whether Carrington was vegetarian or not. The death of animals are not portrayed lightly, and while the feasts are described in lavish and meticulous detail, they don’t come off as appetizing. Of course, the diet of the author isn’t important, but it just would be interesting because were she vegetarian, her oeuvre could be considered a great effort toward animal rights advocation. Their importance and anthropomorphism almost deifies them. They are certainly equals to, if not more important, than the humans who populate Carrington’s cosmos.

And it certainly makes reading “The Sisters” and “White Rabbits,” which deals with vampirism and cannibalism more interesting. “White Rabbits” is about otherworldly neighbors who raise rabbits on rancid meet and turn them into stew every weekend. The lady of the house even expresses some affection for the creatures, but it seems fake and forced, as does the sudden interest in having the protagonist stay for a perpetual dinner.

“The Sisters” takes on a much added dimension in regards to caregiving. A healthy woman’s love life is basically ruined by the undying thirst of her chimerical, confined sister who demands “red” in lieu of her daily ration of honey. I can’t help but see this vampire, Juniper, as inspired by Carrington’s real life Psi vampire during the period of this writing—a family-assigned nurse that followed her everywhere she went in Spain once discharged.

Pigeon Fly: Love Games

Perhaps because the events of WWII and Carrington’s escape from Europe separated her from the Surrealists for a while, games and group dynamics play less of a role in this period. “Pigeon, Fly” is the one exception, and the eponymous word-association game is background noise to the protagonist as she paints. The real game in this story is, as is in many of the others, love. And more often than not, after the protagonist has found it, she looses it or finds it stolen, like in “Waiting” and “As They Rode Along.”

Love is also forbidden by disapproving wives (“The Seventh Horse”), and can takes over one’s identity (“Pigeon, Fly”). Of course, all of these variations on the theme harken back to autobiography. There is Ernst’s wife, Carrington’s love for him, and then her finding Ernst coupled with Peggy Guggenheim the whole time while she was interned in a Spanish asylum.

Relevant to this category:  Silver Press features one story missing from the Dorothy, a publishing project edition. “The Skeleton’s Holiday” is an excerpt from “a collaborative novel with Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Georges Hugnet, and Gisèle Prassinos, et. al. called The Man Who Lost His Skeleton.” It is a hilarious reprieve from the darker and more melancholy shades the other stories cast. It also features a Dadaist emphasis on shit which leads me to perhaps the biggest surprise I found during this reading…

Did…did she just make a fart joke?

“Still, don’t be sentimental. It all began the day of my grandfather’s first communion. He was only a lad, he didn’t realize the solemnity of the occasion. The evening before this Holy Day, the eve before he was to receive his Lord, he ate a plate of beans. And next morning at church…” Mcbologan hesitated. “It happened that a certain noise escaped him…”  (76)

This is from “The Three Hunters,” which features a band of brothers presenting a bizarre spectrum of disability and eccentricities brought on from a family curse. It is a wonderful piece of grotesquery, and the fact that the wrath of God was brought upon the family by a flatulent insult makes it maybe one of the best fart jokes, or at least gassy fairy tales, ever tooted—erm, told.

Literary Painting

But back to seriousness and craft! My personal favorite aspect of Carrington’s work is becoming presented in these stories. A new sensuousness is imbued throughout making the atmosphere more dimensional and visual.

If there is one thing I love about Carrington, it is how she uses color and texture to create verbal paintings. In “As They Rode Along,” Igname’s fur is made a contradiction in textures with the fruits, leaves, and plants with which he ornates himself. In “Pigeon, Fly” horses are “the color of ripe plums:  the color called roan in England.” And scenes like this one from “Monsieur Cyril de Guindre” read like an illuminated manuscript: “He didn’t notice Thibault, who had come silently into the room carrying a bouquet of moss roses. Thibaut, who was a great deal younger than Cyril de Guindre, had golden skin like the corpse of a child preserved in an old and excellent liqueur. He wore an elegant dressing gown the color of  trout flesh, and his face, behind the roses, was livid with anger.” (78) Later on, de Guindre’s daughter’s lips are “black and gleaming like the back of the beetle.” (83)

Those are just a few of examples of her prismatic poetry at work. She also perfumes her stories, and if one ever wondered what the world of Leonora Carrington might smell like, it’s patchouli. This is the predominant scent her protagonists use to scent paper, linens, and themselves.

While Carrington underwent a great deal of tragedy and torment from 1939 to 1941, the resulting maturity and disillusionment transmuted into these ten stories shows her mastering her craft and empowering her voice. By 1942, she moved to Mexico, where she would spend most  of her long life. I can’t wait to see how the stories morph alongside the young Surrealist muse who went over the edge and came back as a respected painter. and writer. Will they be informed like the earlier stories by her life, one that will inevitably be transform by the other roles she takes on—wife, mother, and soror mystic? I guess we’ll find out next week!

The post Hyenas, Horses, and Rabbits, Oh My! Part II appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Spells

Permeating these works is a fascination with urban life—European city life circumscribes the consciousness of the protagonists in most of these stories.  In their urban wanderings, buildings and public squares become a kind of living relic of history looming over the moments of citizens and revealing that the relationship between past and present is far more complex than we often assume, and that it may be more of a two-way street than we’d like to believe.  The secrets lurking behind the 20th century European streets, tucked away in obscure courtyards, or hidden in the inventory of a forgotten shop call to mind some of the same fascinations of setting that one encounters in the New York- and Paris-set weird fiction of Robert Chambers, or perhaps Jean Ray’s “The Shadowy Street,” which literalizes this general idea and builds an entire plot out of it.

Even as there is temptation, generally speaking, to account for great evil by turning to the supernatural, de Ghelderode’s fiction takes care not to entirely remove it from human agency.  It seems safe to assume that this tendency is at least in part abetted influenced by Europe’s escalation into World War II that would have been contemporaneous with the creation of many of these stories.  Threaded through virtually all of them are persistent reminders that hell might well exist entirely independent of a supernatural order: “Why, this is hell!  It’s this monstrous city, its everyday existence. And the damned? They’re my hideous fellow men and me too in their sordid flock!.” (“The Devil in London,” 29)  The observable and rational are sufficient in some ways to account for the idea of hell, and yet the devil may ultimately put in an appearance anyhow.  The ennui that pervades “The Devil in London” and “The Collector of Relics” evokes the sense that this corporeal existence is simply not the one we were meant to inhabit, a sentiment that will strike many readers as sharing a kinship with the modern author Thomas Ligotti.  If the book stumbles on occasion, its main obstacle is an excessive reliance on the same character type that so frequently makes such observations as the one above: the lone, depressed, sick, unmoored, solitary male wanderer in search of distraction from the malaise of the mundane.  Or a “demoralized soul,” as he puts it in “Fog.”  Indeed, one might lift any number of lines from these stories and find sentiments common to both Ligotti and de Ghelderode.  In “Rhotomago,” the protagonist exclaims that he “… pursued my own journey into the unfathomable, dreaming that for once I was sleeping without dreaming!” (83)

The strength of prose and complexity of theme are more than sufficient to recommend the book despite the limitations imposed by the use of relatively unvaried protagonists, but it will likely stand out as a weakness to some and has been discussed by scholars engaged with de Ghelderode’s work:

“Voiced by dedicated solitaries, the narratives discount social or even human relationships…Women too are in short supply; Ghelderode, in a draft prospectus for a planned further collection of stories, promised that women would feature more centrally but, as it turned out, no such stories were written.” (Introduction, x).

Women characters are certainly in short supply; however, it is a mistake to view the “dedicated solitary” as necessarily eschewing the importance of social and human relationships.  It seems not just shortsighted but counterproductive of de Ghelderode to craft so many tales in which the thesis is that “hell” could consist of “this monstrous city” and “my fellow men” but then have a glaring omission of such a large demographic that could add more depth to such treatments.  However, that caveat aside, I submit that the frequent juxtaposition of supernatural and sociohistorical forces under which the protagonists labor is done precisely as a means not of discounting social relationships but of critiquing them from a broader perspective, even as de Ghelderode’s critique could be improved if it were broader still in terms of which people are represented in the story.  It is worth noting a distinction between a lack of close friendships as a “solitary” (this is certainly true of most of the protagonists) and a discounting of human relationships entirely.  Introverted though the narrators may be, there is ample direct, ground-level social interaction that forms crucial components of plot and serves as a vehicle for such critiques, particularly in stories like “The Collector of Relics, “You Were Hanged,” and “The Odor of Pine.”

Octave Mirbeau

Although both Ligotti and de Ghelderode have clear predecessors in the Decadent movement, we can see a much closer connection to the Decadents with the historically proximate Belgian fantasist.  Echoes of French author Octave Mirbeau abound in the cynical frankness and casual cruelty with which one character in the story “You Were Hanged” discusses old and new means of execution contrived by societies in different historical periods.  The characters in most of the stories commit their fair share of transgressions, but the author is careful to foreground such individual ignoble acts against a backdrop of larger systemic cruelties like executions, which comprise an essential part of the structure of sociohistorical power operating in conjunction with the supernatural of de Ghelderode’s fiction.  The hypocrisy that underlies the use of powerful institutional violence against individual transgressors of social order is a theme that one will find in many forms in such literature, and it features prominently in this collection as well.  For example, one of the strongest stories, “You Were Hanged,” takes as its premise a discussion about state-sanctioned violence and explores differing moral responses to it as its specific tools of execution change with history, and supernatural events force the protagonist to confront such horrors from a perspective uncannily removed from the present in an effort to dissect the idea of “progress.”  The recursive relationship between materialist and supernatural concerns is introduced immediately in the first story, “The Public Scribe,” which features a wax dummy “tasked” with recording the ephemera of history in the material form of writing while undergoing a transformation that could not be accounted for by material processes.  Events disembodied by time become history, and here history becomes reembodied as it reattains material form.  The animation of abstractions like time and history recurs frequently throughout the collection and reveals an underlying anxiety about the power they hold over life.

While any astute reader will undoubtedly come away with a great deal to digest from these stories in terms of philosophical discussion, the literary craftsmanship that makes them so effective is remarkable.  Returning for a moment to “You Were Hanged,” for example, one can note several details that at first appear trivial but are threaded through the story such that the conclusion renders a completely different and nuanced significance to them than expected.  The cumulative effect of this is also contingent on any number of subtleties of language that seem to have been well preserved by the translator:

“I was under the clear impression that I’d been in that place [Saint-Jacques Plain] forever, and that my existence had never extended beyond that oblong square.” (153)

In a brief sentence and with the pointed use of “oblong”, de Ghelderode and Maclennan create a complex symbol that coheres perfectly with the themes of the story and the larger collection by inextricably entwining life, death, and social constructs that precede and survive the individual.  In this story as in several others, time and history explicitly become forces alive in ways that are usually invisible to us.  One might well encounter “the breathing of clocks” (159) in an inn adjacent to a setting of historical cruelties.  Sometimes this is direct and catastrophic and at others more restrained in a manner that might remind readers of Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.  In much the way that an innocuous post in a wall may in another era have been the final destination for a condemned person, de Ghelderode frequently explores the significance of the idea of the historical relic in changing social contexts: common items afforded outsized importance as a byproduct of human action, history being an amalgamation whose power becomes greater than the sum of its parts and in turn acts on its descendants.  Many of the stories here are built around a “tunneling” effect of time, with two sets of significant events set apart by a lengthy interval during which the narration distances itself from events on the ground.  The cumulative effect is a volume of weird tales that remind the reader that history asserts itself upon the individual even while quietly hiding in the background.

“The Public Scribe” serves as one of the more subtle treatments of the erosive effects of time on human existence. In it we see a plot device, the infamous mannequin, that has become a fairly commonplace fixture of the weird.  The animate and the inanimate are juxtaposed in an exploration of the ways in which the uncanny valley of the mannequin threatens to usurp the former.  De Ghelderode himself wrote plays for marionettes and was influenced by puppet theater, and he seems to have a particular fascination with exploring exactly where the border between life and not-life resides (or if it can be safely said to exist at all).  Perhaps he’s drawing on his fascination with time and asking us, “what is a mannequin but the appearance of humanity frozen in an instant of time?”  Throughout the collection are frequent appearances of masks and other similar manifestations of these themes. Their usage in a context that consistently emphasizes the degradation and horror of corporeal existence begs the question:  which is truly the more unsettling prospect–attaining human consciousness or experiencing the loss of it?  The author is careful to present both sides of the equation in “The Public Scribe.”  If from the broader perspective of history the human condition is akin to “musical and so fatally beautiful herds, deported to the cruel abattoirs where the beasts are sacrificed.” (“A Twilight”, 146), then it seems a foregone conclusion to de Ghelderode that neither prospect could be a clear preference, and therein lives true horror.

De Ghelderode’s sense of the fantastic exists at times within a Christian context and at others within an apparently invented, at-times haphazard one that achieves much by way of implication and subtlety, even as it remains unclear as to whether the author aspired to create a singular mythos like Chambers’s King in Yellow tales.  In Chambers, there is a constant current of madness and the incomprehensible lurking just beneath the surface of events, and de Ghelderode’s fiction has a similar quality. This is significant especially when considering the biographical data; as the author fell into ill health in the time preceding and during the stories’ creation, scholar Roland Bayen conjectures that his “stories bear witness to an ‘increasing neurosis’, indeed are ‘the fruits of crisis’” (Introduction, viii).  But Chambers is not the only fixture of the weird that we might be tempted to admit to the discussion.  The hallucinatory, landscape-disrupting visions that occur in several of the tales in Spells have a vivid, bold, and intense quality.  For an author with such an interest in place and its influence on consciousness, it is not surprising that crises of the personal are strongly linked to crises of geography and the like.  In particular, such an occurrence in “Fog” might well remind readers of Belgian contemporary Jean Ray’s story “The Mainz Psalter”, with both stories featuring conjurations of hidden worlds lurking adjacent to our own.  De Ghelderode writes:

“During this respite I entertained many such speculations, and all the more easily in that I didn’t have to deal with my usual rational self. Alas! No ecstasy goes without a reversal.  The state of grace left me.  And I felt myself in danger.  Streams of lights climbed the walls, this time coming from down below, coarse reflections of nocturnal fairs lit up with opaque red and green smoke. What I saw could only be an invention of delirium: mouths once more, down at ground level and reaching toward me.  A monstrous host surrounded me of which only the mouths were visible.  Oh! Abject mucous membranes salivating and spitting, swallowing words that I sensed were sordid and that I congratulated myself on not understanding…I was abruptly galvanized by the image of a nearby hell over which I was cataleptically suspended.” (136)

In Spells, there is a malevolence to the universe that becomes apparent whenever the supernatural manifests on the page, but the author is careful to always give the devil his due and remind the reader that human action and events play a part in that malevolence.  There’s a persistent association of social evils and the uncanny, particularly as in “You Were Hanged” and “The Odor of Pine”.  Readers will also note a more direct engagement with real-world religion than in many of the authors of weird tales to which he’s most comparable, which is perhaps not surprising given the overlapping of theme with preceding European authors like Mirbeau, who wrote nothing of the supernatural but obsessively critiqued the real-life figures purporting to be conduits to it.  De Ghelderode’s writing has been described by scholars as anticlerical, but his fascination with religious relics, churches, and other physical remnants of Christian belief systems reveals what seems best described as nostalgia made problematic and ambiguous by the ways in which he ties such holy artifacts to social ills.  Mortal sin, atonement, and many other religious constructs form the core of anxiety that plagues some of the protagonists, but they exist alongside and entwined with the materialism represented by real historical tribulations that seem to carry an equal weight that survives into the present.  In “The Collector of Relics,” for example, norms of both religious and secular life are simultaneously tested and transgressed by the protagonist as a byproduct of his own personal contrarian obsessions.  As the narrator states regarding whether or not to discover what might lurk inside a dim antiques shop: “I’ve found myself tempted to cross the threshold.” (69)  Like Bataille’s Story of the Eye, there is an animus in the character that conflates these two categories of social norms under a reactionary, impulsive, and accelerating disgust.  It becomes clear by the conclusion of “The Collector of Relics” that the reader would be advised to allow for multiple interpretations of the idea of crossing thresholds as the protagonist continually pressures the collector to pursue progressively more taboo objectives, and the preservation of this ambiguity in translation is vital for understanding the story.

De Ghelderode’s fiction has not been broadly available to English readers, and this edition of Spells will hopefully do its part to remedy that.  The consistent execution and thought-provoking, nuanced premises in these stories are enough to render them overlooked classics (at least, to non-Belgian audiences)—there are no real low points to speak of, and it seems unsurprising that the stories are among the final efforts produced by an author with a lengthy and well-developed body of work.  In short, Spells will have much to say, some of it new and some of it quite familiar, to most readers of the weird.

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