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.

The post Review: “Lost Objects: Stories” by Marian Womack appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

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.

WFR: What kinds of fiction or stories did you read and watch growing up?

Dempow Torishima: As a child, I liked stories with illustrations, like Doctor Doolittle, René Guillot’s Un petit chien va dans la lune, works by Edogawa Rampo, and so on (I was enthralled by the things that rose up between the words and the pictures), and I think that is also related to my present style of writing.

In my teenage years, I got really into strange, unique works of Japanese fiction, such as Kyusaku Yumeno’s Dogra Magra, Mushitaro Oguri’s Murder at Black Death Mansion, Shozo Numa’s Yapoo: the Human Cattle. In particular, I was strongly influenced by the word-plays, images of body modification, and so on in Yapoo: the Human Cattle.

After that, I started reading a variety of novels from a variety of countries (regardless of genre), and as you might expect, I really liked the ones with strong conceits and high levels of the absurd. These days, I like Can Xue, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Seth Fried. I’m also drawn to authors like Yoko Tawada and Yuko Yamao, who are very particular about the words they use. In William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Hisashi Kuroma’s translation style shocked me with its copious use of kanji neologisms and ruby text.

(In Japanese books, ruby text—tiny phonetic characters printed next to kanji characters—is sometimes used to indicate the pronunciations of difficult kanji. I use it to create wordplays, double-meanings, and so on. Still, from the time I was first published, I’ve been told those effects are impossible to replicate in English. )

As for movies, I like directors such as David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jan Švankmajer, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, but even within that group Cronenberg looms large, and has influenced me strongly in terms of both visuals and speculation.

WFR: What writers or storytellers do you look up to the most, in regards to setting models for your own writing?

DT: So many names come to mind that it’s hard to narrow it down. For every work I write, I’m inspired by a different author. I’m drawn to authors who draw as well as write, like Edward Carey. As for contemporary Japanese authors, Toh EnJoe and Yusuke Miyauchi are always stimulating.

WFR: How would you describe your personal aesthetic in your own words?

DT: To the extent that it’s possible, I try to put myself in a state where my perceptions of beauty and ugliness, and right and wrong, are a blank slate, and write using only the subjective viewpoints and knowledge of the beings that live in the world I’m writing about. Just as novels with a contemporary setting don’t include explanations about refrigerators, as much as possible I try to use only descriptions to show the things that are self-evident about them. My ideal is to write something like a translation of a novel written in another world.

If I use pre-existing nouns to express various things in that world, somehow the impression just doesn’t gel, so I use the meanings and shapes and sounds of kanji characters (with ruby text) to coin terms appropriate to the appearance and content of those objects (and sometimes I’ll also cram a completely different meaning into a pre-existing noun). To me, neologisms are like sets, props, and special makeup effects in film art.

WFR: Is there such a thing as “too weird”? If someone tells you something you’ve written is “weird” is it usually a compliment?

DT: At the time Sisyphean was released in Japan, I was told it was untranslatable, and the fact that it can now be read in English is itself “too weird,” which makes me very happy. I’m truly grateful that thanks to the long, hard efforts of translator Daniel Huddleston, this has become a reality.

“Weird” is of course a compliment as far as I’m concerned. Sometimes I see comments like, “It’s too gross; I can’t read it,” or “I feel sick at my stomach,” but at times like that, I try to remember the words of John Waters, who said, “If someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation.”

WFR: Sisyphean is incredibly original and surreal. Can you tell us how it came together? When did you start working on it and where did you get the idea for it?

DT: I started writing “Sisyphean,” the title story, in 2010.

I think the misery of having to work for a long time at a company that had bad working conditions, coupled with all the turmoil I’d been bottling up because of my commercial illustration and design work, just broke out all at once, like the Great Dust Plague. The barrel burst. And when I looked around me, I saw lots of people suffering from outrageous demands of their jobs, and thought that by using the techniques of SF and fantasy novels, I might be able to make that present situation apparent. So I set out to create a work where the novel itself would function as a work of installation art on the extremities of labor.

Up until then, I had created stories and pictures as separate things, but it kept feeling like something was half-baked about both of them, as if something very important was missing. Before I started work on “Sisyphean,” I realized that by putting both of those things together, I might be able to achieve a synergistic effect. It was a vague idea, but at that point I intended to put greater weight on the illustrations, and produce a work that was like a visual story.

At first, I made a lot of sketches and expanded the image in my mind, and then after drawing a number of illustrations, I started writing. Prior to “Sisyphean,” I had experimented with writing a surreal dictionary-novel that was just a string of annotations upon annotations, sort of like a hybrid of Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, and that technique came in handy for describing the world of “Sisyphean.”  I was going back and forth between words and pictures, completing both with one another, and while I was writing, I started giving more and more weight to the sentences. (Rather than me writing it, it felt like I was excavating fossils buried in deep underground strata, or weaving it together from fragments of the excavated fossils as I turned them up, down, left, and right.) In the end, I went way over the page limit for the short story competition, and I believe my efforts to condense that text, paring multiple lines down to one, must also be connected to my present style of writing.

After that, using the overstuffed setting of “Sisyphean” as a base, I wrote the other stories going backward through the ages, changing things up with each one, until at last in 2013, I was able to bring it all together in one book.

As for ideas, the idea of the “Descent From Heaven” in “Cavumville,” for example, came to me while I was watching a scene of snow being removed from roofs on TV once, and imagined what it would be like if all of those snowflakes were bugs. Most ideas sneak up on me quietly, at unpredictable times and from unpredictable directions. I get a lot of ideas by attaching plausible explanations to wordplays. When I’m doing that while writing, I sometimes feel like I’m going on and on trying to keep some lies I’ve told consistent.

WFR: In terms of your artwork, what artists and artworks have influenced you? Have you been influenced by manga at all?

DT: Hieronymus Bosch, Arnold Böcklin, Odilon Redon, Max Ernst, Max Klinger, Léon Spilliaert, and Zdzisław Beksiński…when I start listing fantastical painters I like, there’s no end to them. In terms of direct influence, though, I’ll say the paper architects, Brodsky ＆ Utkin and Albín Brunovský.

I’ve read a lot of manga, but that’s influenced me more in terms of content. As for patterns and designs, I’ve always been enchanted by those drawn by Daijiro Morohoshi.

WFR: What’s next? Is there anything you’re currently working on?

DT: After Sisyphean was published, my collection of materials on the setting was released as an e‑book. Aside from that, I’ve mainly been writing novellas and short stories.

There was a jailbreak story about a prisoner who’d been sentenced to have his body changed into an earthworm-like form, a story I contributed to an Ultraman anthology about a special cleaning company that disposes of all the monsters Ultraman defeats, one for Tsutomu Nihei’s BLAME! anthology about people who live in a building that keeps falling forever through a multilayered city, and one that describes daily life in a Japan where pseudoscience is a fact of life.

Presently, I’ve got an illustrated story called “One Hundred Views of a Hallucination” being serialized in Hayakawa Publishing’s SF Magazine. I’m also in the process of revising my first long-form novel, which I’m aiming to have published sometime this year. The story begins in the age that follows the human race’s extinction at the hands of murderous organisms, which are defensive weapons of formerly free-floating celestial bodies which the human race had colonized. Having lost their sense of purpose, these killer organisms have staked out turf like yakuza, and are living their daily lives when an inexplicable change begins to occur in their society, and they come to understand the human race’s scheme—it’s that kind of story. I hope everyone will be able to read it someday.

The post Sisyphean: An Interview with Weird Scifi Author Dempow Torishima 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.”

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— 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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Weird Fiction Review: What was your introduction to horror and the weird?

Priya Sharma: I was lucky to grow up in a house where books and films weren’t censored. I’d have to say Roald Dahl in both his children’s books and short stories, Daphne du Maurier, Hitchcock films, the darkness of Thomas Hardy, Twin Peaks, Ray Bradbury, then Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s alternative fairy tale collections, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, Stephen King novels.

WFR: Is there such a thing as “too weird”? When your work is called weird, is that a compliment?

PS: I’m delighted for my work to be called weird. As to what is “too weird” I think that’s very subjective. Who defines what’s weird and when it crosses the line?

WFR: What inspired your story “The Nature of Bees”?

PS: I was staying with friends who used to keep bees. I went out onto their smallholding for a walk. It was early in the morning and their was a slight heat haze that hadn’t burnt off yet. I heard the swarm before I saw it. It hung in a massive ball. I remember feeling real awe in that moment. And backing away very slowly.

After that I started reading about bee society. It’s truly brutal. I also was thinking a lot at that time about attitudes towards single women who are 30+ and women who don’t have children.
 
WFR: Your work often tends to feature biological elements (bees, snakes, sunflowers, etc). Where does your interest in biology come from?

PS:  I love the science and the art of the nature. I do a fair bit of research, even for short stories, and I find that very invigorating. It makes me stop and look at the world again and it never fails to excite me. I did Medicine at university and the human body and disease processes are fascinating.

WFR: How did your collection All the Fabulous Beasts come together? How would you describe its stories?

PS: I’m very grateful to Mike Kelly, the editor, who has a real eye for putting a collection together. He stopped me from chucking in stories that would have jarred.

This is a difficult question to answer without going into specifics. The stories in ‘All the Fabulous Beasts’ concern themselves with nature and the environment, feminism, and sexuality, life, death, and rebirth. They show how the past haunts us. Place and setting are integral. We never escape where we come from. Nostalgia is powerful, but we can’t let it kill us. I don’t set out to convey a message. And hopefully the stories are entertaining, not didactic. I’m interested in people, places, mythology, and ontology. After all, we are all just fabulous beasts.”

WFR: Given that this month is Women in Horror Month, do you have any favorite women writers that have inspired your work?

PS: Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, Daphne du Maurier, Toni Morrison, Katherine Dunn, Sarah Hall, Alice Walker, Shirley Jackson, Sarah Waters, Jumpha Lahiri, Isabel Allende — to name just a few.

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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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from “The White People,” by Arthur Machen

Machen and the Intrusion of the Weird

Ah! The weird as literature, the weird as genre, and the weird as…weird. Once upon a time such distinctions were not that important and literature was so inclusive as to encompass a pre-genre expanse by which fantasy and the weird could not be overtly distinguished from the mainstream. That was then, this is now. Then relates to the work of Machen, now relates to the work of VanderMeer, for whom the recent review of his novel Borne in the New Yorker suggests a more inclusive acceptance of the weird in literature, an acceptance that harkens back to a situation current over a century ago. In between, we have a simplification of literature in which genre becomes increasingly a defining and selling point, but where the concept of weird literature repeats and reinvents itself, returning after this century to a point of origin where it is invigorated and pointedly relevant to the world in which we live.

The quote from Machen with which I initiate this essay is one of the most evocative and, at the same time, defining that I have ever encountered. I first discovered Machen through his 1948 collection, Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, a gift from my father when I was in high school. “These stories are pretty weird,” my father said. “I think you’ll like them.” I still don’t know where he got that old hardcover, but he was right about my reaction. The sensation that this quote and its accompanying story engender in me is part and parcel of the joy I encounter in reading such weird fiction. I still own and treasure that collection by Machen, along with other books of his that I have collected over the years.

The quote comes from Machen’s amazing short story, “The White People,” which is initiated by a philosophical but nevertheless enthralling discussion on the nature of Sin and Evil. It is here that Machen performs an amazing sidestep around the quagmire of morality with its nebulous and ill-fitting definitions. Machen moves the concept of Evil away from human nature and into the landscape. Religions often focus on criminal actions such as theft, murder, and adultery, but these are not truly evil because, although negative, they arise from purely human failings. Rather, “There is something profoundly ‘unnatural’ about Sin, about Evil.” This statement, along with its examples, encompasses much of what I find stimulating in weird literature. Here, I explore the concept of landscape as it relates to the Weird, and as Machen describes, to Evil.

I appreciate Machen’s philosophy of the weird and its relationship to evil because it need not be dependent on religion and morality. According to Machen, Evil can be considered a poisoning, an infection that is revealed by changes in the landscape, a recognition that the landscape is ‘unnatural’ based on our experience: a weird landscape. The concept of landscape as I use it here incorporates the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral, all that we perceive as our expected reality, the quotidian encounters based on a lifetime of rising each morning to greet the sun and another day’s labor.

Even though not dependent on religion according to Machen’s definition, in his two best-known stories—“The Great God Pan” and “The White People”—the incursion of evil arises from the incompatibility of earlier pagan religions with modern-day Christianity. This, in itself, need not be interpreted as indicating that such earlier religions are innately evil but rather that they are incompatible with the modern world. This incompatibility has the same effect as an infection, with potentially lethal results. The evil arises from this incompatibility and is revealed in part through effects on our landscape.

“The Great God Pan,” first published in 1890, is probably Machen’s most influential story. A key aspect of it is the sense of the awful, or awe-full, that to look upon the face of a god is to inspire madness. In this novella, two landscapes are set in opposition to each other within the first chapter: “You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things are—yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet—I say that all these are but dreams and shadows: the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes.” There are two worlds, the one that we experience and believe to be real, but there is also another, almost Platonic in its nature.

But to perceive this other world, this weird world, is to pay a price, as the experimental subject Mary discovers. She becomes “a hopeless idiot. However, it could not be helped; after all, she has seen the Great God Pan.” What follows combines elements of the detective novel and the Decadence Movement in literature, in which the hybrid child born of that unhallowed night invites disaster on all whom she encounters. Elements of the infected landscape include a house that has “the most unpleasant physiognomy he had ever observed,” a wine that is “about a thousand years” old, and a human body that transforms and begins “to melt and dissolve” before the eyes.

In “The White People,” completed in 1899 although it did not see publication until 1904, there is no clear demarcation of an antagonist, which sets it apart from much fiction. It is not a single god but rather paganism itself and its associated ceremonies that invite evil and result in catastrophe for the protagonist, a girl. She is found dead near the statue of an ancient idol, but not before she has explored and encountered various aspects of the weird although, in her innocence, she does not recognize these as such.

Among her earliest memories are white faces, white people that differ from the norm in this memorable aspect. But the true advent of the weird occurs after she discovers a strange land by following a brook, pushing her way through bushes, low hanging trees, and thorny thickets, and clambering along a dark tunnel, to make her way to a hill that seems, “another world that nobody had ever seen or heard before.” In her journey, she finds rocks like “horrible animals, putting out their tongues, and others were like words that I could not say.” The stones spring about and dance and she learns and joins in their dance, her initial horror turning to fascination and complicity.

Her death is commemorated with the simple but telling words, “She had poisoned herself—in time.” The early pagan gods have escaped their time, being invited to enter into ours, this being the incompatible evil that infected the girl, now sixteen and post-puberty, and which ultimately resulted in her destruction. Interestingly, this sense of warped time is something that repeats itself in many a subsequent weird landscape.

“The White People” encompasses a number of ideas that can inform the weird landscape: (1) a sense of its opposition in relation to the ‘normal’ landscape, such that there is often a clear transition that occurs when moving from one to the other; (2) a sense of unnaturalness where the surreal becomes real; (3) a temporal disjunction such that the stream of time is no longer constrained; (4) a relationship to concepts of evil, sometimes although not always with religious connotations, such that the landscape can infect or poison our world; and (5) that the infection of our world can involve a deleterious effect on humans, this being perhaps its most horrific and evil aspect.

Here I explore this concept of the weird landscape in light of these ideas and how they have been translated over time into other works of fiction. By nature of this expedition I must pick and choose and, in doing so, I highlight seminal works that are also part of my personal pantheon (pun intended), most of the older works discovered when I was in my teens and ripe for discovery of the strange continents within these stories. Such an enterprise is not exhaustive, and I do not mean to imply that all weird fiction must embody similar concepts. Nor do I mean to imply that any specific work is necessarily influenced by those works that came earlier—although many of these writers freely acknowledge their indebtedness to antecedents—just that these forms of the weird landscape reoccur with such frequency that they can be considered emblematic. Each author has brought their own unique perspective to their weird landscape, and I emphasize those distinguishing aspects of their works. I finish with a look at how the use of the weird landscape has transitioned and been reinvented over time from those earlier works to now.

The Weirdness of the Plane and the Pit in Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland

First published in 1908, the initial setting of William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland suggests that we are revisiting the Gothic, with its protagonist taking charge of an ancient towered and castellated house that hangs precariously over a chasm. This supposition is further enhanced by the description of how, after midnight on the morning of January 21^st, while the narrator is reading in his study, the unnatural is announced by candle flames burning low and then shining with a “ghastly green effulgence.” The man’s dog cowers and whimpers at his feet. What follows is not a traditional Gothic fright, but the truly weird.

The light that the narrator sees does not emanate from within his study, but rather from beyond the walls of his study, which are now transparent. They reveal an alien landscape that is progressively stranger the more clearly the protagonist perceives it. We have crossed the border from our normative world and into the landscape that announces the weird. This is truly an alien landscape, for the Plane, as the narrator refers to it, is illuminated by a black-centered sun limned with radiant red, such that the entire landscape appears ruddy. Also of note is a gargantuan house that is the exact replica of the protagonist’s house but of mammoth proportions: “a stupendous structure built apparently of green jade.” The inclusion of this house makes the warped image of this landscape all the more clearly a strange reflection of our world, of surreal and impossible proportions. There is a connection between the worlds but not by any natural law we understand.

Like Machen, Hodgson evokes gods as the impetus for the weird landscape. The narrator, in his passage across the Plane, sees “hundreds of them. They seemed to grow out of the shadows. Several I recognized almost immediately as mythological deities; others were strange to me, utterly strange, beyond the power of a human mind to conceive.” This last statement is significant for Hodgson not only evokes the pagan gods of lore, but gods of whom we have no knowledge. In particular, he describes a Beast-god, a gargantuan swinish creature, one that seems to combine the elements of animal and man. Here we have the entry of a god-like creature not born of any known religion, but one that poses ill to humankind.

There then follow incursions into our world, from beyond the house but drawing ever closer in an attempt to invade its comparative normalcy. These creatures are revealed as Swine-things, diminutive reflections of the Beast-god. Although suggestive of pigs, to the narrator’s horror they exhibit an unexpected intelligence. Their horrific grunts are a form of speech, a demonic suggestion that domesticated animals have taken on the aspect of humans, or that humans have devolved into something animal-like. The Swine-things are, “something beyond human; yet in no good sense; but rather as something foul and hostile to the great and good in humanity.” Machen in his story, “The Great God Pan,” described the progeny of a woman and a god, the female offspring being preternaturally beautiful but still emulating humankind. In Hodgson’s novella, we witness the perverted evil in which the physical aspects of humans are weirded and debased.

Hodgson also allows time to invade his weird landscape. The horrific cosmic landscapes into which the narrator is thrown undergo a rapid abrasion due to accelerated time. There is much in common here with H. G. Wells’s descriptions of far-future travel in The Time Machine. But with Hodgson there is no mechanical invention and the narrator is thrown forward against his will into a decaying future, one in which the sun spirals more and more rapidly across the sky, all the time dying to a dismal red. The parallels to The Time Machine do not end there for, by analogy, the Swine-things that emerge from their dark caverns, from the Pit, harken back to Wells’s debased and subterranean Morlocks (and are also reminiscent of the man-beast hybrids found in Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau). The Borderland of Hodgson is not constrained by space or time and that is part and parcel of its weirdness.

Lovecraft and the Weird from Beyond

Lovecraft moves the concept of Evil into a demonstrably science-fictional territory. In the stories that make up the Cthulhu mythos, he posits the existence of monstrosities from the stars, beings of such great power that they might easily be mistaken for gods. Indeed, these monsters are eager to accept the mantle of god-hood for, as Lovecraft writes, “They came from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them,” these false idols then becoming the focus of worship among susceptible humans. Although Lovecraft is generally considered an agnostic or atheist, the morality in his stories is consistent with that of Christianity, and embodies a concrete sense of good and evil. The entrance of the weird, for all intents and purpose, is synonymous with evil, and Lovecraft uses the word ‘evil’ repeatedly in his stories.

Although the idea of a weird landscape clearly predates the writings of Lovecraft, his use of this motif is almost fixed in our imagination due in part to his recurrent use of the descriptor, ‘non-Euclidian geometries.’ This phrase has become something of a Lovecraftian cliché and is referenced in “The Call of Cthulhu,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” “Dreams in the Witch House,” and “The Trap.” Thankfully, Lovecraft clarifies the meaning of this mental tongue-twister in his actual descriptions of the weird landscapes that presage the incursion of his alien monsters. For example, when sailors explore Cthulhu’s citadel R’lyeh protruding above the waves, they find that “all rules of matter and perspective seemed upset,” and later in their hurried flight to escape the resurrected monster, a sailor is “swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse.”

Lovecraft’s greatest evocation of the weird landscape occurs in “The Colour Out of Space” (1927), which many, including I, consider his finest short story. Here Lovecraft eschews graphic descriptions of monsters and instead focuses on the environmental manifestation of their influence, the result being one of the most palpable evocations of a landscape in transition from our world and into the weird. Indeed, the story is almost entirely a description of the landscape in transition, a recipe for how a normal landscape can become a weird ‘blasted heath.’

As in many stories with a weird landscape there is a physical separation of the weird from the normal landscape, the weird being known as the ‘blasted heath’ and centered around the farmhouse where the landscape became corrupted, following the impact of a meteorite. The meteorite is the proximate cause of the trouble, foreshadowed in part due to its aberrant characteristics, shrinking although “stones do not shrink.” It is only later that we come to clearly understand that an alien force arrived with the meteorite, this ‘creature’ being more alien than any monstrosity from the Cthulhu mythos, being perhaps a gas, or more explicitly simply a ‘colour’ that feeds on the life force of flora and fauna.

The characters in the story are of little value except in their roles, both passive and active, as reporters of the transitioning landscape. At first the farmer and his family are excited due to the bountiful effect of the meteorite on their crops, the fruit growing to “phenomenal size.” But disappointment soon ensues when it is discovered that “for all that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not one single jot was fit to eat.” But it is more than just a poisonous unpalatability to the crops, for all the vegetation begins to possess “hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the known tints of earth. The Dutchman’s breeches became a thing of sinister menace, and the bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion.” The final deathly transition for the vegetation is its becoming brittle and gray and crumbling into dust.

The effects on the vegetation are horrendous and weird enough, but there are also effects on the animals in the vicinity of the meteorite. This is initially suspected due to the strange arrangement of their winter prints in the snow, and is then confirmed by alterations in the actual body proportions of a trapped woodchuck. In the end we witness the ultimate horror of humans being susceptible to the same weirding process as the animals, as the vegetation, a process characterized by madness and that recapitulates the same steps observed with the rest of the landscape: “By July she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours, and before the month was over Nahum got the mad notion that she was slightly luminous in the dark.” And, knowing what has come before, the result for the human must be the same: “collapse, greying, and disintegration.” Here we witness humans that have become weirded in the same manner as the surrounding flora and fauna, the palpability and inexorable logic of this being more horrific than the suggestive relationships between human and ‘other’ found in Machen or Hodgson.

C. L. Moore and the Weird Sexuality of “The Black God’s Kiss”

Catherine Lucille Moore’s story “The Black God’s Kiss” appeared in the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales, a bit less than two years after Robert E. Howard’s genre-defining first Conan story. Moore was a fan favorite and through her character Jirel of Joiry, introduced in the story, provided her own spin on sword and sorcery, and this with a woman in the lead role. Moore set her Jirel stories in medieval France—unlike the mythological Hyborian-Age of Howard’s Conan stories—and this allows for the incursion of the fantastic into a real-world setting, the appearance of the weird landscape telegraphing evil. “Black God’s Kiss” is, in fact, largely devoted to the entrance into and the transit across just such a weird landscape.

Jirel’s journey is inspired by a sexual trespass, following her having been taken captive by Gauillaume the conqueror. He has her iron helmet removed and is startled to discover a woman with short red hair beneath it. Recognizing her sex, he forces a kiss on her even though that turns out to be “like kissing a sword blade.” In a later time and place, the story might contain a more substantive sexual transgression, but eighty years ago this is more than enough to suggest the excessive liberty taken. The imprisoned Jirel cannot forget or forgive, for “upon her mouth she felt the remembered weight of his, about her the strength of his arms.” She will journey “beyond all the bounds of the hells we know” to seek an unholy weapon with which to wreak her vengeance.

Almost immediately we are confronted by strange geometries. Jirel removes stones from within the lower depths of the dungeon, revealing a tunnel that twists and curves downward as if marking the passage of a gargantuan snake. “There was something queer about the angles of those curves. She was no scholar in geometry or aught else, but she felt intuitively that the bend and slant of the way she went were somehow outside any other angles or bends she had ever known…the peculiar and exact lines of the tunnel had been carefully angled to lead through poly-dimensional space as well as through the underground—perhaps through time too.”

This description might suggest Moore is paying homage to Lovecraft’s “non-Euclidian geometries,” but that is not the case. Moore did not read the “The Call of Cthulhu” until 1935, the year after “Black God’s Kiss” was published, when Lovecraft initiated a correspondence with her and sent her two packages of his tales. She comments in her May 27 letter to HPL that “you really had me reeling and dizzy with the geometry of Cthulhu’s city.” The description recalls to her the awful dreams she experienced as a perpetually sick child. Tellingly, she describes this early experience as “nothing was at all describable in terms of physical things, because I wasn’t aware through the senses at all. There was a greyness over everything that was greyness of the mind, not of the light, and nothing had size, yet there was an awful bigness outside the bounds of mere dimensions. And there was an instability of the ground underfoot—only it wasn’t ground and there was no ‘underfoot’—it was rather an instability of anything basic in which to build one’s consciousness.”

It is not too much of a stretch to extrapolate from these descriptions to the weird landscape Moore evokes in “The Black God’s Kiss,” that the landscape is inspired in part due to the dreams she experienced as a sickly child. The story is largely made up of a journey across an aberrant landscape, this strangeness of the journey accounting for part of the story’s attraction. Dreams are repeatedly referenced in terms of the landscape and her supernatural ability to traverse it. The world itself is uneven, full of quaking morasses, strange stars and falling stars, a tower composed of spurting water or tangible light, and a black lake that heaves “with a motion unlike that of any water she had ever seen before.” There is also strange life, these including blind white horses, pale monstrosities with clicking teeth, and a mirrored version of Jirel herself.

Two elements of this journey deserve specific mention. First, in order to view the new landscape, Jirel must set aside the crucifix she wears, throw aside this symbol of Christianity so she may gain access to a non-Christian world. Second, the subject of her quest, not revealed until she has reached it, is a carrier for a type of poison. This final encounter echoes the earlier strange geometries, for she enters a temple in which waits a semi-human statue with one central eye and its mouth pursed for a kiss. “Every line and curve in the dim world seemed to sweep round toward the squatting thing before her with its closed eye and expectant mouth.” The kiss of the alien statue is like a poison, one she then carries with her, the kiss itself having a transformative aspect, for “she ran with the weight from her curiously alien body, heavy with its weight of inexplicable doom.” She carries the poison of the weird environment within her, a vessel awaiting its deliverance to the object of her hatred, to the conqueror Gauillaume, the man who violated her.

Margaret St. Clair and the Weird “Child of Void”

Margaret St. Clair is receiving a recent and well-deserved ascendency in the critical assessment of her work. She began publishing her work in the 1940s, with over a hundred short stories to her credit, but it wasn’t until 1985 that a Best of collection was published, by which time she was over seventy years old. And now, another thirty years later, her work is being included in major anthologies of weird fiction and SF. This is as it should be. Simply on a technical level, St. Clair is one of the best writers to have published in the pulps. Moreover, and unusual for SF at the time, her stories exhibit a seemingly casual awareness of and willingness to explore themes of sexuality, her ability to do so in the pulp magazines no doubt assisted by the humor with which she often handled her subjects.

“Child of Void” (1949) shares some plot elements and structure with Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” although I find no documentation that this was an influence. Like that earlier tale, we have an alien intrusion that takes place on a farm. The aliens have no tangible form themselves, but are “like electricity or radio” and they draw sustenance from energy including that found in living things. They need this because they are trapped on earth in their ‘egg’ and need energy so they can escape back to their home in a parallel dimension. A key difference from Lovecraft’s story is that everything is told from the family’s perspective, in this case by one of the two sons.

The family is going to live in Hidden Valley and, three paragraphs into the story, we learn that something is amiss there, the son saying: “It was the kind of place you see articles about in the Sunday supplement—a place where water flows uphill and half the time the laws of gravity don’t work, a place where sometimes a rubber ball will weigh three or four pounds…You never could depend on things being normal and right.” We thus have the idea of the unnatural landscape forefronted in the story, serving as a signal that the family is entering weird territory, and establishing a mystery as to what is disrupting the natural order. Once the aliens are discovered, it is made clear that their presence is harmful to the family. As the narrator’s younger brother explains, “They can’t help hurting us. It’s something they put into the air, like, by just being alive. They can stop it for a while, if they try hard. But that’s the way they really are. Like poison oak or a rattlesnake.” The things in the egg aren’t consciously evil but put out “a vibration which is hostile to human life.”

St. Claire’s choosing the perspective of someone directly affected by, and living through, the alien ‘invasion’ allows her to place a greater emphasis on characterization and how the aliens mentally control the family. This stands in contrast to Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” where it is suggested that the alien may have some mental hold on the farmer and his family, but the perspective of an outside observer places this in the realm of conjecture. In St. Claire’s story the mental struggle is front and center. The most noticeable characteristic that marks Hidden Valley as strange when the family arrives is how they are emotionally affected, for they all experience a horrible depression, one that lifts suddenly, these seesawing emotions pointing to some outside agency affecting their minds. The range of powers the aliens possess, in particular their modes of mental manipulation, become increasingly evident as the story progresses.

An interesting aspect of the story is how little of the weirded landscape is actually described. The initial description, from three paragraphs in, comes before the narrator and his family move to Happy Valley, and is based on the son’s memories of having visited his uncle there when younger. Once the family moves to Hidden Valley, there is a specific reference to the bounty of the farm (‘milk so rich you could hardly drink it’), even though others in the area don’t experience this bounty. We also learn that, for some unknown reason, the narrator’s ham radio won’t work. A key to this invisible aspect of the story is the depression the family initially experience because later, after this depression lifts, the son says, “The funny things about the Hidden Valley stopped bothering us.” So we know that something had been happening but we have not been made privy to it, in part because the narrator no longer notices or is concerned about such things. This is one of the balancing acts that St. Clair performs in the story. She makes use of an unreliable narrator, not entirely in control of his mind, who can’t process everything that is happening to his family, but who still communicates enough so we know what has happened. As a result, the upbeat ending contains underlying depths of horror, for we know that the narrator, now infected by an alien, is not in control of his emotions.

The Weird Colours of Ballard’s “The Illuminated Man”/The Crystal World

Thirty-odd years separate Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” from J. G. Ballard’s short story “The Illuminated Man,” published in 1964 and then developed into a full-fledged novel two years later as The Crystal World. Those years exemplify the increasing divide between genre and literary works that accreted over this time span. Yet, although Ballard’s works are now often seen as transcending genre, I find it hard to imagine Ballard’s efforts here as existing without his having read, processed, and rejuvenated Lovecraft’s story within his own more modernistic ethos.

Ballard’s story and novel, although taking place at different locations, are initiated with the same transcendent lines: “By day fantastic birds flew through the petrified forest, and jeweled crocodiles glittered like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline river. By night the illuminated man raced among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels, his head like a spectral crown…” But it is telling in how Ballard transitions from story to novel. The story tells of a scientific expedition that intends to uncover the truth about the mysterious crystallization process occurring in Florida. In the novel, which takes place in the tropical forest of the Cameroon Republic, the focus shifts from the weird landscape and the explanation for its origins. Instead the novel explores the relationships among a Graham Greene-channeled cast of characters and how they interact with each other and with this bizarre landscape. In fact, less of an explanation is given about the crystallization process over the entire course of the novel than in the thirty-odd pages of the short story.

There is a surprising sense of similarity between the crystallization process found in Ballard’s work and the poisoning petrification found earlier in Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space.” The relationship is even more pronounced when in Ballard’s story, the Russian agriculturalist Lysenko “maintains that crop yields are increased because there’s an increase in tissue weight.” Furthermore, as the crystallization takes hold in Ballard’s world, objects glow in the dark as they amplify moon and starlight, much like the luminescent flora and fauna of Lovecraft’s world. Also, there is a strange desire shared among characters in the works of Lovecraft and Ballard, a madness that derives from the poisoning, such that the infected characters are drawn to it and refuse to leave the weirded landscape, even against their own better judgment.

Ballard, like Lovecraft, evokes a science-fictional explanation for the crystallization process that has occurred. He cites such names as the Hubble Effect, the Rostov-Lysenko Syndrome, and most suggestively, the LePage Amplification Synchronoclasmique (this litany of tongue twisters all being in the story rather than the novel). Differing from Lovecraft is the lack of a proximate cause for the crystallization process. There is no alien as such, but simply events taking place light years away that are mirrored in our world. Indeed the accepted explanation from the team at the Hubble telescope in “The Illuminated Man,” is that the effects “are a reflection of distant cosmic processes of enormous scope and dimensions, first glimpsed in the Andromeda spiral.” Ballard may have been just reaching for the stars, providing an SF-gloss on astrology, but the relationship between these distant stars and Earth is surprisingly suggestive of the modern theory of quantum entanglement (“spooky action at a distance”).

Also notable in Ballard’s world is his usage of altered time as the basis for the crystallization process, which arises due to particles of ‘anti-time’ colliding with particles of time. Creatures and plants slow as they encounter ‘anti-time,’ and their frozen images proliferate, building on each other to form petrified crystals. The body becomes so thoroughly crystalline that the removal of the crystal destroys the body. These effects of ‘anti-time’ recall Hodgson’s warping of time in The House on the Borderland, although as an inversion, slowed time becoming crystalline with Ballard, whereas Hodgson’s speeded time reduces all to ash and snow. The destructive nature of the altered time also, of course, recalls Machen’s telling quote from “The White People” about the girl who ‘poisoned herself—in time.’

The Weird Science Fiction of Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”

“And we passed through the cavern of rats.

And we passed through the path of boiling steam.

And we passed through the country of the blind.

And we passed through the slough of despond.

And we passed through the vale of tears.

And we came, finally, to the ice caverns. Horizonless thousands of miles in which the ice had formed in blue and silver flashes, where novas lived in the glass. The downdripping stalactites as thick and glorious as diamonds that had been made to run like jelly and then solidified in graceful eternities of smooth, sharp perfection.”

That was my high-school yearbook quote. It comes from Harlan Ellison’s Hugo-award-winning short story, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and, although this story had long been a favorite, it was only while assembling this essay that I realized it embodied key elements of the weird landscape. It is surely a coincidence that the crystalline is emphasized in this quote but, as with Lovecraft and Ballard, such a landscape brings out some of Ellison’s most haunting and beautiful language.

The religious allusions in this quote from Ellison are no accident. Like Machen, Hodgson, and Lovecraft, Ellison evokes a pagan god in relation to the creation of the weird landscape. But Ellison places this ‘god’ fully within the boundaries of a traditional SF trope, that of the malevolent computer. Here the computer that achieves sentience and turns against its human creators is named AM, for Allied Mastercomputer, although the name is also intended to echo Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am.” Ellison does not hide the relationship between the computer and god, the story’s protagonist even stating, “If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was AM.”

Ellison’s story is readily labeled as science fiction because it employs an out-of-control computer as its antagonist. The story’s sections are even separated by images of a computer punch tape, now an historical anachronism. But the scientific aspects of the story are in fact fairly minor, and it could be argued that Lovecraft’s tales of cosmic horror rely more on scientific considerations than does Ellison’s tale. The significance of AM is not necessarily that it is a computer, but rather that such an omnipotent computer allows Ellison to explore the relationship between gods and humans (“God as Daddy the Deranged”). “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” is a weird tale in the grand tradition of weird tales with their weird gods. It is also a fine example of evil as revealed through its weird landscape.

AM has taken over the entire Earth so that no part of the Earth can be considered as separate from AM. The five human protagonists live in AM, the entire story taking place within the bowels of the computer. Unlike the pagan gods evoked by Machen, the animalistic hybrid gods of Hodgson, the tentacled monstrosities of Lovecraft, Ellison’s AM is a god who has no definitive form, a god as encompassing (and therefore as invisible) as the God of Christianity. But, like the old-Testament God, AM talks directly to humanity, humanity being reduced to the single handful of humans he has chosen to keep alive, to torture.

William Blake urged us to discover God through the evidence of His wondrous creation, (“To see a World in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower”). Ellison’s AM is the world, but that world, the landscape the protagonists encounter, although wondrous, miraculous, is also unnatural. It is a marriage of machine and nature—chittering computer banks, a frozen elephant, and a Roc-sized bird whose wings beat a hurricane wind—with the machine controlling whatever originates from the natural. My yearbook quote suggests the malleability of the physical landscape. Time is also skewed in AM, this being apparent early on in the story when the narrator almost casually indicates, “It was our hundred and ninth year in the computer,” that single line evoking the computer as landscape and that there is something unnatural about the narrator’s lifespan or his understanding of time. The narrator later says, “Some hundreds of years may have passed. I don’t know. AM has been having some fun for some time, accelerating and retarding my time sense.”

AM can also manipulate the bodily form of the humans. This is also made clear right from the beginning of the story. There’s the immortality, of course. But we also learn that one of the humans has been remade into the semblance of a chimpanzee. Later, sound and beams of light are emitted from the chimp-man’s eyes. And then, lastly, AM’s revenge on the narrator is to manipulate his form into something that is no longer recognizable as human, but tortured by its mind still being intact and containing all the humanity lacking from its form. Here, the situation is made all the more horrific by the narrator NOT lapsing into a Lovecraftian madness at recognizing the horror but having his faculties fully intact and eternally aware.

The Weird of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy

A key writer I discovered as an adult, one who inspired me with his glancing sidewise vision, his reimagining and deconstruction of SF and fantasy tropes, was Jeff VanderMeer. I first discovered his work in the stand-alone novella, Dradin in Love. Set in VanderMeer’s second world of Ambergris, this story would later be incorporated into his mosaic novel, City of Saints and Madmen. Ambergris bears a tangential relationship to our world. It incorporates names and technologies, interrogates the politics of colonialism and subjugation, and also exhibits VanderMeer’s fascination with flora and fauna, evidenced here through ecstasies of fungi and squid. There are elements, as you progress through City of Saints and Madmen, that indicate the membrane separating Ambergris from our earth is permeable, suggestive of the poisoning relationships of landscapes described by Machen. But the Ambergris revealed through VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen and the subsequent novels Shriek: An Afterword and Finch fits comfortably enough within the historical concept of a second world to fulfill the popular concept of a fantasy.

This changed with VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. Published in 2014, this trilogy of novels—Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance—later collected into the single hardcover edition Area X, is clearly set on our earth and does not fit comfortably within traditional genre labels. The time is close enough to now as to be now, and the setting is inspired by VanderMeer’s hikes in the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge in Florida. An alien environment appears within this territory, shielded by a force field and referred to as Area X, the intrusion of the weird into the normal, into our world.

Such an intrusive weird landscape invites a novel-length exploration. We have a new world, an accessible world, but one in which our natural laws are called into question, a situation that establishes readerly expectations appropriate to detective and suspense novels. The novel’s characters, and the reader, are put into the position of the detective searching out clues as to what rules now apply in this unprecedented environment. The suspense arises because our hard-won experience, the years we have spent negotiating and learning the rules that govern our world, are now worth nothing and may, in fact, invite disaster. There is a relationship here to classic novels in which strange lands, typically prehistoric, are discovered inside the hollow earth or on secluded mountains (e.g. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s At the Earth’s Core; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World). But nowadays, the idea of such lands persisting undiscovered across millennia invites disbelief. In contrast, the sudden intrusion of a weird hostile landscape is more believable, and certainly more in keeping with the disconcerting realities experienced in our increasingly incomprehensible world.

I did not use the word ‘exploration’ loosely when introducing the previous paragraph. In the Southern Reach trilogy, exploration teams are sent into Area X to study the environment once an entrance is discovered. This contrasts with the passive mobility of the protagonist in The House on the Borderland, who wafts from cosmic scene to scene, from vision to vision. Ballard’s story, “The Illuminated Man,” also utilizes an exploration team to facilitate the reader’s entry into the weird landscape, although when he extended his short story to the novel-length The Crystal World, our understanding of the landscape did not increase proportionately, the novel instead emphasizing the interpersonal dynamics of the characters. VanderMeer creates a more diverse weird landscape than does Ballard, which allows him to find a more engaging balance between the interactions of characters with the environment and their interpersonal dynamics.

World building, so common to SF, indeed prized by aficionados for the abilities of the authors in this respect, is focused by VanderMeer on Area X. Elements of the weirded environment include the flora and fauna, not exempting humans. There are creatures in Area X that are unlike anything on earth: human-eyed dolphins, luminescent fungi that write script, the Crawler. There are creatures that are mistakenly assumed to be of our world but are not, their mimicry so perfect that their veracity is not interrogated by the scientific teams. There are also strange geometries, the inversion of up and down, such that the exploration team cannot recognize whether they are climbing a tower or descending into a tunnel. Furthermore, maps from earlier expeditions lack the striking feature of the tower/tunnel, suggesting that Area X is unmappable, that it may be malleable, or that it reveals itself preferentially to different teams. There is also time travel, a knowing employment of quantum entanglement…

…but most significantly, in comparing Area X to previous weird landscapes, there are clear reminders throughout the text that Area X is a more unspoiled environment than that found in our own world. For example, the biologist describes Area X as a “pristine wilderness devoid of human life.” The implication is that our world, our technology-enabled despoilment of the environment, is the true Evil. The exploration team recognizes their own limitations as humans in such an environment: “Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.” This becomes ever more apparent as the trilogy progresses, the black humor of the second book (Authority) emphasizing the Three Stooges-like capabilities and culpabilities of a government agency tasked with uncovering the secrets of Area X.

Within this structure, Area X suggests the Paradise from which Adam and Eve were cast out, never to return. It is the Eden that existed before the advent of humankind: day and night, vaults of sky and water, vegetation, sun and stars, creatures of sea and sky, of the earth, all accomplished before the evening of the fifth day, before the creation of humankind in God’s own image. Our modern world is a despoiled, contaminated version, but one that strangely mimics all that was lost in that original Paradise. Or does the poisonous Paradise of Area X mimic our expectations, our desire to return to the garden, to a harmonious interaction between humankind and the environment?

But notably, and in contrast to many of the tales described earlier, there is no overt religious relationship of Area X to our world. My suggestion of the Biblical Paradise is something I bring to the tale from my own upbringing, inculcated with the Christian mythos prevalent in Western culture. The relationship of Area X to our world could just as readily be described in terms of Rousseau’s philosophy of the natural human, an agnostic but environmentalist perspective that the more humans deviate from nature, the worse they and their world become. Rousseau wrote, “nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man.” Area X pointedly reminds us of the follies that arise from nature and humankind out of balance.

Regardless of which perspective you hold, the expeditions from our world into Area X clearly suggest a level of incompatibility between the two worlds. You cannot accept both, be congruent with both, at the same time. To become part of Area X requires a clear rejection of our world, and with it an accompanying weirding of what we have come to accept as humanity. Does one protagonist truly become a tidal wave of eyes, or is that the only way we can perceive this from our distorted and unsustainable perch?

Weirding the Weird: The Double Negative of VanderMeer’s Borne

Jeff VanderMeer followed up his Southern Reach trilogy with the novel Borne in 2017. The events of Borne take place in the near future, a dystopian future where the protagonist Rachel and her parents were refugees cast adrift like flotsam on waves roiled by wars and political turmoil. That pessimistic but realistic prognostication is already in the past by the time the events of the novel take place. The immediate locale Rachel inhabits is purely weird, the result of the global dystopia coupled to the repercussions of the Company, which through biotech has created a bestiary of strange creatures, drugs, and artifacts. There are neuro-spiders employed as weapons, gangs of morphed children with wings, claws, and fangs, and the giant flying bear, Mord, who terrorizes the city. This is the locale that Rachel now inhabits. She was thrown into this city and has had to learn new skills, acquire new knowledge, if she is to survive.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this environment is the giant flying bear, Mord, who constitutes a weird landscape in and of himself. Indeed, the concept of Mord as landscape is established at the outset of the novel. Mord is truly gigantic, able to carelessly level buildings with a shrug, essentially unknowable but also an invitation for exploration, and the novel opens with Rachel having performed a scavenging expedition on Mord. Such expeditions are worthwhile because Mord’s lair is in the hollowed-out Company building; as a result, he accumulates all sorts of strange items in his tangled fur—food, dead creatures, and biotech—each day bringing a new supply, a bounty for those brave enough to scale his flanks. The existence of Mord reminds us of Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum that a sufficiently advanced science will be indistinguishable from magic. Much of the biotech in the novel, the other creatures no matter how strange, seem possible from the vantage point of an advanced science. Mord slams us up against the impossible—how does one have a creature so vast that it should crumble under it’s own weight, and moreover that can fly without visible means—ricocheting us between the magic of a surreal fantasy and a science beyond our comprehension. This tension between possible interpretations is heightened by one of the characters, even though steeped in biotech, being called the Magician. This tension also moves us out of the comfort of science fiction, with its rationalistic worldview, into a world that is thoroughly disconcerting.

There is a clear sense of transition in Rachel’s memories for how she came to be in this world, a spatial and a temporal disjunction. She entered into the city almost as if through a magic door, leaving behind the human-made hell of war, disease, starvation, refugee camps, and betrayal to enter into the weird: “My last memories from before the city were of floods and makeshift rafts and the expanding silence of people dead or dying in the water—and a hint of land on the horizon. My last memories were of going down for a second, third time, my lungs full of mud. But when I came to, I was in the city, walking. I was walking through the city as if I had always been there.” Rachel has lost her parents and the transient homes they clung to. She has been born anew into a weirded city, an evil locale, one in which the dystopia she inhabited as a girl achieves the distinction of nostalgia. In doing so, she has also lost a chunk of time from her memory; she is now a young woman but she came to the city as a girl.

Rachel combines knowingness and innocence, characteristics in keeping but also telling about the weird environment she inhabits. She has the seasoned abilities of someone who learned hard lessons in brutal environments, both in the world she left behind and in the weirded city she now inhabits. She is an adept scavenger in the ruins of the city, of Mord, and she also knows well the dangers these hold, including the danger in trusting others, a trust she withholds even from her lover Wick. Nevertheless, her cynical caution is balanced by the desire to love, to care for others, and into this conflict of will and desire appears the strange creature Borne.

Borne weirds the weird, being stranger and less predictable than anything Rachel has encountered before in this city. It is no coincidence that Borne is discovered in a scavenging expedition into the weird landscape of Mord. The relationship between Rachel and Borne recalls other encounters between children and the alien, as found in Spielberg’s movie ET with its extraterrestrial visitor, in E. Nesbit’s novel Five Children and It with the snail-eyed Psammead, and in Barbara Euphan Todd novels featuring the animated scarecrow Worzel Gummidge, whose actions entangle his young friends in trouble. In all these cases, the protagonist encounters something outside their mundane world, and whose powers are not yet clear but are disruptive to the world they have known. But, unlike those examples, here the protagonist is older and sexually aware. Such elements were never part of traditional literature where, even if the protagonists had achieved puberty, the story elements were chaste. Furthermore, Rachel’s relationship to Borne changes dramatically throughout the novel, for Borne is itself changing both physically and mentally, her relationship with Borne transitioning from that with a houseplant, to a fish, to a dog or cat, to a child. But just as clearly, we have the sense that the existence of Borne will disrupt the world into which Rachel has been thrown, that the double-negative of weirding the weird might prove beneficial.

Of particular significance is that the weird world found in Borne does not derive from ancient gods or extraterrestrials. Both worlds found in the novel were created by humans, one with the mundane horrors that originate from humankind acting at its worst, the other due to humans having created something incompatible and poisonous to themselves. If anything this is a poisoning of the Present by the Future: “…the wrenching dislocation of trying to make two separate worlds match up, the one that was normal and the one that was grotesque, the old and the new—the struggle to make the mundane and the impossible coexist…” One might also see this as a weird echo of William Gibson’s maxim about the future being already here, but not evenly distributed.

But, as with The Southern Reach trilogy, Borne does not render a verdict on these two worlds as being a simple case of good versus evil, that the weird is innately evil and should be destroyed. The danger, the evil, is in the use of power, not simply the abuse of power, just its use, coupled to the ability and desire to use these items as weapons. As Rachel says, “All I wanted is for there to be no great power in the City at all.” Indeed, the novel suggests the possibility of a synthesis such that the two worlds can coexist without deadly effect. In this respect, one can return to the metaphor of the weird as a disease that infects or poisons our reality. Only maladapted viruses exhibit a high lethality, for such lethality is detrimental to both the host and the virus; this is why highly lethal epidemics often burn themselves out without spreading far. Co-existence, reduced lethality, can benefit both the host and the infecting agent, for our world and the weird.

Conclusion

Writing an essay is much like a journey—an essay about the weird landscape perhaps even more so than usual—in that you start off with some concept of the itinerary and destination but the joy comes in the experience itself, the details you discover along the way. Here I’ve explored fictions that embody Machen’s concept that Evil can be considered a poisoning, an infection that is manifested by changes in the landscape, his century-old story “The White People” defining some of the features we find reiterated in later stories. Fiction is not static, of course, and each author brings their own vision and concerns to this enterprise, these reflecting the cultures in which they live and resulting in the ever-shifting environments we experience as readers.

Reflecting on these stories, on this journey, I find that the most profound changes have to do with the nature of the Evil the authors find invested in the landscape. I titled this essay, “The Weird Landscape as an Avatar of Evil,” using the term avatar in its broadest sense, in which it simply refers to the manifestation of a concept. In its original use, however, avatar referred to how a Hindu deity such as Vishnu manifested himself on earth. This concept is close to how Machen and other early practitioners of the weird made use of the landscape, linking its evil to non-Christian deities. Machen explicitly explored the conflict between early paganism and modern Christianity. Hodgson and Moore also made use of supernatural deities, although they incorporated elements of their own devising, not restricting themselves to the gods of established religions.

Lovecraft’s influential contribution to the weird landscape is to shift the concept of Evil away from gods and into the realm of science fiction. The alien monstrosities of his Cthulhu mythos are a small step in this direction, they being pagan gods in all but name. Not unlike Pan in Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” Lovecraft’s creations are chimeric amalgams of animal parts, have superhuman powers, are capable of inseminating humans, and inspire madness in those who come to understand their reality. More significant from a modern perspective is his story “The Colour Out of Space,” in which the alien is truly alien and its mere existence is destructive to humans. Lovecraft’s colourful alien, like that in St. Claire’s later story “Child of Void,” is reminiscent of the Aesop fable in which a frog swims across a river ferrying a scorpion on its back; the scorpion stings the frog even though it means both their deaths, doing so simply “because it’s my nature.” Frogs and scorpions, humans and aliens: these are natural pairings, but the later may poison the former.

At its most basic level, science fiction implies a rationalistic viewpoint of the world, one in which even the strangest phenomena have an explanation. The uncertainties of the modern world suggest that such a viewpoint is overly optimistic, that satisfactory answers may never be forthcoming. Although Ballard’s The Crystal World may echo aspects of Lovecraft’s landscape, the causal agency behind the crystallization process is never fully clarified. Similarly, scientific explanations are suggested for how VanderMeer’s Area X popped into existence, but these are not highlighted in the same manner as might be expected in a traditional SF novel. VanderMeer’s Borne also contains elements that are discordant with current scientific understanding, this being part of what gives the landscape its unsettling weirdness.

Furthermore, when it comes to deciphering the ultimate source of evil, such answers are now as likely to implicate humans as malevolent aliens. Walt Kelly popularized the Earth Day slogan “We have met the enemy and he is us,” in his comic strip Pogo over forty-five years ago, a potent ecological reminder that we humans don’t need an outside agency to poison ourselves. That concern is now more relevant than ever. Ellison, in “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” explored the concept as to how our computers could assume a poisonous intelligence. VanderMeer fully embraces ecological concerns. His Southern Reach trilogy serves as a pointed reminder as to how, due to our having ravaged Earth, the appearance of an unspoiled Eden is now poisonous to us. More recently, VanderMeer considers the dangers of rampant biotech in the decimated world of Borne. If anything, a century’s worth of differing takes on the weird environment point to the varied goals for which it can be employed, its recent use in interrogating ecological and environmental themes seeming a natural but still underexplored avenue.

On any journey, there are glimpses of other locales, of alternate routes, these tempting you from your chosen path in spite of the knowledge that such indiscriminate journeying may become a maze with no exit. And so, a few final thoughts on those roads not taken, my hope being that these may inspire explorations by fellow travelers. First, although I had initiated my study of the weird landscape based on motifs suggested by Machen’s “The White People,” I was surprised at some unanticipated mechanisms by which the world could be weirded. Of particular note are strange seemingly-impossible mirrorings, best described by Einstein’s phrase “spooky action at a distance.” This refers to the concept that objects, even though far apart in space, perhaps a universe apart, can still affect each other through quantum entanglement. The crystallization of earth in Ballard’s The Crystal World is apparently due to some process occurring in the Andromeda spiral. Area X in VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy exhibits qualities that suggest a similar mechanism behind its manifestation. William Hope Hodgson recognized the disconcerting effect of having a gargantuan mirroring of his protagonist’s house across space and time in The House on the Borderland, doing so long before physicists proffered a possible mechanism by which this could occur.

Second, although the tropes of the haunted house story have become so engrained as to be clichéd, many of the best harken back to the precepts outlined by Machen for how the landscape can reveal evil. Here, the landscape is the house itself, setting it off from the healthy world outside its walls. The morbid history of the house, its unquiet ghosts, are poisonings out of time, ready to infect and destroy those who take up residence within. In stories as varied and potent as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and Kelly Link’s “The Specialist’s Hat,” we find strange geometries, discontinuities between the expected and the actual structure, an increasingly confused sense of place, of time, one that grows ever more disconcerting as the tale progresses…

But, third, why halt with a single house, for what is a house but one element in a town or a city? Machen’s thoughts on the weird landscape were focused on how the natural world, its flora and fauna, was rendered unnatural so as to reveal evil. But this has only a minimal relationship to human distortions of the natural, the aberrant constructs we call houses and, in their aggregate, towns and cities. What about the urban weird? Locales that come to mind are Lovecraft’s Arkham as well as Samuel R. Delany’s Bellona from Dhalgren. Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, Neil Gaiman’s London Below, and Brigadoon might also fit the bill. As might television’s Twin Peaks, Washington and Eerie, Indiana.

Fourth, and lastly—to all those who followed this journey and who now, setting aside any warnings about inherent dangers, equipped with nothing but curiosity and a knapsack glutted with books, following their own whims and predilections, to all those who now embark on their own explorations of the weird landscape—Bon voyage!

Recommended Readings

Michel Bernanos, “The Other Side of the Mountain,” in which the French love for the surreal is married to landscape.*

Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows,” in which wind, sand, and willows transition from the natural to the unnatural.*

Leonora Carrington, “White Rabbits,” in which the weird takes up residence on a New York street.*

Angela Carter, “Master,” in which a hunter meets the old gods of the New World.

Ralph Adams Cram, “The Dead Valley,” in which meteorology is just as significant as the Pit.

Thomas Disch, The Genocides, in which humankind takes refuge in a garden.

Harlan Ellison, “Jeffty is Five,” in which the Present poisons the Past.

William Hope Hodgson, “The Voice in the Night” and “The Derelict,” in which sea travel leads to encounters with fungoid weirdness.

Thomas Ligotti, “The Strange Design of Master Rignolo,” in which spooky action at a distance creates a work of naturalistic art that has mortal implications.

Kelly Link, “The Hortlak,” in which the Pit is located next to a convenience store.

Yann Martel, The Life of Pi, in which a floating island in the Pacific transforms an oceanic adventure story into something more.

Mary Rickert. “The Mothers of Voorhisville,” in which the weird fauna are our children.

Clark Ashton Smith, “Genius Loci,” in which the significance of landscape is emphasized by the title,* and “The Ninth Skeleton,” in which the Boulder Ridge of Smith’s native California is transformed.

* anthologized in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, eds., Tor Books, 2011

Acknowledgements

I thank the 2017 Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird, that occurred in Atlanta, Georgia, for the inspiration and discussions that inspired this piece. I also thank Daniel Braum, Ramsey Campbell, Matthew Cheney, Barry Lee Dejasu, James Everington, Jeffrey Ford, John Glover, Blaine Stevens, and Chad Woody, who responded to an open invitation to recommend their favorite weird landscapes in literature; I have included those that most resonated with Machen’s concept about the intrusion of the weird landscape into our known world in these Recommended Readings. The quotes from C. L. Moore’s letters are from Letters of H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to C. L. Moore and Others, 2017, David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi, eds., Hippocampus Press, New York.

Images

Aubrey Beardsley, cover image for 1894 Machen collection The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light.

W. Otway Cannell, 1921 edition cover to The House on the Borderland.

Wenzel Jamnitzer, 1568, from Perspective of Regular Solids

Frantisek Kupka, 1903, The Black Idol

Joan Miró, 1922, The Farm

Gerardo Dottori, 1919, Forze ascensionali

Joseph Leidy, 1879, Amoeba proteus, from Fresh-Water Rhizopods of North America

Ernst Haeckel, 1904, Lichen lithograph.

Artist unknown, 1760, from Alchemical and Rosicrucian Compendium.

The post From Machen to VanderMeer: The Weird Landscape as the Avatar of Evil appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

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

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

***

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

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

- Eugène Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal

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

The Story

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

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

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

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

The Ritualistic Politics of a Skeleton Town 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Horror Hilarity

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

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

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

Illustration by Jason Van Hollander for Weird Tales #333

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illustration by Jason Van Hollander for Weird Tales #333

Degeneration of Landscape, Degeneration of Self

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

____

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

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

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

[4] Ibid., 31.

[5] Ibid., 27.

[6] Ibid., 27

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 25.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 29.

[11] Ibid., 31.

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

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

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

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

[16] Ibid., 34.

[17] Ibid., 34–35.

[18] Ibid., 35.

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

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

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

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

[23] Ibid., 26.

[24] Ibid.

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

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

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid., 30.

[29] Ibid., 36.

[30] Ibid., 38.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

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

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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.

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