Mandrake gestures hypnotically…

I. A Phone

The current success–critical, commercial, and on its own esthetic terms–of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy necessitates a shift in the way we regard Weird Fiction as a medium. Although H.P. Lovecraft presented a rather broad view of the Weird Tale in his 1927 study “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, and traced its origins to the Gothic novels of the eighteenth century, by the time of S.T. Joshi’s seminal 1990 study of Lovecraft’s antecedents, The Weird Tale, the identification of The Weird as largely a creature of short fiction, thriving best in an ecosystem whose apex predator is the novella, hovered somewhere between accepted truism and cliché. The Weird Tale was precisely that: a conte, not a roman. Certainly this perception stems in part from a fixation on Lovecraft and the Weird Tales “Circle” as starting point or bottleneck for the Weird Tale, yet most of the reasons proposed for this limitation evaporate in historical context. David Davis recently published an excellent overview of Weird novels in which he rightfully cited such early examples as Kubin’s Die andere Seite and Meyrink’s Der Golem. Let us sail quickly back over the territory Davis mapped, visiting a few additional islands and drawing certain conclusions about the undersea geology that unites these isolated outcrops in the archipelago of The Weird.

Davis also cites The House on the Borderland, and rightfully so, as it is when one considers William Hope Hodgson, the accepted hegemony of the short story in The Weird begins to dissipate. Between 1907 and 1912, Hodgson published four novels, three of which–The House on the Borderland, The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”, and The Night Land–are critical exemplars of The Weird. Each is also a masterpiece of sustained dread. Alas, Hodgson perished in 1918, a victim of the First World War like so many promising artists of his time. Had he lived longer, and his works not fallen into obscurity, the lineage of The Weird might be traced through Hodgson rather than Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s work contains little that is not in Hodgson’s, though it could be argued that Hodgson’s explicit insistence on the existence of the soul actually makes his vision of cosmic horror less visionary and “pure” than Lovecraft’s. It is difficult however, to question Hodgson’s overall importance to Weird Fiction today, long in coming as it may have been.

Tracing the “development” of the Weird Fiction novel directly from these antecedents remains a challenge. Weird novels of the last century resemble a set of irregularly spaced stepping stones rather than any continuous lineage. Davis mentions Kafka, whose novels only appeared posthumously, in the mid-1920s. E. H. Visiak’s Medusa: A Story of Mystery (1929) deserves inclusion as well, but it remains even more obscure than Hodgson’s work. The 1930s offer scant pickings, but Amos Tutuola begins to publish in the 1940s, and Jean Ray’s masterpiece Malpertuis debuted in 1943, though it too received little attention until Raymond Queneau began to champion it a decade later.

Yet by the 1940s, Noir–arguably The Weird’s younger sister–had already made the leap into longer narrative forms, first the novel, and beginning with The Maltese Falcon in 1941, cinema as well. It is interesting that the works of Dashiell Hammett essentially provide the starting point for Noir in both short and long fiction, as well as in the cinema. No single author of Weird Fiction achieved so decisive an impact, not even Lovecraft. Moreover, while the major Weird novels were often published posthumously, or rarely received recognition during an author’s lifetime, major Noir novelists such as Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain enjoyed commercial success.

Davis also places Philip K. Dick’s 1969 novel UBIK in the context of The Weird, and among Dick’s contemporaries in science fiction James Tiptree/Alice Sheldon, Stanislaw Lem, and J.G. Ballard equally deserve inclusion for certain works, if not all novels. If I take any major exception to Davis’ list, however, it is the omission of the 1977 novel Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber, more or less a contemporary of Dick. Both authors appeared in Dangerous Visions, along with Ballard, and Tiptree appeared in Again Dangerous Visions. I know I am not alone in considering Our Lady of Darkness the finest Weird novel of the last century at least, and in its evocation of an urban Weird, it served as the culmination of the direction in which Leiber had been moving since his celebrated 1941 story “Smoke Ghost”. Regardless of whether Leiber’s work with urban settings served as a genuine influence on VanderMeer or any of the other writers associated with the New Weird, it does represent an essential step in that direction. Stephen King’s The Shining appeared the same year, and a case can be made for its intrinsic Weirdness as well, though its success came under the banner of mainstream horror.

Several key Weird novels followed about a decade later: John Shirley’s In Darkness Waiting (1988), Kathe Koja’s debut novel The Cipher (1991), and Marc Laidlaw’s The 37^th Mandala (1996). The opening chapter of the last is an especial masterpiece. The effects of subterranean fermentation begin to show.

Up until this point tracing any lineages through the scatter of Weird novels remains difficult. There are some connections: Shirley and Laidlaw share common roots in cyberpunk, and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House echoes distinctly down the line in both The Shining and in Caitlin R. Kiernan’s The Red Tree (2009). However, this apparent insularity of The Weird in the novel medium vanishes upon recognition that Weird novels are really the fruiting bodies of an extensive mycelium of short fiction that spent the last century spreading and adapting right beneath our feet. Then at the fin de siècle the Weird novel bursts forth in the peculiar fruit known as the New Weird, commencing with Jeff VanderMeer’s first novel, Draden, In Love in 1996, and China Miéville’s King Rat two years later. From the start, the New Weird has shown no fear of the novel, and here the Weird novel begins to form its first expanding fairy ring.

The New Weird’s circle of hybrid and exotic boletes grew quickly too amorphous to define, and any literary movement was essentially over by the time it was named. But first simultaneous with the New Weird’s expansion, then in some cases preceding it, and finally in its wake, a new series of Weird novelists began to pop up all across the meadow, following no pattern in their placement, but drawing in general on earlier expressions of cosmic horror. These authors include Michael Shea, Lucius Shepard, Lewis Shiner, Jeffrey Ford, the aforementioned Caitlin R. Kiernan, Michael Cisco, Brian Evenson, and Laird Barron.

Thus begins the Weird Renaissance–behold the plethora! More and better Weird Fiction writers are working at all lengths right now than ever before.

II. A Mouse

A second axiom of The Weird regards the limited size of its audience, usually identified as in the high three-digit range or just beyond the cusp of four on a good day. Such estimates obviously have much to do with small press sales figures and attendance at convention events. Miéville was able to escape these limits somewhat by incorporating tropes from science fiction/steampunk and fantasy and marketing to a general genre audience, but until recently other authors struggled to experience similar crossover success.

Markets change with almost every generation. Consider Shakespeare. The brief and brilliant florescence of the Elizabethan theater actually bracketed the famous Bard’s lifespan: 1564–1616 for Shakespeare, 1562–1648 for the theater as he knew it. Had he been born a generation earlier or lived that much later, he might have been forced to labor in another medium, perhaps less prominently, and his work never spread throughout the British Empire as a foundation of the English language. He could not have become a novelist: the novel did not take hold in England until a century after Shakespeare’s death. Poetry alone could never have paid his bills the way theater did at the Globe.

Pulp magazines originated toward the end of the Nineteenth Century, the successor to dime novels and penny dreadfuls. At their peak in the 1920s and ‘30s, some sold as much as one million copies per issue, and many paid rates beyond even what most genre authors receive today. The death of H.P. Lovecraft in 1937 coincided with the decline of the pulps, and by the mid-1950s they were gone.

With the demise of the pulp market, genre fiction migrated to digest-sized magazines and cheap paperbacks. Science fiction and Noir thrived in these media, as did horror and fantasy to a lesser extent. Weird Tales failed to make the transition to the new format and ceased publication in 1954. Weird Fiction, which had never achieved a distinct genre categorization, now lived only in the shadows of the other genres, analogous to early mammals of the Cretaceous, with Arkham House the flickering volcanic beacon at which the flame was relit time and again.

For at least a generation the gene pool of The Weird remained the province of these small scuttling creatures, with occasional viral intrusions into longer works in other genres. Had it made the leap into the novel prior to World War II, history might be different. A definite springboard had existed: all of Hammett’s novels first appeared as serials in the pulp magazine Black Mask prior to hardcover publication. But whether due to editorial policy or writers’ predilections, the Weird stayed small.

But the sea change came, arguably washed in on the wave of the Internet, which burst into households during the mid-1990s. Cult authors suddenly found their cults expanding. Noir authors like James Ellroy, Walter Mosley, and Dennis Lehane bootstrapped into the mainstream. Weird Fiction became a topic of interest, and at last it did so by that name. The small press market expanded. New writers of the Weird arose, each of them claiming that much more turf. The Weird began to lurk just beyond large scale recognition…

III. A Newfound Door

Despite the proliferation of The Weird over the last two decades–and growing awareness of the Weird Tale and Weird Fiction as literary categories–the form has continued to strain against its own glass ceiling.

Until now.

Jeff VanderMeer exploded these preconceptions with Southern Reach. With these three novels, or one long novel in three parts, VanderMeer brought The Weird to public awareness…and in multiple countries and multiple languages. Even if the public doesn’t know what hit it yet, it has been hit. With Southern Reach, The Weird has at last achieved critical mass.

Several features of VanderMeer’s trilogy deserve special attention:

First of all, it offers a Lovecraft-free path to the True Weird. Lovecraft’s legacy has grown problematic, and even disregarding the controversy his ultra-racist political views have inevitably generated, his name evokes role-playing games, plush toys, and tentacle porn as much or more than tales of cosmic horror. The author’s own tropes have subsumed his work. Although many critics invoked Lovecraft’s name in some sort of lazy shorthand in reviews of Annihilation, the first Southern Reach novel, VanderMeer had already disavowed Lovecraft as an influence.

Secondly, Southern Reach represents a synthesis of access routes to The Weird, combining and transcending both the New Weird and more conventional approaches. Its real world setting makes it accessible in ways that even Miéville’s early novels are not

Finally, the publication of the trilogy by a major publishing house, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, was inherently game-changing, and their decision to release all three books across the span of only half a year was unprecedented, drawing favorable attention in itself. The medium, once more, is the message…

The timing of Southern Reach created a synergy with the eight-part TV mini-series True Detective, which borrowed from Robert Chambers, Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron, and other Weird authors, and drove up interest in Weird Fiction (Tom Lynch, the publisher of Miskatonic River Press, told me that coincident with the increasing references on True Detective to the King in Yellow, Carcosa, and other elements of Chambers’ work, sales of the Joseph S. Pulver edited Chambers tribute anthology A Season in Carcosa shot up from single digits to double digits to over 500 copies in just one month [personal communication 2014]).

Southern Reach and True Detective brought new readers to The Weird. Some of them will stay, and they will stay hungry for more. Who will feed them?

A third major prong of this advance rests with Joe R. Lansdale, whose novel Cold in July has been adapted to film and is making the rounds of festivals to a strong critical reception. Though Cold in July is strictly Noir with no Weird elements, it has made Lansdale a deservedly hot property in Hollywood, with another film and a TV series already in the works. If Hollywood digs into Lansdale’s oeuvre to any depth, The Weird will also emerge (as will Bizarro, The Weird’s other younger sister, if anyone tackles a film of The Drive-In or its sequels).

The membrane between Noir and The Weird is thin. Jim Thompson, one of the great authors from the second era of Noir (the postwar era when paperbacks replaced the pulp magazines as the primary market for genre authors) wrote: “There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot–things are not as they seem.”

Thompson gave us here the perfect instrument not only for understanding both Noir and The Weird, but for comparing the two and recognizing them not as discrete genres, but as different quantum levels of the same literary impulse. In Noir, the revelation of how things really are usually involves the epiphany or discovery of a brutal truth about one [or more] character’s personal relationships and/or the larger sociopolitical structure in which the protagonist operates. Although the protagonist is sometimes the agent by which that truth is revealed, the revelation is often tragic in nature, and the protagonist is frequently destroyed by it. Noir is an American tragic vision equivalent in scope and literary merit to tragedy in the Elizabethan theater.

The Weird operates the same way, only here the Thompsonian revelation occurs not on a personal and/or sociopolitical level, but on the cosmic scale. In its broadest form, it is a revelation of the universe’s indifference to humanity and/or of the presence of things previously unsuspected that take an unwholesome interest in humanity. Now this cosmic revelation may be initiated by a noir revelation, in the same way that an atomic bomb serves as the trigger for a hydrogen bomb, but just as with the H‑bomb, it is the terminal revelation that is definitive.

Which is also an excellent description of Southern Reach. The Weird has arrived full force in the novel, and may be headed for film. Paramount Pictures bought the rights for the trilogy, and a screenplay for Annihilation is already in the works.

The Weird is the new Noir.

The post The Expanding Borders of Area X appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Both works use it and deal with it, but where Danielewski metaphorizes it in an object (a book), VanderMeer remarkably refuses to do the same. VanderMeer, on the contrary, leaves fiction be as a “state” experienced both by the characters and the readers. Fiction in the “Southern Reach” is the very fabric of the novel. In a way, one could say, that is the visible fabric of the invisible fabric, and vice-versa – as, like Area X, its borders are uncertain and keep expanding.

This trilogy appears at a very important time, when academics from all sides try to define “Fiction”, “Fictionality” and “Genre”. This desperate need to control an ever-fleeing territory is beautifully illustrated in “The Southern Reach” by the generic names of the characters – the biologist, the psychologist, Control, etc. – and the impossibility of their task.

What makes things interesting regarding Fiction is that the purpose of the tasks given to each character goes directly against the overall mission, which is to “understand” Area X. The vagueness of each mission, as well as their results, the strange consequences, the paranoid secrecy destroy any gain that could come out of these expeditions. In a way, like with the old Lovecraftian trope, trying to read “Area X” will make you go insane, as with the Necronomicon.

But although the Lovecraftian element is there – especially if one thinks of “The Colour Out of Space” – there is absolutely no mystique in “The Southern Reach”, no old gods or secret rites. Although it might sound unimportant, I think, on the contrary, that it is essential. The “Southern Reach” is not about beliefs, nor does it offer a new mythical explanation of everything – it is, only and solely, about “Area X”, which is precisely the ultimate non-explanation. Or rather – although there is an explanation – it doesn’t change anything.

And this is radically new – it places The Southern Reach in a no-place, that is to say in-between genres and Fiction categorizations, like Kafka, Borges and Burroughs. It is, therefore, purely literature and purely Fiction – an “Area X” in itself. It is a radical attempt and success in re-shuffling the old literary cards and inventing new rules. What we need now is to invent new names for the game – or do we, really?

The post The Southern Reach Trilogy and the Question of Fiction appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Weird Fiction Review: I feel like Southern Reach really pushes the boundaries of weird fiction into new territory in a number of ways. Was that something you consciously tried to do with Southern Reach?

Jeff VanderMeer: I don’t know that weird fiction per se is known for characterization in the traditional sense, but for me the best weird tales are populated by interesting eccentrics and ne’er-do-wells who you’re interested in following as they encounter the unknown. So the first part of the answer to your question is that my first commandment was “follow the characters” and get their arcs right. I felt like the clues and revelations about the central uncanny mystery would fall into place as a result of that focus.

But there’s also no doubt that coediting the massive The Weird anthology with my wife Ann created a substrate of over a hundred years of peculiar fiction in the back of my reptile brain. Something about the speed with which we had to put the book together and read so many stories meant a lot of things got assimilated swiftly.

Added to that is the personal connection to the landscapes the characters move through, the wilderness I feel I know now to some degree. So in a round-about way, my answer is that I didn’t consciously try to push boundaries but that all of these influences came together in a natural confluence and out through the writing. Still, it’s true that I wanted to write something that didn’t bore me and wasn’t like something I’d read a thousand times before. So in terms of the pacing and editing of scenes and sections I was engaging in a form of play—playing off of the fiction I’ve read and reader expectations.

WFR: Southern Reach has been given various different labels. Most commonly, it seems like people describe it as science fiction but it’s also been described as speculative fiction, weird fiction, and just general fiction. How do you tend to describe the Southern Reach yourself? Do you still even think of it as weird fiction?

JV: This is a difficult question and one that, to me, is all in the eye of the beholder. When I think of the trilogy I think about the characters and the wilderness aspects—the aspects of expedition, and what that word means. Then I think in a secondary way about the weird fiction aspects, and then the SF elements. There’s a practical concern in all of this too. What do you spend the most time with as a writer? First the characters, then getting aspects of the weird affect correct. Last comes the SF element because that’s only on the page a small percentage of the time. It’s not that the SF element isn’t important, just that there are so many other places you spend your effort and attention as a writer. Now, for readers, the answers may be as various, but I don’t presume to speak for them. I will say, however, that FSG Originals made the entry point for readers as gentle and as wide as possible with those incredible covers and the marketing and PR for the books. You’d think that would just be about crass commercial issues but it’s really about the reading experience and how the reader perceives a book and their challenge was ensuring that a reader who might like the novels but not typically pick up SF would in fact take a chance on the novels.

WFR: Were there any science fiction works that influenced the Southern Reach? And do you think that reading works outside of weird fiction in other genres, etc. can help writers create better weird fiction?

JV: Any writer is better off reading voraciously and across all kinds of fiction. The more curious you are and the more wide-ranging, the more you bring back to your fiction. I’ve mostly read mainstream literary fiction the past couple of years and in the past binged on space opera and on experimental fiction and I love all of it. There’s very little I don’t like if it’s done well or in an interesting way.

In terms of science fiction, it is probably mostly on the weird side of things. For example, Hodgson’s House on the Borderlands, which holds up even today. Also “The Other Side of the Mountain” by Bernanos, a short novel in The Weird. The works of Jodorowsky are hugely influential as well as the fiction and art of Leonora Carrington. Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, which has three interlocking but separate novellas also was very useful to have in the back of my head. The works of Angela Carter, Edward Whittemore, Vladimir Nabokov are always also in my mind. Stepan Chapman’s The Troika, which breaks every rule of fiction.

WFR: Do you think you’ll explore this sort of area along the fringes of weird fiction in future works?

JV: I’m sure I will. At the moment, I’m working on a novel called Borne that is perhaps less weird and more influenced by manga and anime, or some mix thereof. I’m also working on a short story that might get long entitled “The Birdwatchers” that’s set in the Southern Reach universe. Here’s the beginning of it, just as a teaser:

Once there had been biologists here, in numbers so great that the forgotten coast shook with the aftermath of their passage. These men and women bestrode the terrain like conquerors, sent by government money in the form, it was rumored, of gold bars well-hidden that could not devalue or decay like the money kept in banks. They were thus ungoverned by the dictates of barter or of neighborly responsibility that had bound this place for so long.

In the summer of that first year they established their headquarters in the ruins of the ghost town, a bivouac of scientists unprecedented for that place even when it had been alive. As they spread out across their migratory range, the biologists as observed by the locals began to carry out a series of arcane rituals. They shoved pieces of swamp grasses and bits of bark into vials. They put up tents out in “the field” as they called it, even when it was just black swamp. They used binoculars, scopes, and microscopes. They took readings with innumerable peculiar instruments. At times, they stopped in their labors to swear about the heat and humidity, which did not endear them.

The biologists tagged many living things—at least one of every creature that moved and breathed across the pine forests and the cypress swamp, the salt marshes and the beach. They took fine nylon nets and set up capture zones for songbirds, running clod-stepped to the rescue of what they had themselves endangered. Fragile wings and fragile beaks, heads to the side; small eyes looking up at giants that held their bodies in half-closed fists. They tagged so many things, had brought so many tranq darts, that the blue caps removed from the tips still showed up years later in the marshes, along the river bank or crushed into the gravel of the dirt roads.

In their heyday, at the zenith of their powers, some said their boot prints outnumbered the tracks of deer and raccoons and otters on the salt flats.

But over time, the effort that had quickened slowed, the impulse behind it dulled, and the biologists began to die out. Their mobile tents that had once dotted the camping ground near the lighthouse began to disappear. The sounds of their idle conversations before expeditions in the early morning became muted and infrequent. That last spring there might have been a hundred of them and by the fall only four or five. It was a mass extinction created by lack of grant renewal, a matching funds disaster, and a moving on of government attention, that great eye roving toward other lands and foreign wars.

WFR: At its core, the Southern Reach is a story about the search for knowledge. In the first book, the biologist is looking for answers as to what happened to her husband; in the second book, Control is trying to undercover the secrets behind Area X and the Southern Reach; and so forth. In this respect, it’s reminiscent of works like Goethe’s Faust and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand.” Did other works or perhaps real-life events influence this theme?

JV: Aren’t we all seeking answers? To be glib for a second. But also serious. Part of the effect created by the weird is about seeking answers but not necessarily finding them. You could say the second half of that equation is just as much part of what the weird espouses. To be willing to say you don’t get all of the answers, ever. In that way, the weird is oddly aligned with certain forms of mainstream literary fiction where the story has an open kind of ending. Yes, some weird fiction ends with a twist or a full-on revelation. But the best stuff keeps open the blissful possibility of never knowing everything. We are defined in a sense by our inquisitiveness, and with inquisitiveness comes the arrogance that we are in control and thus have achieve peace of mind through knowledge. Whereas writers have been telling us for ages that’s a false comfort. At some point, the universe reveals itself to you as uncaring and your place in it none too secure. Which is just fine. There’s comfort in that, too, because it’s the truth.

WFR: Have you gotten any indication that Southern Reach might be helping to boost weird fiction readership and might be exposing readers to weird fiction that haven’t read it before?

JV: It’s really hard to quantify. I do know I’m getting a lot of “I don’t usually read SF/horror/fantasy but liked this” reactions. I certainly hope it makes readers pick up more weird fiction. I think it’s a category that’s definitely got affinities with writers who read in the general fiction category can get on board with—they mostly know Kafka and Borges and writers like that. And it’s not at all far into weird territory from there. And, again, I feel like publishers being smart about how they package and market weird fiction is half the battle. If you put a book cover in front of a general reader that screams “messed up” that’s going to turn them off. It’s as simple as that. No amount of saying “yes but that shouldn’t matter” is going to help you. It’s one of those useless territorial battles to say “I must define this as core SF/F/Horror or I’m betraying my ideals.” Instead, it’s better to listen to readers and to speak to them in their language, not impose yours. The fiction itself is still the same.

WFR: Looking back, what were some of your favorite weird fiction elements that you included into Southern Reach?

JV: I’ll try not to spoil too much, but simply point to these elements: hand-hair, mountain moving, weird wall, mound of journals, smashed mosquito, and cell phone.

WFR: Tell us about the new Area X omnibus. Is the text revised? Who did the cover design for this book?

JV: I did cut about three pages from Authority and trim some other sections a tad in anticipation of a continuous read from those who pick up the omnibus. I also altered just a couple of little things in Annihilation and Acceptance for continuity reasons. Rodrigo Corral did the cover design.

WFR: With the success of Southern Reach, do you plan to devote more time toward writing?

JV: I’ve been a full-time writer since 2007, but that has included books I’ve edited being part of the equation, as well as nonfiction. I don’t think that’s going to change. Fiction is my first love—the most personal thing to me—but all evidence to the contrary I’m a fairly slow writer and need other projects in between to keep me stimulated. So expect The Big Book of SF, another big anthology, co-edited with Ann, and a new coffee table book in the mix along with the next novel. All of this feeds into the fiction anyway.

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