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

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

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

— Christopher Burke, editor of 101 Weird Writers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And also, for some reason, cats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetries of the Weird: Hagiwara’s Modanizumu Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concluding Thoughts: Toward A Weird Poetry

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Rotten-Smelling Man” and “Voom” by Michael Bukowski

Margaret St. Clair seems poised on the edge of rediscovery. Certainly few writers in speculative fiction are more deserving of a revival—or more undeservedly neglected. I know I am not alone in thinking this way, as the VanderMeers included her work in both The Weird and the forthcoming The Big Book of Science Fiction. She receives cover billing on the latter, sixth in a list of eleven, above Philip K. Dick, Ted Chiang, and other brighter draws. Since she is hardly well enough known to serve as a draw, one might interpret their editorial intent as an effort to reestablish her name, half a century past her heyday. Perhaps the revival has already begun.

Who was Margaret St. Clair? The available details of her biography provide barely more than an outline. Feminist, Wiccan, she wrote and published freely in the postwar era, which was very much a man’s world. She employed two pseudonyms, Idris Seabright and Wilton Hazzard, but the first is obviously feminine and she rarely used the latter. She is most often remembered today for two stories: the oft-anthologized “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles,” easily the best Dunsany pastiche ever, and “Brenda.”

“Brenda” is a story in the long lineage of muck men and swamp monsters, which runs back as far as H.R. Wakefield’s 1928 “The Red Lodge,” but explodes after Theodore Sturgeon’s “It” in 1940. “It” is the cousin of Joseph Payne Brennan’s “Slime” (Stories from the Borderland #1) and the immediate ancestor of “The Heap.” Heap in turn inspired Swamp Thing, Man-Thing, Bugs Bunny’s interesting nemesis Gossamer, and at least a dozen others. My personal favorite appeared in the fifth issue of the original MAD comic magazine in 1953, where the origin of Heap provides the parody within a parody of the old radio series Inner Sanctum.

“Brenda” focuses not so much on its muck man however, as on its titular character, a young girl nearly as singular and unpleasant as the foul-smelling creature she encounters in the woods. It’s a good story, one of St. Clair’s creepier works, and definitely weird, but the reason it is well remembered is it was adapted for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery in 1971. One of the weirder and more memorable episodes, in fact, if not up to the iconic status of “The Caterpillar.”

Michael Bukowski, my partner in this project, found so much inspiration in St. Clair’s work that he felt compelled to offer two illustrations with this installment, so you can see an image of Brenda’s rotten-smelling man at his blog, along with a creature from the story that is our actual subject this week. If you have seen the Night Gallery episode, you will see that Michael chose to present the creature as he appears in the original story, a humanoid muck man, rather than the TV version, an amorphous and leafy swamp monster that defaults back to The Heap…and looks suspiciously like the basis for Sid and Marty Krofft’s Sigmund and the Sea Monsters two years later. But “Brenda” is only a prelim. Let us move on to this week’s main attraction.

A scene from The Night Gallery episode of “Brenda.” The TV version, an amorphous and leafy swamp monster, defaults back to The Heap.

Michael and I recently discussed how much we enjoy all the unexpected connections we encounter while researching the stories for this series. We approach most of these stories as relatively simple, pulpy, and isolated tales, and before we are done, we find them embedded in webs of references and relations. This has been a surprise for us as well as a reward.

Allusion comes immediate and explicit in “Horrer Howce,” right in the opening paragraph, as Dickson-Hawes, one of only two speaking characters in the story, first mentions Yeats by name then loosely quotes—or rather misquotes—“The Second Coming,” referencing a “monstrous beast” rather than a “rough beast.” The investor’s inspiration for this poetic outburst came from what he saw beyond a small panel in the wall, a “monstrous womb, alone on the seashore, slowly swelling.” The womb and whatever he saw emerge from it comprised one of Freeman’s under-development attractions for a nationwide series of horror houses Dickson-Hawes is planning.

I am tempted to consider this peephole vision of a faceless feminine form as another allusion, to Marcel Duchamp’s final masterpiece, Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage (for which I was once ejected by security from the Philadelphia Museum of Art after sneaking in to view while the exhibit was closed), but Duchamp’s assemblage made no public appearance until 1969, while St. Clair’s story first appeared in the July 1956 issue of Galaxy. Any resemblance must be coincidence unless she had some personal relationship with Duchamp. Possible, but in so far as I know, undocumented. Synchronicity is all. We run into a lot of that here too.

Dickson-Hawes decides to pass on this potential feature however, despite its obviously powerful effect on him, forcing Freeman to extend the tour to other projects, less polished and more…dangerous. Safety railings in Freeman’s funhouse attractions seem as scant as those in the Star Wars universe, and he feels the need to admonish his client multiple times to keep his voice down so as not to disturb the delicate “machinery” of the attractions. Freeman implies there have been “incidents” in the past.

“What happens if I keep leaning over? Or if I drop pebbles down on it?”

“It’ll come out at you.”

Weird Tales, March 1954, which included “Brenda.”

As the two men advance from “The Well” to the “Horrer Howce” their conversation reveals more of the economic dynamics between them. Despite his almost otherworldly skill with electronics: “Particularly radio and signaling devices. Relays. Communication problems, you might say,” Freeman is up against a wall. He has a “political past,” and Dickson-Hawes is his last potential buyer. A political past suggests Freeman ran afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee and found himself blackballed. The McCarthy hearings were barely two years concluded when St. Clair first published “Horrer Howce,” and the witch hunts still reverberated through the American psyche (the HUAC itself continued as a standing committee until 1975). To complicate Freeman’s position further, Dickson-Hawes is his only remaining potential buyer.

Much of St. Clair’s best work—and her weirdest work—engages in a potent critique of postwar American society, with an emphasis on the rampant consumer culture that took off during that era and has dominated our society ever since. In stories such as “Gnoles,” “Horrer Howce,” and “An Egg a Month From All Over,” she satirized the same mercantile values as the cable series Mad Men, but it is “Horrer Howce” that most simply and elegantly demonstrates how the crosshairs of political oppression and cutthroat capitalism can drive a person to open strange doors. She uses The Weird as a tool for social criticism in much the same way, and with the same targets, that Philip K. Dick would do a decade later in his own weird masterpiece The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

St. Clair began the story with a long finger pointed directly at “The Second Coming.” Returning to Yeats’ poem after one has read all of “Horrer Howce,” this couplet inevitably leaps out:

Mere Anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed

Whether or not Freeman makes his sale, doors are now open that should have stayed closed. But an entrepreneur with his special skills at “communication” can find customers on either side.

Please keep as quiet as possible as you go through this next door, where Michael Bukowski is waiting to introduce you to the Voom: http://yog-blogsoth.blogspot.com/2016/04/voom.html. Say hello, shake hands. You pays your money, you takes your chance.

The post “Horrer Howce” by Margaret St. Clair appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

This post is part of an ongoing series on 101 weird writers featured in The Weird compendium, the anthology that serves as the inspiration for this site. There is no ranking system; the order is determined by the schedule of posts.

Leonora Carrington (1912 — 2011) was a British-born Mexican surrealist painter. In addition to being an artist, she also wrote several novels and short stories. Her work was influenced by Max Ernst, who she met in 1937 and began living with in Paris. Ernst was arrested soon after the Nazi occupation of France as his art was deemed “degenerate”. Carrington fled to Spain and then later to New York. In 1941, while in New York City she published “White Rabbits” which was later included in The Weird.

After being granted asylum in Mexico, she resumed her work as a surrealist painter and writer. In 1963, she created a mural called El Mundo Magico de los Mayas, which, like much of her art, was influenced by local folk stories. It resides today at the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City. Carrington passed away in 2011 in Mexico City at the age of 94.

—David Davis

That’s my principal message to writers: for God’s sake, keep your eyes open.
William S. Burroughs, 1965

Metaphysics – I – The Surreal Image

Leonor Fini, La Gardienne des Sources (1967). Oil on canvas. Fig. 1.

What would you do if your eye was cut open? And what if your organ of sight, split in two, could still see – what if the first thing you saw was your eye’s distressing division? In surrealist art and literature, as in weird fiction more generally, the eye is a privileged site of conflict. The narrator of Leonora Carrington’s “White Rabbits” tells us that she can see anything in the gloom of Pest Street, the neighbourhood in which she lives. As she explains, “my eyes have always been excellent.”^[1] But the sights she sees are bewildering: tiny white teeth tearing apart rotting flesh; the human body, cloistered away and subject to leprosy; and then, in the story’s last, beautiful image, an apparition of a woman waving her hand over a gloomy balcony: “and as she waved it, her fingers fell off and dropped to the ground like shooting stars.”^[2] This is an important and transformative image. To recognize it as such, we will need to examine a brief history of ideas of severance and sight, and especially of how a perceived fissure or disconnection with the world one sees can prompt a reinvigorated sense of agency. Severance and sight are our guides to “White Rabbits” and to Carrington’s surrealist artist and metaphysical thinking.

Leonor Fini, Self Portrait (1968). Oil on canvas. Fig. 2.

Artistic representations of sight in traditions associated with surrealism are often startling. Just look at the work of Leonor Fini (1907–1996), the Argentine-born Italian feminist whose adolescent years were spent with her eyes wounded and bandaged, and whose friendship with Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst in the late 1930s was influential and important to all three artists. Spending her teenage years severed from the possibility of sight prepared Fini for an aesthetic that channels vision through blindness, which is to say that her art declares its interest in the insights of closed eyes and the declarative statements made by open sight, all of which are refracted through an erotic charge and a compelling palette of colours.

Following this interest, look at the eyes in Fini’s self-portrait, La Gardienne des Sources (1967) [Fig. 1]. These eyes meet those of the viewer in a direct line of sight. Despite their position at the side of the painting, they are bold black spaces in the painting’s otherwise rampaging colour. Equally startling are the eyes in Fini’s very similar Self-Portrait (1968) [Fig. 2].

Leonor Fini, L’Entre Deux (1967). Oil on canvas. Fig. 3.

Unlike the painter’s earlier L’Entre Deux (1967) [Fig. 3], a canvas that pays lush homage to the style of Gustav Klimt and, importantly, a painting in which all its subjects’ eyes are closed and relaxed, the boldly open eyes of La Gardienne and Self-Portrait make for startling viewing: proclaiming themselves, open eyes direct the attention; closed eyes, meanwhile, invite speculation about what imaginative proceedings are happening behind shut eyelids. Open eyes are risks represented in a mirrored ocular faculty and investments in the trade of direct vision for blindness and insight: so often twin stars in the same system.

Photographer unknown, “Les deux Leonor “surréalisent” (1952). Black and white photograph. Fig. 4.

Leonor Fini and Leonora Carrington were friends in the period directly before the Second World War. At that time, Carrington was living in Europe and Surrealist art was at its cultural ascendancy, but even then life was not easy. In a famous photograph of Fini and Carrington from 1952 [Fig. 4], the two stare directly at the camera. It is a dare: armoured resistance against easy interpretations and assumptions. Not for nothing did Fini paint representations of herself with armour, as in The Ceremony (1939), and of Carrington with knight’s garb in The Alcove: An Interior with Three Women (1939). Herself wary of labels, Fini was never comfortable with the mostly male Surrealist movement and preferred instead to call Carrington a revolutionary. Neither she nor Carrington quite saw eye to eye with Surrealists of their time. Some protection was necessary.

René Magritte, “Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt” in La Révolution surréaliste (1929). Photomontage. Fig. 5.

That said, Carrington’s acceptance within Surrealist circles was a result of genuine hospitality, and her story, “The Debutante”, stands as one of two contributions by women to André Breton’s influential and immediately-banned Anthology of Black Humour (1940), a book dedicated to exploring what Breton conceived of as one of Surrealism’s central tenets. For Carrington and Fini, however, art also served as a defense and a challenge to the growing violence of Second World War-era Europe. Art extended the possibility to see things clearly amid fragmenting visions of society and situations that were directly, materially hostile.^[5] Possibilities for sight were vexed (and vexing) when split or closed.

Still from Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1929). Film. Fig. 6.

Be alert to art that places itself along the path of eyesight. The surrealist tradition of the cut-up eye and severed line of sight inevitably returns with an almost gravitational pull to a foundational image, specifically, an important superimposition of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s film Un Chien Andalou (1929) [Fig. 6].^[6] This film began to cut open its viewer’s minds with an image that slices through conventional and settled views on the real and that proceeds from an almost-ironic title card familiar to any fable (or act of fabulation): “Il était une fois / Once upon a time.” In the film, a calf’s tears of vitreous humour fall to anxious unease, while Simone Mareuil’s face – her left eye held open with soft but firm force traceable through the lines of her skin – lingers in the mind. What does the surrealist image ask us to see? Why is the cut made to a woman’s eye? With the frictional power of a natural pair violently divided, the two eyes of Un Chien Andalou express very different possibilities. With cynical power, one keeps itself slitted; the other, subject to medical power, discomfortingly opens beyond its control. Mareuil’s subjectivity splits before the brandished razor. Did you flinch?

Leonora Carrington, “Portrait of Dr Morales” (c. 1943). Drawing on paper. Fig. 7.

Let me rephrase the question in order to refocus our attention on Carrington’s work. A young English woman of Irish descent, she lived with German Surrealist Max Ernst in Saint Martin d’Ardeche, France for some time in the late 1930s. After Ernst was interned at Largentière, then in Loriol and in the Camp des Milles during World War II, Carrington fled. Her estranged, mistrustful family had her committed to a Spanish mental asylum in Santander, where she was treated with Cardiazol, described today as “a violent thunderstorm” of a drug for its intense similarity to electroshock therapy. Cardiazol split her vision, for sure, and as such it was the realized nightmare for Carrington, whose antipathy to normal class, gender, and social roles was deeply entrenched.^[7] Years later, Dr Luis Morales, the Spanish doctor who treated her at Santander expressed some doubt about the veracity of Carrington’s initial diagnosis by other, more conventional Catholic doctors: more likely that, in 1941 and given the collapse of both personal and public structures, her surrealist philosophies were a sane way to adapt to violence in society, he believed [Fig. 7].^[8] For Morales, hindsight proved clearest.

Fortunately, Carrington escaped from asylum and her family’s clutches through clever thinking and an arranged marriage to Picasso’s friend, the Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc. With Leduc she fled to New York where so many other Surrealist artists at the time also lived. It was at this period in her life, adrift on a new continent and torn between her new husband and her old lover Max Ernst, also in New York but in a relationship with Peggy Guggenheim, that Carrington published “White Rabbits,” in an American journal, View (Dec. 1941/ Jan. 1942). The city was not enough, and from New York, she left with Leduc to Mexico. There, eventually, they divorced, although she lived there until repressive governmental violence in 1968 forced her back to America for a time.

Carrington’s life was a series of dislocations, some violent, some chosen. How can a person cope with the violence of a fissure that suddenly makes what you see an untrustworthy guide to the nature of the things around you? What can you do when epistemology and ontology are so greatly opposed? The answer provided by Carrington’s work of images and language is that of a rich play of metaphysics in art: transformations and metamorphic drifts that work to process the happenings of life into explanatory models made from symbols and images. The philosophy of metaphysics addresses itself to “first” concepts such as “being” and “the world.” Yet metaphysics is so slippery that, for some, it is in disrepute entirely, while for others it serves as a preeminent site of thought about life.^[9] The abstract certainty of metaphysical pronouncements makes it attractive for artists, writers, and spiritualists, as well as for the Surrealists proper. In the twentieth century, Italians Giorgio De Chirico’s and Carlo Carrà’s “metaphysical art” wagered that nothing less than reality itself must be liberated from the “real.” Metaphysical thought applies itself to very broad circumstances.

Playing with metaphysics can be dangerous and banal in turns, as today’s new age movements illustrate, but it is often necessary in desperate or critical situations. The Surrealists turn to metaphysics in order to reveal a vision of reality liberated from what they saw as the disturbing fictions that distort modern life. For Carrington, the Second World War and ongoing frictions in gender and history, on the one hand, and Surrealist adoptions of old languages of magic and superstition on the other challenged her vision of the world through both microscopic and macroscopic lenses. In consequence, art permitted Carrington space and time for understanding these influences. She defines surrealism as “an approach to a reality that we do not understand yet.”^[10] Compare her father’s definition of art. For him, a successful businessman of the time, painting was “horrible and idiotic” and “you didn’t do art; if you did, you were either poor or homosexual, which were more or less the same sort of crime.”^[11] Contrary to her father’s beliefs, the things Carrington saw and the world’s changing faces demanded an explanation which, for her, took the form of art: the work of metaphysics. And yet where metaphysics promises to explain, it often succeeds only at making matters inscrutable or, at best, arcane. Apuleius, whose Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass stands as a particularly clear instance of the metaphysical art of understanding the world, offers a warning: “I have told you things of which, although you have heard them you cannot know the meaning,” he says.^[12] In the best scenario, metaphysical art distributes the work of understanding among cultural traditions and symbolic systems, and it is along these lines that Carrington’s work has been described as a productive combination of Mexican, Egyptian, Hebrew, Celtic, Greek, and Mesopotamian elements. Her paintings, plays, and stories mix the symbols of alchemy, astrology, Tarot, herbalism, magic, witchcraft, and a personal iconography.^[13]

Xul Solar, Jefa (1923). Watercolour on paper, set on cardboard. Fig. 8.

Such bewilderingly syncretic systems held under fluid control resemble the otherworldly aesthetic of Argentine artist Xul Solar (1887–1963), friend to Jorge Luis Borges and devoted esoteric thinker. Jefa (1923) [Fig. 8], for example, shows the play of one of Solar’s invented cosmic languages across a female patroness’ face. In this fantastic fusion of elements designed to make sense of things by focusing on the creative, the esoteric, and the numinal, we find weird fiction and mid-twentieth-century painting hand in hand. Another of Xul Solar’s paintings, The Aleph (1930) [Fig. 9], prompted Borges’ story of the same name published some fifteen years later (Andrew Hurley’s classic translation is collected in The Weird). Whereas Xul Solar went east from Argentina only to return to the Americas, however, Carrington eventually went west from Europe for good. Each artist’s work draws from the surrealism of aesthetic metaphysics in response to severed systems of sight and dislocation. For Solar and Borges, in the pre-war sun, vision was compromised as well, and the draw on metaphysics and “the languages of the Southern Hemisphere of Tlön” make for strange thinking.^[14] For each artist, the dizzying play of metaphysical explanations bridges cultural systems of representation and belief.

Xul Solar, The Aleph (1930). Oil, minerals, and metals on canvas. Fig. 9.

Why is this so? Because metaphysics speculate and express not just ways of seeing the world, the space of epistemology, but more acutely the ways in which people justify existence. And within every appropriation of the real—the “this is how things are done” mentality—is an element of fantasy, a reminder of its ultimately metaphysical lineage in something beyond the visible and the real. Guyanese writer Wilson Harris speculates that even within a text of “so-called realism” exist elements of “curiously subversive fantasy,” so that, as readers, we can “perceive realism and fantasy as a threshold into evolution and alchemy.” “That threshold,” Harris writes, “is a component of the ‘mental bridge’ within and across cultures.”^[15] In 1935, Bronislow Malinowski, one of the twentieth century’s ground-breaking anthropologists, considered magical words in the hospitable space of ethnographic theory. He argued that cross-cultural communication operates along a “coefficient of weirdness” opposed to a “coefficient of reality”^[16]—optimally, the two will work in tandem. However, as Surrealist and metaphysical art suggests, when distorted and ideological impressions of reality become oppressive and overbearing, a surge of weirdness might answer the impending disaster of a world grown grey, pinched, and purchasable.

We can thus explain the observations of Edward James (1907–1984), the incredibly rich art patron, critic, and writer, who wrote that to him Carrington’s paintings “are not merely painted, they are brewed. They sometimes seem to have materialized in a cauldron at the stroke of midnight, yet for all this they are no mere illustrations of fairy tales.”^[17] The Surrealist precedent of the severed eye of Un Chien Andalou is no fable. While the image of “White Rabbits”—severed fingers, seen falling—does resemble the fabulous, or the fantastic, something has changed. Carrington has drawn her audience close: not to the comforts of the fantastic, but to something more, something that might express how vision is bifurcated and unsettled, and must come to terms with strange images. As it is with her paintings, so too her prose. For the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, Carrington’s artistic works offer “a gay, diabolical and persistent struggle against orthodoxy, which Leonora conquers and disperses with imagination, always multiple and singular, an imagination which she communicates with loving pride.”^[18] Ample material to provoke a reader of the weird, whether one looks to images or to words while addressing the unquenchable thirst for the metaphysical justification served by art.

Leonora Carrington, The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) (1947). Tempura on wood panel. Fig. 10.

Carrington works as a metaphysical engineer whose structures blend human forms with animal shapes, and whose images occupy the ever-transforming threshold of the grand philosophical statement. In her The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) (c.1947) [Fig. 10], the most famous of her works, Carrington’s play of evolution and alchemy takes audiences out of their comfort zone and into a place of colours and darkness; her work confronts an audience’s blindnesses with visions hitherto unthinkable. But like the distortions of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), itself a text of vision and visions, the scale is always subject to revision and (with a threat of violence) further justification (can you see the dull blades of the tiny haters trying to cut down the spiritual giant?).^[19] This is the prerogative and risk of metaphysics which appear graceful but conceal great violence. Explanations are weird, for they draw neither from sight nor facts but instead operate along another principle to pronounce upon the other two. Never fear them. Never trust them either, for there are jagged jaws, tiny knives, and little teeth in the darkness, waiting for the giant edifice of the human to fall to ground in rapture, astonishment, ignorance, or simply sleep. Something might eat you while you’re wondering at clouds and colours, sheltering what is precious to you all the while. “White Rabbits” indeed. We can now ask: what else runs into the underground with us—chasing Alices to find alluring rabbits in some darkened and lost-looking glass world—only just ahead?

Gently Falling Fingers – II – Never Enough “White Rabbits”

At this point, it should be noted that for the Weird Fiction Review this story is familiar territory. In a tour de force of interpretation, S.J. Chambers describes “White Rabbits” using an admirably visual explanatory model. Therefore, it would not do to dwell on Carrington’s story along the same lines. But another look at the story seems earned for the 101 Weird Writers series. What follows will engage with the story as a peculiar textual affair lodged in the chasm between seeing and its objects of sight. The events discussed occur under the oddly hostile sign of New York, where the narrator is and where Carrington was when writing the story. The city is described as “so hot that I got palpitations when I ventured out into the streets, so I sat and considered the house opposite and occasionally bathed my sweating face.”^[20] In this sweltering heat, vision changes and falls subject to mirage.

“The time has come that I must tell the events which began in 40 Pest Street,” our story begins. While the narrator’s reason for telling her story is obscure, her voyeurism is clear. She sees strange things in the house opposite hers and gets too involved, bringing rotting meat to the neighbour’s door. Disconcertingly, on encountering the physical object of her gaze she feels the house itself recoil from her fingers. The door is violently hidden under a sudden “cascade of something,” then implodes at her touch, its bell ringer falling to the ground when, subject to her “angry push,” the door “caved inwards, admitting a ghastly smell of putrid meat.”^[21] The smell is what she’s brought, stinking and decomposed: “flesh meat.” She has brought it for the house’s inhabitants, Ethel and Lazarus, who live a strange life. There are the rabbits, for a start, and then there is Ethel’s dead white skin, speckled with what look like stars.

First the rabbits. So many rabbits. A hundred rabbits, all with unblinking large pink eyes. What is their role in this story, these strange interlopers? Animals remind us of the strangeness of flesh before the fact of death when they exist in such close proximity to the human body—when, as in Carrington’s paintings, the human and the animal are bands along the spectrum of living shapes that blend or shift before your eyes. Comparing the similar situations of human beings and animals, Carrington argues that “We both live the best we can and then we die, and we don’t know anything about what happens after death, maybe nothing. […] We are in the same situation as animals.”^[22] Perhaps the more pressing question is this: why do they eat rotting meat? Rabbits are herbivores, but these ones emerging from the dark corners of this almost-abandoned, disappearing house have changed without explanation. We know only the sudden clutch of fear and the desire “to get out and away from these terrible silver people and the white carnivorous rabbits.”^[23] What happens when you see something that challenges your instruments of vision? You run. What if that sight is a woman turning to stars and a horde of animals setting to an unnatural feast? The order of things differs from what it was thought to be; her gift of dead animal flesh leads her to the task of making new metaphysical concepts that might explain what was previously hidden from her.

Against the beastly play of collapsing logical syllogisms and frail-to-breaking metaphysics, Carrington’s figures dance, sometimes with great visceral joy in matters of the flesh but, more often, with weird and unsettling pain or sometimes, increasingly, with a fragile beauty. Let us return to hands—a magician or sleight-of-hand artist knows that the gestures traced by a hand lead the eye to belief. That’s how they trick you. Look again at these hands, delicate and celestial, and see behind them how Ethel’s green silk dress pales against her “dead white” skin that “glittered as if speckled with thousands of minute stars.” Is there a universe within her? A “whole world,” as they say? If you don’t run when seeing such a sight, you might remain to face the mystery. “Do you not want to stay and become like us?” the woman asks. “In seven years your skin will be like stars, in seven little years you will have the holy disease of the Bible, leprosy!”^[24] Biblical references and the seven years of famed magical property: an esoteric language is being called to account for the fullness of human life, having been dismissed by others out of hand.

Leonora Carrington, detail from Samain (c. 1951). Oil on canvas. Fig. 11.

There are other hands in Carrington’s universe. See, for instance, Samain (c.1951) [Fig. 11]. Look at the delicately tapered white hands of the feminine figure in the bottom right of the painting. They trace an absent egg, perhaps the one seemingly dropped to the figure’s lower left… hand, where a foot might be. Incidentally, for a connection between eyes and eggs, look no further than Georges Bataille’s Story of An Eye (1928), where Simone muses on the similarity between the two: egg reminds her of a calf’s eye, she says, “because the white of the egg was the white of the eye, and the yolk the eyeball.” Only shortly after, Simone speaks “about broken eggs, and then broken eyes.”^[25] The parallel seems exact. In Carrington’s Samain, having seemingly dropped the egg, the figure’s hands are still holding something immaterial, still making the gesture. Fingers are how hands hold objects, make gestures, and interact with the world in general—they are the tactile method through which we shape the meaning of what we say. This is how “White Rabbits” ends, with the vision of Ethel’s hand above a balcony, “and as she waved it, her fingers fell off and dropped to the ground like shooting stars.” What do you see? A declension of stars? A text somehow celestial? The flesh leprous and translucent? What kind of sight is offered? An otherworldly image where, catalyzed by a gift of rotting meat, the hidden things of the world are quietly separating into a metaphysical opposition of bodies heavenly and beastly.

Leonora Carrington’s “White Rabbits” is an entry in a Surrealist ledger of works that inscribe visions of a fractured world within a singular point of view engaged in clear metaphysical labour. The story returns its audience to a conception of literary reading itself wherein symbols and signs mean exactly more and less than they appear: where the ocular vision of a reader is split between the meaning of a word and the graphical shape of ink on the page, in other words. As Peter Mendelsund argues, both the “notion that readers are ‘see-ers’” and the conventions used to describe reading are derived from metaphysical traditions of “visitation, annunciation, dream vision, prophecy, and other manifestations of religious or mystical epiphany.”^[26] Carrington’s stories, like her paintings brewed on an alchemical crucible, suggest that a divided vision might arrive at new ways of seeing things: not as they are, but as they might mean. Symbols are made to betray the mystic operation of their signification.

It is thus that the distended and broken parts of the human body fall to the ground as shooting stars surrounded by hordes of brilliantly uncanny white rabbits—white rabbits that, as we know, eat rotting flesh such as that of the woman whose delicate, disintegrating hands prove so alluring to the narrator’s eye. If the image of an eye severed is surrealism’s gift to our aesthetic consciousness, then Carrington’s image of a body turned to stars falling among red-mouthed rabbits must also be accorded its place in a surreal sequence of remarkable images.

One more thing. After an eye reassembles its vision, it confronts a harsh truth of the world—transitory beauty will be eaten and consumed by beasts that fit no rational order. Like the narrator of “White Rabbits,” we will run from both beasts and beauty. In the end, Carrington’s fateful image raises another question: what if it isn’t just the eye that is cut? What if one’s fingers themselves are severed?

Every time I see the eye cut open—its vitreous humours spurting—I flinch. What should I expect? The sight is the painful afterimage of a wound: a wounded vision of the real. An intensity of feeling occupies the place of meaning or message. When I read about those falling fingers, it’s beautiful, but also oh-so-achingly weird.

_____

^[1] Leonora Carrington, “White Rabbits,” 1941/1942, in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, eds. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, New York: Tor, 2011: 277.

^[2] Carrington, “White Rabbits”: 277.

^[3] This gendered twist is common: Luce Irigaray, for example, remarks that “‘femininity is a role, an image, a value, imposed upon women by male systems of representation. In this masquerade of femininity, the woman loses herself, and loses herself by playing on her femininity,” The Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985: 84.

^[4] See a full discussion of this image in Rudolf E. Kuenzli’s “Surrealism and Misogyny,” Surrealism and Women, eds. Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg, Cambridge: MIT, 1991: 17–18.

^[5] Alyce Mahon, “She Who Revealed: The Celtic Goddess in the Art of Leonora Carrington,” in Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist, ed. Seán Kissane, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2013: 132–33.

^[6] In a garrulous story, Alejandro Jodorosky describes the only time Carrington and Luis Buñuel met. While I take the liberty to quote the story, I retain reservations as to its authenticity: “She had a mythic reputation among Mexican painters; she was an incarnation of the most extreme surrealism. During a party, Luis Buñuel, seduced by Carrington’s beauty and emboldened by the notion that she had transcended all bourgeois morality, proposed (with his characteristic bluntness) that she become his mistress. Without even waiting for her answer, he gave her the key to the secret studio that he used as a love nest and told her to meet him at three o’clock the next afternoon. Early the next morning, Leonora went to visit the place alone. She found it tasteless: It looked exactly like a motel room. Taking advantage of the fact that she was in her menstrual period, she covered her hands with blood and used them to make bloody handprints all over the walls in order to provide a bit of decoration for that anonymous, impersonal room. Buñuel never spoke to her again,” Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky: The Creator of El Topo [Mu: Le maître et les magiciennes], 2005, trans. Joseph Rowe. Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2008: 25–26. The relationship between the Chilean filmmaker and Carrington (he staged her play Penelope in 1957, for instance) is described with such verve and invention that all readers of the weird are directed to Jodorosky’s work for more.

^[7] N. McCrae, “‘A Violent Thunderstorm’: Cardiazol Treatment in British Mental Hospitals,” Historical Psychiatry 17 (2006): 67–90. Here is Carrington’s description of what Cardiazol induces, and what she called “the Great Epileptic Ailment”: I learned later that my condition had lasted for ten minutes; I was convulsed, pitiably hideous, I grimaced and my grimaces were repeated all over my body.” In “Down Below,” The House of Fear, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1988: 192.

^[8] Susan L. Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy, and Art, Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2004: 46.

^[9] Those interested are directed to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s page on “Metaphysics”: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/metaphysics/.

^[10] Leonora Carrington, Interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, “An Approach to a Reality That We Do Not Yet Understand,” in Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist, ed. Seán Kissane, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2013: 165.

^[11] Quoted in Aberth, 20.

^[12] This citation from Apuleius is quoted in the foreword of Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today (1954), a text which Carrington appreciatively read. See also Teresa Arcq, “A World Made of Magic,” trans. Jonathan Brennan, in Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist, ed. Seán Kissane, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2013: 32.

^[13] Arcq, 19.

^[14] For more in whimsical but very accurate analysis, see Maria Bustillos, “Lot 51: Borges, Xul Solar, and the Occult,” Paris Review 18 June (2015): http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/06/18/lot-51/.

^[15] Wilson Harris, The Womb of Space, Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1983: 69–70; see also Steven Slemon, “Magical Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

^[16] Bronislaw Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic Vol. 2, London: Unwin Brothers, 1935.

^[17] Edward James, “Leonora Carrington,” in Leonora Carrington: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculptures 1940–1990, ed. Andrea Schlieker, London: Serpentine Gallery, 38. For Carrington, the question of alchemy opens to political structures. As she described the Irish Sidhe, in words told to her by her grandmother with clear parallels to Ireland under English rule, there are “descendants of that ancient race that magically started to live underground when their land was taken by invaders with different political and religious ideas. They preferred to retire underground where they are dedicated to magic and alchemy, knowing how to change gold,” from an interview with Mexican journalist Manuel Avila Camacho López in “Max Ernst me enseño nueva forma de vivir,’ Excélsior, 10 February 1974, and quoted in Aberth: 12. Aberth also points out that, for Carrington, alchemy was connected to Herbert Read’s Surrealism (1937) and the artistic education she received while 19 at Ozenfant Academy. Cf. Aberth 22–23. It must be regarded as a principle irony of the artist’s life that her artistic investment in a transformative and theoretical prosecution of alchemy parallels the occupation of her estranged and even hostile father, Harold Wilde Carrington, a principle shareholder of Imperial Chemicals Industries (ICI). The line between alchemy and chemistry, aesthetics and commerce, runs like a finely sharpened knife within the Carrington family.

^[18] Carlos Fuentes, “Leonora Carrington, or Ironical Sorcery,” in Leonora Carrington: Exposición de óleos, gouaches, dibujos y tapices, Mexcio City: Instituto Anglo-Mexicano de Cultura, 1965.

^[19] For connections between Carrington and Swift, see Kissane 61–69.

^[20] Carrington, “White Rabbits”: 227.

^[21] Carrington, “White Rabbits”: 278.

^[22] Leonora Carrington and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, “An Approach to a Reality that We Do Not Yet Understand [Interview],” Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist, ed. Seán Kissane, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2013: 160.

^[23] Carrington, “White Rabbits”: 279.

^[24] Carrington, “White Rabbits”: 279.

^[25] Georges Bataille, L’histoire de l’oeil [Story of the Eye], trans. Joachim Neugroschel, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987: 38–39.

^[26] Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read, New York: Vintage, 2014: 350.

The post 101 Weird Writers #38 — Leonora Carrington appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

This post is part of an ongoing series on 101 weird writers featured in The Weird compendium, the anthology that serves as the inspiration for this site. There is no ranking system; the order is determined by the schedule of posts.

Kelly Link was born in Miami, Florida, and is the author of numerous short story collections, most recently Get in Trouble from Random House. In 2000, she and spouse Gavin Grant co-founded Small Beer Press, an independent publisher of fantasy, weird, and other forms of speculative fiction, whose releases have been nominated for numerous awards in the field. She is a graduate of Columbia University and UNC-Greensboro, and has taught writing workshops at Lenoir-Rhyne College, Bard College, Clarion East, Clarion West, and others.

Link’s work has been described as magical realism, slipstream, and weird, amongst other categories. “The Specialist’s Hat,” included in The Weird, originally appeared in Event Horizon in 1998 and was subsequently collected in her debut collection Stranger Things Happen. It was selected for multiple Year’s Best… anthologies and received the World Fantasy Award in 1999. She has won numerous other honors, such as the Locus and O. Henry Awards. Link’s other collections include Magic for Beginners and Pretty Monsters, and her debut novel is forthcoming. She lives in Massachusetts. More information can be found at www.kellylink.net.

– Christopher Burke

***

“The Specialist’s Hat” has become a touchstone for a number of overlapping literary movements (magic realism, slipstream, interstitial, metafiction, fabulation, weird fiction), and there is good reason for this. It infuses tropes drawn from Gothic tales such as Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto or ghost stories such as M. R. James’s classic “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” with a playfully postmodern sensibility. The story has a peculiar lightness to it, as it weaves together children’s games, fairy tales, oral histories, and snatches of poetry whose deliberate awfulness amuses us even as it unsettles us. This sort of brilliant cognitive dissonance is a hallmark of Link’s particular brand of fiction.

The story begins easily enough. Samantha and Claire are twin sisters, aged ten. Following their mother’s death, their father has relocated them to Eight Chimneys, a typical Gothic mansion complete with exactly one hundred windows, three-stories, and a supposedly haunted forest. It is revealed that the girls’ father has been studying the literary stylings of the house’s previous occupant, Charles Cheatham Rash, who wrote “three volumes of bad obscure poetry, and an even worse and more obscure novel” (888). While their father works, the twins are cared for by the nameless babysitter, fourteen-years-old, who comes and goes as she pleases. Their favourite game is playing Dead (“When you’re Dead…you don’t have to brush your teeth…”; “When you’re Dead…you live in a box and it’s always dark, but you’re not ever afraid.”) (888). One day they discover the Specialist’s hat hanging on a nail in the attic, apparently made by the poet Rash out of the fifty-two teeth of a range of exotic creatures as well as those of his own vanished wife. The Specialist’s hat, we are told, looks like nothing, but it can sound like anything. The plot of the story itself follows a kind of dream logic that makes it difficult to précis; but its effects creep up on you, a sort of shivery, nerveless numbness, the mental equivalent of knocking your funny bone badly. Is it a love story? A ghost story? Does it end happily or not? Most readers would agree the story is fundamentally disquieting; but few, I think, could agree on why.

You Can’t Make a Hommelette…

While searching for a way to explain the curious effects of “The Specialist’s Hat”, I found myself recalling “Troubles with the Real”, an essay written by the Marxist philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, which I first encountered as a graduate student. The essay, a strange piece of Gothic-tinged criticism in its own right, discusses a monstrous figure first described by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan as the lamella or the hommelette (the “man-omelet”), a membranous creature that apparently flies off the moment the foetus emerges. It is extra-flat, moving like an amoeba, capable of surviving any division, and, for all intents and purposes, immortal. “Well!” exclaims Lacan, “This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep…” (197–98)

Suppose, indeed! What a horrifying thought! That element of horror was something Žižek picked up on in Lacan’s account of the lamella, leading him to make the leap between the psychoanalytical concept (the lamella represented for Lacan the libido or the “death drive”) and the horror genre. For Žižek, the lamella—indivisible, indestructible, and immortal, an “entity of pure surface…first heard as a shrilling sound, and then [popping] up as a monstrously distorted body”—is undead, possessed not of a “sublime spiritual immortality” but rather the “obscene immortality” of a zombie. It is a creature which cannot die; it recomposes itself in the face of violence and clumsily staggers on. It is unstoppable, a representation of “an uncanny excess of life”; it is the urge to persist beyond the natural cycle of generation and corruption. Žižek memorably compares the lamella to the face-hugger in Ridley Scott’s Alien, an indestructible creature which multiplies when it is cut into pieces, and whose extra-flat body can suddenly fly up and envelop your face: “In it,” he writes, “pure evil animality overlaps with machinic blind insistence.”

So far, so terrifying—but what does it have to do with Kelly Link? In rereading “The Specialist’s Hat” for the umpteenth time, I noticed a striking similarity between the eponymous piece of clothing and Žižek’s lamella:

Hanging from a nail on the nursery chimney is a long black object. It looks lumpy and heavy, as if it were full of things. … There are holes in the black thing, and it whistles mournfully as [the babysitter] spins it. “The Specialist’s hat,” she says.

“That doesn’t look like a hat,” says Claire. “It doesn’t look like anything at all.” (893)

And then:

Claire snatches the hat off the nail. “I’m the Specialist!” she says, putting the hat on her head. It falls over her eyes, the floppy shapeless brim sewn with little asymmetrical buttons that flash and catch the moonlight like teeth. (893)

Is this not an eerily evocative description? The lumpy, shapeless, toothy object which emits a strange sound and creeps over your face in order to seal it up? “Yes,” you might cry, “but so what? What does it mean?” Or better yet: “Why does it frighten me?”

Here we might return to that classic ghost story I mentioned at the beginning of the essay: “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” by M. R. James, a tale with a rather similar uncanny presence. When Professor Parkins arrives for an off-season visit at a seaside hotel, he wanders into the vicinity of a ruined Templars’s church where he discovers an ancient whistle engraved with the words QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT (Who is this who is coming?). The sound of the whistle fascinates Parkins, but as he sleeps he is haunted by a terrifying vision of a long stretch of shore, absent of any distinguishing features except a man, fleeing.

So far no cause whatever for the fear of the runner had been shown; but now there began to be seen, far up the shore, a little flicker of something light-coloured moving to and fro with great swiftness and irregularity. Rapidly growing larger, it, too, declared itself as a figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined. There was something about its motion which made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close quarters. It would stop, raise arms, bow itself toward the sand, then run stooping across the beach to the water-edge and back again; and then, rising upright, once more continue its course forward at a speed that was startling and terrifying. (20)

The subsequent night, Professor Parkins discovers the entity has invaded his room, taking up residence in the empty second bed, a rustling and shaking thing to be described later as “a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen” (26). In a fit of panic, Parkins dashes for the whistle which he has left by the window:

This was, as it turned out, the worst thing he could have done, because the personage in the empty bed, with a sudden smooth motion, slipped from the bed and took up a position, with outspread arms, between the two beds, and in front of the door. Parkins watched it in a horrid perplexity. Somehow, the idea of getting past it and escaping through the door was intolerable to him; he could not have borne — he didn’t know why — to touch it; and as for its touching him, he would sooner dash himself through the window than have that happen. (26)

For all intents and purposes, the monstrous apparition of James’s story possesses the very same qualities as the Specialist’s hat: it is formless and flat, nothing more than crumpled linen and yet somehow indestructible, indescribable and intensely horrible. Like the lamella, it emits a strange noise, and it can move at a terrifying speed. It unsettles because its lack of form speaks to its monstrous immortality; how would you destroy such an entity? Is it even possible? What is it? If we return to the inscription on the whistle, we discover our question is only repeated back to us: Quis est? Who is this?

This is precisely the question that Link returns to in the chilling conclusion of “The Specialist’s Hat.” Claire and Samantha have worn the Specialist’s hat, they have allowed themselves to enter a strange stasis, somewhere between the Death of their childhood game and real annihilation. “He’ll be coming soon,” the babysitter tells them. “It will be coming soon” (894). But who is the Specialist? There are only vague hints and suggestions.

Who’s there?
Just air. (894)

No one is there. Nothing is there. Or rather nothingness is there. Death.

And then the front door opens. Samantha and Claire huddle together as they listen to someone creeping up the stairs. “Be quiet,” the babysitter commands them “It’s the Specialist.” And then we hear him ourselves:

“Claire, Samantha, Samantha Claire.” The Specialist’s voice is blurry and wet. It sounds like their father’s voice, but that’s because the hat can imitate any noise, any voice. “Are you still awake?” (894)

Is it their father who has come for them? Or is it, as the babysitter suggests, the Specialist? And is this what we find terrifying in the story: the disappearance of the father, his replacement by a simulacrum, almost identical, someone who pretends to love them but who is fundamentally a stranger? Quis est? Perhaps this is part of the terror, but it isn’t everything. What leaves us most disturbed, I think, is not their father’s transformation into the Specialist but rather their own transformation, facilitated by their interaction with the Specialist’s hat—the lamella. And in fact it is the lamella that they themselves seem to become. Think about it. They gain the ability to move strangely, to vanish up the chimney and fly, if they want to, from the bed; they are trapped in a kind of pre-sexual stasis between ten and eleven; they are indivisible:

Last year they were learning fractions in school, when her mother died. Fractions remind Samantha of herds of wild horses, piebalds and pintos and palominos. There are so many of them, and they are, well, fractious and unruly. (894)

Their mother’s death has left them in this state, but they have also chosen it; as a game, as an escape, as a way of liberating themselves from the need to grow up. Like the zombie, the alien, and the spectral presence, they have taken upon themselves an obscene form of immortality; they are undead.

…Without Breaking a Few Eggs

But what then is “The Specialist’s Hat” about? At one level, this is a story invested with enough sexual imagery to make it any psychoanalyst’s (wet?) dream. We begin with Samantha and Claire, two prepubescent girls who lose their mother, only to find that their widower father has recently met a woman in the woods. We learn that the woman is a distant relation of Rash; we know by this point that Rash had a pretty wife who met another man “who wanted to go with her” (889). When Rash’s wife finally agreed, her husband found out and tricked her into drinking the blood of a snake:

And in about six months snakes created in her and they got between her meat and the skin. And they say you could just see them running up and down her legs. They say she was just hollow to the top of her body, and it kept on like that till she died. (889)

This is the first explanation we hear of what sex might mean in the context of the story: snakes, hollowness, and eventually death. The image of the snake reoccurs throughout the story. One of Rash’s poems tells how he met a woman in the wood, and “her lips were two red snakes” (890). The Specialist’s hat makes a noise like a snake. Most importantly, when the girls’ father comes stumbling into the bedroom, he claims “I think I’ve been bitten by something. I think I’ve been bitten by a goddamn snake” (894). The sense of this image is clear: the snake is a symbol of consuming sexuality, a creature that hollows you out, and eventually kills you. Only the twins, who escape as ghosts through the chimney, remain untouched.

So what might Žižek say about this? Recall that the lamella is itself a representation of the libido in Lacanian theory. He describes it as the irrepressible sexual urge, the death drive, the drive for “an uncanny excess of life.” It is also something thrown off from the foetus, amoeba-like, the thing without any sex of its own. It is pre-sexual. The symbolic resonance of the snake as a representation of the lamella is obvious. What haunts Samantha and Claire is the fear that their father has become fundamentally different because of his libido, somehow alien to them; he has vanished into the woods to meet his lover, and he has been bitten by the snake; it will kill him—or worse yet, it will change him.

But the real anxiety, I think, is not simply what the snake has done to their father, but what it will do to them. Sexual women become dead women in this story: Rash’s wife, their own mother. And so they must find a way to stop themselves from growing older, from falling into the inevitable trap of puberty. “Samantha doesn’t care for boys that much,” the story reminds us.

She likes numbers. Take the number 8 for instance, which can be more than one thing at once. Looked at one way, 8 looks like a bent woman with curvy hair. But if you lay it down on its side, it looks like a snake curled with its tail in its mouth. This is sort of like the difference between being Dead and being dead. (894)

For Samantha, the image of the number 8 oscillates between the form of the bent woman, the sexual woman, and the snake devouring itself. Becoming a sexualized woman is like being Dead: it is liberating, the Dead fear nothing, the Dead can move as they will. But the snake also symbolises true death or annihilation: “The morning comes not, no, never, no more” (892). When the twins put on the Specialist’s hat—the ultimate vagina dentata—they gain control of their sexuality, or rather, they gain the power to annul their own sexuality, to control it. The Specialist’s hat, then, is both a sign of what haunts them and the mechanism by which they learn to escape it.

But the horror of the lamella extends beyond a purely sexualised reading of the story. It is truly disturbing, Žižek might say, because it represents the intersection between the imaginary and the Real; it reveals the Real in its most terrifying dimension as the primordial abyss which dissolves all identities and swallows everything. This concept of the Real will be familiar to readers of weird fiction. It is represented in a range of literary guises from Poe’s maelstrom to the horror at the end of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Lovecraft’s elder god Cthulhu, a creature who presents such a dangerous vision of the universe that he cannot be seen without causing madness:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (139)

The critic Benjamin Noys identifies in Žižek’s critical writing a true Gothic sensibility. For Lacan, the Real is inscribed into the notion of human sexuality, but for Žižek, the kernel of reality is horror, the horror of the Real—an encounter with the universe as it really is, stripped of imaginative protection and representation.

“The Specialist’s Hat” terrifies us in much the same way that Lovecraft terrifies us: it hints at an encounter with something which is beyond the realm of our experience—death—and yet which is simultaneously so deeply embedded in our own nature that it is always already there. Beneath the awfulness of Rash’s obscure poetry is an insight we recognise as fundamentally true: we are dying, we have always been dying, and sex, which seems to promise immortality, is not a way out of that trap, but rather a way further into it. Sex is the disappearance of the self, just as death is; there is no immortality, there is only the restless seeking after it, the repetition of the journey into the woods, the bite of the snake, and the hollowing out of the body as skin pulls away from meat, as you grow accustomed to slowness, as your eyes sink in, your flesh decays…

This repetition, this annihilation, this image of the future is what terrifies us—because we know it is true. The twins embrace another kind of formlessness—Death—as a way to ward off or sublimate the vision of natural death they witnessed when their mother passed away. The ambiguity of the ending comes not in the identity of the father—whether he has turned into the Specialist—or indeed in whether something awful has happened to the twins. Rather it comes in the irresolution of the twins’ stasis: like Peter Pan, will they choose Death forever? Or will they accept life with all its dangers, its delusions, and its ultimate dissolution?

Bibliography

James, M. R. “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” In Great Horror Stories: Tales by Stoker, Poe, Lovecraft and Others. Ed. John Grafton. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006.

Kay, Sarah. Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. Print.

Kelly, James Patrick and John Kessel, eds. Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology. Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2006. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Eds. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995. Print.

Link, Kelly. “The Specialist’s Hat.” Event Horizon November 1998. Reprinted in Stranger Things Happen. Brooklyn, NY: Small Beer Press, 2001. Print.

Lovecraft, H. P. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. Ed. S. T. Joshi. London: Penguin, 1999. Print.

Noys, Benjamin. “The Horror of the Real: Žižek’s Modern Gothic.” International Journal of Zizek Studies 4 (2010). <http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/viewFile/274/372>.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a Viewer of Alien.” Lacan.com. 2009. <http://www.lacan.com/essays/?p=180>.

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Gabriel García Márquez

“The world had been sad since Tuesday.”

Reading the stories of Gabriel García Márquez reveals that we have been incomplete all this time. A delirious current of imagination and critique runs like live electricity through the masterful Colombian writer’s prose, and his stories envelop readers in a sensual and richly affective world where all stray details, all passing observations, and all chance descriptions contribute to something generous, wise, and powerfully weird. His is a world where the stray, the passing, and the chance take centre stage. (Cue our bedraggled old man with sorry wings.) My advice to approaching such richness is to be aware of critical appellations, but also to engage with the stories on their own terms. Magic realism, the term most often used to describe García Márquez, has many definitions. We should at least know that the Colombian’s penchant for blending fabulous and fantastical with the heartrendingly real can be traced to the children’s stories his grandmother would tell him when he was young. That disclaimer made, allow me to present you with today’s offering by way of a wish to have it included in the weird fiction canon: “Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes” / “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (in Gregory Rabassa’s translation).

What we have is a children’s story about a place warped by sadness and visited by a distressed, lost Daedalus. It bears comparison with Franz Kafka’s best fables, Herman Melville’s shortest stories, and Angela Carter’s dangerous fantasies (or, equally as good, those of Silvina Ocampo). Yet its vibrant colour is all its own. It is – and I’m looking at you, weird reader – a story deeply imbricated in the febrile plenitude of fiction’s constitutive strangeness and in the complex relationship we as humans have with ambiguity and with each other. That sounds like a tall order but it’s a very simple draw. Like so much of García Márquez’s writing the story aches with a luxurious language of sadness and beauty. Let me rephrase my sales pitch, then. The story is a marvel and a wonder.

“Against the judgement of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death.”

To begin, who is our eponymous figure? An angel? An old man? A movie star or a dramatic actor? (Let’s not get distracted by the adaptations of this tale in film, in 1988, and on the stage, in 2002 and then in 2005.) He’s got wings but little will to use them. Perhaps he is Daedalus, the great artificer who flew with his son Icarus on self-devised wings – the father who saw his son fall to sea and drown in the same wings he made. The old man speaks neither Latin nor Spanish but some “hermetic” tongue. (Although I silently implore Father Gonzaga to address him in Greek, the meddlesome priest does not even oblige a response.) Perhaps the old man is the angel of death, as the neighbor suggests, his wings the ragged remnants of heavenly garb. He is – this is certain – the narrative pretext for the villagers’ actions: his aberrant nature and abrupt presence precipitate events of passing strangeness. Answers are not forthcoming from the story itself. Readers must draw their own conclusions.

“The simplest among them thought that he should be named mayor of the world.”

Never mistake the simpleminded for silliness. There have been worse politicians than incomprehensible foreigners. To be led by signs or ciphers – our angel raving in a sailor’s voice – is the fate of all readers. If there is in our old man a sign mistaken for a wonder, then, as his changing fortunes demonstrate, the villagers bear him little allegiance. (Beware the competing spectacle of a spider woman!) The story raises a question: to what degree are people led by the spectacular and the strange, only to capriciously and suddenly shift their allegiances and interest? You would not be mistaken to hear faint if distorted echoes of Guy Debord. What should our relationship with the clearly inexplicable be? This is the territory speculative fiction charts; in it, the weird overlaps with magical realism to create a magnetic, alluring relationship asking us to evaluate our perspective on things we don’t understand. An old man with enormous wings is a thing to be seen, but is he a sign of political allegiances? Is he something less than that? Something more? Perhaps he is just an old man with wings.

“The curious came from far away.”

Readers and not critics are the best agent provocateurs of recalcitrant fantasies, just as those interested in the old man and his wings come from great distances to get a look for themselves. We all need physical immediacy to gawk and marvel. It’s worth taking a minute to understand where we’ve come to, however, and place the story in its moment of origin.“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” was first published in the pages of the New American Review (1955), much before the majority of his work and twelve years before One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), probably the most familiar of his stories. Some critics point to La Violencia, a tumultuously violent time in Colombian history, as the key to understanding the actions of the community composed of Pelayo, Elisenda, Father Gonzago, and the rest of the vaguely cruel villagers. Thus, as John Goodwin argues in Explicator (2006), the story reflects the influence of religion and political instability in social crises.

García Márquez wrote “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” long before his Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), itself a novel which exposes the pathology and fascism of tyranny in its centroamericano or suramericano guises (norteamericanos do tyranny differently). Nonetheless, the endeavours have a certain resonance. Quoting from the United States Government Printing Office’s Area Handbook for El Salvador in her own Salvador (1982/3), Joan Didion provides some illuminating passages about General Maximiliano Hermández Martínez, El Salvador’s tyrant from 1931 to 1944 and an inspiration for Autumn of the Patriarch. “He kept bottles of colored water that he dispensed as cures for almost any disease, including cancer and heart trouble, and relied on complex magical formulas for the solution of national problems,” one sample goes. Another: “During an epidemic of smallpox in the capital, he attempted to halt its spread by stringing the city with a web of colored lights.” Any magic realism or weird fiction does not far diverge from the Colombian writer’s chosen antagonist: political reality. As Didion concludes in Salvador, “I began to see Gabriel García Márquez in a new light, as a social realist” (59). It is for this reason that, in his 1982 essay “The Critic and Society,” Wole Soyinka describes García Márquez’s work as a “haunting fusion of magic and revolutionary history.” We would not be far off to read this early story along similar lines.

And yet the story is not as simple as mere political allegory. Look at the brilliant lines of feverish dream with which the angel’s entrance changes the villagers’ lives. Remember the airs and sounds of the sea; remember Pelayo and his many dead crabs. Magical realism – the weirdness in which García Márquez’s story is deeply imbued – disrupts the political intractability of fiction’s traditional relationship with its social origins, but that disruption retains and even clarifies a hard nub of political violence and communal ethics. Weird fiction sets itself out against a particular milieu of social, literary, and political influences but does not cut its ties to the world as we know it.

“The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act.”

The mystery of the old man with enormous wings remains intact. Our be-winged Bartleby is no allegory; Gabriel García Márquez is no John Bunyan. Remember if you will, and only briefly, Melville’s great character Bartleby from “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853). (The continental affiliations between these two American literary giants are powerful.) In that story, a man whose only forlorn utterance is the inimical “I would prefer not to” moves from a dead letter office to an early grave in a mental hospital. Along the way he betrays deep philosophical differences with the milieu in which he is placed and with the literary carriage that carries him. At one point many commentators read Bartleby as a clinically depressed man, but nothing could be further from the truth, as readers attuned to the weird should see clearly. Bartleby is strange. Better yet he is estranged. His refusal of the demands to which his interlocutors attempt to interpellate him delineates a clear space of non-possibility, a space of freedom in an age whose possibilities have been thoroughly colonized by the Wall Street of Melville’s short story. So too does our old man with wings refuse the explanatory allure of allegory. He proves utterly unreadable and alien to the villagers who at one point, with the pointless violence of those easily bored and lacking any critical conscience, cruelly brand his side. (Knock on the glass at the zoo, kid; wake that snake up from its sleep.) Like Bartleby, the old man with wings is weirdly different. He is of and only himself.

“His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience.”

These introductory remarks must draw to a close. The old man waits, lending his body to the townspeople’s amusements and depredations in what García Márquez describes as “a cataclysm in repose.” Our story patiently waits to bear meaning for its interpreters. The parallels hold but should not frighten us. Daedalus gave Ariadne the key to the maze he had created; before that, he built for her a dancing floor. García Márquez has given us something elusive and ethereal, but its brief and elusive reading has a strength which novels and epics would strain to match. Like the old man the story can give us much, if we give it mind. Draw your own interpretations. García Márquez’s world is vast. I invite you to enter in, once again.

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Image by Ida Kar, vintage bromide print, 1960

This post is part of an ongoing series on 101 weird writers featured in The Weird compendium, the anthology that serves as the inspiration for this site. There is no ranking system; the order is determined by the schedule of posts.

Robert Aickman (1914–1981) was an English writer of what he called “strange stories”; he wrote over thirty of them in his lifetime. Aickman had a tremendous influence on weird fiction. His tales masterfully created an atmosphere of dread and disquiet. Moreover, his stories were beautifully constructed with prose that could easily rival other great writers like Vladimir Nabokov. Aickman was also known for his conservationism and co-founding the Inland Waterways Association. This year, 2014, marks the 100th anniversary of his birth.

– David Davis, editor of 101 Weird Writers

***

hospice: noun \ˈhäs-pəs\

1. a place that provides care for people who are dying

2. a place where travelers can stay; especially: an inn kept by people in a religious organization.

          –Merriam Webster Dictionary

1. Entrainment

Robert Aickman’s “The Hospice” emerged near the end of his life. The story is the pinnacle of a well-honed technique and persists as a modern classic. Small wonder, because over the course of his career, he’d been writing it piecemeal all along. To approach the story properly, I endeavor as he did, and that is circuitously.

In the course of a recent review, critic Rick Kleffel remarked that, “Aickman understood the many ways of haunting.”^[1] Kleffel’s is a trenchant description of Mr. Aickman’s approach to weird fiction. I am not taken with the notion of gateway art or artists. Water seeks its own level. Unless pursued systematically, experience of one discipline or aesthetic does not imply reciprocal familiarity or access to another. However, I will advise this much: Don’t try to cut your milk teeth on this author. He’s a rare case, and with the exception of the literary equivalent of an occasional radio-friendly tune (“Ringing the Changes,” I’m looking at you), his work can’t be appreciated with the same relaxed ease as a top-forty pop-charter.

The surest way to comprehend Aickman is to read a lot of Aickman. You’ll have to work for it. You’ll return to his stories and turn them over, hunting for the access point, a seam, a code, or a hidden catch. Once you’re inside, once you’ve read and absorbed the message, you’ll return later to find everything has shifted, everything has changed, nothing is as you left it hours ago, or years ago. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s the seed Aickman has implanted in your brain. A multiplying, damnably adaptable psychic virus that sprang from the man himself (gods know where he picked it up) and manifested as several collections of the uncanny. To interact with Aickman on any meaningful level is to experience a form of quantum entanglement. His ideas entrain the subconscious and mutate it in the fashion that transgressive art must. And yes, I’m implying that the old boy has fucked your mind. Buttoned down or not, it’s just what he liked to do.

Arguably one of Aickman’s most important stories, “The Hospice” is his lens, his micro-focus upon man’s journey into the Beyond. In relatively few pages, he brings to a boil questions of transition, identity, and agency. The mutability of perception, the thin veneer of loyalty and security. 

At its core, this is a fable of decay and disintegration. Among contemporary kindred, I’ve only seen its like faithfully reflected, albeit via a warped body-length mirror, in the intensely erotic imagery of Livia Llewellyn who shares a preoccupation with matters of degeneration and transference by spiritual or psychic osmosis.

Aickman’s work often presents a major thesis of Weird literature: Life is far stranger than we assume. He frequently asks, what do we know? The answer: Nothing, and possibly less than. He tipped his hand in the majestic, “Larger than Oneself.” Another story where a gathering of the eccentric (as opposed to an eccentric gathering) is charged with tension attending an imminent collision with the numinous. Another story of supernatural impingement, of an outsider scrabbling at the door, and one where death lurks offstage, huffing and puffing with baleful menace. Ultimately, mortal flesh gets added to a massive ball of cosmic clay. Transitioned right off this terrestrial coil.

“The Hospice” stops short of that previous cataclysmic denouement. The anticlimax of this story in relation to “Larger than Oneself” is further evidence of his oeuvre’s obsession with its own narrowing of focus. This late work is an exhibition of the terminal; addition by subtraction; a drawing back from a precipice; the retraction of a fang after the serpent has delivered its bite.

2. Slave Rowers of Purgatory

“The Hospice” begins, if not technically in media res, certainly amidst ongoing events that are superficially explained and thereafter dismissed. The material world and its connections and complications recede, with one or two recurring exceptions, into a fog not unlike the umbra of a persistent dream or a nightmare.

Lucas Maybury, our protagonist and a company drone, is driving lost into the back of the Beyond. All he wishes is to get home to his wife. Dusk swells against the windshield. His eyes grow heavy and his sight grows dim. The petrol needle drifts near the E, then penetrates. Identical streets and gated driveways arc in an infinite loop, repeat. When he exits the car to approach a house for directions, he is briefly assailed by a cat, or something catlike. The creature, if not feline, perhaps a gargoyle, perhaps an unnamable figment lent fleeting substance, slashes his leg and flees, or evaporates. The attack shakes Maybury and leaves him anxious about venom and infection. The universe has shifted from passively confounding, to directly aggressive. It has sunk a claw in. It has drawn blood.

Calamities are compounded, yet one gets the impression that this is the most excitement Maybury has had in years. This stuffed shirt mama’s boy is on an adventure!

I don’t know whether the Eagles enjoyed a spot of Robert Aickman in prelude to the composition of “Hotel California.” I do believe the particles that constitute the universe tend to clump into discrete masses. These supra-objects and their wedding trains of gas and dust hurtle outward from the instigating detonation toward whatever awaits beyond where light doubles upon itself and time flattens to the black edge of God’s shaving razor. The journey of material existence is always about accretion and dissolution. We combine, we divide, and we dissolve into infinity. Time is a broken ring. Its jagged braid will cut you. Mortal agency, always a tenuous proposition, will be nullified.

It is clear from the start that Maybury’s own agency is on the wane. Gripping the steering wheel of the car is an illusion of control just as material life itself is arguably an illusion. He is not the agent of his own destiny, a sad fact reinforced by each new development. Despite a pretense of self-determination, Maybury is merely a passenger headed for a predestined result. From its inception, Maybury’s journey is conducted by a company manager who compels him on a “shortcut” into the Beyond. The shortcut lies in the opposite direction of the destination, of home. This incongruity, this instance of being forcibly conducted, is but the first of many pills our increasingly hapless protagonist will swallow.

Maybury tries his luck at a building with a sign proclaiming it to be THE HOSPICE. From the moment Falkner, the proprietor, admits him into the hospice dining hall for supper, Maybury senses something vital has gone awry. Yet, his response to irrational occurrences is oddly muted. Hunger, weariness, and irritable civility cloud his perceptions to danger. Initially, he dismisses the mounting strangeness as eccentricity, or clannish custom impenetrable to his outsider’s perspective. Other guests occupy a single long table while he is seated alone at a distant orbit. Everyone sups from oversized bowls and plates that remind Maybury of how parents might outfit toddlers. Baby plates, is the term that strikes him. Baby plates with THE HOSPICE encircling the rim.

The room is too warm, much too warm. Hot as hell, a colloquially-minded wit might be inclined to suggest. Portions are enormous. Maybury begins to struggle. Meanwhile other guests tuck into their meals with gusto. They have ceded the field to their lesser angels. The process of reversion to the primitive mode is akin to decomposition. The solid state universe retrogrades with each indulgence of physical appetite, with each debauchery of the senses. Human psyches are in the process of being broken upon a rock and ground into a fine powder, or reduced as fat is reduced in a cauldron of boiling water.

Throughout the proceedings, the old refrain, “life is but a dream” mutters and murmurs, an unattributed background chant as prosaic reality deliquesces around our protagonist. Or, more likely, it is the protagonist himself who is melting, reducing to his base desires. Either way, the hymn is given throat by a company of slaves chained to the deck of a Roman galley. The inhabitants of the hostel exist in a condition of exalted captivity, catered to and exhorted by the staff. So-called guests. There is no mistaking that these guests are prisoners. Prisoners of gluttonous vice, and certainly possessed of debilitating fear, if one cares to infer aspects of their eagerness to please as stemming from dread of some unspoken punishment. The bonds transcend the metaphorical. One of the guests is literally shackled at the ankle while handsome men in white jackets and women in blue dresses hover, wielding encouragement like whips.

Maybury notes that while his own appetite has dulled partway through the second course, the others eat “as if their lives depended on it.” When he begs off finishing a prodigious and slimy turkey entrée (a natural soporific, no less), his server becomes enraged and dashes the pate to pieces. A fascinating projection as it is precisely the outburst one might expect of a wrathful child.

3. Genius Loci

The weird cascade effect is only ramping up.

Maybury endures his meal and the displeasure of the server, one Mulligan. He escapes to the lounge for a cup of coffee, black. This is a special request granted with dictatorial benevolence by Falkner. In stark contrast to the monstrously large supper settings, the coffee arrives in a tiny cup. The coffee is not part of the regularly scheduled program; it represents a liminal desire of wakefulness, and therefor at odds with the apparent measure the hospice staff have undertaken to drug their guests into torpor and compliance.

As is often the case in an Aickman tale, you’ll bear witness to a weird sexual encounter. Maybury is accosted by a fellow guest named Cecile. She of the tragic demeanor and cloying perfume. During the course of their cryptic conversation, major domo Vincent observes their interaction with rapt concentration. Cecile becomes increasingly familiar, a fact that despite his married status, Maybury seems of no mind to dissuade. Her fraternization escalates until she seizes his hand and presses it to her breast and then curls into his lap. The festivities are eventually disrupted when Falkner announces curfew. Cecile slips away, but not before whispering an invitation into Maybury’s ear.

He recovers from this peculiar dalliance and requests petrol for his car. The car won’t start. However, Aickman is too clever to obstruct his protagonist’s escape with a cheap ploy such as mechanical failure, nor does he resort to the logical premise of sabotage. No, he doubles down on the weirdness quotient; goes all in on the dream atmosphere. Maybury simply can’t depress the starter—it’s the stuff of nightmares. The ignition seems to be a decoy, or Maybury has inexplicably forgotten the trick much as many people report of dreams where they appear in the buff at social functions. In any event, the starter refuses to budge until another of Falkner’s minions brutishly intervenes. Even so, this solution merely peels another rotten layer of the onion—the hospice vehicles only operate with diesel. Alas, diesel is incompatible with Maybury’s model. He’ll be forced to spend the night…And what a night it proves to be.

With every passing moment, Maybury descends into the rabbit hole. Beginning with the opaque suburban maze, continuing through a semi-coerced meal to this shipwreck upon a lee shore, and punctuated by Falkner’s glib obfuscation, the snare has tightened around his neck. No matter how he twists, the cathode bends to accommodate and drag him farther into the gloom of the underworld.

He is paired with an elderly gent named Bannard, who warns him against the dangers of inadvertently waking other guests as the men tiptoe into their room. The old man exhibits similarly peculiar behavior as Cecile, including a rather coy offer for sex before lights out. Thoroughly unnerved, Maybury lies awake wondering what has become of him. He is further alarmed to discover Bannard stealthily departing the room. Shortly thereafter, a series of shrieks echoes throughout the building. Maybury apprehends it as a death cry, but at this point one might excuse a cynical reader for wondering if it might be a “little death.” Our hero decides to investigate, but as with the car ignition, the doorknob refuses to budge. The curtains reveal blank wall absent windows. These, as are most items in dreams, stage props. He returns to his bed in a state of anxiety, helpless except to wait. The lone light bulb fizzles and dies. Bannard creeps into the room reeking of Cecile’s perfume, leaving us to ponder whether the earlier scream was elicited by torment or ecstasy. He falls into slumber, snoring loudly.

Are these events real, or is Maybury trapped in the amber of a hypnogogic state? In the morning Bannard pries into his personal life regarding his wife and son. Maybury’s answers are evasive—as if he possesses the vaguest recollection of how his dear ones appear. They assume a blurry, ethereal quality in his elliptical confirmation of their physical descriptions and personalities. When pressed as to whether he loves them, he offers a glib retort. It rings hollow.

Odder yet, the fellow he knows as Bannard seems changed, an older, keener version, an imperfect doppelganger. This imperfection, this off-kilter mutability, may be the key to unlocking the secret of “The Hospice.” Everything that exists within this microcosm of reality could simply be extracted from Maybury’s thoughts. Falkner knew his name shortly after Maybury arrived; a detail never satisfactorily explained. Certain individuals are vexingly familiar, as if retrieved from the recollection of a television show or magazine article. Cars that won’t start, doors that won’t budge—not until the dramatic moment demands they do so.

Indeed, the hospice may function as a kind of Lagerstätte, a repository wherefrom trapped consciousness slowly leaches as through a membrane to some ultimate destination. The building’s physical characteristics may be illusory, conjured from the subconscious memories of its inhabitant souls. Memory and dream are fragile. Known faces blur and alter. We forget our pants, we fail at rote tasks, we try to run and discover our feet stuck in quicksand. Dream state is a rough approximation of the waking world. Only that which is necessary or dramatic is fully revealed.

Whether the hospice and its staff are manifestations of a sentient being is debatable. In the context of Aickman’s wider portfolio, I’d hazard an affirmative. So, what does this genius loci desire? Domination, mental and physical, is the exhibited purpose of Falkner and enforced by the facilely pleasant staff. By their combined arms effect, tenants of the hospice are not only imprisoned, they are degraded unto a subdued, yet orgiastic infantilism.

Domination to what purpose, is the larger question. Are Falkner and his minions actually helper spirits guiding the lost through a transition from flesh to spirit? Is the hospice a spiritual sundew that sedates and pacifies its victims and then slowly digests them, blood, bones, memories and all? We may speculate, but we cannot know. That which lies beyond the veil is an abiding mystery.

4. The Passenger

Maybury’s final minutes as a guest are spent with Falkner who informs him (while unlatching a meticulously barred front door) there has been a death in the night. Vincent, clad in his white coat, leads four black-jacketed pallbearers down the stairs as they lug a coffin to a waiting hearse. Meanwhile a crowd of guests mills nearby, oblivious to the procession.

Falkner insists this transfer must be assayed quickly to spare his tenants pain. He offers Maybury a lift to town, which is accepted. Maybury is forced to ride in back with the coffin—the driver and a “director of the firm, a corpulent man” occupy the front seat. What firm does Aickman refer? Is this a sly insinuation that by logic of dream or a dying mind, we have circled back to the beginning as Maybury was directed to a nonexistent shortcut by a company man? What death is represented by the coffin? Both Cecile and Bannard are conspicuously absent from the throng of guests. Among the last comments Falkner makes, is that if Maybury leaves with the hearse he won’t be able to thank Bannard.

Some suggest, that Maybury himself was murdered in the black of night, that the silence within the hearse is not due to respect for the dead. Rather, it is symbolic that Maybury has begun the terminal approach to his destiny. At last, the driver leaves him at a bus station, saying, “It won’t be long.” Long before what? Before the bus arrives? Or not long until the last trickle charge of Maybury’s consciousness ebbs into the ether?

Whatever the true nature of the hospice, whatever the truth of Maybury’s fate, whatever the weird message this piece attempts to communicate, Robert Aickman ruthlessly cracks one’s skull open and rearranges the furniture. He intimates we are merely passengers in this existence, trapped, albeit briefly, on a repeating coil. As Maybury discovers while riding in austere silence in the rear of the hearse, we’re only getting out feet-first.

_____

^[1] Kleffel, Rick. “ ‘New Strange’ Stories Hold A Chilling Mirror To Life.” NPR. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/2013/06/22/191375234/new-strange-stories-hold-a-chilling-mirror-to-life

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This article is part of our series about the four stories not included in

The narrative of Philip K. Dick’s “The Preserving Machine” is conventional in structure, straightforward even, and deceptively so for a work of what is ultimately high quality weird science fiction. Dick’s writing is deft and wastes no time in getting straight to Doc Labyrinth and the initial mention of his titular Machine. By the end of the second paragraph, we get the nameless narrator speaking to Doc Labyrinth, asking what is essentially the propelling question for this entire story: “Then the Machine did work the way you expected?” This, of course, begs the question of what the machine does, and what it does is rather strange indeed.

It is a shame that this story never made it into The Weird, for Dick truly is one of the great weird science fiction writers. The large scale picture of Dick is familiar to most readers: he was a warped prophet of reality and unreality, obsessed with writing stories that closely examined the fabric of our environments and our ontologies before flipping them over entirely and proposing often bizarre alternatives. It is a testament to the skill and power of these stories that many still find them provocative and startling today. I have fond memories of reading “Faith of Our Fathers” for the first time in college and looking up from my book, feeling like the lines of people’s skin and the corners of walls were going to blur away at any minute. I also still admire the final twist of Ubik that I dare not reveal here (because if any of you haven’t read it yet, go do so now, or as soon as you can). All I will say is it may affect the way you see your pocket change.

But those stories are essentially later-period Dick, much more confident and overt in their weirdness than “The Preserving Machine,” which is subtler and ultimately smaller in scale than these examples, though no less provocative. The weirdness in this story is, of course, enabled by the Preserving Machine itself, born out of the apocalyptic fears of Doc Labyrinth (call this story “pre-apocalyptic” if you wish; the label is fairly appropriate here). In the time and setting of this story, Labyrinth is worried that “civilization [is] going the way of Rome,” that “[his] world, our society, would pass away as theirs did, and a period of darkness would follow.” The specific cause of these worries is never revealed in the story directly, but it is indirectly hinted at, with references to war, to bombers and bombs, and walls going “down in a roar of rubble and plaster.” To consider context a bit here: this story was written and published in 1953, well into the heyday of the Cold War, and tensions were still running high for many, including Dick, who played off of Cold War fears quite often in his early science fiction.

It is in the reverie of a dark vision of the world’s destruction, combined with the good doctor’s fears that all proof of human art and civilization will disintegrate, that the kernel of the idea of the Preserving Machine itself is revealed:

And then, in Doc Labyrinth’s vision, he saw the score come borrowing out, like some buried mole. Quite like a mole, in fact, with claws and sharp teeth and a furious energy.

The mole, in this case, is a musical score, like “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” or “Ride of the Valkyries,” somehow transmuted into living, breathing, surviving physical form, because ideally an animal, driven by instinct, would fare better in any apocalypse than a simple piece of sheet music. And then, once the apocalypse is over, the animal can be turned back into its original, sheet music form.

This is a truly bizarre, cognitively challenging idea, when you really take the time to consider it. Transformation is a well-worn trope of science fiction and weird fiction, and it was so even in the time of this story. But this is something entirely different. This is synesthesia given literal, science fictional form. Instead of hearing particular musical notes or melodies which provoke unanticipated physical sensations or changes in mood or visual perception, here we literally have the transference of something from purely conceptual, non-tactile form into literal shape and existence, one that we can feel, see, touch, etc. directly for ourselves. This is a philosophically loaded idea at its core, with resonances of Plato’s theory of Forms, something else Dick loves to play with in other stories. (I think of the regressing historical forms of objects and settings in Ubik, which threaten to ultimately turn into the purest, most conceptually ideal Forms of themselves.)

With this setup, Dick has a great deal of fun imagining what actual pieces of music would look like in literal, animal form. There is, of course, the “Mozart bird” which is “pretty, small and slender, with the flowing plumage of a peacock,” and the “beethoven beetle,” “stern and dignified” in its hard-shelled manner. Even with these initial successes, however, Labyrinth questions the results of his experiment: “He had expected an army of stout badger creatures, equipped with claws and scales, digging, fighting, ready to gnaw and kick. Was he getting the right thing?” And yet, Labyrinth goes on with what is the quintessential Mad Scientist answer: “it was too late to turn back, now.”

The remainder of the story is indeed a story of survival, but one unintended by Labyrinth: the music-creatures proceed to go to ever-loving combat with each other, much the same as predator and prey would in the wild. (Naturally, the Wagner animal is the apex predator.) With each turn of the story, Labyrinth (and perhaps the reader) is increasingly puzzled and dismayed by the results of the transmutations, which defeat his expectations for these music-creatures entirely. It’s evident that Labyrinth though these creatures would be more dignified somehow, more well-behaved and, to put it bluntly, domesticated. It’s like this assumption is grounded in the fact that these creatures are based on music composed by humans. Once they’re in the animal kingdom, though, Nature’s rules take over.

I want to wrap up here, before I spoil the entirety of the story for readers, but suffice it to say Dick has one last twist up his sleeve, with more wrinkles in both the function of the Machine and the future of these music-creatures to reveal and leave readers to think about. In the end, this story is a fun, yet heady meditation on ideas and composition in general, grounded in the notion of translating the conceptual to the literal and the composition of form by human hands, versus the composition of forms by Nature – and the rewriting of those forms through the intervention of strange technology. It may have surprised Doc Labyrinth, but it probably shouldn’t surprise us that weird machines yield weird results.

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Where should we draw the line between the Weird and magical realism? In Stephen Graham Jones’ Flowchart of the Damned, he draws the line between weird fiction and other forms of fantastic literature like magical realism and surrealism by asking whether the strange elements are assumed. If the characters naturally accept the bizarre occurrences, then it’s magical realism. If not, then it’s weird. But what if we have a narrator we cannot trust? What if the narrator is so disturbed that we’re not sure if the narrator’s assumptions are those of a sane mind? Such is the case in Otsuichi’s “The White House in the Cold Forest.” This short story is a tale from 2009 collection Zoo penned by Japanese author and filmmaker, Otsuichi.

I tend to agree with Stephen Graham Jones on his distinction between weird and other forms of strange literature. However, like most rules in literature, there are exceptions and I think that “The White House in the Cold Forest” is one of them. In Otsuichi’s story, the narrator is raised by his aunt and uncle, who ostracize him by forcing him to live in a barn out back while his family lives in the house. Eventually the narrator runs away after he comes of age, and ventures deep into the forest where he builds a house out of corpses. This house reminds him of the barn he was raised in and in it we can see the dichotomy of weird and magical realism. To be able to build a house purely of corpses is strange or downright impossible but to want to build a house of corpses is weird. So again, is this weird fiction or magical realism?

Another piece of this puzzle occurs when a girl, sister to one of the house’s corpses, offers herself in place of her brother so that his corpse may be returned home. She assumes the position of her brother’s corpse and remains there for days until she passes.

She slept standing upright. After a while she spoke less and less. Her face grew whiter and eventually became the same color as the other corpses around her.

This seems almost natural and accepted by the girl but we have two doubts here as well. First, we never know the girl’s thoughts. Perhaps the house of corpses is as strange to her as it is to the reader. Secondly, the girl is a third person in this story and is only seen through the eyes of the narrator. Certainly, there is no shock or dismay described but maybe that’s because the narrator, who is disturbed and unreliable, doesn’t pick up on it or denies its existence.

The style of Otsuichi’s writing also allows the reader to interpret the story in different ways. He writes in a very simple manner with very direct sentences. Perhaps only once do we ever see the narrator experience any emotion: when the girl dies he “[feels] a stab of regret.” In the first part of the story, the narrator details the horrible alienation and abuse he suffers at the hands of his relatives. However, we see no emotion, no anger, no despair. With so little to go on in terms of how the narrator feels, it’s hard to determine whether or not any of the story’s events are assumed or not.

Despite the simple style of Otsuichi’s writing, we have a story with all the dark, eerie atmosphere of any classic weird tale. Moreover, his simple and concise style creates a fairy-tale-like prose where the interpretation of what’s happening is largely up to the reader. Without a doubt though, the narrator’s strange and unsettling behavior in this story make it one of the great works of the Weird.

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“The Drowned Giant” by Shafeen Alam

The work of J.G. Ballard occupies a unique space that exists at the intersection of science fiction, horror, satire, and post-modern literature. All of these tendencies can be witnessed even within the short space of a story like “The Drowned Giant.” First published in the aptly-named 1964 collection, The Terminal Beach, in it we witness the bizarre appearance and lingering effects of a mysterious giant’s corpse. The story features many of Ballard’s perennial themes—physical grotesqueries and society’s fascination with them, alienation, the juxtaposition of life and death, and a sense of bleakness that pervades the human condition. His themes and stylistic experimentation have traditionally placed him in the science fiction New Wave movement with the likes of other weird authors, such as M. John Harrison and Harlan Ellison, but much of his work resists even this nebulous categorization.

In “The Drowned Giant”, our narrator, along with numerous other anonymous onlookers, witnesses the appearance of a deceased monstrosity and observes the manner in which it decays, undergoes various mutilations, and is distributed piecemeal throughout the unnamed city nearby. The story operates on a number of levels— an exercise in abjection and body horror, a kind of fairy tale in reverse, and a commentary on the fluidity of identity. Ballard deliberately creates no expectation of a rational explanation for the giant’s corpse, as the opening presents the body in a non-emotive, matter-of-fact manner. From the beginning, one can clearly see that the story is going to develop along a trajectory that deliberately goes against the expected narrative development; the story is less about solving the mystery of the giant’s origin (as it ironically decomposes and is dismantled) than it is about exploring the effects upon the town that discovers and distributes it.

In Ballard’s work, humanity’s strange fascinations and conflicting drives become a lens through which we can conceive of our existence as an exercise in weirdness. As time passes and the giant becomes more repugnant, its pieces are severed and repurposed into totems, decorations, and horrific adornments. The relative anonymity of the story’s “I” and “we”–the only identifiers for the characters other than the giant—creates an intensifying sense of unease and makes it clear that Ballard is commenting on the dehumanizing effects, on both observer and observed, of spectacle consumed en masse. Simultaneously, the persistent mutilations—in the name of science, entertainments, and other motivations—serve to erode the identity of the one distinct character in the story. We witness it disintegrating and regressing from “the body of a drowned giant” to something no longer bearing resemblance to a human (“the human likeness I had noticed earlier had vanished again”). As it continues to lose any recognizable identity, it becomes a skeleton, and eventually even its unity as a skeleton is dismantled as “the high curved bones are deserted, battered by the breaking waves, but in the summer they provide an excellent perch for the sea-wearying gulls.”

The anti-gestational tendency of the story forces the reader to confront a fundamental problem found in much of the best literature and science fiction: what is it to be human? If one loses something as crucial as a limb, is one’s identity retained? What about several limbs? A head? As in other of Ballard’s works, this selection illustrates a kind of uncomfortable view of evolution and adaptation; as components of the body are faced with selective pressures, they often adapt other functions that were previously impossible, culminating in a recognizable, distinct specimen made up of such parts.   In “The Drowned Giant,” the process occurs in reverse until a distinct identity becomes impossible, but one can never quite pinpoint at what moment it ceases to be a giant and becomes a skeleton, or a disfigured collection of parts. Are the components now discrete wholes of their own and divested of their connection to the strange colossus?

The systematic dismantling of the body is focused on with excruciating detail, often calling to mind the detached, clinical depictions of morbid processes in the works of Kafka, such as the torture mechanism in “In the Penal Colony”. This narrative style is a crucial part of what makes the story so profoundly unsettling; the giant is clearly not too distant a relative from humanity, and yet its fetishized destruction is a product of the all-too-human urge to reappropriate. We are, after all, makers and users of tools and totems. Although the story turns upon a weird premise, the behavior subsequent to the giant’s appearance seems all too normal and loses its spectacular qualities. “With this loss of identity, and the few traces of personality that had clung tenuously to the figure, the interest of the spectators expired.” Like Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People,” there is a kind of unsettling consonance to the human behavior depicted—a challenging effect to achieve for any writer.

While the giant itself is of obvious significance, so too is the manner in which news of its arrival is disseminated and consumed.   The anonymous “I” and “we” are linked to the circulation of news about the spectacle that is the giant. Note, particularly, the distinct use of the passive voice in the first two sentences; the giant’s body is acted upon, and the consumers of the news are similarly acted upon, which subtly reinforces the theme of spectacle consumption as a numbing agent. From the beginning, “accounts of the giant circulated around the city” in a fashion that morbidly parodies the later circulation around the city of its constituent limbs, bones, and other assorted components. Over time, the giant’s arrival has been forgotten, but his constituent parts remain and begin to show up in seemingly-random locations. Instead of a giant, it is now a jaw bone, a humerus, a square of skin, etc. Instead of novelty, its pieces are now unremarkable. In keeping with the story’s ironic trajectory, the abnormality of the giant becomes progressively more mundane–a likely commentary on the numbing effects of superficial mass entertainments.

The juxtaposition of the mundane and the spectacular is just one of many such contradictions present in “The Drowned Giant” and the rest of of Ballard’s work. Presented here are life and death, the animate, anonymous collective and inanimate, identifiable singular, utility and futility, the mysterious otherworldly and the rational investigations of science. Decades after publication, Ballard’s speculative work remains as weird as ever, with just as much disquieting relevance to current readers.

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“The Preserving Machine” by Philip K. Dick

“The Preserving Machine” is a short scifi story from Philip K. Dick first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1953. It’s a companion piece to another Doc Labyrinth story, “The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford.” Like many of Dick’s works, it demonstrates Dick’s love for classical music.

“The Drowned Giant” by J. G. Ballard

J. G. Ballard’s “The Drowned Giant” is about a large humanoid that washes on shore. The story was published in Ballard’s 1964 collection The Terminal Beach. It was also reprinted under the title “Souvenir” in Playboy magazine in 1965. The story can be found in several of J.G. Ballard’s collections such as The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard.

“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez is perhaps best known for his magical realism in novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. But Márquez also wrote short stories too such as “Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes” (“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”) in 1955.

“The White House in the Cold Forest” by Otsuichi

To try to describe Otsuichi’s work is very hard. It’s a blend of surrealism, horror, the Weird, and fairy tales. Otsuichi, born in 1978, hails from Japan where he is both a writer and a filmmaker. “The White House in the Cold Forest” appears in Otsuichi’s 2009 collection, Zoo. The prose in Zoo is very simple but Otsuichi still manages to create all the weirdness and unease you’d expect from a weird story.

These are four amazing and pivotal weird stories that demonstrate all the facets and the varied history of the Weird. They are as much a part of The Weird compendium as the stories that appear in the physical book. Thus, we really hope you join us over the next few weeks and read the stories along with us. It should make for a very weird time!

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