If I could point to a quintessential weird tale–a short story that has all the Lovecraftian features that have come to be associated with weird fiction–I would point to Robert Barbour Johnson’s “Far Below.” Not only is Johnson the first author in The Weird to mention Lovecraft by name as a fictionalized character in his story, but he seems to have deeply read his essay “On Supernatural Horror in Literature.” In Johnson, the Lovecraftian weird tale has solidified into its most stable form.
The opening line is an absolute classic: “With a roar and a howl the thing was upon us, out of total darkness” (260). The “thing” itself is nothing more unusual than a New York City subway car, but the way it is described estranges it, so that it comes to resemble a bizarre worm crawling though the darkness below the city streets.
But there is a monstrous threat below the city. As Inspector Gordon Craig of the NYPD informs the nameless narrator, “They” have been known to break into the tunnels. The threat remains vaguely defined: a race of pale white creatures who inhabit the darkness and appear similar to a human or a gorilla, yet not dissimilar to “some sort of giant, carrion-feeding, subterranean mole” (262).
“Far Below” actually precedes The Mole People, a 1956 film that popularized the concept of mole people living beneath the earth. However, the first example of mole people is probably the Moorlocks from H. G. Wells’s Time Machine in 1895, in which they were depicted as devolved forms of proletarian humans operating machinery far below the earth’s crust.
This story scores almost every tick in the weird fiction checklist, or, if you prefer, every square in the weird fiction bingo card. These mole people are a cosmic horror, a vaguely defined outside threat that the majority of human beings carry on their lives blissfully ignorant about. The NYPD are like the Night’s Watch from Game of Thrones fighting back the dark horrors of the night, though instead of a wall, they patrol the subway tunnels. And if they do find one of the creatures, they shred them to pieces with suppressed Maxim guns so no questions are asked about the hidden war beneath the streets.
Unfortunately, it also checks off the “racism” item on the weird tale checklist. The editors make it clear that some aspects of the story would appear dated today. The reasons for this is probably best encapsulated by the fact that the mole people are used to explain Indigenous burial practices that settler scientists cannot explain. (This particular details also checks off the pseudoarchaeology square on the bingo card.) The mole people are also used to explain the cheap price at which the original inhabitants of Manhattan sold the land to the Dutch settlers. Furthermore, there are certain reference to phrenology, or determining human intelligence by the shape of the skull or brain. These features show how the mole people inhabit settler fears of counter-invasion and counter-colonization, as well as White people’s fears of miscegenation.
Johnson is clearly a disciple of Lovecraft’s. As if the content of his story was not enough of a clue, he also has Gordon Craig directly say that he consulted Lovecraft’s writings himself when researching the history of these underground monsters:
Oh, yes; I learned a lot from Lovecraft–and he got a lot from me, too! That’s where the–well, what you might call the authenticity came from in some of his yarns that attracted the most attention! Oh, of course he had to soft-pedal the strongest parts of it–just as you’re going to have to do if you ever mention this in your own writings!
(264)
This passage is quite clever because of the way it plays with fictionality: the reader’s relationship to other texts and the reader’s relationship to the world outside the text.
Firstly, it posits that the story told by the character of Gordon Craig has been influenced by Lovecraft himself–but a version of Lovecraft that exists in Johnson’s fictional universe. This raises questions about the ontology of this version of Lovecraft. Is this Lovecraft the real Lovecraft known to scholars, who wrote made-up stories for Weird Tales? Or is it a Lovecraft who may be a slightly different version of himself, appropriate to Johnson’s world?
Johnson seems to want the reader to think that his fictional Lovecraft had “real” encounters with the weird things he wrote about. Since he blurs the line between the real and fictional Lovecraft, he implies that the real Lovecraft who lived outside the text also had these encounters: in short, that his mole people and the weird events of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” also happened in the reader’s world.
What’s more, Johnson subtly usurps Lovecraft’s own originality by saying he owes the authenticity of his own descriptions to the first-hand experiences of Johnson’s fictional character, Gordon Craig! This positions Johnson’s story as closer to the “truth,” while Lovecraft’s fiction is actually a second-hand report.
These rhetorical moves and blurring of lines between fiction and fact create not only the illusion of a shared reality outside the text that both Lovecraft and Johnson have written about in their fiction, but the illusion of the reader’s immersion in their shared universe.
The fact that Johnson’s narrator is never named strengthens the illusion that the narrator might be a fictionalized version of Johnson himself, who “really” travelled with Gordon Craig in the New York subway and recorded his story like a journalist would. Since encounters with real cosmic horror cannot be tolerated by most readers’ minds, perhaps Johnson wishes to make the reader think that he has chosen to tell his story through fiction only because of the shielding alternative it gives. If he had used journalism, perhaps readers would have thought him mad, or gone mad themselves.
Johnson may have intended the appearance of fiction to be seen as one the ways in which his narrator has softened the truth, just as Lovecraft supposedly softened it through fiction. By suggesting that not all of the truth was told, Johnson lets his readers posit that there is a “worse” reality behind his story, a reality the reader could discover for themselves if only they searched for it “out there.”
Each of these strategies of Johnson’s assists in creating the intertextual illusion that the the mole people might actually exist outside the story, in the grimy subway tunnels of Manhattan, where the reader is currently reading Weird Tales magazine as the dark tunnels zip by the plexiglass windows.
“Genius Loci” by Clark Ashton Smith is a striking inclusion in this weird fiction anthology. It is a much simpler, quieter story than Smith’s more famous pulp fantasy adventures. A significant influence on Lovecraft, Smith may be best known for his highly wrought prose style and his fantastic short stories and poems about vanished continents and civilizations.
I first grew acquainted with Smith by reading the The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, a Penguin Classics book. I picked it up in Toronto when I presented on my Master’s thesis for the Academic Conference for Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy (ACCSFF) in 2019. During the same trip, I also had the chance to glimpse Clark’s artworks in a book held by the Toronto Public Library in the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation & Fantasy. Smith’s interests in painting and poetry certainly come through in “Genius Loci.”
Though it can be easy to criticize Smith’s artworks as amateurish and his prose as overwrought, some of his artworks and short stories (especially his poetry and prose poems) do more than tell a story: they conjure a specific mood that Lovecraft considered essential to the weird tale. “Genius Loci” does this but on a much quieter scale than his other works.
Like so many of the preceding stories, this is also a survivor’s tale told by the narrator, who is a writer living in the countryside with Amberville, a renowned painter. Amberville becomes fascinated with a particular spot in the landscape that seems to ooze with an undefinable sense of menace and evil. The painter is both attracted to, and repulsed by, the dreadfulness of the bony, dead willow growing above a stinking, scummy pool. “The spot is evil–it is unholy in a way that I simply can’t describe,” says Amberville (223). Yet, the spot takes over his mind. The painter can soon think of little else than visually and artistically pinning down exactly what gives the site its awful appearance.
A genius loci, Latin for “spirit of a place,” was considered the guardian of a place in Roman religion (Wikipedia). In modern architecture, it refers to the concept of that un-nameable quality that gives a building its unique feeling. In a sense, it is a personification of a place. The habit of seeing an inanimate setting as having human features recalls pareidolia: the mind’s habit of seeing human faces in non-human objects.
Do you see the twisted, horrific faces?
Initially at least, this seems to be what Amberville has experienced in this particular spot on the Chapman estate. When describing his composition, he says he was “impressed immediately by a profound horror that lurked in these simple elements and was expressed by them as if by the balefully contorted features of some demoniac face … The evil conveyed was something wholly outside humanity–more ancient than man” (224). Later on, he remarks that the Genius Loci “has the air of a thirsty vampire, waiting to drink me in somehow, if it can” (226).
Why is it that seeing faces in of animate things can create such a disturbing sense of horror? It may have something to do with the fact we are inherently disturbed to see faces in things in which we do not expect to see them.
This spotting of the familiar in the unfamiliar Freud called unheimlich–unhomely–which in English is often translated as “uncanny.” The uncanny can serve to explain why we feel uncomfortable when we see a staircase in the middle of the forest, or see a face in a piece of wood. But in my opinion, the uncanny alone cannot explain the specific sense of dread and menace that Amberville sees on the Chapman property. For example, a benevolent Genius Loci would still be uncanny. So what can account for the overpowering sense of evil?
A suggestion of what might be at work here, and in a great deal of other weird fiction, can be found in Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject.
Julia Kristeva
In Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection, Kristeva’s opening paragraph describes the abject, a term whose relevance to weird fiction should be apparent:
There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection, 1
Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” describes the weird tale as requiring an “unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces,” which in light of Kristeva, actually maps well onto the abject as she describes it above (“a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable”). The painter in “Genius Loci” is seduced by the malignant, outside force of the landscape he desires to paint; in addition, there is also a powerful urge or necessity to resist seduction and resist the evil.
Indeed, Chapman’s grove could be said to be “an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned.” The painter is both repulsed and summoned by the Genius Loci, as many weird tale protagonists have been, from Ewers’s “The Spider” to Merritt’s “People of the Pit.” And like the fates of Bracquemont and Stanton, whose desires are only satisfied in death, the painter is drawn towards the Genius Loci as a moth to a flame, where he drowns in the stagnant pond, becoming part of the haunting landscape himself, where his presence continues to haunt the narrator of the tale after death.
Since the abject is a useful term that I may be returning to in future posts, I should write a little more about it here. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, the abject is defined as “what the subject’s consciousness has to expel or disregard in order to create the proper separation between subject and object” (2069). The abject remains unconsciously desired, but is transformed into something filthy and disgusting in an act of repression. For example, “both matter and mother are abjects for the fantasy of self-creation” (2069). In establishing any identity, there must be a thing rejected because it is seen as filthy or evil.
The abject often manifests when this separation between self and other breaks down in moments of horror. Horror fiction is often based on the violation of boundaries and taboos: the boundaries between the human and the material, the human and the animal, the living and the dead, the natural and the supernatural, and the self and other. According to Wikipedia, for Kristeva,
the abject […] is used to refer to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object, or between the self and the other.
This breakdown occurs in “Genius Loci” when Amberville sees the face of Chapman, an old man, in the branches of the dead willow. The reason this pareidolia produces such revulsion in Amberville is thus not only because he’s “seeing things” that aren’t there but because he has witnessed that the division between a human being and the material world has dissolved. This has implications for his own humanity, since if another human being could become so transfigured by the vampiric glade, then he can be transformed too.
Seeing a dead body produces a similar feeling in us. We see the stiffness of the body and recognize the fact that it is made of matter as material as grave dirt. Then we realize that we ourselves also inhabit a body, which is, in reality, just as material as the dead one. For most of our lives, we repress this reality and express our revulsion of the body, especially the dead body, because we will also cease to exist except as a material body. Belief in the eternal soul is a symbolic belief that rejects the permanence of the body as abject–but when you look a dead body, you become aware that there’s not so much difference between the dead body and you, whatever your beliefs about the soul.
However, having an abject is necessary to maintain our functionality and perhaps our sanity as well. Arguably, it is the abject that keeps us sane, because it instills the human mind with “the inability … to correlate all its contents” (Lovecraft “The Call of Cthulhu”). In a way, one aspect that makes the followers of Cthulhu insane is their contact with the Real–what Lovecraft identified with the true, cosmic scale of the universe, terrifying in its vastness.
To return to “Genius Loci,” if Amberville notices that there is now no difference between Chapman and the landscape, then it could mean there is no difference between himself and the landscape either, except on a symbolic (not “Real”) level. He sees the landscape as evil because it is an abject for him, so that he can retain his own sense of self. However, as an abject, the Genius Loci is also unconsciously desired, leading to the back-and-forth repulsion and attraction that draws the painter inexorably nearer to the landscape and to his death.
As I read more and more weird fiction, the more I’m noticing that this pattern seems to be a key dynamic of the genre.
Next week, I’ll be discussing Hagiwara Sakutarō’s “The Town of Cats” (1935).
Jean Ray’s “The Mainz Psalter” is a ‘supernatural’ sea adventure–although a better word for it would be a nautical weird tale, since it purports to be about a natural, material phenomenon that exists beyond everyday human perception. The editors state that it takes after William Hope Hodgson’s stories of ghost pirates–think the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie–though Ray claimed to have actually written “The Mainz Psalter” before reading Hodgson.
He would not have had to read Hodgson first, however, to have found predecessors for this kind of story in any old coot’s high seas tale, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Marinere, and in the supernatural South Seas stories of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Like Merrit’s “People of the Pit” and many other tales besides, this is a “lone survivor” narrative. The captain of the Mainz Psalter, which, as the italics hint, is a ship, tells his story to the crew of the North Caper, the ship that has rescued him, as the only surviving witness of the strange and fantastic phenomena glimpsed form the deck of the Psalter.
Like Margaret Irwin’s “The Book,” “The Mainz Psalter” could have easily been a ghost story–but it is a good deal more than that. There is no haunting, no disembodied hands, but there is the fear of an inchoately perceived threat.
Sea stories are especially well-suited to weird fiction because of sailors depend on each other for survival against the hostile, incomparably vast ocean, a shorthand for humanity’s futile struggle against the distantly perceived exterior threat contained in the cosmos. Sailors have speculated about what monsters lie in the depths of the sea since time immemorial. In its terrifying dimensions, sailing the open ocean is as close to plumbing the uncharted depths of cosmic space as one can get on earth.
The story begins with a schoolmaster requesting passage through hellish waters to Cape Wrath. As part of the deal, he ask for the ship to be renamed the Mainz Psalter, after a rare incunabulum printed by the successors of Gutenberg in the sixteenth century that was gifted to him from a grand-uncle. He’s transporting the rare, precious manuscript, which is worth a fortune, for scientific purposes the likes of which he does not disclose to the captain. Combine M. R. James’s antiquarianism with Stevenson’s love of a high seas tale–with a dash of Lovecraftian alternate dimensions–and you have an idea for the story will be about.
The sailors weigh anchor in Big Toe Bay, a smuggler’s notch and a shelter from the violent seas, where some coastal raiders assault their ship from atop the surrounding cliffs. However, the raiders are picked off one-by-one by an unknown, invisible force: they are hurled from the cliffs and fall to their deaths.
Saved, yet terrified of what could have done such a thing to a human being, the captain tries to determine what happened. Friar Tuck, “a sea-going jack-of-all-trades” (194), points up the cliff at something he’s just seen, but when Jellewyn, his companion, turns, it has already disappeared, and the schoolmaster is seen walking down to the beach from the cliffs.
The sea behaves oddly after that. The water has “oddly coloured streaks” and laughter seems to be coming from within the waves themselves (197). The schoolmaster disappears from the ship. When asked what he thinks of this phenomena, Friar Tuck answers: “I know only that something is around us, something worse than anything else, worse than death!” (197). Fear of the threat posed by indeterminate, outside forces is part of what makes a weird tale weird, and it only gets weirder from here.
New stars appear in the sky, the strange constellations “new geometrical groupings [that] were shining dimly in a frighteningly black sidereal abyss” (197). Here the abyss of the ocean is joined with the abyss of the cosmos, along with a sense of dislocation: that they might have journeyed onto “another plane of existence” (198). This is where the story truly gains a sense of cosmic horror.
Ever since the voyages of Bran the Blessed, and probably before that, Atlantic sailors have claimed to cross into strange, other worlds. The Psalter has now wandered into one of those strange spaces. Jewellyn even states that “if, by some inconceivable magic or some monstrous science, we were transported to Mars or Jupiter, or even to Aldebaran, it wouldn’t prevent us from seeing the same constellations we see from earth” (198). They’ve voyaged so far from home, they’ve surpassed the conventional ways of expressing extreme distance, arriving into a new dimension which they don’t even have the language to describe: the “Nth dimension” (198).
The kraken
A strange, glass like substance covers a lifeboat and causes it to vanish. Later, like in the voyages of Bran–not to mention Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”–the Psalter sails above a vast, sunken city:
The water had become transparent as glass. At an enormous depth, we saw great dark masses with unreal shapes: there were manors with immense towers, gigantic domes, horribly straight streets lined with frenzied houses. We appeared to be flying over a furiously busy city at an incredible height.
(200)
At once, something arises out of the city and hits the keel of the boat. Briefly, the crew glimpses a horror that at once recalls legends about the kraken and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu:
we saw three enormous tentacles, three times as high as the mainmast, hideously writing in the air. A formidable face composed of black shadows and two eyes of liquid amber rose above the port side of the ship and gave us a terrifying look.
(200)
The figure disappears, but the crew is picked off one by one, until only the captain and Jewellyn remain, holed up in the cabin. They hear footsteps on deck, as a strange crew manages the sails–a ghost crew, except for the fact that they must be material, not spiritual, in substance, since they are steering the ship.
Jewellyn says the schoolmaster kept a crystal box, which may be at the source of the horror. He climbs the mainmast to “see something” (203)–what he intends to find is never explained–and leaves behind a note anticipating that in the event of his death, the captain must burn the schoolmaster’s books and destroy the box.
This is precisely what he does. He burns the Mainz Psalter (the incunabulum) and the schoolmaster’s other tomes, finding the crystal box hidden inside the Psalter. The schoolmaster resurfaces in the ocean, an “infernal swimmer” (203), pleading with him to stop destroying the books, but in the end, he smashes the glass box into a million pieces.
What follows is a brief recap: it was at this point that the North Caper, the ship on which the captain has been telling his story, finally rescues him. But the horror follows him on the new ship. The schoolmaster reappears in the ocean, appearing like a clergyman with eyes like burning coals. The clergyman tries to kill the captain of the Psalter, but the narrator–John Copeland, first mate of the North Caper–shoots the clergyman with a pistol. When the body is recovered, however, all that is left are the clothes and a wax head, a mere mannequin.
In the end, Reines, a literary magazine writer and the transcriber of the captain’s account, takes the mannequin to a churchman, who finds that it smells of octopus, in addition to phosphorus and formic acid. This revelation is interesting in terms of deciding whether Ray wants the reader to believe Ballister’s account or not. The phosphorus would seem to suggest a hoax, while the smell of octopus could confirm the truth of the trans-dimensional voyage. Of course, the octopus smell could also be a coincidence and phosoporus is not really sufficient to explain the rising of the three-tentacled vision from the depths of an underwater city. From a Todorovian perspective, the reader may not be sure whether a natural explanation of Ballister’s story has been given, but it certainly permits a reading of what happened as marvelous.
Perplexed by this contradictory evidence, the churchman quotes the Bible, telling them not to “[darken] counsel by words without knowledge” (205). The men of the North Caper give up “trying to understand” (205), and, in so doing, reconcile themselves to perplexity.
Is this a “fantastic” ending in the Todorovian sense, where the events could equally be given a natural or supernatural explanation? Not at all–it’s more of an abdication of any kind of judgment about what they have seen.
The different levels of narration complicate this reading further. Ballister’s account of the Psalter is embedded within Copeland’s story of his rescue on the Caper, which later develops into their encounter with the coal-eyed clergyman. Also, Ballister’s account is not verbatim, but stylistically embellished by Reines. Furthermore, the entire story is presented as a factual account, with Copeland mildly admonishing Reines’s embellishments, while still testifying to the validity of the facts.
But Copeland himself only witnesses the coal-eyed clergyman’s attack–the only part of the story that could be explained by the natural causes of formic acid and phosphorus. How can he guarantee the reader that Ballister’s account is also factual, especially since he admits it has been embellished by Reines? How much of the inter-dimensional travel story was from Ballister’s memory and what was from Reines’s imagination?
On the question of whether there is a marvelous or natural cause behind Ballister’s story of the Mainz Psalter, perhaps what Ray is saying is that we, as reader, should also not darken counsel by “words without knowledge.”
(For more on how embedded narrators can be used to play around with the truth claims made in a story of fantastic discovery, I would recommend Umberto Eco’s study of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Voyage of Gordon Pym in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods.)
Flemish author Jean Ray
Next week, I’ll be discussing Jean Ray’s “The Shadowy Street” (1931).
Margaret Irwin’s “The Book” is considered both a ghost story and a weird tale. These two genres do not always coincide. In “Supernatural Horror and Literature,” H. P. Lovecraft says that the true weird tale goes beyond the ghost story’s formalism to give a certain atmosphere of breathlessness and unexplained dread of “outer, unknown forces” (“Introduction”). Irwin’s ghost story accomplishes this mood and atmosphere. Not only does the protagonist become aware of the haunting, despite his sceptism, but he comes to see his ordinary world as an illusion. His very rationality becomes twisted, supporting his fall into madness.
The formalism of the ghost story was explored by the Russian formalist Tzvetan Todorov in his famous analysis of “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe. In his analysis, the reader of the ghost story bandies continually between being convinced that the haunting has a supernatural origin and justifying a natural explanation for the phenomenon. A ghost story can thus achieve three effects by time the tale achieves closure:
1) the reader reaches the conclusion that it definitely has a natural explanation, in which case it is known as an “uncanny” story;
2) the reader concludes that the haunting must truly be supernatural, in which case it is a case of the “marvellous”;
and 3) a perfect balance of ambiguity between the natural and the supernatural is achieved, in which case it is an example of what Todorov calls “the fantastic.” It is fantastic because the reader cannot decide whether it has a natural or supernatural explanation.
Very few stories achieve a perfect fantastic ending. But most ghost stories do play with the reader’s uncertainty of whether the haunting has a natural and supernatural explanation. It is this interplay that can be thought of as defining the form of the ghost story.
Irwin’s story, like many ghost stories, performs this Todorovian game with the reader. But it also establishes a mood–essential both to the weird tale and the effective ghost story.
The story begins when Mr. Corbett, filled with ennui upon reading a detective story, returns to his library to pick up another book to entertain himself. For one reason or another, a cynical, moribund mood has overcome him, and it colours his reading of every book he picks off the shelf.
Corbett cannot read even optimistic literature without seeing the skull beneath the skin. He sees Charles Dickens’ “revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s “sickly attraction to brutality,” and calls Jane Austen “a prying, sub-acid busybody in everyone else’s flirtations” (184-5). No explanation is given for this mood–he might have just become tired of the optimistic rationalism found in commercial detective novels.
When he replaces the Dickens book, he realizes that there is a larger gap in his bookshelf than there had been before. “This is nonsense,” Corbett thinks. “No one can possibly have gone into the dining-room and removed a book while I was crossing the hall” (184). It is the first sign of a haunting, of something potentially marvellous, in Todorov’s sense. Of course, he does not believe in ghosts, and he has no reason to suspect that there could be one in his house. However, the gap torments his mind once he goes to sleep. It becomes “the most hideous deformity, like a gap between the front teeth of some grinning monster” (184). By the time he awakes, the gap has disappeared. He thinks nothing of it.
Later, he seeks out an old Latin tome in the theological library. As he sets about interpreting it, he reads about the horrible rights of devil worshippers and falls sick. He returns to his family, who seem to be “like sheep”: “nothing in his appearance in the mirror struck him as odd; it was their gaping faces that were unfamiliar” (186). This passage is uncanny in the Freudian sense of unheimlich, or “unhomely.” Corbett sees his own family as other; what is homely and familiar becomes unhomely and strange. The mood conjured by the Latin book has made him see the unreality of his mundane existence, conjuring a mood that goes beyond that of the ghost story into weird tale territory.
It’s this combination of the ghost story form and the weird tale mood that makes Irwin’s “The Book” such a “weird” ghost story. The ghost is not only haunting Corbett; his experience of the ghost alienates him from his very sense of reality.
But the story’s strangest turn has yet to happen. Corbett notices that a few lines of Latin text are being added to the book every night. No one in his family is writing this text; it simply appears. He comes to read these lines as if they were words from an oracle, or a prophet. A practical man, when he reads the line “Ex auro canceris / In dentem elephanits” (“Out of the money of the crab / Into the tooth of the elephant”) (188), he invests his money in the African ivory trade. He makes a killing on his investment.
Due to this turn of good fortune, he learns to trust the book to tell him what to do. Every night he interprets new lines from the text. However, it takes a turn for the worst when he reads “Canem occide” (“Kill the dog”). He attempts to murder the family dog, Mike, who he does not like, with rat poison.
Fortunately, he fails, but his young daughter has a dream that night of a disembodied hand crawling among the bookshelves and picking out a particular volume. Corbett comforts her as the ominousness of the dream settles. Then that same night, he reads the next command: “Infantem occide,” or “Kill the child.”
In one disturbing moment, he resolves to use the rat poison to kill his own daughter:
Jean had acquired dangerous knowledge. She was a spy, an antagonist. That she was so unconsciously, that she was eight years old, his youngest and favourite child, were sentimental appeals that could make no difference to a man of sane reasoning power such as his own. Jean had sided with Mike against him.
(191)
In this passage, Corbett rationalizes his paranoid delusions much like Edgar Allan Poe’s narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” His rationalism, which has affected his taste in literature and his scepticism of ghosts, is now precisely what drives him into unreality. Furthermore, his patriarchal rejection of sentiment (gendered female) as non-rational drives him to reject his common sense and commit the unthinkable.
However, in the end, he cannot bring himself to kill his own child. He throws the cursed tome into the fireplace. As a result, his body is discovered later. He is assumed to have committed suicide due to a sudden plunge in the ivory stocks. But the strangling finger marks discovered around his throat suggest a final, supernatural explanation for his death and all the preceding events: the severed hand from his daughter’s dream has killed him for disobedience.
What is so horrible about this story is not so much the supernatural itself as the all-too-willingness of human beings to obey such heartless commands. The second half of this ghost story bears certain similarities to “The Spider” by Hanns Heinz Ewers in how the void seems to whisper dark commands to the protagonist, commanding absolute obedience.
From a politico-economic standpoint, I also find it interesting that Corbett invests in the African ivory trade, which likely means he invested in the Congo, where the Belgians were responsible for genocidal abuses at the beginning of the century. The Belgian atrocities included cutting the hands off slaves engaged in the rubber and ivory trade. It is interesting that a severed hand then murders Corbett, who likely invested in this same industry. It is interesting to imagine the hand as the severed revenant of an African slave. Though the text itself may not support such a reading, the imagery is suggestive.
Next week, I’ll be discussing Flemish writer Jean Ray’s “The Mainz Psalter” (1930). Ray is one of the few authors in this anthology to have been published twice in The Weird.
H. P. Lovecraft may often be thought of as the father of weird fiction for the scale of his influence. He is certainly one of the most important and central writers in the twisted bouquet of texts gathered in the VanderMeers’ anthology. However, he is not so much the founder of weird fiction than one of its first self-professed authors.
The scale of Lovecraft’s influence was felt by his contemporaries and vastly more so by his successors. But it is also reflected on the literary histories that were later made. Jorge Luis Borges might have been speaking of the author of “The Dunwich Horror” and “Supernatural Horror in Literature” when he said, in “Kafka and His Predecessors,” “His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future” (On Writing 87).
Like Kafka, Lovecraft created his own predecessors. Understood in Lovecraft’s own terms, they stretch back not only as far as Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and Edgar Allan Poe, but as far back as the early Gothic writers. In fact, they could be said to go back far earlier, to the earliest superstitions of our human ancestors.
In his “Afterweird” to the VanderMeers’ anthology, China Miéville describes the indefinite nature of the weird canon, saying that its
edges are as protean, its membranes as permeable and oozing as the breaching biology of Lovecraft’s Dunwich Horror. We interpret it, of course: our minds are meaning-factories. But the ground below them is hole-y. There are cracks and chaos, meaningquakes. The metaphors we walk on are
scree
(1115)
The terrifying, invisible abomination of form that lies at the centre of Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” is thus metonymic for the (highly permeable) form of weird fiction itself. For Mieville, the weird is an “affect,” not bound by the categories of high or low literature, genre, nationality, subject matter, or even the category of supernatural fiction (1115). It defies our capacity for description through language. Like the worms that were around before the human race came to be and will still be here when it is gone, the weird is about that which exists separately from human affairs.
In “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Lovecraft charts the historical development of the weird tale. He defines his subject as such:
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a serious and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain–a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.
(“Introduction”)
This definition contains the essence of the literary history he traces in “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” The early Gothic writers who often included a rational, natural explanation of a ghostly haunting do not earn Lovecraft’s admiration, though he does commend writers who experiment with a certain sense of breathlessness in their style. The key figure separating these early experiments from the vein of horror Lovecraft finds most inspiring is Edgar Allan Poe, to whom “we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state” (“Edgar Allan Poe”).
For Lovecraft, the psychological realism of horror was crucial for the weird tale, as was the avoidance of any pandering to “the majority’s artificial ideas” such as genre conventions, happy endings, and moral or social lessons (“Introduction”). Lovecraft goes on to mention various authors in Britain and America whose work follows in the supernatural tradition, ranging from Rudyard Kipling, Lafcadio Hearn, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Bram Stoker, George MacDonald, and William Hope Hodgson.
(He even includes Joseph Conrad in this list, who “often wrote of the dark secrets of the sea, and the of the daemoniac driving power of Fate as influencing the lives of lonely and maniacally resolute men” (“The Weird Tradition in the British Isles”). Parallels between the nautical aspects of “The Call of Cthulhu,” “Dagon,” and Hodgson’s nautical tales of discovery are considered one with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the tradition of terror.)
“The Dunwich Horror,” can be read as the culmination of the literary values described in “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” This weird tale contains a gradual unveiling of an invisible horror, culminating in the revelation of the formless, shapeless monster at its heart.
Lovecraft’s debt to Poe can be seen in the first paragraphs, in which the tiny New England community of Dunwich Village is described as impossibly ancient in comparison to the lands around it. Dunwich fell long ago into decadence and decline, much like the House of Usher. Dunwich was apparently settled long ago by residents of Salem who fled the witch trials. As such, no building in the entire village was built more recently than the early 1800s and many of them date back to the 1600s.
Degeneracy as a result of strict endogamy plagues the “repellently decadent” natives of Dunwich (160). The albino Lavinia Wateley gives birth to a “dark, goatish-looking infant” who matures with an unusual speed (161). Young Wilbur Whateley soon becomes the apprentice of his father, Old Whateley, a sorcerer. By the age of four and a half, he resembles a fifteen-year-old boy and can speak fluently, becoming learned in the dark arts his father teaches him.
Artistic rendering of Wilbur Whateley by Reuben C. Dodd
On feast days, he and his father perform secret rites on the site of an altar on Sentinel Hill, performing occult ceremonies. Earthquakes and explosive sounds are heard coming from underground. The villagers fear and avoid the Whateley’s and their house; the dogs bark at the boy, who speaks with a voice that one suspects is produced by more than human vocal organs. Everywhere the rites are practiced, a peculiar stench can be detected. Furthermore, he is never seen without a tightly, buttoned-up shirt, as though his clothes are hiding the monstrous body beneath them.
Before his father dies, he tells his son to “Open up the gates to Yog-Sothoth with the long chant that ye’ll find on page 751 of the complete edition,” which is later revealed to be a reference to the Necronomicon (165). Wilbur seeks the Necronomicon at Miskatonic University, asking the librarian Henry Armitage to bring it back to Dunwich. Armitage catches a glimpse of the text and immediately forbids it.
This is what Armitage reads:
Nor is it to be thought that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. […] By Their smell can men sometimes know them near, but of their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind. […] They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. […] Man rules now where They ruled once They shall soon rule where man rules now.
(167)
Taking into account all that he knows about goat-faced Wilbur, Armitage reaches the terrible conclusion that he has been plotting the annihilation of the entire human race by attempting to summon Yog-Sothoth from the depths of interdimensional space. He decides that Wilbur must never be allowed to consult the Necronomicon, under any circumstances, for the good of the human race. He forbids Wilbur and phones ahead to warn the library staff at Harvard, where he goes searching for the forbidden tome next.
In the end, Wilbur breaks into Miskatonic Universtiy to steal the cursed book. Armitage hears a terrible scream and finds the body of Wilbur Whateley, mauled by a guard dog. His clothes have been torn, exposing the true form of his “teratologically fabulous” body:
Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where the dog’s rending paws still rested watchfuly, had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was pie-bald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.
Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, wound with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat.
(169)
This description is worth quoting in full because of the expert way in which Lovecraft attempts to use language to describe not merely what “no human pen” can describe, but a body that cannot even be visualized “by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions” (169).
The description gains the reader’s trust with the easier-to-grasp image of the slightly anomalous torso, but then becomes gradually more outrageous. How could it be that this creature has dark, coarse fur on its tentacles? Is it a bear-like mammal or is it more like a cephalopod? It clearly has something of both categories, indicating how useless our categories are to defining the sheer Otherness of this being.
Even the eyes on the “hips” of the tentacles only seem to be undeveloped eyes. The tail is not really a tail but a feeler or trunk–the author isn’t sure which. The coup-de-grace comes when the annular markings around the trunk/feeler give some kind of evidence indicating they are mouths–or throats. But to make that visualization, the reader must forever abandon the limitations on their understanding of what could constitute a “mouth.”
As Graham Harman remarks in Lovecraft and Philosophy, this is “one of the greatest and most important of all Lovecraft passages” (161). Rather than succumb to a pulp trope and leave the description simply at “no human pen could describe it” (Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror” 169), Lovecraft chooses to describe “the specific manner in which the corpse resists description” using a “cubist” and “Husserlian” technique in which he multiplies “an absurd number of concrete features that are nearly impossible to unify” (161). In this way, Harman says, “language is overloaded by a gluttonous excess of surfaces and aspects of the thing” (25). This description foregrounds how human perceptions are always filtered by our eyes, by the dimensions we know, and the categories in which we sort the sensuous data with which we perceive the world.
All this is merely the prologue to the real Dunwich horror–which begins to unravel the moment Armitage gets on the case. Armitage becomes the protagonist, tasked with saving the planet from the apocalypse that Wilbur, the spawn of Yog-Sothoth himself, nearly succeeds at initiating before his death.
An invisible giant whose elephant-like footsteps are all that is visible of it wrecks the house of the Elmer Fryes, extinguishing the entire family line. Armitage rallies a competent team of men to track down the entity and stop it with a spell. Like one of Conrad’s duty-bound protagonists, Armitage chases after Yog-Sothoth to the peak of Sentinel Hill. Though competent, he is constantly aware of the unknown nature of the threat and the fact that all their tools and weapons are insignificant compared to the Dunwich horror’s size and power.
It is here that Curtis Whateley, part of the “undecayed” branch of Wilbur’s family, glimpses the terrible form of Yog-Sothoth himself. Lovecraft delivers the description in what can only be described as an unreadable mess, Lovecraft’s indefensible attempt at a transcription of an (albeit obscure) rural New England dialect.
Feel free to skip to the “translation” I’ve provided two paragraphs down from it, but the original text is here:
‘Bigger’n a barn… all made o’ squirmin’ ropes… hull thing sort o’ shaped like a hen’s egg bigger’n anything with dozens o’ legs like hogsheads that haff shut up when they step… nothin’ solid abaout it–all like jelly, an’ made o’ sep’rit wrigglin’ ropes pushed close together… great bulgin’ eyes all over it… ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin’ aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all a-tossin’ an openin’ an’ shuttin’ … all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings… an’ Gawd in Heaven–that haff face on top…’
In On Writing, Stephen King calls Lovecraft “a terrible dialogue writer” (180). Lovecraft only wrote about 5,000 words of dialogue in his entire career, according to King–a mercy to the human race, whose minds still remain sensible because of it. Even in this 1.88% concentration, a dose can be fatal to a reader’s sanity. However, translating this classist, country bumpkin-ese into the kind of plain English Lovecraft is fully capable of writing when more educated, privileged characters are speaking, the above passage would read like this:
‘Bigger than a barn … all made of squirming ropes … the whole thing sort of shaped like a hen’s egg bigger than anything with dozens of legs like hogsheads that half shut up when they step. Nothing solid about it–all like jelly, and made of separate wriggling ropes pushed close together. Great bulging eyes all over it… Ten or twenty mouths or trunks sticking out all along the sides, big as stove-pipes and all tossing and opening and shutting. All grey, with kinder blue or purple rings. And God in Heaven–that half-face on top…’
The body of the Old One is undefined, barely contained, filled with moving parts that are anything but stable. What strikes me most about this passage is the sense of the Old One’s body being formed of ropes bound together. Wilbur’s family resemblance to this entity is apparent in the eyes that he shares with Wilbur, and in the ambiguity of whether the things sticking out from its body are mouths or trunks.
According to Miéville, the Dunwich horror, as described by Curtis Whateley, is a metaphor, or metonymy, for the boundaries of the weird as a genre. Each text, or perhaps each group of texts, is like a tightly bound “rope” that forms part of the amorphous body of the creature. The weird, like the Dunwich horror, walks the earth as if it had no care for the human race at all. Its worm-like trunk-eyes are looking at us, but “that they watch us is as random as a rip” (Miéville, “Afterweird” 1115). The affect that defines the weird for Mieville is equivalent to the sensation of being watched by those rope-like, or perhaps worm-like, eyes.
The end of “The Dunwich Horror” was a little disappointing to me. Essentially, the invisible entity returns to the dimension from whence it came after shouting the name of its father, Yog-Sothoth. No action is needed from Armitage and his team. The daemon is revealed to be the twin brother of Wilbur Whateley, spawned from the same father, the Old One, Yog-Sothoth.
While it does not provide a happy ending, like much of the supernatural fiction that Lovecraft disliked, “The Dunwich Horror” does fail at creating a satisfying non-conclusion. The explanation that the Dunwich horror was actually Wilbur’s twin brother seems extraneous and bizarre.
It would have been far more interesting had Wilbur not truly “died” but become the Dunwich horror himself.
After all, the dog only destroys the physical, visible body of Wilbur, and the entire point of the story is that there exists a realm of invisible, incorporeal monsters who have existed since before the dawn of time. Perhaps Wilbur, despite being half-human, has retained these incorporeal abilities. Perhaps he could have become united in some way to the beast he had summoned.
Making Wilbur the Dunwich horror itself, Lovecraft could have at least avoided drawing upon extraneous information to explain to the reader what the Dunwich horror was. In this case, learning the explanation frankly dulled the affect of the horror. At least, that was the effect the story had on me.
I could have pointed out half a dozen other strengths to this story, despite its glaring faults. For one, the gradual revelation of the horror through the dispensation of information, clues, and connections was expertly done. I could see at once how effective this technique was, especially since it has been borrowed by Lovecraft’s modern-day imitators. For instance, Usman Malik does much the same trick in “In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro” during his buildup to an unspeakable blood sacrifice beneath a Buddhist stupa.
Next week, I’ll be discussing Margaret Irwin’s “The Book” (1930), which Mieville and writer Joanna Russ both call one of the most interesting supernatural stories they’ve ever read.
Francis Stevens is the pen name of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, the first major female author of science fiction and fantasy. She has been compared to (and even been mistaken for) A. Merritt, and H. P. Lovecraft wrote approvingly of her famous novel Claimed, which is about the summoning of an ancient god in New Jersey. Her short story “Unseen – Unfeared” is billed by the editors of The Weird as a classic weird tale.
“Unseen – Unfeared” is motivated by a curiosity about the unknown things that lie outside of human experience: a greater unknown which science and religion cannot altogether explain. Like in Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” curiosity is rewarded with despair and terror at the realization of the grim condition of the human race. The most merciful thing here is the “inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” The story can also be seen as proto-Lovecraftian in its anti-humanism, its racism, and in how the two relate together.
The story begins with the narrator meeting a detective in an Italian restaurant by chance, discussing how Holt, an experimental chemist, has been falsely accused of poisoning an assistant. The people in this part of town are suspicious of Holt, given his experiments, and they accuse him of using the Evil Eye. The detective gives the narrator a cigar and goes on his way.
The narrator wanders down South Street, feeling sick from sour wine, and has several encounters in which he voices his disgust of the ethnic minorities of this neighbourhood–a group that includes Black people, Jews and Italians. This naturally gave me pause as I confronted the racist fear depicted in this story. It reminded me of the essay about Lovecraft, “Why We Can’t Ignore Lovecraft’s White Supremacy.” Racial fear disturbs Stevens’s narrator at visceral level, in a way that is disturbing in itself to read, because it convincingly puts the reader in the shoes of a racist walking through a poor, ethnic neighourhood.
Curiously, much of the narrator’s fear at South Street’s “nameless dread” is directed towards Italians. Italians were considered racial others at this point in American history, and as Catholics, they were viewed as being more superstitious than Protestant Anglo-Saxons, especially when it came to the malocchio, or Evil Eye.
One depiction of a young Italian struck me because of how similar it was to the demonizing language used by police to justify the use of racist violence against Black and Latinx people. The narrator remarks that the young man is “handsome after the swarthy manner of his race, but never in my life had I seen a face so expressive of pure, malicious cruelty, naked and unashamed. Our eyes met and his seemed to light up with a vile gleaming, as if all the wickedness of his nature had come to a focus in the look of concentrated hate he gave me” (126). This look of hatred has no cause, no reason, and so it is attributed to the man’s “nature,” which is a concept not so far removed from his race.
The sense of racial fear is palpable in this description. That Italians are no longer subject to such demonizing descriptions in 2020, but Black people still are, is testament to the unevenness of their experiences of assimilation into white culture. Anti-Black racism in North American society clearly endures today, while Italians and other European immigrants have had the privilege of becoming “racially united through assimilation” into white culture (DiAngelo, White Fragility, 49). (DiAngelo references Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White to develop this point.) However, in 1919, this assimilation had not yet occurred, and this passage reveals what racist fear of Italians might have looked back then.
The racial fear that the narrator experiences, a fear towards all the racialized groups that inhabit it (not just Italians), eventually expands to encompass the whole human race. Like Lovecraft’s fiction, “Unseen – Unfeared” has an anti-humanist philosophy at its core.
An antique camera
To get back to the story, the narrator finds a sign advertising “THE GREAT UNSEEN” (125) and enters the building to sit out his sense of unease and paranoid fear, expecting to find a museum exhibit to distract himself. There he encounters an old man with grey hair and black eyes who shows him inside a laboratory where he has been experimenting with colour photography.
By chance, the old man has stumbled upon a rare, pearlescent-gray plant membrane from South America, which, when applied as a lens to his camera, sets off an abundance of light that reveals the existence of creatures who have never before been observed by the human eye.
The empty air now appears to be crowded with insects, arachnids, and invertebrates–huge, writhing, tentacled creatures who climb all over the room. In addition, there “were the things with human faces. Mask-like, monstrous, huge gaping mouths and slitlike eyes” (129). The fear the narrator has felt up to now becomes a dizzying, as if he has learned to see the panoply of microscopic germs, viruses, and parasites that pervade our world.
But these are not mere germs or viruses. The old man explains what the creatures are, crying, “Among such as these do you move every hour of the day and night. Only you and I have seen, for God is merciful and has spared our race from sight. But I am not merciful! I loathe the race which gave these creatures birth […] man has made these! By his evil thoughts, by his selfish panics, by his lusts and his interminable, never-ending hate he has made them, and they are everywhere!” (129)
This revelation can be interpreted as justifying the narrator’s vague disgust about racial others due to the fact the human race is beastly as a whole. But it is also a moment where the narrator comes to hate the sight of his own hate–because it is hate that has created these abominations.
The narrator is immediately seized with terror and reaches such a depth of despair and loathing for the progenitors of these creatures that he wishes to kill himself, to prevent himself from birthing any more of the hideous beasts. However, he ultimately faints before he can go through with the deed. The old man is seized by the same impulse, and succeeds.
When he awakens, the narrator becomes convinced the vision was a dream. The detective revives him and explains that his vision of the old man was caused by the drugged cigar he gave him back at the Italian restaurant. However, when the narrator discovers the pearlescent membrane still in the lab, he becomes tempted to try the experiment again, to see if his vision of the creatures was real. In the end, the detective encourages him to burn it and they do, because “doubt is sometimes better than certainty” (132).
This ending resolves the story’s disturbing anti-humanist claims in a way that would have been palatable for readers of People’s Favourite Magazine, where the story first appeared. There’s no doubt that this is a racist story. However, it is remarkable to see how the narrator’s disgust with specific groups of people soon becomes a generalized hatred for the human race as a whole, including himself: for humanity’s brutishness and pettiness, for its sinfulness and its failure to live up to higher ideals. I’m not sure if the narrator’s realization “redeems” the story of its racism, but just as the depiction of racial others as brutish reinforces the narrator’s anti-humanism, his urge towards suicide could imply that he has recognized the hatred and fear that exists inside himself.
I would venture even to say that “Unseen – Unfeared” can be read allegorically (somewhat against the grain) as a reflection on what it means to notice racism in society. In our contemporary society, racism is almost invisible (much of the time), though it is still enshrined in racist policy and institutions. We (White people especially) need the special lens of an anti-racist education to get better at seeing where racism exists: where it infests our society like so many many-legged millipedes and spiders.
Once we do learn to see and recognize the effects of racism, we must resist the temptation to forget it. Unlike the horror that grips the narrator, witnessing the horror of racism in all its grotesquerie won’t kill us.
This being said, I’m not certain Francis Stevens intended such a message to be made of her story. To the anti-humanist, human progress is futile, if not absurd–including progress towards racial equality. Human beings may strive towards progress, but they will inevitably succumb to their base nature eventually and lose any sense of progress that has been made. This worldview is undeniably bleak, though it must have been radical for its time in its condemnation of sins of the human race.
Today, we’re all too aware of how humans behave like a virus, depleting the earth’s natural resources and slowly destroying our environment through pollution and climate change. Rather than express a bland humanistic optimism, “Unseen – Unfeared” expresses a condemnation of humanity itself. It is a vision of humanity that is so bleak, the only rational response is suicide or to forget that this situation exists, as the author makes clear. In light of this, perhaps humanism and the pursuit of racial equality only makes sense if you forget humanity’s meaningless position in the universe.
Perhaps that bleak situation isn’t such a bad thing to try to forget.
N.B.: I noticed a passing parallel to “Unseen – Unfeared” in Alyssa Wong’s “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers,” in which a woman endowed with a rare power notices her Ivy League date’s ugly thoughts, which are described as being “covered in spines and centipede feet, [glistening] with ancient grudges” (The New Voices of Fantasy, 21). Here, hate and misogyny becomes visibly manifested as insects and vermin to those who can see them. It seemed to me that Wong was either inspired by Francis Stevens in crafting this image or inspired by the same broader cultural associations that inspired “Unseen – Unfeared.”
Speaking of centipedes and cockroaches, next week, I’ll be writing about “In the Penal Colony” (1919) by the iconic Franz Kafka, who wrote the most famous cockroach story of all.
Having come this far in this Archaeology of Weird Fiction project, I have noticed that certain patterns of representing the attraction and danger of the weird have begun to repeat as patterns. In addition, I keep finding parallels, in one way or another, to Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. In this, my experience of “People of the Pit” by A. Merritt was no different. It is, however, the first story in the collection to explicitly feature archaeology and past civilizations as a source of the weird (except perhaps in “The Hungry Stones” by Rabindranath Tagore).
Two men exploring the far northern reaches of Alaska come across a hazy mountain with five peaks outstretched like a hand where a strange light is glowing. A frightened man near death crawls up to their campfire and tells them he has just returned from those very mountains. He narrates the story of his encounter with the People of the Pit. Having reached the mountains from the other side, the horrified speaker recounts how he journeyed down the bottleneck of the seemingly infinite pit that lies between the mountains, to finally reach the massive, primeval city at the bottom.
Made a captive of the invisible, glowing creatures who live at the bottom of the pit, the man participates in their chanting rituals and eventually comes to see the inner sluglike forms. Horrified, he breaks his chains and escapes. The man finishes his tale and soon dies. The explorers cremate the man according to his wishes and scatter his ashes to prevent the People of the Pit from claiming his body after death.
According to the editors, Merritt was heavily influenced by Gertrude Barrows Bennett, the first major female American science fiction and fantasy writer and inventor of dark fantasy, who published under the pseudonym Francis Stevens and wrote weird tales about lost civilizations. Merrit, in turn, influenced H.P. Lovecraft, who himself was an admirer of Stevens/Bennett. All three authors are included in The Weird.
“The People of the Pit” follows the formula of an explorer/scientist who journeys to the frontiers of the (to Europeans) known world to investigate a curious phenomenon, only to encounter horror and terror and supernatural dread. Some of Merrit’s other scientists, like Throckmartin in The Moon Pool and Goodwin in The Metal Monster, use the scientific process to get themselves out of seeming supernatural quandaries, and do so successfully. These novels are better spoken of as science fantasy. However, “The People of the Pit” destabilizes the efficacy of science, calling into question its ability to categorize extraordinary phenomena, in the way that much weird fiction does.
The explorers note the whispering coming from a strange light on the mountain, which “can’t be the aurora” (101). Indeed, it is not a “crackling sound like the ghosts of winds that blew at Creation racing through the skeleton leaves of ancient trees that sheltered Lilith” either; rather, it holds “a demand. It was eager” (101). It evades the categories of Judeo-Christian mythology and science and attracts their curiosity with “inexorable insistence” (102) in a way that recalls the Sirens from the Odyssey. This phenomena that evades their categories and classifications produces a curiosity that can lures and seduce men to their doom. In a way, this whispering is the equivalent to Tagore’s marble palace and Ewers’s Clarimonde. It demonstrates the sensual’s domination over the rational, a modernist dichotomy.
Drawn by the mystery of the mountain, which is a kind of El Dorado given the “Athabasean” legend of gold streaming out from the peaks (102), the survivor recalls his first sign of the unusual: a road. Since he is far from civilization, the existence of an ancient road in the wilderness is unexpected in how it suggests the ancient presence of a technologically advanced human civilization. “Lost” civilization tropes often carry the problematic assumption that non-Western, non-white people could not have possibly built monumental structures, urban centres, or possessed advanced technology. Perhaps, then, the Athabaseans’ ancestors, or those of another Indigenous nation, had built this city once, long ago. However, “The People of the Pit” does not specify who used to live here; that fact has been lost to time and history and is one of the many unsolved mysteries that confront the survivor as he ventures past the city, over the mountains, and into the pit.
Currently, I am teaching a 12-week course called “Imagining the Past: Fiction & Archaeology” in which I am leading discussion on fictional texts about archaeology and history. In this course, we’ve been talking a lot about what motivates archaeologists–for some it is a quest, a curiosity about the world, or a need to fill out the answers to a burning question rather than face the blankness of the unknown. Merritt’s story features and explorer and honourary archaeologist whose curiosity about the world leads him to his doom.
While celebrating this curiosity in a certain way, Merritt also exposes just how little of the world is actually known. In 1918, places like northern Alaska may still have contained regions remote enough that most Americans could believe a Pit of this size and scale could exist. However, what seems to have driven Merritt to write this story is not enthusiasm for mapping uncharted frontiers, but rather an awe at that very unchartedness. He revels in exposing precisely what is unknown, and those who investigate it too closely pay a price.
Perhaps he was a romantic, reacting against modernity’s exhortation to map the last pockets of difference on the earth’s surface. Rationalism and irrationalism, sensuality and reason are at war in Merritt’s work.
A. Merritt’s novel The Metal Monster featured in a Fantastic Mysteries and Fantastic Novels joint issue
The survivor is drawn to his doom by the pit. Curiously, this image anticipates the Tower in VanderMeer’s Annihilation: a spiral staircase leading down, down, down to a seemingly infinite depth. “It was like peeping over the edge of a cleft world down into the infinity where the planets roll!” writes Merritt (104). The pit has a hoard of possible meanings: a journey to the unconscious or to the underworld, a quest for the base of reality itself, the end of all questions and inquiry–a base that does not really exist.
In a further parallel with Annihilation, the walls are inscribed with an inscrutable text. In “People of the Pit,” that text is visual. The inscriptions along the wall of the spiral staircase in Merritt, left behind by unknown peoples, contain figures that hold back a vaguer, underlying image: an “impression of enormous upright slugs” (104). Later, when the survivor reaches the city at the bottom of the pit, he sees inscriptions on an altar of “formless things that gave no conscious image, yet pressed into the mind like small hot seals–ideas of hate–of combats between unthinkable monstrous things” (106), suggesting the abstracted forms of primitivist paintings.
The mention of a upright slugs connects the People of the Pit to the Crawler in Annihilation. Both are described as grotesque sluglike creatures who glow and whose form seems too much for the human eye to take in at once. Both are sublime monsters because they surpass our senses’ ability to see and our brains’ ability to make understand them.
To better illustrate, VanderMeer describes The Crawler as follows:
[I]t was no longer golden but blue-green, and the blue-green light was like nothing I had experienced before. […] As I adjusted to the light, the Crawler kept changing at a lightning pace, as if to mock my ability to comprehend it. […] It was a great sluglike monster ringed by satellites of even odder creatures. It was a glistening star. My eyes kept glancing off of it as if an optic nerve was not enough. (176)
Compare this with Merritt’s description of the People of the Pit:
Great transparent snail-like bodies–dozens of waving tentacles stretching from them–round gaping mouths under the luminous seeing globes. They were like the ghosts of inconceivably monstrous slugs! […] They did not crawl or walk–they floated! They floated and were–gone! (108)
While VanderMeer’s prose is less exclamatory, the similarities are clear. The monstrous bodies of the People of the Pit and the Crawler are abject and grotesque due to their being in excess of the very categories used to define them. They throw in question humanity’s ability to classify phenomena and understand the universe. They throw in question the very capacity of language–the very language the authors use–to describe them. They are a splinter irritating the universe with their own incomprehensibility, exposing the world for its illusions.
In short, “The People of the Pit” is a quintessential weird tale, destabilizing Enlightenment assumptions about reality and the knowability of the universe, suggesting there are whole worlds and civilizations that lie beyond our senses and our understanding–a position that would go on to influence Lovecraft.
Next week, I’ll be writing about the ‘father of the Japanese short story’, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, and his weird tale, “The Hell Screen.”
“The Vegetable Man” by Luigi Ugolini is a simple enough story of a man whose skin has turned completely green.
He explains how he became infected with this unique illness. Seduced by the mysteries of science’s unexplored frontier, Olivares goes on an expedition to the Brazilian interior in search of new forms of plant life. There he discovers a plant that “seemed to have been created deliberately to upset all of my botanical science,” a plant that cannot wholly be categorized as vegetable, but which has the appearance of “human limbs without skin” (98). Pricked by a thorn, he soon experiences the first subtle symptoms of what becomes a wasting disease that turns his skin green and leads to other mutations besides.
Soon, Doctor Benito Olivares literally becomes a green man: half-vegetable, half-man.
Appearing in the Italian journal The Illustrated Journal of Travel and Adventure Over Land and Sea in 1917, “The Vegetable Man” reads like a traveler’s tale from a distant corner of the earth. Like Indiana Jones, Doctor Olivares is an adventure scientist like you might find in a pulp story who is dedicated to “[penetrating] the virgin forests” and pushing the frontier of knowledge (97). However, with that sense of guarded mystery comes a sense of intruding into what nature never intended humanity to see. Twice, the Guaraní Indians try to warn him about the samples he took of the Inhuacoltzi, the great spirit of the plants.
Perhaps most uncanny are the leaves of this plant. Resembling a prickly pear, they have “two oval scuttulem” on them, resembling “two very human eyes that seemed to stare out at me in an unpleasant and sinister way” (98). When the green man pulls off his gloves, his hands are revealed to have been turned into these same, shapeless leaves, with uncannily human eyes.
Doctor Olivares claims to have been born in Santos, Brazil, and he donates his samples of the Olivara vigilans to the Museum of Natural History in Buenos Aires. This puts Ugolini’s story in the vicinity of another great weird fiction writer, Jorge Luís Borges. Buenos Aires is Borges’s storied home city; in his famous story, “The Aleph,” Santos happens to be the Brazilian town where Pedro Henriquez Ureña supposedly found Sir Richard Francis Burton’s manuscript on the Aleph.
Details like these have me imagining a weird fiction “shared universe.” What would Borges (who suffered from blindness) have thought of Olivara vigilans, a plant he would have been unable to see with his own eyes, even though the plant itself could “see” him?
I was astonished to find tangential links to Jeff VanderMeer and H.P. Lovecraft in Ugolini as well. For one, Olivara vigilans is described in a similar way to how Lovecraft describes the shoggoth fossils in At the Mountains of Madness. Both straddle the uncanny line between the vegetable and the animal. For instance, Lovecraft describes the shoggoth as a “barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature,” defying categorization, such that Lake cannot decide whether they are “vegetable or animal.”
In comparison, Ugolini’s scientist describes Olivara vigilans as “a living contradiction” in terms of classification, a plant that is “in itself an order, family, species, variety … with palmate leaves that were thick and fleshy” (98). The discovery upends the categories scientists use to classify and order the physical world, throwing such artificial boundaries into doubt and uncertainty.
Furthermore, the liana, “the octopus of the forest” (98) which strangles trees in the grove where Olivares finds the Olivara vigilans, is almost an echo of the strangling vines that move around in the fungal lettering left behind by the Crawler in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. Even more of a strong echo are the all-too human eyes growing out of the plant’s leaves, which call to mind the all-too human eyes of the dolphin the Biologist glimpses in Area X. The implication in Annihilation is that those who visit Area X somehow get transformed into animals, yet retain uncanny traces of their humanity. In a similar way, this is Olivares’s fate; he becomes “reclaimed” by the natural world after being infected with the Olivara vigilans‘s poison.
As I continue to notice parallels between VanderMeer’s work and the stories he and his wife, Ann VanderMeer, included in this anthology, I am strongly reminded again of what Borges wrote in “Kafka and His Precursors”: every author creates their own precursor. The weird fiction authors included in this anthology may have seen each other as influences, or they may not have done so. But VanderMeer acts as both author and critic, creating the predecessors of the New Weird as a literary movement through his role as editor of this anthology, even as he drops teasing hints as to who his own, personal precursors may have been. Even if “The Vegetable Man” did not inspire Annihilation directly, they are both holding a conversation with the same literary zeitgeist.
Luigi Ugolini
Next week, I’ll be getting into pulp adventure with Abraham Merritt’s “The People of the Pit.” I have discussed one of Indiana Jones’s predecessors, Merritt’s The Moon Pool, elsewhere on this blog, so I’ll be in familiar territory when I write about it next week.
At the World Fantasy Convention in 2015, I was introduced to the world of weird fiction.
My roommate for the weekend, Usman T. Malik, introduced me to the Year’s Best Weird Fiction anthology series (Undertow Publications), where a short story of his, “Resurrection Points,” had been published recently. His enthusiasm for his genre of choice, the weird tale, was contagious.
Soon I had discovered ChiZine Press’s lineup of dark fiction novels and short story collections and I had picked up Jeffrey Ford’s collection A Natural History of Hell. These stories, particularly those in the Ford collection, astounded me with their imaginative situations, their mythologies, and their bold use of language. Although I had not been exposed much to H.P. Lovecraft, I began to read his classic weird tales as well. I had caught the bug.
Before I knew it, weird tales had infected my brain. It was just as China Miéville described in his “Afterweird” to Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s seminal anthology, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories: weird texts “will eat the books you read from today on … That is how the weird recruits. … These stories are worms” (1116).
These textual tapeworms led me to write an essay on the Weird and Usman T. Malik’s fiction in Harf: A Journal of South Asian Studies, an academic journal based at McGill University. The ways this genre twists language and representation became an object of fascination for me.
It was not long before I discovered the vast range of texts Ann and Jeff VanderMeer had compiled together in their anthology. Texts from the early twentieth century to the twenty-first are gathered here within the same sprawling volume, encompassing authors as diverse as Franz Kafka, Ray Bradbury, Rabindranath Tagore, James Triptree, Jr., George R.R. Martin, Julio Cortázar, Kelly Link, and Jamaica Kincaid. The anthology also includes contemporary authors of the New Weird, such as China Miéville and Thomas Ligotti. In all, 110 texts appear in this collection, each originally published between 1909 and 2010.
The Weird creates the predecessors of the New Weird movement, an act of canonization. However, Miéville emphasizes that this compendium “does not, nor could it, enshrine one set of texts. Without motion–of crawling and wringing time–there is no Weird. All canons are tombs, yes, but this collection is a post-elegy, wearing / an eaten shroud / –a long-dead rag for the dead” (1116). Weird fiction frustrates our categories and subverts our reassurances of permanency and order.
This project is an excavation of that canonical tomb. It is an archaeology of the weird.
My goal will be to post weekly reflections on the earliest stories in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s compendium throughout the month of October. I hope to learn something about how the genre developed the way it did. I also hope to figure how the weird produces some of the stylistic effects it is famous for making. And lastly, like a pulp archaeologist in the adventure serials, I may find my cold, rational logic challenged by the sudden manifestation of the realities human beings were never meant to understand…
It promises to be fun.
My first post will be on an excerpt of Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side (1908), the first story included in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology. The posts will appear weekly on Saturday mornings.
Last week I wrote about my interview with Charles de Lint at the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs. Today, I wrap up my discussion of the conference with some comments on the fantasy canon and the awards ceremony, which have of late been the subject of some controversy.
My MA thesis is on fantasy as a globalized form, with a focus on the works of Charles de Lint. However, I will be gesturing towards a larger project of studying contemporary fantasy as a product of the age of globalization. One panel at World Fantasy whose subject spoke to my project was “Epic Fantasy is All About the European Middle Ages–Except When It Isn’t.” Joshua Palmatier moderated and the panelists included Bradley Beaulieu, Anatoly Belilovsky, Kevin Maroney, and Gregory A. Wilson. Think of your typical or canonical fantasy novels: chances are they are set in a version of the European Middle Ages. We might draw exception at Guy Gavriel Kay’s Chinese historical fantasies Under Heaven and River of Stars, which stand as fine examples of non-Western fantasies, but there was also some good discussion about Russian fantasies and Russian steampunk.
Wilson said there is a lot of speculative fiction not being done in English, such as in China and Laos. This represents, from the American point of view, an large untapped market. The only way for the English world to read such works is through translation. At this insight, I was reminded of Goethe’s claim that translation is a fundamental requirement for the development of world literature. This rule of world literature applies to the field of contemporary fantasy just as much as it applies to global modernisms.
There are many non-Western fantasy authors writing in different languages and even some Western authors writing in languages other than English. On this latter list, we might include the authors published by Acheron Press, a small press that publishes English translations of Italian fantasy authors. My review of Demon Hunter Severian by Giovanni Anastasi can be found through the above link. We need translators like Acheron, but also translators specializing in different languages, such as French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Urdu, Arabic, Sinhalese… any language where there is significant work being done today. Perhaps my living in bilingual Quebec is why I might be more conscious of the need for translation. I might add that the French publisher Alire translates some fantasy from English, such as the works of Guy Gavriel Kay. This is another non-anglophone example of an institution that roles up its sleeves while working on this grand project of world literature.
Belilovsky discussed Russian literature, mentioning that Russian, like English, is an imperial language. Many other languages exist in Russia, but translation gives authors who might be writing in such languages an audience outside their country. Literature must recognize that Russia is not a monolithic culture; for example, Belilovsky mentioned the Koreans who settled in Siberia but were deported to Kazakhstan because it was claimed to be too difficult to tell them apart from Japanese spies during the Second World War. Literature has a capacity to un-erase such identities.
Another interesting thought that I had during this panel was that there are material, economic conditions requiring authors of epic fantasy to employ the myths of diverse cultures in their work: it is a way to make a novel stand out in the market. There is a great danger in getting the sense of a culture wrong even if one gets the facts right, Beaulieu explained. This made me speculate that what might problematize the ‘exploitation’ of such cultures, even if done by well-meaning authors, is that epic fantasy can become a kind of cultural tourism, much in the same way ‘ethnic memoirs’ present themselves in the literary marketplace. Despite all this controversy, there was a consensus at the panel that writing about various cultures that have been marginalized does broaden the conversation, encouraging the building of bridges across cultures.
The final panel I attended during the convention was “Creating the Fantasy Canon” with Jonathan Strahan as moderator and John Clute, Michael Dirda, Yanni Kuznia, Gary Wolfe, and Ron Yaniv as panelists. Since I was contemplating fantasy as a globalized form, the discussion during this panel at the ‘World’ Fantasy Convention promised to be significant. However, I confess to being disappointed in the ‘worldness’ of the convention. All of the works the panelists could agree on for canonization were anglophone works. This was predictable, but it goes to show that fantasy novels from other language traditions are still subversive to the ‘secular scripture’ of the fantasy canon.
What is a canon? This was the opening question of the panel and each panelist gave a separate answer. Kuznia said a canon was whatever books continue to influence today’s writers. Dirda said the canon was whatever books are taught in English classes or books that we continue to find useful when thinking about the genre. Clute claimed that we create the canon constantly, but the books that constitute it must meet the condition of still being read. Wolfe said that a canon is formed of those books that continue to be read, even if no one tells you that you should read them. I thought this was a clever answer.
From my perspective, being a student of canon theorist Robert Lecker, I would have to agree mostly with Michael Dirda on this account: a canon is a ‘secular scripture,’ a body of assembled, and often anthologized, texts that we consider fundamental to fantasy and the values it holds dear. They are the works representing the values we wish to pass on to the next generation of students–it has nothing essentially to do with what is popular at the moment. Harry Potter may or may not ever enter the canon, but the works of William Morris and Tolkien will always be in the canon. In the larger canon of English literature, the works of Aphra Behn may not be frequently read outside of universities and colleges, but her work has entered canonical status nonetheless. A canon is, to my understanding, an essentially conservative institution, in the sense that it protects a certain set of values, rather than trying to subvert them. We cannot really talk about multiple canons without dissolving the significance of what ‘canon’ means. But that is not to say that the values upheld by canons cannot be challenged or that new works from previously marginalized authors may not be added to the canon: this expansion of the canon is still an important task.
John Clute adopted a more historically-lensed approach to what a canon is. “Any canon is a form of argument. It is not an establishment,” he said. A canon that begins with the pulps, for example, argues for a different source of origin for modern fantasy than another that begins its narrative with the works George MacDonald. This view has its merits, but it is a definition of canon removed from the original sense of ‘canon’ as an assembly of sacred texts, such as the books that constitute the Bible. The Bible’s exclusion of the Gospel of Thomas, for instance, may be seen as an argument in favour of a particular interpretation of Christianity, but the accepted canon as it comes to exist is more significantly a set of texts which held a highly exalted position in society–an establishment. That said, an argument in Clute’s favour is that the fantasy canon may still be in the midst of being decided, it being a lot less stable than the Biblical canon or the canon of English literature as anthologized by Norton.
The moderator asked each panelist to provide one work of twentieth-century fantasy that they would nominate for canonization. Gary Wolfe nominated Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, Ron Yaniv, Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, Michael Dirda, Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist, Yanni Kuznia, Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn.
On a second pass, the following titles came up in the same order of panelists: Mary Stuart’s The Crystal Cave, C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, Lord Dunsany’s Gods of Pegana, and Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. The moderator Jonathan Strahan felt obliged to throw in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings for good measure. Further discussion turned up the names Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, Arthur Machen‘s horror stories, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and Joan Aitken’s Wolves of Willoughby Chase.
When asked which recent books were likely to become canonical in the future, the panelists provided another list of titles. Yanni Kuznia: Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton. Michael Dirda: Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. John Clute:Perdido Street Station by China Miéville. Greg Wolfe: Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay (although there was some discord about whether to list Tiganainstead; read both). Ron Yaniv: Charles de Lint’s Someplace to be Flying.
Consider this a reading list.
Any serious academic of fantasy should think about reading this canon; the works have great value. Yet we must not think uncritically about this value. It was disappointing to me, for instance, that the panel did not discuss any challenges to the canon. Perhaps the fantasy canon is still at the stage of becoming solidified into something stable and therefore teachable. Yet, whether the canon(s) described by the panelists were ‘writer’s’ canons or more professorial in nature, one thing remained consistent: each work was originally written in English.
In face of this anglophone fact, what happens to all this rhetoric about fantasy being a universal drive shared in common by all cultures, all languages? Fantasy should be bigger than any one language. The canon listed above represents not a ‘fantasy’ canon but a ‘fantasy literature in English’ canon, which is a very different thing. It is worth noting that even the concept of ‘fantasy’ as a term that can be applied to a modern genre is an English term with a specific English meaning (although derived from a word in Greek meaning ‘to make visible’). Therefore, I would propose that ‘fantasy’ connotes an originally anglophone literary form. It is unclear what terms other language traditions apply to describe their ‘fantastic’ literature, although the cultural hegemony of the English-speaking world has probably spread the influence of Tolkien and other fantasy authors into those non-English speaking traditions as well, altering them by the influence of translations.
English fantasy writers seem glad enough to declare the universality of fantasy in all cultures around the globe. It grants a validity to the idea of borrowing from the myths and folklore of increasingly diverse cultural traditions. If a myth is fantasy, it is in a sense dead and therefore exploitable; it has no more central authority in the society that formed it and in turn was formed by it. The loss of these central organizing myths is a feature of modernity; read The Sacred and Profane by Mircea Eliade. However, in the case of budding Maori, Aborigine, or Native American authors who derive inspiration from the narrative traditions of their respective cultures, it is unclear whether such authors would even consider their works ‘fantasy,’ especially as such cultures undergo renaissance and revitalization. As such cultures attempt to re-establish the realauthority of their cultural narratives, the term ‘fantasy’ would seem to undercut the privileged position these narratives ought to have in their society, relativizing the importance of cultural narratives.
Although such rhetoric of the ‘universality’ of fantasy exists–that all cultures have myths equally valid for raw literary material–the actual literary landscape is heavily Eurocentric and with the hegemony of American culture, weighted in definite favour of the English language. Fantasy is more heterogenous and unequal than works such as Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces, which proclaims the universality of the heroic journey in all mythic traditions, would have us believe.
The World Fantasy Convention awarded the H.P. Lovecraft trophy this year for the last time. A new trophy is currently being designed.
This World Fantasy Convention was the last year the trophies for the World Fantasy Awards will bear the shape of a bust of H.P. Lovecraft’s face. From what I understand of the controversy surrounding this decision, it was at least partly related to the reputation that Lovecraft has today of being a racist. Like Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling, whose works each retain their canonicity and literary value despite their authors’ imperialist politics, Lovecraft’s works will continue to be valued despite his racist ideas, however problematic they may be. However, the change of trophy design is a message that the ‘face’ of fantasy is changing, that the established canon is being challenged by new, upcoming writers. This is a sign of a healthy, living literary tradition that refuses to become ossified. One can only applaud the renewal of the genre and the renewal of world literature in general.
(To take a less explicitly political perspective on the trophy controversy: Lovecraft was a brutally excessive stylist, like Edgar Allan Poe on steroids, so if this change of trophy dissociates the fantasy/science fiction field from H.P.’s standard of foggy, dense, unclear writing, then I my opinion there’s a lot less of a down side to the change than you might think.)
The World Fantasy Awards were handed out to the following winners. There was considerable Canadian representation in the list of winners (ChiZine, Tachyon). As a matter of fact, I was seated at the ChiZine table and so I got to sample the excitement of my companions winning not once but twice.
The Life Achievement awards went to Ramsey Campbell and Sheri S. Tepper.
Best Novel: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (Random House/Sceptre UK)
Novella: We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory (Tachyon Publications)
Short Story: Do You Like to Look at Monsters? by Scott Nicolay (Ferdogan & Bremer, chapbook)
Anthology: Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant (Candlewick Press)
Collection: Gifts for the One Who Comes After by Helen Marshall (ChiZine Publications) tied with The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings by Angela Slatter (Tartarus Press)
Artist: Samuel Araya
Special Award–Professional: Sandra Kasturi and Brett Alexander Savory, for ChiZine Publications
Special Award–Non-Professional: Ray B. Russell and Rosalie Parker, for Tartarus Press
Congratulations WFC 2015 award winners!
The new books I hauled home somehow after the convention
“The Vegetable Man” by Luigi Ugolini is a simple enough story of a man whose skin has turned completely green.
