Tag: weird fiction

Short Story Review: “The Woman of the Wood” by A. Merritt

August 25th, 2025

(Cover by C. Barker Petrie, Jr. Weird Tales, August 1926.)

Who Goes There?

A couple years ago I was supposed to review A. Merritt’s novel The Dwellers in the Mirage, although I couldn’t get far into it before admitting defeat. It could be because I was reading it as it appeared in Fantastic Novels, a magazine with a type size intended for ants and other insects, but I was struggling with it. At the time I knew I would have to give Merritt another shot at some point, not least because of his reputation in the field—or, more accurately, his lack of a reputation nowadays. Abraham Merritt only wrote eight novels and small number of short stories, which for someone who wrote pulp fiction is borderline miniscule, but in fact he had such a well-paying day job that he felt not the need to write much fiction. He worked as assistant editor and later editor of The American Weekly, a Sunday newspaper whose top positions paid a pretty good deal. (Making it as a journalist a century ago meant a lot more than it does now, in the sense that you could afford a house without taking on a second job.) Merritt basically quit writing fiction after 1934 to focus on his lucrative career, resulting in a writing career that lasted not quite twenty years. As with close contemporary Edgar Rice Burroughs, Merritt didn’t start writing fiction until he was in his thirties; but once he picked it up, he found a good deal of success with it as well. Merritt cultivated such a devoted following that he’s one of a very small group of people to have a genre magazine named after him, the short-lived A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine.

Yet Merritt’s reputation dwindled in the years following his death in 1943, with naysayers popping up rather early on. In one of his books of criticism, I forget which piece exactly, James Blish calls Merritt a lousy writer. While such an assessment is more often true than not when it comes to once-beloved genre writers from so long ago (E. E. Smith was indeed a pretty bad writer, and his immense influence on the field is thus hard to account for), this judgment of Merritt seems harsh to me. It’s telling that Merritt was one of the first people to be inducted posthumously into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, then was “awarded” the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award in 2009. His stuff only seems to be kept in print by small independent presses, and I’m actually unsure if even all his novels are in print. He also wrote few short stories, with “The Woman of the Wood” being his only original appearance in Weird Tales. Merritt’s work was frequently reprinted in the genre magazines of the time, but he was originally published in the general pulps, namely Argosy.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales, and later reprinted in the January 1934 issue. It’s also been reprinted in the first issue of Avon Fantasy Reader, A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (ed. Terry Carr and Martin H. Greenberg), The Fantasy Hall of Fame (ed. Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg), and the Merritt collection The Fox Woman and Other Stories. It’s in the public domain now, which means you can read it however, although it’s not been transcribed for Project Gutenberg in the US as of yet. Very little of Merritt’s public-domain work is there.

Enhancing Image

McKay, an American World War I veteran, has come to the mountains of France in need of some fresh air. A pilot in the war, McKay had apparently joined the French forces and later the Americans, once they entered the war; but while he served honorably, the experience left him shell-shocked. “The war had sapped him, nerve and brain and soul. Through all the years that had passed since then the wound had kept open.” This is, of course, Merritt telling us upfront that we ought to take McKay’s testimony of the strange events to follow with a grain of salt. Indeed, McKay not entirely having his mental screws in place is key to the story working, or else it would sound even more ridiculous than it already does. McKay is quite different from his creator, being a war veteran while Merritt was not, but both men are what we might call eccentrics, and both also have green thumbs. McKay would be perfectly happy as a gardener, such that he seems to get along better with plants than people, and like Bob Ross he has a tendency to bestow human personality on the birch and pine trees of the Vosages. He’s staying at a lodge, owned by an unnamed inn-keeper and his wife, on the edge of a lake, with only one other human habitation at that forested lake—that being the house of Polleau and his two sons.

Polleau and his sons are the descendants of serfs who lived off the land generations ago, but they’ve been feuding with their surroundings such that several members of their family have befallen to bizarre tree-related accidents. Now they are the last of their kind. Given that McKay repeatedly equate the trees with royalty and medieval figures, it’s easy to picture the last of the serfs going up against a legion of nobility (or so Merritt/McKay thinks) from centuries past, in a France which has not had a monarch for many years at this point. When one of the sons tries cutting down a birch (the birch trees are given feminine qualities), McKay witnesses something very strange indeed: the trees seem to fight back. The birch, wounded, lies on a neighboring fir “as though it were a wounded maid stretched on breast, in arms, of knightly lover.” Something I’ll say in Merritt’s favor is that while he’s fond of using certain words over and over, he has a knack for evocative imagery that’s a step above most other people submitting to Weird Tales at the time. The cast is small, and it become apparent pretty soon where Merritt is gonna take the plot, but the setting is well-realized, and there’s an intense earthiness to it that reads like a pulpier and perhaps less scary Algernon Blackwood. I have no doubt that Merritt would’ve read his fair share of Blackwood, considering he was big into reading on the occult and both authors have a shared fondness for rural spaces. “The Woman of the Wood” was by no means the first “Nature fights back” story, probably not even the first to be published in Weird Tales that year, but it’s redeemed by Merritt’s knack for setting and tone.

One of the sons lose an eye in the ordeal, which was a bit more violent than I was expecting, but also it’s unsurprising that a) this conflict between man and tree is a bit more literal than would be deemed realistic, and b) McKay sympathizes a lot more with the trees. Later he is tormented, or maybe just haunted, by a small army of birches come to life as ghostly women, which is how I imagine we got the cover for this magazine issue. The trees tempt McKay to “slay” (they keep using that word specifically for a while, which makes the proceedings just a bit hard to take seriously) the Polleau family for them. Since the closest we have to a human woman in the story is the inn-keeper’s wife, who doesn’t say much, the estrogen quota will have to be met in the form of sly and vaguely slutty tree spirits. The spirits of the forest are not exactly evil, nor are they really good, but simply wanting to retaliate against a small but passionate force of deforestation. It does not seem to occur to anyone, even Polleau himelf, that the old man and his sons should probably make plans to move out of the mountains; but then, considering what we see of them, it wouldn’t be surprising that their pride would make moving out of the question. As is typical of weird fiction, and also pulp writing generally at the time, there’s an appeal more to emotions than the brain. That Merritt can delay the reader in thinking about the logical issues of the setting is to the story’s benefit, not really a negative. That McKay himself is shown to be in a fragile mental state to begin with also makes his extreme actions in the climax easier to understand.

There Be Spoilers Here

The really crazy part, which might be the one thing I wasn’t expecting in terms of the story itself (putting style and pacing aside), is that McKay gets away with murder. Yeah, he shivs one of the sons in the goddamn neck, in a kind of tree-induced rage, actually rips out the guy’s throat with the knife (it should be sliced instead of ripped if it’s with a blade, but putting that aside…), and it’s pretty graphic. It’s about as graphic as you could get away with in a dark fantasy magazine with a lot of naked women on its covers in the 1920s. And what’s more, the trees kill Polleau and the other son off-screen, giving McKay enough leeway to get off scott free. The trees don’t even take vengeance on him when he turns down their offer to join them (I assume by giving up his human body to become a tree spirit, I’m not sure), they just seem a little crestfallen about it. But yeah, aside from being shaken from killing a guy and making contact with a bunch of ghosts, McKay gets out of this in one piece. Didn’t expect that.

A Step Farther Out

Merritt’s known more for his novels (not that he’s known much at all these days), but I’m more of a short story fan myself. Why he didn’t contribute more to Weird Tales, I’m not sure. Maybe the pay rate wasn’t enough. At least with Amazing Stories in the late ’20s, Merritt’s lack of original appearances (although he did give the green light on a few reprints) can be explained by Hugo Gernsback being reluctant to pay anybody much of anything. By the time more rivals to Weird Tales, and indeed more genre alternatives to the general pulps, came about, Merritt stopped writing, and then he died about a decade later. It’s a bit of a shame, because it turns out he wasn’t half bad at writing short fiction. “The Woman of the Wood” is a decent bit of rural weird horror that’s aged better than most from the same period, namely due to Merritt’s style plus the lack of racism.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Wolves of Darkness” by Jack Williamson

April 19th, 2025

(Cover by H. W. Wesso. Strange Tales, January 1932.)

Who Goes There?

Despite the sheer length of his career and how much of SF history he was involved with, there’s been relatively little retrospective material on Jack Williamson. He made his debut in 1928 and kept writing, albeit with quiet periods in his career, until his death in 2006. By the time First Fandom arose in the late ’30s, Williamson was already considered something of a titan in fandom circles, yet he also outlived most of the young folks in First Fandom who looked up to him. Williamson’s obscurity could be tossed up to him being a B-tier writer who occasionally wrote A-tier material, and also because despite being pretty popular within SF fandom, especially in the ’30s and ’40s, his influence is nowhere near as pronounced as, say, Robert Heinlein’s or even A. E. van Vogt’s. As he more or less admits in his memoir, Wonder’s Child, Williamson didn’t think of himself as a capital-A Artist™, but rather he wrote genre fiction because he enjoyed it. In a way he was the longest-lived and most persistent of the pulpsters, having more in common with the likes of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs than Heinlein. “Wolves of Darkness” itself is a curious if imperfect SF-horror blend that marked one of several turning points for Williamson as a writer. It was, up to that point, his biggest paycheck for a single story, it was made the cover story for the January 1932 issue of the short-lived Strange Tales, and it was also his first attempt at applying an SFnal rationalism to what was then considered purely the ground of fantasy: lycanthropy.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1932 issue of Strange Tales. It was stranded there for 35 years, until it was reprinted in the November 1967 issue of Magazine of Horror. It’s also been reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Classic Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1930s (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh), Rivals of Weird Tales (ed. Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert Weinberg), Echoes of Valor III (ed. Karl Edward Wagner), and the Williamson collection The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson: Volume Two.

Enhancing Image

Clovis McLaurin is a med student, so somewhere in his twenties, who makes his way to the rural Texas landscape on account of his weird scientist dad needing his assistance for some vague purpose. Dr. McLaurin had inherited a ranch plus some funds from his brother, and has apparently been using the combo of free home and secluded location to conduct experiments. Clovis convinces one the locals, Judsgon, in the town of Hebron, near enough to the ranch, to help him on his way, although traveling by night ends up being a huge mistake for both of them. We’re already told early on that the landscape in these here parts of the state seem to be tormented at night by a pack of wolves, or maybe a werewolf. The introductory blurb for “Wolves of Darkness” tells us that this story will have to do with lycanthropy, which is true enough, although Williamson’s treatment of it pretty unconventional by the standards of pulp fiction. It’s also worth mentioning that one major plus in this story’s favor is its sense of place, which is no doubt inspired by Williamson spending much of his life in rural areas. He was, in fact, born in what is now Arizona, before it had become a state (that’s how old he is), before his family moved to Texas and then New Mexico, literally in a covered wagon in the 1910s. Despite being ostensibly set in what was then modern times, “Wolves of Darkness” is a depiction of the southwest at a time when it was still in the early stages of modernization. It’s set in the 1920s or early ’30s, but could almost just as well takes place circa 1900, as if the past and present were converging. Incidentally Jack Williamson and Robert E. Howard were close contemporaries who were both from the southwest, and thus reading their work from the ’30s you can get an idea of what early modernization for that region was like, albeit from quite different perspectives: Howard had a very love-hate relationship with Texas while Williamson was more forgiving.

Anyway, Clovis ~~it’s such a weird name I’m sorry~~ and Judson are attacked by wolves and a rather skimpily dressed lady with glowing green eyes—in fact the wolves have the same sort of uncannily green eyes, as depicted in the cover. Judson gets killed off-screen, but the woman and her wolf pack take Clovis back to the ranch as a captive. Clovis swears he recognizes the girl from somewhere, and realizes it’s at least the body of Stella Jetton, the daughter of Dr. Jetton, who is (or was) Dr. McLaurin’s colleague. The problem is that Stella doesn’t recognize Clovis, and going by her actions it’s more likely that some outside force has taken control of her body. This turns out to be the case, not just with Stella and the wolves but Dr. McLaurin himself, who is, let’s say not quite himself once Clovis meets him. Both the people and wolves Clovis meets all have green eyes, and all seem to be possessed of some fierce intelligence that while in the bodies of “lower” animals appears to give them extra intelligence, while in the bodies of people they become more animalistic. The big weakness of this outside force becomes apparent early on when Dr. McLaurin (or the thing inhabiting his body) tells Clovis that they really dislike light of any kind, so as to why the interior of the ranch is only shown in a dim red light. The beings who have taken over these bodies are nocturnal, or rather they come from a world that is deprived of light—a notion that seems outlandish, although there are many organisms in the depths of our own planet’s oceans that have never known sunlight. “Wolves of Darkness,” like much if not necessarily all of weird fiction, is basically about someone trespassing beyond the boundaries of the natural order and in so doing fucking around and finding out, as we say. In the case of this story it’s Dr. McLaurin who, prior to the beginning, had tampered with studies in possible alternate dimensions. This is what I mean by the story being SF rather than fantasy, since we’re given an SFnal explanation for why these things are happening.

Even in 1932 the premise of humanity coming into contact with malicious alien life was by no means new, although what’s more novel here is that “Wolves of Darkness” is an early example of aliens of the body-snatching variety. We never see what they look like, although from what I can tell they’re more like energy beings of the sort of that appear regularly in Star Trek; rather we only see them as filtered through the organic Earth bodies they take over. The conflict thus boils down to Clovis being held hostage, to help the aliens make a machine that would basically facilitate an invasion of Earth, or die a horrific death. Of course, he figures he’s gonna die either way, but he’d much rather defeat the aliens and save Stella in the process (he’s not as concerned about saving his dad). I’ve read enough early Williamson that I can tell Clovis very much fits in the mold of what Williamson was doing at the time, which is to say Clovis is a typical early Williamson protagonist: he’s sort of shy and intellectual, but also antsy, and he has a hunger for adventure that puts him in dangerous situations despite his social insecurities. In a way this is wish-fulfillment, a fact which Williamson was not exactly secretive about when it came to his ’30s output. (Some writers intentionally keep the methods behind their madness hidden while others, especially in the age of social media, are a little too eager about sharing with us all the boring fucking processes of their work. Williamson, in Wonder’s Child, takes a pleasant middle ground and only gives us insight into what really mattered to him as both a writer and person. If I ever become a professional writer of fiction, please put a gun to my head if I start oversharing about the miserable and solitary process of writing and getting my stories accepted wherever.) The “romance” between Clovis and Stella (the two barely interact if we discount scenes where the latter is still possessed) is also indicative of pulp fiction, in that it’s totally unconvincing.

What’s more convincing is the thinly veiled sexual angst, which Williamson also points out in his memoir as being rooted in his own failed attempts at romance and sexual intimacy at that time. There’s a memorable scene in which Stella bites Clovis’s leg in retaliation and licks the blood, in a way which is animalistic but also evocative of a merciless dominatrix. Clovis carries that leg wound for the rest of the story, and it gets brought up a few times so as to remind us that Clovis is not in the best physical shape to run from these horrors, but it’s also a connection he has with this woman he is irrationally driven to save. The idea is that he really want to fuck Stella, although this sentiment is never made explicit, or rather it’s shrouded under the guise of “true love.” Their relationship is unconvincing when taken on its face, but is more convincing when read as repressed lust, helped by the fact that Stella is barely clothed for pretty much the whole thing. Another neat thing is that the energy beings are apparently able to inhabit any organic life, even those who are dead, resulting in a small army of green-eyed zombies, including the resurrected Judson. There’s a memorable little passage in which Williamson describes one of the zombies, apparently missing its head, with a pair of gaseous green eyes protruding from its neck stump. This is the kind of gory and unabashedly horrific stuff that would’ve been fine in Weird Tales but would probably not have been fine for Unknown a decade later. “Wolves of Darkness,” aside from just being too long (it’s a novella but has the plot and character depth of a novelette), is a slight challenge to recommend because it has elements of both pulpy weird fiction and more sophisticated SF and fantasy that would appear later.

There Be Spoilers Here

After a lengthy infodump, in which Clovis manages to put Stella under hypnosis and make the energy being recede from controlling her temporarily, and also a failed escape attempt, Our Hero™ knows what he must do. The aliens really hate light, to the point that enough exposure might be able to kill them, or at least make them retreat from the bodies they control. With the help of a few locals, some dynamite, and some matches, he kills the fuck out of some of the zombies and ultimately is able to turn the tables on the aliens. Of course everyone who fell under the possession of the aliens is dead now, including Clovis’s dad, a fact which he doesn’t seem to mind much, leaving Stella as the sole survivor. All’s well that ends well, I guess? It’s a weirdly upbeat ending, considering the death toll and also the strain it put on Clovis’s mental health; meanwhile Stella conveniently doesn’t remember being a meat puppet. Not one of the more convincing endings among Williamson’s fiction.

A Step Farther Out

A few years ago, when I really started to get into magazine fiction, I remember being instantly captivated by H. W. Wesso’s splendid cover for this issue of Strange Tales. I didn’t even know what Strange Tales was at the time; it was actually the horror/fantasy sister magazine to Astounding Stories, back when both were published by Clayton. Astounding almost didn’t make it, but Street & Smith came to the rescue, although Strange Tales was left to rot. Since it was the cover story for this issue, I’d been wanting to read “Wolves of Darkness” for a minute, and I’m glad I finally did. I will say that it does pale a bit in comparison with Williamson’s later attempt at putting an SFnal twist on lycanthropy, “Darker Than You Think,” which I had read a couple years ago, although I may revisit that for the sake of writing about it. “Wolves of Darkness” is a liminal piece in Williamson’s career that I’d recommend for anyone interested enough in the trajectory of the man’s career and/or the history of old-school weird fiction.

See you next time.
The Observatory: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mad Scientists

July 15th, 2024

(Portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne, by Charles Osgood. Circa 1841.)

(Contains spoilers for “The Birthmark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and “The Artist of the Beautiful.”)

Sorry I missed last month’s editorial. I don’t really have an excuse as to why I couldn’t write anything; sometimes things just turn up empty. I did already have a topic in mind for July, though, so I wasn’t worried about that. We’re here to talk about some “classic literature,” which I understand tends to fall outside genre confines for a lot of people. After all, genre SF, or indeed science fiction as a codified genre, did not exist in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s lifetime; and yet he, along with a few contemporaries, contributed massively to what we now call science fiction. Hawthorne is one of the undisputed canonical American authors, and he was also one of the first, having been born on July 4th, 1804, at a time when the US had not even started really to foster its first generation of “canonical” literature. When Hawthorne started writing his first major work in the 1830s the literary landscape in the US was basically at the stature of a toddler; and despite having already written a novel (one that nobody talks about and which Hawthorne went out of his way to disown), he would dedicate two decades of his life to mastering just the short story. The Scarlet Letter is one of the most famous (if divisive) American novels of all time, but when it was published in 1850 Hawthorne had already garnered a reputation as a master of short fiction; and like his direct contemporary Edgar Allan Poe he often wrote stories that would now be considered horror, fantasy, and/or SF. There’s a reason Lovecraft, in his “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” singled out Hawthorne as a major pioneer in weird fiction, even calling his borderline supernatural The House of the Seven Gables a masterpiece.

If I was here to talk about Hawthorne’s horror fiction then I would really have my work cut out for me, given how much of his material is horror; but today we’re here to talk about three of his short stories, all of which could be considered SF, and all of which involve some kind of mad scientist figure. The truth is that had Mary Shelley not beaten him to the punch by a few decades then the popular conception of the mad scientist would probably be much more based on Hawthorne’s conceptions—and to a degree those conceptions have still left a footprint on the popular consciousness. Had things gone a bit differently we might call a scientist who plays God a Rappaccini instead of a Frankenstein. The three stories—”The Birthmark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and “The Artist of the Beautiful”—were all published over a span of two years (1843 and 1844), and the SF Encyclopedia singles them out as masterpieces of early SF. There’s a good reason for this. While not officially connected with each other in any way, the three stories are thematically conjoined at the hip, on top of featuring variations of the same character type: the scientist in search of perfection. These are also stories that happen to show Hawthorne at the top of his game, being some of his most tightly composed and insightful work, and showing a seriousness that would be missing in the early days of genre SF a century later. Mind you that this is not a review: I very much recommend all three stories. We’re gonna be doing some analysis, specifically in how Hawthorne conceptualizes scientist characters at a time when “the sciences” as different fields of discipline were only then starting to splinter, and indeed some hadn’t been founded yet. This was a time before Darwin’s theory of evolution and our modern understanding of genetics, for example, such that “science” in 1843 might now sound like mysticism.

I read each of these stories in order of how they appeared in the Hawthorne collection Mosses from an Old Manse, so let’s talk about “The Birthmark” (or “The Birth-Mark” as it’s also written) first. This is one of Hawthorne’s most reprinted stories, and given its simplicity and economy of style it’s easy to see why it’d be one of the more popular choices. There are only two main characters (plus a singular supporting character I’ll get to in a minute), trapped together in basically one room. Aylmer is a research scientist, living at some point in the late 18th century, with his wife Georgiana, a perfectly submissive woman who nonetheless is insecure about a hand-shaped birthmark on her cheek which renders her, at least to her husband, just imperfect enough as to be tragic. We’re told Georgiana is as conventionally attractive a woman as one can think, almost perfect in her beauty—almost. This single imperfection (clearly supposed to be the hand of Nature on her cheek) is enough to make Aylmer neurotic, and to propose a series of experiments in order to remove the birthmark, which Georgiana agrees to. Aylmer’s assistant, Aminadab, suggests that the experiment would be a bad idea, but remains loyal to his master. Aminadab is a curious figure, since he has to be one of the first examples of the mad scientist’s impish assistant in SF, serving almost as a predecessor to the likes of Fritz in the 1931 Frankenstein movie and Igor elsewhere. (Remember, Dr. Frankenstein did not have such an assistant in the novel!) Of course, Aminadab is not very impish; if anything he serves as “earthy” wisdom to contrast with Aylmer’s blinding bookishness. Aylmer is not evil by any means, but he turns out to be tragically misguided, perhaps driven by the fact that he loves his work more than his wife, or as the narrator posits, he is unable to untangle his love for his wife from his love for science.

“The Birthmark” is a parable that has quite a bit going on within its almost brutally simple confines. It’s a story about man’s vain pursuit to overthrow Nature (and for Hawthorne it’s always Nature with a capital N), which will become a big of a running theme here. It’s also about the vain pursuit of obtaining perfection, which of course Aylmer and Georgiana can’t have. Aylmer’s borderline abuse of his wife and the narrative’s sympathy for Georgiana’s insecure arguably reads as proto-feminist, especially now that we’ve become much more aware of women having unrealistic beauty expectations thrust upon them; indeed the seeming “need” for perfect beauty is so prevalent that despite the quasi-Shakespearean dialogue and dense expository paragraphs, very little has aged about any of these stories in terms of their concerns. Of course Aylmer is able to remove the birthmark, but Georgiana quickly becomes ill and dies on the operating table; obviously if we’re being pedantic the removal of the birthmark shouldn’t have been able to kill her, but it’s meant to be symbolic. Prior to the climax Georgiana alluded to being connected with the birthmark in some spiritual fashion, such that if the birthmark were extinguished then her a soul might go with it—a possibility Aylmer doesn’t quite heed. For a brief moment he renders Georgiana “perfect,” but as will become apparent if one reads his other fiction, Hawthorne thinks of perfection as something that can only last for a single moment—if it’s possible at all. Aylmer is a tragic hero in that he has good intentions, or at least thinks he has good intentions, but is unable to do away with Nature’s imperfections.

Now we have possibly Hawthorne’s most famous short story with “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” which despite being a fair bit longer than either of the other stories is still very much a parable. I should probably mention that I suspect the biggest reason why more people don’t enjoy Hawthorne nowadays is that he was not a realist; he often wrote in the allegorical mode, itself having apparently gone out of fashion in recent decades. Nobody likes being moralized at, and Hawthorne did quite a bit of moralizing; but he was also very good at it, such that his skill goes undervalued now. It’s quite possible that had Frankenstein not been published a quarter-century earlier that our conception of what a “mad scientist” even looks like might’ve been more informed by Hawthorne’s Rappaccini—an ironic fact considering Rappaccini himself barely appears in his own story and we don’t even get any dialogue from him until the climax. We do, however, see a great deal of Rappaccini’s work, including his experimental botanical garden, an “Eden of poisonous flowers,” and his daughter Beatrice, who manages said Eden. We move off to Italy, where a young man named Giovanni gets caught in a rivalry between two physicians, Baglioni and Rappaccini, and Giovanni himself becomes deeply fascinated with Beatrice. I could be wrong, but this might be the earliest example of the “mad scientist’s beautiful daughter” trope in fiction; I certainly struggle to think of anything that could’ve predated it. There is a problem with Beatrice, aside from the fact that she’s socially inept: she’s poisonous, such that even her breath can kill. After years of exposure to the garden Beatrice has become immune to the poisonous plants around her—the tradeoff now being that she has become poisonous to everything else. Well, nobody’s perfect.

Of Hawthorne’s mad scientists Rappaccini is by far the most villainous and the least human, so it’s fitting he’s the only one who serves as a proper antagonist. Rappaccini’s sinister nature is amplified by the fact that we get to know very little about how this whole situation came to be. We never find out what became of Mrs. Rappaccini and we never get a clear answer as to why Rappaccini would use his own daughter as a kind of living experiment, or why he built his garden so that it would resemble a kind of inverted Eden—a place where nothing is allowed to live except that which kills. Maybe the point of making Beatrice immune to the poisonous plants of the garden was to make her, quite literally, immune to what Rappaccini considers the evils of the world—the killing things which Nature produces. Beatrice has become so perfectly immune, and herself so perfectly poisonous, that the result is idealistic—if only in a way that would strike the average person as perverse. Not that Hawthorne’s writing tends to be subtle, but “Rappaccini’s Daughter” might be one of his most overtly religious works in how intensely (and masterfully) it harks to Biblical mythology, to such a degree that even the verbose style of the prose seems to be the spawn of Milton and the King James Bible. (Of course there are also references to The Divine Comedy.) Rappaccini is a man who clearly thinks of himself as akin to God—a demiurge who has created an inverted and treacherous Eden of his own. If Rappaccini is the demiurge, a counterfeit God, then Baglioni is like the snake in Eden, but made ultimately good, such that his foiling of his rival involves making Giovanni immune to Beatrice’s own poison—an antidote that, tragically, results in her death. The villainous striving for perfection, the “paradise” of the garden, has been lost.

(Cover by E. M. Stevenson. Weird Tales, July 1926.)

The last of these stories is not as famous as the others, nor was it reprinted in genre magazines as a classic—all a shame, since it’s arguably the strongest of the bunch. I was stunned a bit when I had first read “The Artist of the Beautiful” a year or so ago, which as its title suggests is an incredibly tender parable. It must be said, though, that the protagonist of this one is not, strictly speaking, a scientist. Owen Warland is young watchmaker who has just finished his apprenticeship under Peter Hovenden, a capable but conventional-thinking watchmaker who doesn’t see the value in Owen’s idealism. Working on little machines is all well and good, but Owen wants to make something beautiful, something with real aesthetic value that will stick in the mind long after its practical function has expired. In other words, he wants to be an artist. In “Birthmark” we saw the scientist-as-destroyer, in “Rappaccini’s Daughter” we saw a villainous take on the scientist-as-creator, but in “The Artist of the Beautiful” we see the scientist-as-artist. Indeed it’s here, in this tightly constructed little story, that Hawthorne most neatly marries art with the sciences. Owen’s growing obsession with making something small and yet perfect could serve as analogous with Hawthorne’s own obsession with perfecting the short story. After all, “the beautiful idea has no relation to size.” This proves to be a very hard task for Owen, though, and he gives up a lot to achieve his vision, having lost his chance with Peter Hovenden’s daughter Annie and having become an outcast. There are false starts, and he even gives up watchmaking to focus on his secret project, mooching off an inheritance in the meantime. For all intents and purposes Owen shuts out the human world, but the same can’t be said of Nature, which he becomes more fascinated with…

The scientists of the previous two stories thought that in some way they could conquer Nature—Aylmer to remove Nature’s imperfections and Rappaccini to bend Nature to serve his own ends. If Owen is redeemed by anything it’s his willingness to acknowledge Nature’s—maybe “superiority” is not the right word, but Nature’s status as the immovable object, not to be destroyed or pushed aside by human hands. So rather than try to conquer Nature Owen instead takes inspiration from it, perhaps with the expectation that he won’t be able to reach perfection—but he can get very close, if only for a prolonged moment. Even if only a few people get to see his creation before it falls apart in their hands. The mechanical butterfly, an early example of a robot in fiction, is tiny, yet perfectly designed. It has no practical utility, but it exists seemingly for the sake of being a wonderful little work of art, not to mention what would’ve been a technological marvel. Post-industrial technology rarely comes up in Hawthorne’s fiction, partly because he actually lived through the industrial revolution and partly because his fiction tends to take place what would’ve been the distant past, even from the perspective of 1840s New England. Owen’s mechanical butterfly thus stands out as a rare example for Hawthorne of what we even today would call modern technology, but it’s also an example of science and art coming together to imitate Nature—not to replace it but to take inspiration from it. The ending is bittersweet, as Owen’s creation which he had toiled over for months crumbles, but it strikes me as a kind of spiritual victory for the “scientist” here. If Aylmer was misguided and Rappaccini villainous then Owen, the scientist-as-artist, comes out the victor.

Hawthorne wrote more SF than just these three stories, of course, although SF would still only take up a small fraction of his output, for I think at heart he was really a horror writer. There is some overlap between the genres he played with, though, and it shouldn’t be too surprising that “The Birthmark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” were reprinted in Weird Tales. Poe certainly wrote more SF, but far more than Poe I think Hawthorne set a standard for how we (people who, for the most part anyway, are not scientists at all) think about scientist characters in SF. Poe’s protagonists are often misfits, adventurers, schemers, and other archetypes Poe may or may not have admired; but Hawthorne’s protagonists tend to be more bookish, dour, isolated from human contact, like the man himself. No doubt Hawthorne saw some of himself in Owen Warland, and he may have even seen a bit of himself in Aylmer. More than with scientists as people, though, Hawthorne was arguably the first (after Mary Shelley, obviously) to write science fiction in which the sciences matter even close to as much as the action and themes of the story. In “Rappaccini’s Daughter” alone we have a physician who is also a botanist, and while he stays offscreen for most of the story we do see clearly the fruits of his labor. In the days before we even knew of Darwinian evolution Hawthorne had given us some ideas as to what a world ruled by scientists, by the seeking-after-knowledge above all else, might look like—and it didn’t look promising.
The Observatory: For M. R. James, the Past Is Never Dead

April 15th, 2024

(Illustration by James McBryde, 1904.)

(Contains spoilers for “The Ash-Tree,” “A Warning to the Curious,” and “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.’”)

Montague Rhodes James was born in 1862 and died in 1936, incidentally the same year as Rudyard Kipling; and with that, English literature lost two of its finest writers of the supernatural. It wasn’t the only thing they had in common: they were both conservatives of a breed that seemed to die out following the erosion of the British empire, both given to a distrust of women (Kipling more explicitly), both seeming to be relics of a prior age—a status which makes them a bit of a challenge for modern readers. More endearingly, both were consummate and compulsive storytellers. Kipling read stories to his children while James often wrote his stories with the intention of reading them aloud to his friends, which he would then do at Christmastime gatherings. They can’t help it; it’s like a second language for them. But whereas Kipling wrote almost every kind of story then conceivable (adventure, fantasy, science fiction, horror, you name it), James wrote only one kind of story: the ghost story. As he admits in “Stories I Have Tried to Write,” a brief but telling essay, “I never cared to try any other kind.” It’s a good thing he was perfect for such a niche job.

I’ve been reading some M. R. James as of late, or in a few cases rereading. I’ve said before that I’m a bit of a slow reader, and even then I struggle to retain information; but there’s also a pleasure in rereading something juicy, and James’s writing often demands closer examination. It’s occurred to me that James really was one of the best horror writers of his time, and he did this despite (by his own admission) being adept at only one specific kind of story. If you read five M. R. James stories in one day (which I wouldn’t recommend, because each requires at least some time to digest) then you will at some point feel like you’re reading five variations on the same story—the primordial M. R. James story which may not exist. “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” and “A Warning to the Curious” were written more than a decade apart, but read like the offspring of the same mother—or, to evoke the things lurking in the ash tree at the climax of that story, siblings in the same brood, belonging to the same monstrous spider-queen. To make a more film-nerd comparison, James’s fiction is sort of like the movies of Yasujirō Ozu, in that both artists seemed preoccupied with toying with the same set of ideas, creating works that are similar enough to each other, with subtle and at times profound differences.

In James’s case there is a tangible obsession with the distant past—in many cases the positively ancient past. This wasn’t just a hobby for the man, mind you. James was one of those writers who wrote relatively little fiction (his complete set of ghost stories has been printed in volumes under 500 pages) because he had a day job that both covered his ass financially and was respectable. He spent pretty much his whole adult life in academia, at a few different colleges, from undergrad all the way to senior positions. He was a professional medievalist, and he did not fuck around when it came to uncovering artifacts and works of architecture. If he were alive today he might be one of those “lost media” YouTubers, but ya know, more cultured. Something to keep in mind about James is that, being a Briton and living in the UK most of his life (he did like to travel), he had a first-hand conception of the ancient that filthy Americans like myself simply don’t have. For Americans the “ancient” past goes back to about the 1600s, but for someone who’s traveled through the UK and continental Europe this conception of the past goes back several more centuries. In this sense his story “The Ash-Tree” might be one of his most well-known, at least for American readers, because of its dealings with Puritans and the persecution of alleged witches—things Americans are likely to know about. Fans of Nathaniel Hawthorne will be sure to seek out this one especially.

But more often than not the terrors that haunt James’s protagonists are unspeakably old and ethereal, perhaps more monster than man. Not only are the living characters unable to communicate with these apparitions, but they’re barely even able to understand their existence in the physical world. You may be thinking there are only so many ways one can write about ghosts, or even imagine ghosts; but even comparing James to Kipling, or Montague Rhodes to Henry (that other great ghost story writer), shows that there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Indeed, unlike the popular conception of ghosts up to the Edwardian period, James’s (I’m talking about M. R. now) ghosts are decidedly meaner, crueler, more unreasonable, and more impenetrable. Or, to quote H. P. Lovecraft in “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” in which he articulates James’s virtues better than I could:

In inventing a new type of ghost, [James] has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition; for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy—a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man—and usually touched before it is seen. Sometimes the spectre is of still more eccentric composition; a roll of flannel with spidery eyes, or an invisible entity which moulds itself in bedding and shews a face of crumpled linen.

That latter description, by the way, applies to the ghost at the center of what is arguably James’s masterpiece, “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.’” This story, one of the finest ghost stories of all time, also happens to be a perfect encapsulation of James’s wants, fears, virtues, and limitations; it is a microcosm of everything relevant to and about M. R. James. We follow an academic, Professor Parkins, journeys to the coastal town of Burnstow (based on the real town of Felixstowe) for vacation, where he ends up golfing with a fellow at the same inn who mostly goes simply by “the Colonel.” Parkins gets word that there’s an attraction within walking distance of the inn that may be of interest to him: the site of a Templar preceptory, now mostly buried. The site would be at least 600 years old, and yet, England itself being such an old country, there might be something worth digging for. One day Parkins goes to the site as part of his beach walk, and digs out a whistle that, despite being caked in and clogged with dirt, remains miraculously intact. There’s writing on the whistle, in Latin, which Parkins can only partly make out, but which he translates as, “Who is this who is coming?” Having cleaned the whistle, and out of curiosity, he decides to use it. This is a mistake. The whistle’s owner has been dead for centuries, and yet upon Parkins’s discovering the whistle has been brought back into this world—first as a vague human-shaped specter that stalks Parkins on the beach and later taking possession of the aforementioned “crumpled linen.” This might be the only time in history the stereotypical bedsheet ghost is made threatening.

Everything is neatly laid out for us. We have an intellectual but sort of hapless protagonist, a pastoral locale that seems inviting but which houses an ancient evil (locations in James stories always seem either to be wide open spaces or storied buildings like cathedrals and old colleges, no in-between), a spirit of the distant past which is catapulted into the present by some cursed object, and ultimately an anti-intellectual message. For James, the past seems to always be just one bad move away from resurfacing, on a collision course with the present unbeknownst to the latter. The central character of “A Warning to the Curious” takes what is supposedly the last buried crown on England’s coasts, made to stave off foreign enemies, and draws the unwanted attention of something—and, even after returning the ancient crown to its rightful place, he pays for his transgression. Similarly the latest in a line of Puritan landowners falls prey to a witch’s curse that his ancestor had brought upon the family in “The Ash-Tree,” with the witch continuing to wreak vengeance long after her execution. According to James, the past is never dead—merely dormant. In cosmic horror a rule of thumb is to never alert the eldritch horror to your presence, but while James’s ghost stories are not cosmic, they do have a similar rule: do not wake that which is sleeping. All things considered, Parkins gets off lightly.

It’s funny to think that James would revolutionize the ghost story, since he was about as far removed from the revolutionary as is possible. He was a reactionary, a staunch anti-Modernist, a misogynist, and if contemporary accounts are to be believed, a bit of a man-child. He had no sense of worker solidarity, wasn’t remotely interested in making the world a better place, and seemed to be a walking goldmine of useless trivia (again, think “lost media” YouTuber); and yet it could be argued that this sheltered lifestyle, this state of being perpetually knee-deep in the past, had nurtured James’s writing rather than hindered it. Sure, you (possibly left-leaning reader—or maybe not) and I find the politics of, say, H. G. Wells, a lot more agreeable, but I don’t think Wells (at least young Wells) could’ve written such a menacing work of horror as “‘Oh, Whistle’” or “Count Magnus” or “Casting the Runes.” I’ve been having this thought, or rather question, tumbling around in my head lately: Is horror a conservative genre? Very loaded question, probably worthy of its own editorial at a later date. Historically some of the great horror writers were conservative, and certainly the best writers of ghost stories in particular have tended to be right-wing. It could be because conservatives go through life already being stalked by phantoms—by the specters of queerness, feminism, socialism, and what have you. M. R. James is a rare case where his artistry was often fabulous because of his backwards politics, and more specifically because of his crippling fear of the present.
Short Story Review: “The Hounds of Tindalos” by Frank Belknap Long

April 6th, 2024

(Cover by C. C. Senf. Weird Tales, March 1929.)

Who Goes There?

Frank Belknap Long had an exceedingly long life and career, born in 1901 and writing from about 1920 to well into the ’80s. He was close friends with H. P. Lovecraft, and was the first author to contribute to the Cthulhu Mythos, although it wasn’t called that in Lovecraft’s lifetime. “The Hounds of Tindalos” was Long’s third Mythos story, despite Wikipedia calling it the first to not be written by Lovecraft. This one story would have a rather large influence on Mythos fiction to come, with the hounds themselves even appearing later in Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness,” in one of several instances of Lovecraft inspiring and in turn being inspired by others in the so-called Circle. There’s even an anthology of Mythos stories by different writers featuring the hounds. By the ’40s Long would move away from cosmic horror and focus more on science fiction, and indeed “The Hounds of Tindalos” is an early example of Long marrying the weird with the scientific, creating a structurally flawed but pretty memorable SF-horror narrative with an iconic monster at the center. It’s one of the more influential cosmic horror stories, and that’s because Long effectively utilizes one of the scariest things known to man: basic geometry.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1929 issue of Weird Tales. It was then reprinted as a “classic” in the July 1937 issue. It first appeared in book form in the Long collection of the same title, with a pretty gnarly Hannes Bok cover for the first edition. We also have Avon Fantasy Reader #16. For anthology appearances there’s Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos: Volume 1 (ed. August Derleth), The Spawn of Cthulhu (ed. Lin Carter), and The Science Fiction Century (ed. David G. Hartwell).

Enhancing Image

Frank is an average guy who happens to be buddies with a real eccentric in the form of Chalmers, a sort of scientist-mystic who has contrarian views regarding objective reality. His library is filled with books on alchemy and theology, and “pamphlets about medieval sorcery and witchcraft and black magic, and all of the valiant glamorous things that the modern world has repudiated.” Or as Charles Fort would’ve put it, the excluded. Chalmers rejects what would’ve been conventional scientific narratives in 1928, although to Frank’s mild relief he does see Einstein as a kindred spirit, “a profound mystic and explorer of the great suspected.” Chalmers has a hypothesis that time, the fourth dimension, is actually an illusion, there merely because without it the human mind would wither at being able to see everything happening simultaneously. To test this he has concocted a drug which, if successful, should have the effect of breaking down that barrier. He wants Frank to be there as witness, and to act if something goes wrong. This is like your friend trying LSD for the first time and having you stay in the room with them for hours on end as a sober spectator, although LSD had not yet been invented when Long wrote this story.

Drugs play a surprisingly large role in the history of cosmic horror writing, although in the ’20s and ’30s these things were treated with utmost skepticism, if not contempt. In the context of a cosmic horror narrative the ambivalence makes sense. Sure, Aldous Huxley would later argue for the positive potential of hallucinogens, but for fiction with an overall thesis of “There are things man is better off not knowing,” it makes sense to go on an anti-drug screed. I’m not sure what experience Long would be basing his writing of this fictional drug on, although it seems he had been reading the Tao Te Ching and found it inspirational—but not for religious reasons. Chalmers takes the drug, which takes effect “with extraordinary rapidity,” and to say he has a trip would be understating it. What Chalmers expected happens, in that he not so much hops across bodies through time but experiences all these different perspectives at the same time; it’s that he can only convey this information to Frank in a linear fashion. But there’s something much more concerning that rears its head in the midst of this trip, which only Chalmers can see (not so much see as comprehend) and which forces Frank to break him out of the trance.

Let’s talk about the hounds, since they’re the star of the show, which is saying a lot since they never technically appear. We never see the hounds because they don’t exist in three-dimensional space. As Chalmers says, “There are […] things that I can not distinguish. They move slowly through angles. They have no bodies, and they move slowly through outrageous angles.” They’re only called hounds because Chalmers really isn’t sure what else he can call them; they’re certainly not like any dog in the real world, and they might only be distantly related to something mythical like Cerberus. In line with Lovecraft’s own conception of morality, the hounds are evil, but only as understood by humans. They act simply according to their nature, which apparently is an unspeakably horrific one. Or, as Chalmers says:

“They are beyond good and evil as we know it. They are that which in the beginning fell away from cleanliness. Through the deed they became bodies of death, receptacles of all foulness. But they are not evil in our sense because in the spheres through which they move there is no thought, no morals, no right or wrong as we understand it.”

Because Chalmers broke through the barrier of time he also stepped into the hounds’ domain, which if you know your cosmic horror is always a fatal mistake. The worst thing you can do in this kind of story is to alert the eldritch horror to your presence. So, there are basically two kind of geometry: curves and angles—cleanliness and foulness. Which sounds a bit silly as I’m saying it, but I respect Long for trying to apply a scientific rigor to something which refuses to be understood in human terms, even if math is supposedly the language of the natural world. This melding of the weird and scientific might’ve helped inspire Lovecraft in his own later, more SFnal Mythos stories, such as At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow Out of Time.” I can’t say for sure because I’m a layman and not a scholar. If you’re a Lovecraft scholar then feel free to call me a dumbass. Anyway, what makes the hounds memorable, despite never being seen in-story (though this hasn’t stopped people from trying, such as the aforementioned Bok illustration), is that they’re threatening while also not being god-like figures like Cthulhu or Shub-Niggurath; these are animals basically, as their name indicates, but they’re not puppers you’d wanna pet.

Unlike some other contemporary attempts at writing cosmic horror, Long’s language is fairly unadorned; even Chalmers, who is given to monologuing, is not as verbose as the average Lovecraft narrator. Frank (who might be a stand-in for Long) is less a typical cosmic horror narrator and more riding shotgun to the poor sap who normally would be narrating. Long might’ve done this one-degree-of-separation tactic because Chalmers is such an eccentric and so detached from normal human behavior that the reader (the God-fearing Christian reader who might dabble in the occult as a tourist) might not have anything to latch on to. This decision seems like a good idea, but as we’re about to see, it does have a serious drawback, which in my opinion stops “The Hounds of Tindalos” from entering masterpiece territory and instead relegates it to the realm of “pretty good.” I mean, there are far worse things you can be than pretty good.

There Be Spoilers Here

The story is split into five chapters, of which the first is by far the longest; this first chapter puts us in Frank’s shoes and the result is one long scene that happens in one location. So far so good. The second chapter, much shorter, sees Frank and Chalmers plastering up the angels in the latter’s room, since the hounds have been alerted and, as said before, enter through angles. But then Long makes the odd decision to jettison us from Frank’s flesh prison (Frank himself basically disappears from the narrative), and to switch perspectives to what seems to be a third-person view—and then to switch perspectives yet again. All in the span of just a few pages. Perspective, especially in a short story, is an important thing to keep consistent, and it’s a rule Long violates without (I would think) just cause. Of course things don’t turn out well for Chalmers; when do they ever. I think the last cosmic horror story I read where the protagonist/narrator comes out of the ordeal more or less intact was Robert E. Howard’s “The Black Stone” (review here); and yes I do consider Chalmers the real protagonist of Long’s story. On the plus side, Chalmers’s death manages to be both gory and genuinely creepy: authorities find his body with his head removed and placed on his chest, and yet there’s not a drop of blood at the scene. And to make things weirder there’s protoplasm on the body. Certainly no human could’ve done such a clean job, one that seems physically impossible—unless your existence is deemed physically impossible by known science.

A Step Farther Out

As I’ve been getting more into horror fiction I think I’ve come to appreciate the efforts of the “old masters” more. The irony with Long is that he would outlive Lovecraft and Howard by decades, but he never garnered even close to the amount of respect and impact as them—in death or in life. When he died he was so poor that he was initially buried in a potter’s grave, and it was only because of several big names in the weird fiction scene banding together that allowed him a proper burial about a year later. Clearly there’s some respect there, but if Long gets mentioned nowadays it’s very likely because he was buddies with Lovecraft. I know I haven’t helped with that problem. “The Hounds of Tindalos” points toward a talent who does indeed take after Lovecraft but whose priorities might lie elsewhere. If anything the quality of this story has made me curious in Long’s later, more mature work, albeit I know he drifts away from the cosmic.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Valley Was Still” by Manly Wade Wellman

January 20th, 2024

(Cover by Virgil Finlay. Weird Tales, August 1939.)

Who Goes There?

Manly Wade Wellman debuted in 1927, in Weird Tales, and remained a resident there for quite some time, which partly explains how he, who wrote both SF and fantasy, managed to stay relevant after John W. Campbell started reshaping the former genre in his own image. Indeed his reputation as a fantasist only grew over time, and when he eventually settled in North Carolina he would become one of the foremost authors associated with that state. His career is a long-spanning one, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing him again before too long. He won the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1980. I may have picked “The Valley Was Still” as my first Wellman to review because it was adapted into a classic Twilight Zone episode, retitled “Still Valley.”

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1939 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. Was anthologized in Weird Tales (ed. Peter Haining), The Twilight Zone: The Original Stories (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Richard Matheson, and Charles G. Waugh), and The American Fantasy Tradition (ed. Brian M. Thomsen). It’s also in the Wellman collection Worse Things Waiting. That last one seems to be in print.

Enhancing Image

I wanna start this review by saying I’ll be discussing the ramifications of the American Civil War a fair bit—maybe even a bit more than the story itself. “The Valley Was Still” is a very fine story, but it’s also a work of neo-Confederate propaganda, albeit one that’s more morally nuanced than the usual. Wellman believed pretty heavily that the Confederacy fought for a just cause, more specifically that the Confederacy fought for “states’ rights.” What rights exactly states should have is something neo-Confederates are always silent about giving. The topic of slavery never comes up in this story, which for anything regarding the Civil War basically renders the given viewpoints incomplete at best. The problem with not mentioning slavery when talking about the Civil War is that the absence of slavery renders the Civil War a conflict seemingly without a root cause. The Civil War, Confederacy sympathizers argue implicitly, is a war that started basically from nothing. Mental gymnastics are obviously at work here.

You may be wondering how I, as a proud Union man, can like this story if I think the implied worldview it’s presenting is wrong on a basic level. The answer is simple: I have the media literacy of at least a 5th grader, as opposed to the 3rd grade where too many people are stuck at. You can like a work of art whilst disagreeing with its worldview. This is really easy to understand, but many people somehow miss the point. Like I said, “The Valley Was Still” is a very fine story, with maybe more texture in its ideas than Wellman had intended; but then art, even art written to fill pages in a pulp magazine, requires at least a fraction of the artist’s subconscious for its making. I have to say Wellman also does something that at least from a modern perspective is hard to pull off, in that he gives us a protagonist who is a Confederate soldier, a “chivalric idealist” as Wellman tells us, and despite his patriotism for a doomed and deeply immoral system he remains worthy of our sympathy. This is a sign of good writing, by the way. Wellman tells us very early on that Joseph Paradine is this idealistic patriot, because it’s important to establish such a thing before Paradine gets confronted with what would be for him (if not for us dirty Yankees) a tough choice.

Paradine and his scout buddy Dauger are looking out over the town of Channow, a Southern town deep in a valley that Union troops are supposed to be encamped in. There’s one problem: from where Paradine is sitting he can’t find any Yankees. Indeed the town is… a little too quiet. Paradine volunteers to go on ahead by himself, in what would under normal circumstances by almost a suicide mission. He would be guaranteed a POW if the Union boys caught him if not for the fact that he could, at least at a glance, pass for a Union soldier, having stolen several items of apparel as “trophies of war.” On the other hand, if the Union troops are not encamped here, then something more sinister may be going on. Paradine ventures into town and it doesn’t take him long to scout out the place: it’s basically deserted. All the townsfolk had gone. More importantly, he finds dozens of Union troops, all of whom have seem to have dropped dead. “But who could have killed them? Not his comrades, who had not known where the enemy was. Plague, then? But the most withering plague takes hours, at least, and these had plainly fallen all in the same instant.” Only it turns out, after some testing, that they’re not dead, but have somehow been made to take to a deathlike sleep. But what could’ve done this?

I wouldn’t call “The Valley Was Still” a horror story, but it does have a quiet eeriness at its center, and this is helped by Wellman’s style, which I would call a few steps above the standard weird pulp prose of the time. Rod Serling, when he adapted it into a teleplay for The Twilight Zone, must’ve been similarly taken by Wellman’s writing, It’s simple, but controlled and quite affecting. By the way, Serling must’ve read it in what had to be a battled old copy of the 1939 issue of Weird Tales, since “The Valley Was Still” had not yet been reprinted anywhere at that time. Indeed it’s very short (only maybe a dozen book pages) and it presents its message with a neat little bow, which is just the kind of thing Serling liked. However, the message, for how concisely it’s presented, may not be so simple. Things get weirder when Paradine finds there is one other waking person in the town—a very old man named Teague, who had apparently put a spell on the Union boys. Teague is a “witch-man,” from a family line of witches, so he says. The townsfolk of Channow treated him as an outcast, only coming to him for favors, and when the Union boys came in they high-tailed it, leaving Teague seemingly alone to fend for himself—only he’s a one-man army.

Like Paradine, Teague is a patriot. He almost confused Paradine for a Union man and nearly put the sleeping spell on him, but is delighted to find a bright-eyed Confederate willing to do anything for the cause. Well, we’ll see how far that “anything” goes. Before I get to spoilers, I wanna say again that we’re clearly supposed to believe Paradine is fighting on the “right” side of the conflict, even if it’s doomed by history. The plot almost could not exist if not for its pro-Confederacy angle—I say “almost” because Serling, a New Yorker and a flaming liberal, saw that there was something rather touching at the core of what could easily be woe-is-me Gone with the Wind-esque soap-boxing. (Gone with the Wind is a very bad, overlong, melodramatic, and deeply racist novel, none of whose qualities overlap with “The Valley Was Still,” other than a general wistfulness about a certain war neither of the authors were even old enough to have witnessed.) We’re told repeatedly that Paradine believes in honor, that he looks up to Robert E. Lee, that he believes in chivalry. Lee fought to preserve slavery, but he was courageous, and he did believe in such a thing as honor on the battlefield.

The question Wellman then poses is: How low are you willing to sink to fight for what you believe is a just cause? Do the ends justify the means? Should the Confederacy win, even through dishonorable means? Is “honorable” defeat something Paradine will have to accept? These are some juicy questions Wellman asks of us in the span of only a few pages, and it’s here that the story reveals itself as a parable. On the surface it’s a parable about an honorable man who’s fighting for a dishonorable cause, and must chose between cheating for the sake of victory and defeat on his own terms. Consciously Wellman thinks Paradine and Lee are perfectly honorable men, but subconsciously he might’ve been more conflicted; he might’ve been unsure, deep down, if the Confederacy really was a cause worth dying for. This uncertainty stops “The Valley Was Still” from becoming jingoistic garbage, but it also elevates this story about witchcraft from pulp to a perfectly respectable fantasy fable.

There Be Spoilers Here

Teague has a spell book. The whole thing, he claims, is filled with the word of God, but when Paradine sees the book for himself he finds God’s name has been crossed out and replaced with what is highly implied to be the devil’s. We’re told that with the power in this book the Confederacy can win the war, with Paradine as the second greatest man in the South—only behind Teague, of course. Paradine assumes when Teague refers to the greatest he means Robert E. Lee, but Teague clearly thinks highly enough of himself that he believes he can rule the South almost single-handedly. Almost. He needs the help of some fresh meat, some young patriot to help carry out his plan—someone like Paradine. All Paradine needs to do is sign his name in the book, with his own blood, to make an allegiance with the devil, and the South can win this war; if he doesn’t sign, then we’re told the devil doesn’t like being scorned. Now, Paradine is well-read enough to figure out quickly what kind of situation he’s in; he may be an idealist but he’s not an idiot. He knows the price one might have to pay for this deal.

Victory through evil—what would it become in the end? Faust’s story told, and so did the legend of Gilles de Retz, and the play about Macbeth. But there was also the tale of the sorcerer’s apprentice, and of what befell him when he tried to reject the force he had thoughtlessly evoked.

Thus “The Valley Was Still” is a Faustian parable, or a deal-with-the-devil type story. The difference between this and some others of its ilk is that rather than make a deal with the devil, Paradine ponders whether he should do such a thing in the first place. Ultimately he decides that whatever wrath the devil might inflict on him and the South, he figures it’s better to lose (if the South is to lose) honorably than to win dishonorably. Not only does he reject Teague’s deal but he cuts the old man’s head off with his saber before he can finish signing his name. He then takes the book and undoes the sleeping spell, replacing the devil’s name in his recitation with God’s, opting to do the right thing even if it means likely getting taken prisoner. Wellman seems to be telling us that even the most patriotic of Confederates would rather risk losing the war than to commit blasphemy in the name of winning it. I think Wellman is being a little charitable here, but you have to admit his take on the war is about as morally upright as one can be while still being pro-Confederate; indeed the story borders on anti-jingoistic. In the context of the story, the South loses because one man chose to do the right thing, even if it meant the devil conspiring against him.

A Step Farther Out

I shouldn’t have to say this, but you don’t need to be a neo-Confederate or even a Southerner to enjoy this one. Wellman, as expected in the pulp tradition, can phone it in at times, but this is definitely not one of those times. This is a story he clearly wanted to tell; it might’ve been rolling around in his head for years prior to the writing for all we know. It has the controlled style and tight structure, combined with a thematic density, that implies it was a passion project, and I’d be surprised if it was just another bit of hackwork. You could teach this in a course on the art of the short story and people would probably not make a big fuss over it. Certainly it’s a good place to start with if you’re getting into Wellman.

See you next time.
The Observatory: Clark Ashton Smith, Literary Sorcerer

January 15th, 2024

(Clark Ashton Smith, as sketched in the October 1930 issue of Wonder Stories. Artist uncredited.)

It’s the first editorial of the year, and yeah, I know it’s a bit late to be seeing this. Clark Ashton Smith’s birthday is January 13, so a couple days ago. He was born in 1893 in California, and he would more or less live there for the rest of his life. He never ventured too far, and in the ’20s and ’30s he would care for his ailing parents, hence his turning to writing fiction. So the story goes. Smith never gave interviews, and we still don’t have a biography of him, but we do have copious letters he wrote to H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and others. With only one serious rival (whom I’ll get to), Smith was, for my money, the best line-for-line writer to appear in Weird Tales during its 1930s heyday; and he appeared in that magazine A LOT. Despite being formidable in both quality and quantity, though, Smith is somewhat forgotten today unless you’re a weird fiction enthusiast; certainly he lacks the mainstream recognition of Lovecraft and Howard. You’d be hard-pressed to find Clark Ashton Smith studies in academia and you’d be as hard-pressed to find Clark Ashton Smith fanclubs.

How Smith’s reputation failed to pick up a posthumous second wind like what happened with Lovecraft and Howard is a mystery that has a few clues, but after all it might not even be a mystery. Certainly Smith becoming semi-obscure by the time of his death is the same fate that befalls most authors—those, anyway, who garnered any reputation in the first place. It’s the singing quality of his prose and the striking power of his writing that makes this fate seem unjust, though. This dissonance between his deserving recognition and not getting said recognition was solidified by Smith “winning” the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award in 2015, an award reserved for authors whom the folks at Readercon believe to be worthy of recovering from the dust piles of history. Even Lovecraft agrees with me and the Readercon people: he singles out Smith as one living master of weird fiction in his seminal essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” It’s funny, because in some ways Lovecraft and Smith were very different, the former zeroing in on a rather niche subgenre of horror while the latter was content to hop across genres if it meant an extra paycheck.

Going back to the beginning, Smith tarted out as a poet; as a teenager he caught the attention of some notable personalities in the local California literary scene, even running into Ambrose Bierce. Smith was an autodidact who accrued an enormous amount of knowledge and even learned a couple extra languages from being a voracious reader. He would read encyclopedias and dictionaries front to back. He read seemingly everything he could get his hands on. Even without a proper education, Smith would come to have a much larger vocabulary than the vast majority of people who read his stories in the pulps, hence his (in)famous prose style. Smith dabbled in short fiction during his early days as a poet, but it was not until the late ’20s that he went full steam ahead on writing short fiction. Smith wrote something like a hundred short stories between 1929 and 1934—enough for a lifetime, compressed into five years. All told, Smith put out more fiction than Lovecraft (who, incidentally, did not write a whole lot during that same period), and he probably matched Howard in productivity for a short time there. He appeared in ten out of twelve issues of Weird Tales in 1934 alone, making him an almost omnipresent force.

Unlike Lovecraft, who turned up his nose at anything he deemed less dignified than Weird Tales (he was apparently cross when August Derleth sold At the Mountains of Madness to Astounding Science Fiction), Smith was not so picky; he would sell to Weird Tales the most, but he also appeared in Wonder Stories, the short-lived Strange Tales, and even Astounding. Of course, given how much he was writing, Smith could not afford to sell to only one outlet. And unlike Lovecraft, who didn’t seem to think of some of his work as science fiction, and Howard, who straight up never wrote science fiction, Smith was fine with playing into the recently founded pulp SF market, hence his appearing in Wonder Stories almost as often as Weird Tales. Smith had created several series, although it would be more accurate to call them settings: Zothique (a far-future wasteland which anticipates Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth), Hyperborea (a prehistoric Earth not dissimilar from Howard’s fantasies), and Averoigne (an alternate medieval France that has been infested with vampires, ghouls, and the like) are the big ones. When not setting his fiction on some fantastically altered Earth, Smith sometimes resorts to picking Mars or some other planet as the venue.

It’s worth mentioning, of course, that while Smith did play to the expectations of pulp readers for the sake of a paycheck, he did not do much to dumb down his language even with his most uncharacteristic work, which must’ve come as a shock to many at the time. The reality is that even many of the “classic” SF stories of the ’30s are semi-literate; they had other redeeming qualities, but you did not go to such fiction expecting to enjoy the prose for its own sake. Those who complain about the lack of literary flashiness in pre-New Wave SF writing would scarely survive a bout with SF as published in the pulps circa 1934. Read a randomly picked Smith story, on the other hand, and you’ll notice two things: you’ll find at least one word you do not recognize, and you’ll probably get swept up in the rhythm of Smith’s style. I’m a highly colloquial writer as opposed to a poetic one, so rather than try to lecture on what makes Smith’s prose different, I’ll simply provide a couple examples. The first is from the most recent story of his I’ve reviewed, “The Door to Saturn.” The wizard Eibon has used a magical door, courtesy of the god Zhothaqquah, to escape a pack of zealots, and upon entering Saturn (Cykranosh) encounters a strange creature:

He turned to see what manner of creature had flung the shadow. This being, he perceived, was not easy to classify, with its ludicrously short legs, its exceedingly elongated arms, and its round, sleepy-looking head that was pendulous from a spherical body, as if it were turning a somnambulistic somersault. But after he had studied it a while and had noted its furriness and somnolent expression, he began to see a vague though inverted likeness to the god Zhothaqquah. And remembering how Zhothaqquah had said that the form assumed by himself on Earth was not altogether that which he had worn in Cykranosh, Eibon now wondered if this entity was not one of Zhothaqquah’s relatives.

The second example is not from a story I’ve reviewed, but one I had read over a year ago which helped make me a Smith fan. This is from “The Dark Eidolon,” one of Smith’s best and most bombastic stories—a real scorcher of a tale, a dark fantasy epic in miniature. The wizard Namirrha, having accrued an unspeakable amount of power in his decades-long quest for revenge, has summoned the literal horses of the apocalypse to decimate the city of Ummaos, reveling in the destruction even as it will likely cost him his own life in the process:

Like a many-turreted storm they came, and it seemed that the world sank gulfward, tilting beneath the weight. Still as a man enchanted into marble, Zotulla stood and beheld the ruining that was wrought on his empire. And closer drew the gigantic stallions, racing with inconceivable speed, and louder was the thundering of their footfalls, that now began to blot the green fields and fruited orchards lying for many miles to the west of Ummaos. And the shadow of the stallions climbed like an evil gloom of eclipse, till it covered Ummaos; and looking up, the emperor saw their eyes halfway between earth and zenith, like baleful suns that glare down from soaring cumuli.

This shit is EPIC.

I wish I had something more sophisticated to say, but Smith’s work at its best conveys a sense of scale and a dark majesty in the span of twenty to forty pages that most novels fail to match up with, let alone other short fantasy stories of the time. Robert E. Howard was unlikely to use “somnolent” and almost certainly never used “somnambulistic,” let alone in combination with “somersault,” achieving the effect Smith pulled here. Lovecraft was also one to pull obscure words out of his ass, but he also never wrote a story featuring (among other things) a revenging sorcerer, an army of giant skeletons, and horses the size of skyscrapers which trample a whole city underfoot; and this is all in the same story! I’m just saying, read “The Dark Eidolon,” it kicks ass. You could say Smith dared to kick ass in a way Lovecraft had no interest in, and which Howard could only match via a different school of writing, that being the propulsion of action writing. Howard thrilled us with tales of musclebound men fighting demons and giant snakes, rescuing damsels and the like, but Smith thrilled us with his use of language. Reading a lumbering Smith paragraph, with its parenthetical asides and protracted sentences chain-linked with semi-colons, peppered with words you might not have ever seen before but whose meaning you can gather from context, can be like reading an incantation in a forbidden spell book. If Howard was a literary swordsman, then Smith was a literary sorcerer.

(Cover by H. W. Wesso. Strange Tales, October 1932.)

There is, of course, at least one writer in Weird Tales in the ’30s who I think matched Smith on almost the same wavelength: C. L. Moore. Being nearly twenty years Smith’s junior, Moore was very young when she hit the scene in 1933, but her first professional story, “Shambleau,” was an immediate success, and in just a couple years Moore garnered a reputation as a sort of prose poet, never mind a writer of immense depth. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry is one of the most memorable old-school sword-and-sorcery characters (she should by all rights be as influential as Conan, but sadly she is not), probably a bigger achievement than any of Smith’s characters individually (although Eibon and Maal Dweb are very fun and dastardly sorcerers), and despite her youth she could at times go toe-to-toe with Smith’s poetic strength. Imagine being a Weird Tales reader circa 1934 and seeing both Moore and Smith’s names in an issue’s table of contents. Both of these writers, for the rather brief time they were direct contemporaries, must surely have expanded the language of many readers, and by extension their minds. Moore is another writer who deserves to be popular with modern readers and for some reason is not; but that is a story for a later date.

Aside from being pessimists with a penchant for penning brooding passages, Smith and Moore were also both more open go writing about sex their most of their contemporaries—I don’t mean sex as a source of titillation, but as it pertains to human psychology. Lovecraft was probably asexual, and so avoided the topic when he could, and Howard, while he did sometimes write about erotic love (never mind his attempts at titillating the reader), was not given to jealousy, forbidden lust, and other psychosexual matters. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry experiences a crisis of conscience when she realizes (after she has killed him out of vengeance) that she is profoundly attracted to the man who had sexually assaulted her. Smith’s characters likewise are at times met with these conflicts between mind and flesh. Jealousy and temptation are especially common. I’ve noticed, after reading enough of his fiction, that Smith was fond of using flowers as symbols for two things at the same time: an ideal and tempting beauty, and a horrific malice which lurks under said beauty. For example, in his story “Vulthoom” (review here), the protagonists are met with an eldritch being in the Martian underground who, seemingly in an effort to tempt Our Heroes™ over to its side, takes on the appearance of an androgynous beauty within a massive flower. Much like Smith himself, who was a notorious womanizer (he only married after his sixtieth birthday), characters in Smith’s writing think about sexual attraction, and this thinking-about-sex plays into their psychologies.

Why did Smith never pierce the mainstream consciousness? There are a few reasons for this. For one, the fact that he never wrote a novel in adulthood (he did write one as a teenager, but it was only published decades after his death and I don’t know anyone who cares to read it), does hurt him, as it would anybody. Unfortunately novels have always sold far more than short stories; you’ll find many stories of SFF writers in the ’50s who take up novel-writing in an effort to make that extra cash. Even Howard, who died so young, wrote a novel with The Hour of the Dragon. Another is that while Lovecraft and Howard were very good at writing a certain type of story, Smith is harder to pin down—that is to say it’s harder to come up with a single “encapsulating” Smith story to hand off to some newcomer. Someone curious about Lovecraft would do well to start with “Dagon” or “The Rats in the Walls,” but an unaccustomed reader might find the sheer awesomness of “The Dark Eidolon” or “The Maze of the Enchanter” off-putting. Even when compared to Lovecraft, who by no means was a slacker in the language complexity department, Smith’s prose is positively purple. The truth is that Smith is at his best when his language is at its most pyrotechnic; an “easy-to-read” Smith story is a relatively boring one. Lastly, Smith was not exactly an innovator, nor did he write extensively on the history of weird fiction; as such he was neither a pioneer nor chronicler of the form.

As you know, Smith’s output slowed to a trickle after 1934; once his parents died he no longer had the financial strain that had pushed him to try writing for a living. He could be coaxed to write a short story now and again thereafter, and strictly from a modern perspective it might seem like he actually wrote a decent amount after 1934. He always remained a poet. Being restless as an artist, he would also take to sculpting and illustrating, although his reputation stands on his prose and poetry. Smith died in 1961, having outlived some of his contemporaries by a good margin, but in the context of weird fiction and American fantasy it’s easy to think he had “died” around the same time as Lovecraft and Howard. Much like how Moore’s story as a writer basically came to an end with the death of her first husband, Henry Kuttner, Smith’s winding-down as a writer of some of the darkest and gnarliest (and at times funniest) fantasy can be said to coincide with Weird Tales‘s subtle decline towards the end of the 1930s. Many writers have tried (and a few have even succeeded) to sound like the next H. P. Lovecraft, but I don’t know anyone who has tried to sound like the next Clark Ashton Smith. Maybe he was a sorcerer without an apprentice.
Short Story Review: “The Last Feast of Harlequin” by Thomas Ligotti

October 31st, 2023

(Cover by Stephen Gervais. F&SF, April 1990.)

Who Goes There?

In the “canon” of great horror writers, you come across the same names: Lovecraft, Poe, King, and so on. This is a canon that has not, as far as I can tell, changed fundamentally in the past two decades; but then one can say that’s only the case if we’re talking horror at novel length. Since the market for horror novels exploded in the ’70s, there’s been the odd side effect that those who tapped that market then largely remain the faces of horror literature. When it comes to short fiction, though, the genre has been ever growing, ever evolving, if also blocked off from mainstream appeal in such a mode. (Novels sell far more than short stories, and sadly always will.) One of the modern masters of the short horror story is Thomas Ligotti, who has deliberately avoided writing a horror novel, as he believes (I think rightly) that the horrific strikes best in short bursts.

Ligotti debuted back in the early ’80s and picked up quite a bit of atttention from horror connoisseurs with his first collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer. The stories contained therein were eerie and often disturbing, but by way of implication rather than on-page violence. In a way his style can be said to complement Clive Barker’s, who also hit the horror scene around the same time; but whereas Barker tapped into the gruesome potential of the human body, Ligotti begs us to avert our gaze. Overtly a student of Lovecraft, Ligotti’s writing at its best captures a perverted wonderment—an awe of outside forces that compels more than it frights. “The Last Feast of Harlequin” itself is apparently set in the Cthulhu mythos, and fans of Lovecraft will find it in some ways familiar.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1990 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s since been reprinted fairly often, first in the Ligotti collections Grimscribe, The Nightmare Factory, and The Shadow at the Bottom of the World, and then a ton of anthology appearances. There’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourth Annual Collection (ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), Best New Horror 2 (ed. Ramsey Campbell and Stephen Jones), American Gothic Tales (ed. Joyce Carol Oates), and perhaps biggest of all, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now (ed. Peter Straub).

Enhancing Image

This is not a story to read if you hate clowns.

The unnamed narrator is an anthropologist who specializes in the study of clowns across different cultural contexts; this is in no small part due to the narrator having a real soft spot for clowns himself, to the point of thinking of himself as one. “To me the title of Clown has always carried connotations of a noble sort. I was an adroit jester, strangely enough, and had always taken pride in the skills I worked so diligently to develop.” This is foreshadowing for how he will get involved in the—let’s not say conflict, but the spectacle of the story. Hungry for events involving clowns, preferably off the beaten path, the narrator is informed by a colleague that there’s a town in the Midwest, Mirocaw, which has a yearly “Fool’s Feast” with clowns as part of the main attraction. We’re never told what state Mirocaw is in, nor are we even told when the story takes place; you might assume it’s set in “modern day,” i.e., the 1980s, but the narrator’s mannered style of narrating suggets a more antiquated period. Maybe. It’s ambiguous.

Having arrived in Mirocaw, the narrator asks for directions and some info on the town’s culture, first an old man who promptly ignores him and then an older woman who is of some help but who also says some rather ominous things about the festival. There are a few oddities. For one, the festival is set to take place form December 19 to the 21st, coinciding with the leadup to Christmas, which the narrator points out as being weirdly timed since the Fool’s Feast has seemingly nothing to do with Christmas. “It’s just tradition,” the woman says. Despite the supposed age of the festival, the narrator is only able to find one scholarly article on the proceedings—one which happens to be written by a former professor of his, Raymond Thoss. Thoss was a real eccentric who had inspired the narrator to pursue his studies in his own way, but who had seemingly vanished without a trace some twenty years ago, having wanted to write a book on the town but never finishing it. The narrator gets to thinking, however, that the old man who had ignored him earlier may be Thoss, who, if this turns out to be the case, has been living in Mirocaw for the past two decades.

Slowly but surely we get a buildup of mystery, helped by the fact that Ligotti’s is being willfully obtuse about some details. Apparently not wanting to date his story, the only impressions of time that we’re given are the date of the festival, and the time span of twenty years, something which shows up, eerily, more than once. Thoss disappeared twenty years ago, but around that same time there was another disappearance in Mirocaw. Every year, around Christmastime, there’s at least one suicide in town, with a nearby lake being a popular location. Elizabeth Beadle, wife of hotel owner Samuel Beadle, had vanished twenty years ago; she’s presumed to have been a suicide, but her body was never found. The narrator, not long after reading about this bit of town lore, encounters Sarah, Elizabeth’s daughter (likely barely out of her teens), who bares a striking resemblance with her mother. For my money this is the most effective scene in the story, it being a Vertigo-esque moment of time seemingly having repeated itself, and it alludes to something else that will be a repeat of a past horror.

Since we’re this far in I may as well elaborate on a few points. The first is that Ligotti plays into phobias of clowns, worms, and Midwesterners here, and I have to say that, at least as an adult, I don’t find those first two to be scary. I was interested in the mystery surrounding the origins of the festival, Thoss’s disappearance, and the connection that Elizabeth and Sarah might have with the town’s traditions, but I was not put off by the clown imagery. Of course the inhabitants of Mirocaw themselves, whom the narrator describes as ” the probable descendants in a direct line from some enterprising pack of New Englanders of the past century” are uncanny by virtue of their behavior and how they’re disconnected from the rest of civilization. If Ligotti does anything really well here it’s to evoke a sense of isolation, in which we’re cut off from the world, from humanity, and even from our own sense of time. The narrator himself is a bit of an uncanny figure, being someone without any social life outside of academia, seemingly without normal human interests, who thinks himself a jester without a court.

Another thing, and this is important: “The Last Feast of Harlequin” is long as shit. It’s not a narrative you’d think would be this long, because while there is a bit of a plot, there’s virtually no conflict, nor are there characters in the conventional sense. I’ve read that Ligotti had written the first draft for this story back at the beginning of his career, when he was trying to figure out his own voice as a writer, and while he had revised it drastically over the years there’s still the germ of a Lovecraft pastiche, including one or two of Lovecraft’s shortcomings—namely his tendency to use three words when one would do the trick. Now you may be thinking, “Brian (you handsome devil), how can you praise Clark Ashton Smith’s immense verbosity but treat Lovecraft’s similar style as hit-or-miss?” For one, Smith was the better poet, by a considerable margin; nobody writing weird fiction at that time evoked the weird through sheer language like he did, except maybe C. L. Moore on a good day. Another thing is that Smith’s protagonits tend to be active players in their stories—explorers, warriors, sorcerers, thieves—while Lovecraft’s protagonists tend to be bookish observers.

The narrator for “The Last Feast of Harlequin” is very much an observer in the Lovecraft mode: he sees things happen, and may inquire about these happenings, but his actions are more or less negligible. I’ll explain more in the spoilers section, but even when the narrator decides to act, his actions fail to alter the series of events he has stumbled upon. Frankly I tend to find such protagonists boring. It doesn’t help that, in keeping with the Lovecraft influence, the narrator is verbose but often not poetic, which only makes sense since he’s an academic. Having gone through academia, and as someone who hopes to attend graduate school in a couple years or so, I can say that academics, by and large, are terrible writers who have no ear for the English language. Ligotti is a much better writer than the man narrating his story, such that he’s able to sneak in some effective allusions, an example being when the narrator enters a shabby diner and sees a bunch of people coming out “in a wormlike mass.” Which brings us to…

There Be Spoilers Here

The day of the festival has come, and the narrator has decided to play a part in the festivities. Being a clown himself, he tries to look the part, modeling his makeup after Edvard Munch’s The Scream. He joins a gathering of people in the streets and follows them down a down cavern, which itself leads to an underground lair, where a part of the festival is to take place. It’s here that the narrator, who had seen Thoss a couple times before but had not been able to confirm these suspicions, finally realizes that not only has Thoss been living in Mirocaw for the past twenty years, but has long since taken a hands-on approach with the festivities. This is another case of history repeating itself: both men came to the town to observe an obcure cultural event, only to become active participants—”going native,” to use an old saying. Of course, Thoss is not a cult leader but merely playing into a tradition that is possibly a couple centuries old at this point.

Now, you may notice that so far nothing supernatural has happened. There have been some strange happening, but nothing that strictly defies the laws of nature. It’s here that we’re treated to a grotessque transformation scene (I don’t know if I like that the cover for this issue illustrates this or not), in which the gatherers at the sacrifice (for that’s what it turns out to be) transform into monstrous worms with gaping mouths. “Individual members of the congregation would gaze emptily—caught for a moment in a frozen trance—and then collapse to the floor to begin the sickening metamorphosis.” They gather around the woman on the alter—Sarah Beadle, probably lying on the same slab as her mother did twenty years prior. They probably devour her, but we don’t see it; the narrator, naturally in horror, runs out of the tunnel, Thoss and his people allowing him to escape. At the very end we’re told that Thoss let the narrator go because, according to Thoss, “He is one of us. […] He was always one of us.”

I’m indifferent to the climax. It could be that I had read a Cthulhu mythos story not too long ago that had a similar structure, with even a similar climactic event, but it was handled in a very different way; I am of course referring to Robert E. Howard’s “The Black Stone” (review here). While he was not as refined a wordsmith as Ligotti or even Lovecraft, I think Howard managed to beat both at the cosmic horror game in that instance, and with less than half this story’s word count. When I got to the end of “The Last Feast of Harlequin” I felt like I had eaten a meal at a very fine independently owned restaurant that was clearly made with love and which had just the right amount of seasoning—but the portions were all wrong. I came out of it feeling weirdly undernourished.

A Step Farther Out

I had conflicting feelings while reading this one. I didn’t find anything blatantly wrong with it, and yet I was left feeling unfulfilled. Part of it is the length: this is a long novelette clocking in 15,000 words or so, and I don’t think that length is justified. Another is that I was hoping, deep down, that the climax would be more than what it ended up being. This is a story that evokes intrigue well, but then fails to provide a satisfying payoff, the answer we’re given being not only too easy but one that’s been done before. “The Last Feast of Harlequin” is one of Ligotti’s longest stories, and it was also his pro zine debut (having only appeared in semi-pros up to that point), so for some readerss this was their introduction to Ligotti’s talents. Having read a few of his stories beforehand, I’m aware that he’s done better—that he can be more chilling and idiosyncratic than this.

Happy Halloween. See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Dreams in the Witch-House” by H. P. Lovecraft

March 17th, 2023

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, July 1933.)

Who Goes There?

I’m about to talk some shit. I can’t say I’m a fan of H. P. Lovecraft, even though I’ve read a good portion of his work at this point and have liked some of it. Lovecraft, when he’s really up my alley, is pretty good: “The Rats in the Walls,” “Cool Air,” and “The Shadow Out of Time” are all bangers for me, with that last one especially standing out for its marrying of cosmic wonder with an equally strong dose of cosmic anxiety. But Lovecraft, IN MY OPINION, can also be pretty boring and full of himself, never mind his other limitations. You may notice for instance, especially in his later stories, that Lovecraft hates writing dialogue and will do anything to get around having to write basic human conversation. The irony is that, at least regarding his letter-writing, Lovecraft was very talkative; indeed the only reason we laymen even know about Lovecraft is because he formed several connections that proved valuable for preserving his work after his death. Based on his fiction alone, Lovecraft should have by all rights stayed as obscure as his close contemporary Clark Ashton Smith, whose stories are often more entertaining and who was overall the more elegant writer.

This, of course, is all just opinion, because the objective reality is that Lovecraft is the most influential horror writer of the 20th century and it’s not even close. Oh sure, Stephen King is the most popular, but popularity does not equate to influence and if we’re talking about authors whose tangibly left an impact on other authors, Lovecraft’s only serious rival would be Edgar Allan Poe. Everyone who even dabbles in cosmic horror must contend with Lovecraft’s legacy and it’s no coincidence that “Lovecraftian” horror is used interchangeably with cosmic horror; he didn’t invent the subgenre (Lovecraft made it clear that he was not the first), but he was, more than anyone, the guy who connected the dots and brought clarity to what must have seemed to a lot of people like just a bunch of stories written at different times by different people. His long essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” is arguably the single most important document on the history of horror fiction, and it also gives us precious insight into how Lovecraft himself—that is to say, as a keeper of the flame that is horror fiction.

A little bit of bashing, a good deal more of praise. I’m putting all this upfront because there’s gonna be more bashing to come: today’s story is… not fun. “The Dreams in the Witch-House” (the hyphen removed for reprints) is a later Lovecraft story, set in what we now call the Cthulhu Mythos, and it’s what we might also call a noble failure. See, people called this story a turkey before it was even published: August Derleth admitted to not liking it, which didn’t stop him from submitting it to Farnsworth Wright, who promptly bought it. “The Dreams in the Witch-House” was written a year after At the Mountains of Madness, but was published three years before that short novel on account of the latter being rejected by Wright and collecting dust. I find this all ironic since while I think At the Mountains of Madness is unspeakably boring, the poor editing of “The Dreams in the Witch-House” strikes me as less excusable.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. You may notice that the aura of these Weird Tales covers has changed radically since last time we saw them, the greys being replaced with an erotic blueness. Margaret Brundage did basically all of the covers for the magazine at the very height of its popularity, so from about to 1933 to 1937, and she sure did love her female nudes. Anyway, because this is a Lovecraft story, it’s very easy to find. You can read an easily legible online version via the H. P. Lovecraft Archive, found here. “The Dreams in the Witch-House” has been collected and anthologized many times over the years, despite opinion on its quality being widely varied; if you look up a given Lovecraft collection it’s probably in there.

Enhancing Image

Before I dig into this piece of shit, there are a few nuggets in the opening stretch that may trick you into thinking you’re about to read a good Lovecraft story, like “The Dunwich Horror” or “The Colour Out of Space.” For one, this is one of the few Cthulhu Mythos stories where Arkham is the main setting, whereas more often it’s simply alluded to. If you’re a Mythos fan there are chestnuts of the series you’ll notice quickly, such as the Necronomicon and that classic college for goths and edgy white dudes everywhere, Miskatonic University. Lovecraft even tips his hat to Robert E. Howard by including Von Junzt’s book (see my review of Howard’s “The Black Stone”), albeit under a different title. These Mythos stories all radiate Lovecraft’s undying love for New Endland, and “The Dreams in the Witch-House” might be the most New England-y of them all, not only taking place in Arkham but referencing Salem, that real-life eldritch location, heavily.

Speaking of Salem, the keyword for today is “witchcraft.” The villain of the story, Keziah Mason, is a 17th century witch whose exploits very much interest our hapless protagonist, Walter Gilman, a Miskatonic student who has rented a room in the house where Keziah had lived. The house, lorded over by unhinged Christian Joe Mazurewicz, is unique both for its history (having harbored a known witch and all) and its architecture, which Gilman finds to be… a little odd. The walls and ceiling of Gilman’s room are at odd angles, and I have to wonder if Lovecraft was inspired by the angular set design of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or if he had even seen that movie. (As weird as it sounds, Lovecraft really enjoyed movies, and on at least a couple occasions, including his late masterpiece “The Shadow Out of Time,” he was apparently inspired by movies he saw.) Any reasonable person would have rented some other goddamn house, but as the omniscient narrator makes clear, Gilman is not a reasonable man, with his closest ally, housemate Frank Elwood, also being a bit of an eccentric.

Back to witchcraft, Keziah was tried in Salem, in the court of one Judge Hathorne, a name that will ring a weird bell for some people. Hathorne was a real person in 17th century Salem, and was indeed the direct ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who changed his last name slightly to distant himself as a descendant of someone who persecuted innocent people under the guise of Puritan justice. Lovecraft was a devotee of horror literature and he sure knew his Hawthorne; indeed his enthusiasm as a student of weird and macabre fiction is what I like most about him. Keziah was set to be executed, but by means incomprehensible to normal humans was able to escape her jail cell, never to be seen again, as explained here:

She had told Judge Hathome of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. She had spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name of Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.

A few things to unpack here…

The gimmick of “The Dreams in the Witch-House,” aside from the feverish dreams that Gilman has, is the way in which Keziah conducts her witchcraft, because it’s not the usual toil-and-trouble routine. Lovecraft’s writing increasingly delved into the cosmic as his career progressed, and in that sense I can believe “The Dreams in the Witch-House” was written after At the Mountains of Madness; there’s a preoccupation with geometry and special awareness here that is simply not present in Lovecraft’s fiction from a decade earlier. I dare say it makes sense that an eccentric college boy would rent a space with weird dimensions so that he could study this nifty bit of local history. Besides, the witch is surely dead by now, no harm can come from it, just don’t think too much about the sleepwalking.

The other thing is that Keziah is in cahoots with what Lovecraft calls “the Black Man,” although after a certain point he stops capitalizing for no reason and calls him “the black man.” Okay. So the Black Man is a Mythos character, he’s mentioned in the Necronomicon, and contrary to what his title would imply, he’s not black: he has charcoal skin but is supposed to have “white” features, “a tall, lean man of dead black coloration but without the slightest sign of negroid features.” First off, oof. Second, I know what we’re all thinking: Lovecraft is being his usual racist self again. To an extent that’s true, because it seems he goes out of his way to word things a certain way, and also the people who are clearly of Eastern European background in the story are described in unflattering terms, but it would be a mistake to call the story racist, for reasons I don’t feel like getting too much into.

The thing about Lovecraft is that if we’re talking about his fiction, and for this site that’s mostly what we’re talking about, his racism is not exceptional, even for ’30s pulp fiction—especially for ’30s pulp fiction, considering the myriad Yellow Peril narratives from the era that were deemed perfectly acceptable. Hell, Howard’s “The Black Stone” has some rather conspicuous racist underones, as indeed does a good deal of Howard’s other fiction. The difference between Lovecraft and Howard, though, is that the latter was actually willing to depict POC… at all? And not just that but as flesh-and-blood people when he wasn’t using racist tropes. Howard being a proud Irishman, at a time when the Irish being treated by WASPs as “unclean” whites was still recent history, definitely also informs his views on race and particularly his imperfect but sympathetic views of non-white peoples; meanwhile Lovecraft grew up in a WASP bubble and he never entirely broke out of said bubble, though he did eventually try.

I’m getting sidetracked, but then this story’s not terribly interesting.

Something I should’ve mentioned earlier is Keziah’s familiar, Brown Jenkin, a half-man half-rat thing with a human face and hands/feet but the body of a rat, which admittedly is an uncanny creature design. The problem is that none of this is scary; if anything it’s a bit silly. I don’t understand why Lovecraft, a known heathen, would indulge in tropes about witches that would’ve been old hat even when he wrote this story. Of course Keziah is an ugly old hag, because she must either be that or Marilyn goddamn Monroe, and of course the ugly old hag is up to no good. I’m sorry, is the implication here that the Salem witch trials were justified? It’s such an odd marriage, between old-timey witchcraft and a subgenre of horror that was comparatively young and less superstitious. The weirdest thing of all is that the aforementioned Eastern Europeans, who are rabidly Christian and thus would discomfort Lovecraft for both their religion and their ethnicity, are obviously in the right when they shun the witch-house.

Before I head into spoilers (not that there’s much that can actually be spoiled) I wanna let you know that this story took me THREE DAYS to get through. Technically two, but I took a day off from reading before finishing it, which for a short story is damning; of course I say that, but this is a long novelette, close to 15,000 words, and it really needn’t be that long. I criticized Hao Jinfang’s “Folding Beijing” (review here) for feeling bloated to mine eyes, but let it be known that while Jingfang’s story is about a thousand words longer than Lovecraft’s, the latter still felt longer. Gilman has several acid trip dream sessions with Keziah and Brown Jenkin and soon these scenes become reptitive, with little progress outside the dreams being made, not to mention the reliance on dreams gives the whole ordeal chopped-up pacing that makes it feel longer than it is. And then there’s what I said at the beginning, with Lovecraft summarizing (not concisely, mind you) conversations rather than actually writing them. I’m amazed Wright readily accepted this, because it so obviously could’ve used an editor’s blue pen.

There Be Spoilers Here

A lot happens, but deceptively little of it is proves to be concequential. Gilman keeps having these dreams with increasing vividness, to the point where a couple of drunkards claim to have witnessed one of his sleepwalking sessions—only this time he’s accompanied by Keziah and the Black Man. It’s pretty clear to us but not to Gilman what is happening, until it’s almost too late. In his dreams, in that other dimension, Gilman finally takes the initiative and tries to stop the blood sacrifice of a child, using the crucifix Mazurewicz gave him to stun Keziah momentarily before strangling her.

I have a couple questions…

Gilman pulling out the crucifix and it actually spooking Keziah is one of the most baffling things to happen in a Lovecraft story, and as far as I can tell there’s no defense for this. Lovecraft, an avowed atheist, uses a crucifix as a deus ex machina against a witch who by all logic should not be spooked by Christian iconography, on account of her being able to, ya know, travel between dimensions and cheat death literally for centuries. I’m also baffled by the fact that there’s not a single actual subversion of what Puritans thought witchcraft to be like, even down to witches sacrificing childen to what may as well be the devil. Oh sure, the Black Man is not Satan, but the result is exactly the same.

It seems that Lovecraft wanted to elevate what would otherwise be a standard evil witch narrative with a dash of cosmic horror, but if I’m being honest this is the least convincing use of the Necronomicon, the Old Ones, and so on that I’ve seen in a Lovecraft story. Arkham may as well be Salem, and while it seems at first like Lovecraft might be setting up what would’ve been standard witch hijinks only to subvert our expectations, he ultimately chooses to play everything straight—albeit more gruesomely than one would expect. Gilman kills the witch, but Brown Jenkin kills the child and completes the sacrifice, not to mention gets out alive. The climax is a bittersweet one, with Gilman daring to be heroic and partly succeeding but still failing to save the day to an extent.

Elwood finds Gilman in his bed, dazed. “On his throat were the marks of murderous hands, and on his left ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His clothing was badly rumpled, and Joe’s crucifix was missing.” Gilman, soon rendered deaf by an unearthly sound, never regains full lucidity—and in typical fashion for a Lovecraft protagonist, he will not live much longer. One day Elwood finds him very much dead, his chest having been eaten through by what is clearly meant to be Brown Jenkin; again this is gorier than is typical for Lovecraft, but the effect is hollow. Quite reasonably, this experience drives Elwood to madness temporarily (he gets better), and Mazurewicz soon abandons the house. The old damned place is evacuated, and as far we’re concerned this is where the story ends.

BUT WAIT, WE’RE NOT DONE YET!

The house is condemned, then partly demolished. The attic, which had been kept a mystery up to this point, collapses and covers the upper level of the house, no doubt killing anyone who would have been where Gilman was. I get that this collapse could have only happened after Gilman killed the witch, but I like to think of an alternate ending where Brown Jenkin doesn’t kill Gilman and instead Our Hero™ dies in some freak accident. Would that ending make the story better? Hmmm. Nobody wants to scavenge the remains, except someone has to; and the results will be shocking to the remaining townspeople, if not to us.

Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were several things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the police in turn called in the coroner and several professors from the university. There were bones—badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognizable as human—whose manifestly modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible lurking place, the low, slant-floored loft overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner’s physician decided that some belonged to a small child, while certain others—found mixed with shreds of rotten brownish cloth—belonged to a rather undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive of controversy and reflection.

They then find what we know to be the skeleton of Brown Jenkin, since all the features match: unusually large rodent body, but with what appear to be humanoid hands and feet. The implication is that Keziah and Brown Jenkin have been dead in this dimension for centuries, but have stayed alive in that other dimension thanks to evil maths. We also get hard evidence that what Gilman had been experiencing was real and not a dream, even though we already would’ve figured a normal rat could not have eaten through his chest like it did. It’s only here, after this lengthy epilogue, that the story actually ends and by extension ends my suffering.

Something to keep in mind is that this final scene changes NOTHING. What useful information do we get here that we did not know about before? More importantly, all the characters have by this point left the scene, so we’re not attached to the people who find the hard evidence of supernatural shenanigans. If this was supposed to be confirmation of things that were “ambiguous” before, it fails because the aforementioned happenings were not ambiguous. If Lovecraft meant it to be a twist, it fell flat.

A Step Farther Out

There you have it, the second story I’ve reviewed for this site that I just don’t like; and unlike Tanith Lee’s “Bite-Me-Not or, Fleur de Feu” (review here), where it was my first story of hers and so I gave her the benefit of the doubt, I know I caught Lovecraft on a bad day with this one. “The Dreams in the Witch-House” is tedious, overly long, and more than a bit hackneyed, not so much Lovecraft repeating himself (which he does sometimes) as taking cues from older, more superstitious horror fiction. Despite enhancing the affair with some neat cosmic imagery, and treating witchcraft as like a sort of perverted mathematics, Lovecraft still plays the evil witch narrative straight from start to finish. What interests me is that Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos stories, despite sharing continuity, run the gamut from occult horror to outright science fiction, with “The Dreams in the Witch-House” falling into the former end with a few hints of the latter, and if you know me then you know which end of the spectrum I prefer. Point being, this was a chore to get through; the chances of me ever rereading it are low.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Black Stone” by Robert E. Howard

March 13th, 2023

(Cover by C. C. Senf. Weird Tales, November 1931.)

Who Goes There?

I’ve covered Robert E. Howard on this site before not long ago; actually it was just last month with one of the longer Conan serials. Howard is one of the most important voices in the history of fantasy literature and he reached truly astonishing heights and put out an intimidatingly large body of work despite having committed suicide when he was only thirty. He began writing professionally as a teenager and never stopped until his death, and even then there was a healthy amount of work released posthumously. Given how well an “immature” Howard reads, it’s nothing short of tragic that we only barely got to see his writing reach a mature state by the end, but what we have is still one of the most impressive and versatile oeuvres to come out of pulp fiction. That for some reason Howard basically never got around to writing SF is in itself a bit tragic, and one has to wonder what would’ve happened had he lived to be direct contemporaries with his descendants.

While Howard is most known for Conan the Cimmerian, Kull the Conqueror, and other adventure characters, he also wrote a ton of horror, sometimes involving series regulars like Solomon Kane but more often venturing into different territory altogether. He even got a Retro Hugo nomination for his voodoo zombie story “Pigeons from Hell,” and indeed while his horror lacks the deliberate pacing of H. P. Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith, he compensates with that usual Howard brand of energized plotting. Today’s story, “The Black Stone,” is very much Howard trying to write a Lovecraftian (as in it’s clearly a Lovecraft homage) tale, but for better or worse ~~it’s better~~ this is still Howard’s show.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales, later reprinted as a “classic” in the November 1953 issue. The convenient thing about Howard is that he’s famous and has also been dead for a very long time. “The Black Stone” is easy to find online for free, even being included in the Library of America’s Story of the Week program, which you can find here. If you want printed copies then you can find it in LOA’s American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps, although it looks like it might be out of print. More readily available is The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, a delightfully thick and heavy volume which still contains only a small fraction of Howard’s output. Because “The Black Stone” is set in the Cthulhu Mythos (although it wasn’t called that when Lovecraft and Howard were alive), it’s been anthologized alongside other Lovecraftian tales, the most available of these probably being Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Enhancing Image

The unnamed narrator of “The Black Stone” is a bit unusual for a Howard protagonist in that he’s not a warrior or a tough guy at all, but a bookish dweeb who travels to Hungary basically for the lulz. Okay, there’s a bit more to it than that: the narrator is a linguist and archaeologist (or something like that), and like any good protagonist in a Lovecraftian narrative he also has a soft spot for the macabre. Here we start with Von Junzt’s Nameless Cults, also known as the Black Book, with Von Junzt being a 19th century studier of the uncanny and unexplainable. “Reading what Von Junzt dared put in print arouses uneasy speculations as to what it was that he dared not tell.” During his reading of Von Junzt’s book, the narrator catches mention of a mysterious object which Von Junzt doesn’t spill much ink over but which the narrator finds himself immensely curious about: the Black Stone.

The narrator cross-references Von Junzt’s writing (however scant) about the Black Stone with a few other documents, incidentally all early-to-mid 19th century, and struggles to distinguish fact from legend—though the legend, if true, would make quite the story. The Black Stone is supposedly a black monolith standing alone in the mountains of Hungary, near a village called Stregoicavar, roughly translating to “Witch-Town.” Nobody knows who built the Black Stone, but it possesses such power that even to gaze upon it apparently causes it to haunt one’s dreams, and to watch it on Midsummer Night (early on we’re given the pagan connection) for reasons unknown have driven people to insanity, then death. The narrator, being a perfectly reasonable man (I’m kidding), decides to travel to Hungary and see for himself what the fuss is about.

Mind you that we’re only just getting started.

Howard has a talent for compressing a novel’s worth of information into a much smaller space, and “The Black Stone” might be the most stark example of this I’ve seen yet; there’s enough backstory here for a narrative ten times the length. We haven’t even gotten to the thing with the Ottoman Turks yet. Okay, so we’re in Hungary, in an especially mountainous part of the country no less, and the narrator has come to Stregoicavar to inquire about the Black Stone; first he talks with the local tavern-keeper, then a schoolmaster about the village’s history. It’s—well, it’s a long story. You see, the Hungarians in the village are fairely recent settlers; they were not the first inhabitants of the village. Centuries prior there were people in the lowlands and people in the mountains, round Stegoicavar, and these latter peoples were of a different ethnic sort. The mountain people were half-castes: “the sturdy, original Magyar-Slavic stock had mixed and intermarried with a degraded aboriginal race until the breeds had blended, producing an unsavory amalgamation.” If this sounds problematic, boy do I have a tree to sell you.

Anyway, the original half-caste people of Stregoicavar, who were apparently pagans who kidnapped women and children from the lowland people, are not around anymore; they had been exterminated by the Turks, who had swept through Stregoicavar and had not left one person standing. Which even for warfare sounds a bit extreme; one would at least expect the Turks to have taken some as slaves, but for reasons unknown they gave no quarter, ridding the village and environs of the half-caste peoples and inadvertently making way for the lowland “pure” whites to settle.

Right, so there was an invasion…

The Hungarians, in 1526, entered Stregoicavar to push back the Turks, and by this point the mountain people had already been exterminated. Count Boris Vladinoff, in a nearby castle, had acquired a chest from a slain Turkish scribe, but nobody ever opened the chest or even discovered it, as the Count died suddenly in an artillery strike and, for some reason, the ruins of his castle have never been excavated. Keep this in mind for later. So the Turks had come into Stregoicavar and then were forced to retreat, and all seemed well for the lowland peoples, who then came in to occupy the village that had been made vacant before and which was now free once again. Only… they never could figure out what the deal with the black monolith in the woods was… only they figured out, the hard way, that this is not something to be touched or even seen for long.

We had a rough idea of what the Black Stone looked like before, but it’s only upon the narrator inspecting it first-hand that we get a detailed description. Mind you this is only part of a very long paragraph:

It was octagonal in shape, some sixteen feet in height and about a foot and a half thick. It had once evidently been highly polished, but now the surface was thickly dinted as if savage efforts had been made to demolish it; but the hammers had done little more than to flake off small bits of stone and mutilate the characters which once had evidently marched in a spiraling line round and round the shaft to the top. Up to ten feet from the base these characters were almost completely blotted out, so that it was very difficult to trace their direction. Higher up they were plainer, and I managed to squirm part of the way up the shaft and scan them at close range. All were more or less defaced, but I was positive that they symbolized no language now remembered on the face of the earth.

The engravings on the monolith would have only made sense to the original worshippers, who, all being dead now, no longer have opportunity to explain it to our unusually curious narrator. Personally I would’ve just fucked right off if I found this thing in the woods, but then I also wouldn’t be caught dead going to some backwater corner of Hungary. And yet the mysteriousness of the Black Stone has its allure, no doubt, and because Our Hero™ is a dumbass he thinks it would be just swell if he were to camp out in the vicinity and catch the monolith do its supposed freaky thing on Midsummer Night. Now, if you know even a little bit about paganism (or Hollywood depictions of paganism—I’m glancing warily at Midsommar) then you can predict the pagan connection and what will come next. What intrigues me, and what held my attention so sternly when reading this story, was how Howard couched what should be a derivative (and somewhat offensive) devil-worshipper narrative in so much history and lore.

I won’t spend much time talking about the back end of the story, partly because it’s at this point that we’re funneled from a busy backstory to a relatively straightforward plot in the present, and partly because I’ll be brutally honest with you, my beloved reader, for a second here: I’m pressed for time and while I’d love to write more about what’s probably my favorite horror story of Howard’s so far (I’ve read several), I must surely be on my way and meet the deadline I’ve set for myself.

There Be Spoilers Here

On Midsummer Night the narrator sets up camp near (but not too close) the monolith, presumably with some popcorm that he had microwaved in advance. I don’t know what this dude is expecting. Regardless, something very strange happens: Our Hero™ gets a free show that he didn’t expect, and ultimately he very much will not want. People start gathering round the Black Stone and, in one of those things silly old-timey people think pagans do, they dance around it and make some real noise. There’s a masked man with a thing round his neck that looks like it’s meant to carry a jewel, or perhaps a small idol, which the narrator deduces is a priest or elder of the cult. We’re then presented with a young naked woman and infant—possibly hers, possibly not; I don’t know which possibility is worse.

In what genuinely reminds me of a scene out of Blood Meridian, the priest takes the infant and, swinging it around, slams it down AND BASHES ITS FUCKING SKULL IN. WHAT THE FUCK? I mean, the Conan stories I’ve read have been violent as shit, but this is the single most gut-churning bit of violence I’ve read from him yet. The woman herself is beaten pretty severely, to the point where when she crawls toward the monolith she leaves a trail of blood in the grass, which can’t be good.

But that’s not the worst part of; well actually it is the worst part, but it’s not the only thing that would make you run in the opposite direction really fast. In the climax of the blood sacrifice, the mad priest has seemingly conjured a thing which the bloodied woman is meant to satisfy. “I opened my mouth to scream my horror and loathing, but only a dry rattle sounded; a huge monstrous toad-like thing squatted on the top of the monolith!” The toad-like creature, certainly not human but perhaps eerily close enough to humanoid, accepts the woman, although we never find out exactly happens to her—though probably her fate is similar to the baby’s. To make things even stranger, when the narrator wakes up (after having passed out), there is not even one sign of what had happened the previous night—no blood, no footprints in the grass, nothing.

And yet it was certainly not something he had imagined!

The narrator, working tirelessly, finds the castle of the late Count (who, mind you, would’ve been dead about 400 years) and uncovers what the Count had taken from the Turkish scribe, who had been so spooked by what he’d found that he never told anyone about it. In the Count’s chest of things is a parchment with Turkish writing, which the narrator can only make out pieces of—but enough to get the picture. More importantly he finds an idol of the toad-like creature—an idol which the priest would have been wearing during the sacrifice. The bad news is that what narrator saw last night was not a dream or him tripping balls; the good news is that he was not seeing a blood sacrifice in real time, but the projection of one. The people who worshipped this abomination have been dead for centuries, and even the creature itself had been slain “with flame and ancient steel blessed in old times by Muhammad, and with incantations that were old when Arabia was young.” So yeah, the Turks were basically in the right to massacre the village, as they murdered the cultists and their god.

At the end the narrator gets rids of the parchment and idol, drowning them in a river where hopefully no one will find them. Unusually for a Lovecraftian protagonist there’s no implication that the narrator will go insane or kill himself at the end; he is able, somehow, to retain his sanity, if only by the skin of his teeth. (Howard’s characters generally have stronger willpowers than Lovecraft’s.) And yet the knowledge that there may be other such beasts which walk the earth and acquire human worshippers may prove too much in the long run, and because this story got incorporated into the Cthulhu Mythos we know this much to be true.

A Step Farther Out

Apparently Howard got hooked on “The Rats in the Walls,” which distinctly is not cosmic horror (even the supernatural aspect is debatable) but which carries the theme of ancestral memories. Not unlike “The Rats in the Walls,” “The Black Stone” is intriguing partly because of its problematic elements; there’s some language Howard uses that’s rather unfortunate, and the topic of genocide is handled crassly. There’s racism crammed in which sadly is inextricably linked with the horror element; the fear of race-mixing, of “pure” white blood being tainted with something else, seems a chestnut of classic cosmic horror. At the same time, Howard does things here that Lovecraft probably wouldn’t, including a gruesome climax that juxtaposes pagan sexuality with death. The setting is also pretty unique, taking us away from even the outskirts of urbanity and placing us somewhere very distant from America or even modern civilization. A lot of the story’s eeriness is accomplished simply through Howard’s use of the location, and in things that took place long before the narrator was even born. The backstory has more meat than the story proper, which in this case is not really a negative; the backstory is the pearl inside the mollusk.

Is it assbackwards that I’ve reviewed a Cthulhu Mythos tale written by someone who is not Lovecraft before I got to Lovecraft himself? Well yes—but don’t worry, we’ll be getting to Lovecraft, and one of his more famous short stories, soon… very soon…

See you next time.