Freaky old books are reborn and strange new ones claw their way out of the darkness, as columnist Scott Connors reviews recent releases and reissues from Leonard Cline, G.G. Pendarves, Eric Frank Russell, George Zebrowski, Thomas Ligotti and more.
THE DARK CHAMBER by Leonard Cline
(Cold Spring Press, $6.99)
Leonard Cline’s 1927 novel The Dark Chamber is one of the titles described by H.P. Lovecraft in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” that actually reads better than Lovecraft’s description. Cline was a talented and critically acclaimed novelist whose career was tragically cut short as the result of a prison sentence for manslaughter. He is an excellent example of how mainstream writers prior to the 1920s could utilize themes and subject matter that would be thrust into a literary ghetto in a few years with the rise of critics such as Irving Babbitt and Edmund Wilson. Like Jane Eyre, The Dark Chamber is partially a delicious parody of Gothic mannerisms and memes: the isolated and lonely Old Dark House, the Byronic villain, the huge menacing dog, “experiments of a semi-scientific nature,” etc. Even the names of the characters assault the reader with their blatant symbolism: the dog is named “Tod,” which we are reminded means “death” in German, while the seldom-seen Master of the House is one “Richard Pride.”
It would be too simple to dismiss this as kitsch were it not for two things. The first is the seminal importance of the story to modern horror fiction. As Douglas A. Anderson points out in his informative introduction, Lovecraft read the book and passed it along to several of his associates, including Donald Wandrei, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, and Henry S. Whitehead. All of these wrote stories dealing with ancestral memory that owe their existence in large part to Cline, but Cline’s treatment of the theme, besides being the first, is also the most powerful. Cline used the Gothic trappings as a cultural shorthand that allowed him to communicate ideas that were cutting-edge during the 1920s.
The other redeeming factor is the sheer pleasure of Cline’s style. In an essay appended to this edition, Cline noted that “there is a music in words no less sensible than the music in an orchestra after the baton rises,” and if Cline is inclined to Stürm und Drang, so what? Language such as “On the bows of trees strained taunt the night fiddled with a giant bow,” or “the doomed year dress herself in October and stood for a little thoughtful in loveliness,” to give just two examples plucked at random, are like a stage magician, distracting us with their beauty while communicating meaning unnoticed by the audience.
THING OF DARKNESS by G. G. Pendarves
DARKER TIDES by Eric Frank Russell
(Midnight House, $45 each)
Midnight House has issued two collections of stories from Weird Tales’s early days that are of more than a little interest.
G. G. Pendarves was one of the many second-string writers who provided the bulk of stories in an issue after the Lovecrafts, Seabury Quinns, and Edmond Hamiltons finished their contributions; Thing of Darkness is the first of two collections gathering her contributions to this magazine. A native of Cornwall, she wrote in a direct, energetic manner that manages to create a spooky atmosphere despite a certain crudity of technique.
Miss Pendarves also had a keen interest in occultism, which lends her work a certain aura of authenticity at the expense of awe. Lovecraft once made the assertion that it was easier for an atheist or agnostic writer to concoct a weird tale than it would be for a devoted believer; and regardless of its applicability to the genre as a whole, in this instance HPL was right on the money. Pendarves was on such familiar terms with her material that much of the sense of wonder was diminished. In addition, she wrote of a very human evil driven by a desire for power and a willingness to storm the gates of heaven to gain it, but her own belief in the triumph of good makes many of these villains mere stick figures who collaborate in their own destruction. This is nowhere better illustrated than in “The Grave at Goonhilly.” A sensitive young lad who belongs to the local golf club becomes obsessed with the notion that the fifth hole contains something that is trying to possess him. He tells a friend who has a profound knowledge of the occult, and his friend discovers that the fifth-hole mound is the burial spot of a 16th-century alchemist and sadist, who was searching for a body through which he could return to our town. Reminiscent of both H. R. Wakefield’s “Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster” and Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, its pulpish origins are nowhere more apparent than in the climax, where the villain is vanquished despite his full knowledge of the hero’s true identity. The fact that there is a hero is itself a shame, since, as HPL wrote several times, the true hero of a weird tale is the phenomenon described. In Pendarves’s favor are her ability to capture the nuances of Cornish village life; and if her characters are drawn with a broad brush, at least she uses a full palette.
While Miss Pendarves is largely remembered for her association with this magazine, it is often forgotten that not only was Eric Frank Russell (1905–1978) a mainstay of Weird Tales in the late 1940s, but that one of our distinguished competitors, Unknown Worlds, was started in 1939 for the purpose of providing a home for his Fortean novel Sinister Barrier. Back when I was a teenager, eagerly purchasing back issues from mail-order dealers, I turned to Russell’s contributions with a gusto ordinarily reserved for tales by Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, and Fritz Leiber; and as with their tales, I was not often disappointed. Russell’s prose displays a rare sense of irony and wit that Clark Ashton Smith undoubtedly appreciated, and does the reader the compliment of presenting the story in an indirect fashion so that he has an investment in the tale. His stories are more science fantasy than horror, since they often deal with the manifestation of a superior science that is mistaken for magic, as in the wonderful tale “The Ponderer,” one of the joys of a misspent youth that has not diminished with the years.
“The Sin of Hyacinth Peuch” is proof that humor and horror can work effectively together as his ironic depictions of a series of hideous murders bring first a smile to the reader’s lips before it is replaced by a grimace. “Displaced Person” is a more conventional allegory on whether our national ideals are as firmly established as we might think. But even if this book consisted of just “Rhythm of the Rats” it would be worth every cent. This updated märschen has retained all of its power from the first time I read it in this magazine, graced by one of Matt Fox’s grotesque covers that managed to capture the malignant idiocy of the tale’s villain. If Thing of Darkness is best read in multiple sittings, Darker Tides can be safely devoured in one sitting; in fact, one might be compelled into doing just that.
THE MOTION DEMON by Stefan Grabinski
(Ash-Tree Press, $47.50)
In a previous column I quoted Jean Cocteau to the effect that the English-speaking world had a gift for the tale of the weird and macabre. The Polish writer Stefan Grabinski (1887– 1936) is eloquent proof that this gift is not uniquely Anglo-Saxon. His champion and translator Miroslaw Lipinski has followed up the earlier The Dark Domain with this first of a series that will reprint all of Grabinski’s collections as well as a number of uncollected tales. Grabinski writes in a deceptively simple style that takes the unusual occurrences he describes as matter-of-fact, but this very nonchalance serves to make the overall impression quite memorable. The Motion Demon collects his stories about trains, a symbol of man’s technological “progress” and the change that it causes in human life and society. “Engineer Driver Grot” is the tale of an isolated loner whose life revolves around his job as a locomotive engineer, and who becomes more and more obsessed with speed. The story works both as a commentary upon the irrelevance of mankind to the universe at large, or as a description of developing obsessive-compulsive disorder. “The Wandering Train” reveals that man’s obsession with schedules and routine ultimately counts for nothing.
“The Sloven” is an effective variation upon the banshee theme, where a disheveled and idiotic specter appears whenever chaos is about to erupt into the well-ordered existence of the rail system. “The Perpetual Passenger” contrasts the ideas of motion/change with order/stagnation, creating a character for whom a settled existence is not an option. The title story depict man as being at the mercy of chaotic impulses, equating as it does the train’s conquest with space with man’s conquest of others in war, making the railway an instrument of chaos. One looks forward to seeing more of this writer’s work, as well as other European writers in the genre such as Thomas Owen and Jean Ray.
GASPARD DE LA NUIT by Aloysius Bertrand
(Black Coat Press, $20.95)
Another writer whose work, like that of Grabinski, will be new to most readers is the French Romantic poet in prose Aloysuis (or Louis) Bertrand, whose masterpiece Gaspard de la Nuit inspired generations of French decadents, from Victor Hugo on through Baudelaire and Verlaine. Bertrand was also a significant influence on the one of the few Americans to embrace the prose poem form, Clark Ashton Smith, both directly through Stuart Merrill’s translations and indirectly through the example of Baudelaire. Now Donald Sidney-Fryer has provided a scintillating and accessible translation of this monument to French Romanticism that puts on displays its affinities for the fantastic, the grotesque, and the medieval.
Bertrand was in many ways the prototype of the starving artist. He died in obscurity only to have his work posthumously championed by friends. However, the reader will find no sense of self-pity or sentimentality in his writings, but rather a robust gusto for life and living seasoned with a taste for the macabre and the impious. The work of art closest to it in spirit that comes to mind is Carl Orff’s secular cantata Carmina Burana, crossed perhaps with the Berlioz of the “March to the Gallows” sequence of Symphonie fantastique.
Like Smith, Bertrand draws mental images of extraordinary vividness with his words and delights in doing so: “But me, the iron rod of the executioner, at the first blow, had broken like a glass.” Graced with an introduction by T.E.D. Klein and a cover by Gahan Wilson, as well as Sidney-Fryer’s own exhaustive and illuminating introduction, Gaspard de la Nuit is available directly from the translator (signed upon request) at 6505 Firebrand Street, Los Angeles, Ca 90045 (add four dollars for postage and handling).
SONGS AND SONNETS ATLANTEAN: THE THIRD SERIES by Donald Sidney-Fryer
(Phospor Lantern Press, $20.95)
Sidney-Fryer’s poetry collection Songs and Sonnets Atlantean was the last book published by Arkham House during the lifetime of founder August Derleth. He has now followed that with a third series collecting much of his recent work, some of which has appeared in these pages. A linear descendent of Edmund Spenser by way of the California Romantics (a group that included Clark Ashton Smith, George Sterling and Nora May French), Sidney-Fryer’s work emphasizes clarity, accessibility, and simplicity in form — and magic, music, and continuity in content. Included is a dramatic-poem, “The Fugitives,” inspired by an uncompleted play of the same name that provided two of the poems in Smith’s 1925 collection Sandalwood; although I hasten to add that the author does not style this any sort of “collaboration,” posthumous or otherwise. There is little here that is terrible, but much that is wondrous, often infused with a fey wit that reflects a gentleness we could only wish were more often found in this world.
BLACK POCKETS AND OTHER DARK THOUGHTS by George Zebrowski
(Golden Gryphon Press, $24.95)
Turning to more contemporary writers, let us examine George Zebrowski’s Black Pockets and Other Dark Thoughts. Like Eric Frank Russell, Zebrowski is not usually thought of as a writer of horror stories, but his first collection in the genre should serve to shatter that preconception. Zebrowski divides his tales into three cat-egories: the Personal, the Political, and the Metaphysical, working outward from the specific to the general, although one wonders how he came to classify each story into their final categories. For instance, “Earth Around His Bones” strikes me as being an expression both of a personal phobia as well as an existential angst about the final state of the human condition. One wonders if “Jumper” is not perhaps a metaphor on man’s lack of insight for where his abilities may ultimately lead. The Political Terrors are more pensive studies in magical realism, in which an Undead Fidel Castro continues to linger on long after his relevance has died. The Metaphysical Terrors provide the juiciest tales, as is good and proper after all. Jesus returns as both a victimized derelict and as a supernatural prankster who reveals that we are just part of a science experiment. “Black Pockets” is a study of two souls locked hopelessly in hate so intense that even their own destruction is acceptable as long as their enemy also perishes. “The Lords of Imagination” strikes me as more manifesto than story, with its melancholy recognition that fantasy and horror were truer representations of “our black, anarchic souls, for all that we had leashed, chained, and imprisoned within ourselves” than the bland, sterile optimism of Roddenberry SF. While I would not go as far as Howard Waldrop does in his introduction and equate Zebrowski’s achievement with that of Fritz Leiber in “Smoke Ghost,” this is nonetheless an impressive collection that will repay repeated readings.
SLEEPING POLICEMEN by Dale Bailey and Jack Slay Jr.
(Golden Gryphon Press, $24.95)
Does a weird story have to have a supernatural or paranormal explanation? Lovecraft argued that William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” was not a weird tale because it could actually happen —whereas the crux of the weird tale is that it cannot possibly happen. The boundaries have blurred between the genres a bit since then, since such novels as Robert Bloch’s Psycho and Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs are now regarded as iconic works. In Sleeping Policemen, International Horror Guild nominees Dan Bailey and Jack Slay, Jr. present a story that is genuinely horrific without ever even bending a natural law.
Three college students returning from a road trip kill a stranger in a hit-and-run accident. The rich boys want to keep going, but their friend Nick, who comes from a much humbler background, insists on going back and seeing if they can help. From this good intention several miles of Hell are paved as Nick, his friends, and his girl friend Susan are drawn into a nightmarish world of snuff films and runaways overseen by a grotesquely Mabuse-like figure known as the Pachyderm. The authors contrast Nick’s own moral strength with the lack of strength shown by his friends, yet it is apparent that the compromise of that strength is what worsens their situation. There are many self-conscious references to works by Conrad and Fitzgerald that drive this home, but what Sleeping Policemen boils down to is how Nick and his friends act when confronted with moral evil.
THE WHITE HANDS AND OTHER WEIRD TALES by Mark Samuels
(Tartarus Press, £9.99)
One drawback to the domination of our genre by small-press publishers producing beautiful editions for the collectors’ market is that their products are often, if not always, priced out of the reach of the casual reader. It is refreshing to see that Tartarus Press, at least, has reissued one of its most distinguished recent collections in an affordable paperback. To call Mark Samuel’s first collection, The White Hands, a freshman effort is perhaps the literal truth, but it is a truth that conceals rather than reveals. Samuel’s prose is some of the most highly polished and surreal it has been my pleasure to read since I first discovered Thomas Ligotti. He is, like Ligotti, Matt Cardin, Quentin Crisp, and a number of other contemporary writers, something of a counter-realist. One of his characters defends weird fiction on the grounds that “the anthropocentric concerns of realism had the effect of stifling the much more profound study of infinity.” Contem-plation of the infinite “was the faculty that separated man from beast.” Realism “was the literature of the prosaic.” This has its roots in writers as diverse as Arthur Machen and Clark Ashton Smith, but Samuels embraces it and makes it his own. Beginning with “The White Hands,” he evokes the sense of alienation and sin that pervaded the weird fiction of the Yellow Nineties while drawing a cautionary tale of the hazards of literary research that I for one found a trifle disquieting. “Vrolyck” is what Lovecraft might have written had he done The Shadow out of Time from another perspective. He closes it symmetrically with “Black as Darkness,” an entertaining ghost story that deals with a never-released British portmanteau horror film that nonetheless still shows up on the shelves of the local videostore where the right person might stumble across it.
THE SHADOW AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD by Thomas Ligotti
(Cold Spring, $13)
The attentive reader may correctly deduce that I regard Thomas Ligotti as one of the pre-eminent writers working in the genre today. Much of his best work has been unavailable since the retrospective anthology The Nightmare Factory went out of print, but now the best of that work has been reissued in a handsome trade paperback, The Shadow at the Bottom of the World. Beginning with the deservedly famous “The Last Feast of Harlequinn,” an exercise in the sort of pseudo-realism pioneered by the latter Lovecraft but run into the ground by Stephen King and Dean Koontz, we enter a world that is not only indifferent to mankind and his aspirations, but possesses an inherent malignancy that gradually manifests itself both physically and spiritually in an ever-widening erosion and degradation of those hopes and aspirations. He tells us in “Vasterien” that “nothing ever known has ended in glory,” while “The Tsalal” tells of a “great blackness “ [that] has always prevailed.” Ligotti is not a writer that one reads for casual entertainment: his vision is too unremitting, too bleakly nihilistic. Like Poe, Lovecraft, and Machen, he is a writer that one reads to understand what lies beneath the surface of our “reality.”
