Weird Tales

It’s the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking dark fantasy comic The Sandman, and Weird Tales correspondent Eric San Juan is revisiting the series book by book. (Day 4 of 10.)

Season of Mists is widely considered one of the best Sandman arcs, if not the best, and for good reason. I remember loving the heck out of this one first time around, and sure enough I loved it all over again.

Neil Gaiman manages to take eight issues that are, when you boil it down, mostly talk — and spins something engrossing out of it. Plenty of drama, intrigue and trickery; not only important for the overall saga, but just plain making for a gripping tale. Season of Mists was a chance for the author to flex his mythology muscles, playing with characters from a variety of cultures and seeing if they fit. The intrigue here comes not from the stunning events unfolding in Hell — events that would lead to a spinoff series featuring the Gaiman version of Lucifer — but from the interaction between mythic beings from differing pantheons.

They all want something from Dream, you see. They want the keys to Hell, which Lucifer has abandoned, and Morpheus has got to give them to somebody. And while these gods and demigods from around the world will beg, borrow, cheat, lie and steal to get their prize, the core of the story is really the audience Dream gives them all. Their machinations are secondary to Dream’s reactions to them — and from this perspective, we realize that while Season of Mists is a very, very key event in the overarching Sandman saga, it’s perhaps even more importantly the deepest examination of the Morpheus character to date.

It all begins with a family meeting: the first issue of this story and one of the single best Sandman issues overall. Gaiman’s Endless are a superb mix of deviousness and otherworldliness and the typical squabbling of human families we all know and love. What makes these personifications of concepts like Desire, Despair and Death so powerful aren’t the concepts themselves, but the very relatable personalities behind each one: Destruction the black sheep, Desire the attention whore — even Delirium, a loopy LSD victim of sorts, has an endearing little-sister quality. This family interaction is the heart and soul of Sandman. It’s also what kicks off Season of Mists.

This volume’s title refers to the time during which Hell is empty, a time when restless spirits descend upon the world and the dead seem to live again in their ghostly way. We get an inside glimpse at this in Chapter 4, a fine story though a needless distraction from the arc: Chapter 3 leaves off with Dream welcoming the aforementioned host of divine supplicants to his realm, and then abruptly we get this interlude about a student stuck at boarding school while dead students repopulate it. It’s a poignant little vignette, but its timing is maddening.

But otherwise, what’s not to like? Morpheus isn’t the most likeable chap in the world, yet the reader can’t help but he drawn to him. He’s rather curt, the sort who tells it like it is without much emotion. (Unless his pride is hurt… but that’s another discussion.) He suffers neither fools nor politics. That’s why seeing him deal with the likes of a decidedly less grand Odin, a falsely humble representative of an Asian deity, a horrible demon in the guise of an adorable little girl, and many others is so — well, endearing. Sure, Dream is kind of a cold and distant bastard, but he’s just the sort you want to see these manipulative folks facing. In other stories they would play their victims like fiddles. Not here. Dream does not get played.

Not by these people, at least.

That’s it. That’s the sum total of Season of Mists. Lucifer bails out on Hell, leaves Dream to make the decision on what to do with it, and Dream spends a load of pages listening to entities make their pitch. And it’s fantastic.

Sandman might be at its best in shorter stories and one-shot tales, but among the longer arcs Season of Mists stands out as one of the very best: a fascinating dose of political drama that could — amazingly, given that it’s fourth in a ten-book saga — be read on its own and still be eminently satisfying. Wonderful stuff.

Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. His Weird Tales debut was last year’s “Whispers of the Old Hag.”

It’s the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking dark fantasy comic The Sandman, and Weird Tales correspondent Eric San Juan is revisiting the series book by book. (Day 3 of 10.)

You wouldn’t think a collection of one-off stories would be where Neil Gaiman finds his voice, but that is exactly the case. Dream Country, the third collection of his acclaimed Sandman, is made up of four one-shot stories. Each is different from the last. And each one is excellent.

The real treat here, however, is that this collection pushed Sandman out from its light-horror/dark-fantasy origins and finally showed the world what the series was capable of being. Which is to say, it can be almost anything.

I think that was Gaiman’s idea. The very concept of who and what Dream is was in part to allow him to do a wide variety of stories; whatever suited his fancy at any given time, he could go there. We’re not limited to tales about serial killers and demons. Time nor place nor tone is an obstacle. Sandman can be ANYTHING, and at times it is.

Part of what makes the series special, this.

The first story here is “Calliope,” a tale in which the muse of the same name is kept captive for a greedy, selfish writer. This is probably the weakest of the bunch. That’s no insult, though, as Gaiman manages to blend mythology and horrid people and a satisfying ending. Still, it’s rather mundane, all things considered, with nothing that screams “SANDMAN!” A “careful what you wish for, you just might get it” tale and little more. This could have been a John Constantine story or a Swamp Thing story and you’d not bat an eye. Oh, there is a dream sequence, sure, but it’s not essential.

Of course, as with all things Sandman, seeds are planted here that will bear fruit later. Dream has a son? How interesting …

It’s followed by the wonderful “A Dream of a Thousand Cats,” in which cats ponder ruling the world (and, as in many stories, we see yet another aspect of Morpheus). The art is perfect for the story, a sort of twisted fairy tale come to life, and the writing … well hell, the head kitty’s monologue inspired me to dream of cats ruling the world. Quite poetic. I liked this one because it underlines an important idea: that dreams are potent, world-changing things.

This is a theme that runs throughout the series. Dreams — the stuff of ideas and inspiration, of beauty and love and fear and horror — can change who we are and what we become, and in turn we can change the world around us for good or ill. Ideas are powerful, and even more powerful is man’s willingness to be inspired by them. The world is what we make of it. It is a reflection of who we are.

This is, I think, one of the foundations upon which Sandman is built.

Third out of the gate is the award-winning “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which picks up seeds Gaiman dropped in a one-shot story featured last volume. (Again, our refrain: NOTHING is “standalone” in the world of Sandman.) How he manages to hold this one together, I do not know, but he does. The story jumps from scene to scene like a frog on a hot plate. First we’re seeing a brief exchange between two characters, in the next panel it’s something else, and in the third it’s something else yet again. The dialogue jumps back and forth between excerpts from Shakespeare and the story. The whole thing just flips and flops and is all over the map. There is little to no sense of continuity here at all.

Yet it works. Somehow, Gaiman’s approach makes this tale almost dreamlike, like a fevered vision seen at dusk, when the shadows begin to come alive and the day withers in the face of the night. Quite appropriate, given the subject matter.

I don’t think this is the finest of the Sandman one-shots — that one comes later — but it is fine. Overpraised (sorry, folks, it is), but good.

Finally is “Façade,” in which Gaiman scoops up an obscure old DC Comics character (Element Girl, though she’s never named) and … well, I won’t spoil what happens with her, but it’s a tragic tale with a happy ending, an examination of isolation and feeling alone and wanting so badly to end it all but not being able to do it. Quite an affecting work, with bleak and moving artwork by Colleen Doran. There are some truly haunting moments, such as an awkward dinner scene, and Gaiman does an amazing job of getting across this woman’s pain. Though an utterly inhuman character, she’s one of the most human people you’ll ever read. Fantastic stuff.

So: four stories, four wildly different approaches, four entirely different spins on who and what the Sandman could be. Nice vignettes that serve to show us “business-as-usual” Dream before we launch into the world-shaking events of Season of Mists.

Gaiman’s chess pieces are now in place. From this point forward, the game truly begins.

Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. His Weird Tales debut was last year’s “Whispers of the Old Hag.”

It’s the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking dark fantasy comic The Sandman, and Weird Tales correspondent Eric San Juan is revisiting the series book by book for the next ten weekdays.

The Doll’s House picks up seemingly throwaway threads from Preludes and Nocturnes and creates story out of them. Builds mythology from stuff that appeared to be mere tone and atmosphere building.

This is what Gaiman does. This is what Sandman is. And even at this early stage, when he’s still getting a feel for the world he’s creating, it’s brilliant.

When we caught glimpses of troubled sleepers and people struck into dreaming comas in the first story arc, it appeared to be little more than attempts to vividly paint the impact of Dream’s captivity. Gaiman was showing us a world without Morpheus, letting us see why he’s important and using a series of tiny arcs to do it. We saw people caught in an endless slumber, a woman tragically raped while in a coma, a man destined for insanity, and more. These were passing references to a slew of people, unimportant to the main story save for adding texture to it. Just the stuff of atmosphere building. Or so it seemed.

But we were wrong. One of those little “atmosphere” arcs becomes central to The Doll’s House.

We begin with a prologue that feels as if it’s a standalone story, something largely unrelated to the whole. This is an illusion, of course. Nothing in Sandman exists in a vacuum. Throughout the series Gaiman proves to be a master of using even the smallest of story elements and passing references as springboards to larger tales. I’m not talking clunky comic-book stuff, either, those “gotcha!” revelations or retroactive explanations of what happened between another book’s panels. Gaiman doesn’t do clumsy. Here we’ve got the sense that a mythology is being built — not a make-it-up-as-you-go-along mythology, but a true, coherent, densely interwoven, real mythology.

For instance, this prologue, “Tales in the Sand,” appears to be the story behind a brief encounter Dream had while in Hell, as shown in the first volume. It was nothing more than a fleeting interaction with a lover who’d allegedly wronged our protagonist, a hint at something in Dream’s past. In “Tales in the Sand” we learn this lover’s tale and why she is in Hell. It seems like this prologue is unconnected to The Doll’s House, but what we don’t realize is that this story will also serve as the roots for one of the most important arcs of the entire series, the forthcoming Season of Mists.

Are you sensing a pattern here?

Anyway, The Doll’s House. You can feel Gaiman starting to shake the Alan Moore dust off his bones with this arc, breaking free from his mentor’s influence and juuust starting to create his own voice. (It’s not a stretch to call Moore Gaiman’s mentor. It was Moore, after all, who showed Gaiman how to write a comic script.) The influence is still there in the way Gaiman handles his serial killers and in the lyrically self-aware narration, but it’s a big step forward from the very Moore-esque Preludes & Nocturnes.

Gaiman shows himself to be adept at creating strange, surreal characters here — and I don’t mean the murderers! Our protagonist, Rose, who’s searching for her missing kid brother, is exactly the sort of intellectual young everygirl who’d be likely to find herself amid a posse of weirdoes, and indeed, her roommates are an odd but interesting and likable bunch. Though, yeah, those serial killers are well realized, too. Gaiman has a knack for establishing character without needing lots of strokes; any one of these side figures could probably sustain a story in their own right.

We also see some playing with the comic form. Nothing groundbreaking, but stuff that keeps us on our toes. Typewritten letters as narration; lettering being used in creative ways; pages being turned on their side to represent Rose being turned on her side (figuratively, not literally); a twisted dream sequence that puts us into the psych of her roommates.

Lots and lots of good stuff.

There is an interlude here about three fifths of the way through the arc, “Men of Good Fortune,” that I can’t help but think should have been moved to Dream County in the collected editions. It’s a standalone story, albeit a very good one, and feels out of place in the midst of this extended arc. (Of course, once again, it’s not really a standalone: this one is later extended in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and a part of it comes up in Season of Mists. Let it be a lesson learned: take nothing in Sandman for granted.)

The arc wraps up with a satisfying resolution that never feels cheap and leaves us without any doubt: We’re reading the start of something special.

The astonishing thing is, Gaiman isn’t even there yet. He’s not yet firing on all cylinders. With this arc, he’s still working to move away from his influences and to find his own voice. And yet it’s really quite good. Not yet UTTERLY BRILLIANT, as this series will soon become, but quite good indeed.

Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. His Weird Tales debut was last year’s “Whispers of the Old Hag.”

It’s the 20th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking dark fantasy comic The Sandman, and Weird Tales correspondent Eric San Juan is revisiting the series book by book for the next ten weekdays.

I would be exaggerating if I said I approached a reread of Sandman with trepidation. Sometimes you read something, think it’s great, but years later you wonder if it was really as good as you remembered. I had no such feelings when thinking back to Sandman. I knew what I had read was brilliant and was confident it wouldn’t lose its luster over the years.

So, I wasn’t surprised when Preludes and Nocturnes remained an excellent read. What DID surprise me was that it was far better than I recalled. The first volume is often seen as the weak link in the Sandman chain, the shaky start readers must get through in order to get to the truly brilliant stuff. Maybe in our desire for people to read those remarkable high points, in our eagerness to share the awesome with them, we forget how good this first set of stories truly is.

Thing is, for all the depth we attribute to Sandman, Gaiman’s grand saga begins with something very simple. Dare I say, a cliché. Our protagonist must Go On A Quest and retrieve Items Of Great Power.

Wait, no. It doesn’t start there. It starts with the titular Sandman naked and huddled in a cage. Weak. Powerless. A captive. But he is Endless, and patient, and he will wait. Even as the world of dreamers falls apart, he will wait.

It’s a pretty ballsy way to open a series, really.

Gaiman is smart. He doesn’t inundate us with information. He doesn’t outline his whole mythology right out of the gate. We’re left to guess at aspects of Morpheus’s nature and power and personality. This not only involves us in the story by forcing us to invest a little of ourselves in it — smart stories almost always do this — but it also leaves him wiggle room to invent, create and interpret over the course of the next 75 issues.

But I’m getting into big-picture stuff here when really I want to discuss Preludes and Nocturnes. Yeah, it’s better than I remembered and isn’t at all the just “okay” start Sandman fans (including myself) sometimes insinuate. Right off the bat we’re getting heaping helpings of mythology, dark magic, and a clear sense that Dream isn’t a humanlike figure with godlike powers. He is something other. Something alien. A being who can be many things. This is utterly vital to what the series would come to be.

Sure, in the context of the smart series that is Sandman, Dream’s fetch quest is kind of a dopey fantasy trope, but it works. It works because it’s a great excuse for allowing us to begin exploring this world. It doesn’t always work. Gaiman makes a misguided effort to tie Sandman into the main DC Comics universe — something thankfully all but forgotten as the series goes on — but by and large Dream’s quest shows us slivers of the kind of realm in which we’ll dwell. And I’ll be damned if the execution isn’t excellent right off the bat. The writing is VERY strong. His ear for dialogue is not perfect, but his narration is poetic and moving even at this early stage.

That said, much of this first volume is kind of standard dark fantasy stuff. Good, but in the years since it came out we’ve seen a TON of stuff like this (a lot of it from Vertigo, the DC Comics imprint that built upon Sandman’s success). The Alan Moore influence is pretty heavy in the early going, and at times it’s distracting. “Listen,” Gaiman writes as a repeated motif over a few issues, and every time he does so I think of Moore. “24 Hours,” the story set in the diner with Doc Destiny, was a somewhat misguided effort to delve into the kind of disturbing darkness Moore dabbled in with Swamp Thing. Gaiman can do better than this sort of gimmicky thing. It’s disturbing, yeah, but it’s also a bit cheap and easy. Gaiman at his best disturbs us with smarts, not shocks. At his best he gives us interesting characters in extraordinarily magical situations, not cheap shock.

It all ends well, though, and we get the sense that this whole story arc was nothing more than a grand beginning.

And it was.

When we get to the coda featuring Dream’s sister Death, we fall in love. We realize we’re reading something that might turn out to be very special indeed. We realize that maybe we’re in store for something that won’t be an ordinary comic book.

Rereading these initial stories reminded took me right back to when I first got sucked into Sandman. I had read non-tights books before — Hate, Cerebus and others were all on my reading list before I ditched comics in the early 1990s — but these were the books that told me I could keep reading and loving comics even if I no longer cared about superheroes.

Did this first volume of Sandman hold up? It sure did. This was very strong, stronger than I remembered … which means I can’t imagine how good the later stuff will be.

Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. His Weird Tales debut was last year’s “Whispers of the Old Hag.”

The new Weird Tales #352 features an exclusive interview with bestselling fantasy author Neil Gaiman. This fall saw the release of Gaiman’s new novel The Graveyard Book, and January 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of his comic-book masterpiece The Sandman — so WeirdTales.net will spend the next two weeks revisiting The Sandman in “Recurring Dream,” a daily retrospective column by correspondent Eric San Juan. Take it away, Eric…

It may sound melodramatic, but The Sandman changed my life. No, not in an after-school-special, inspired-me-to-join-the-Foreign-Legion kind of way. But it sparked something in me. A new understanding and appreciation of something I had long cherished, but didn’t necessarily take pride in: comic books.

A childhood love I continued to enjoy into adulthood, comics were filled with fun adventures, great characters, and boundless imagination. All wonderful things, to be sure — but as with so many young fans, there eventually came a time when comics and I no longer saw eye to eye. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a dreadful time for the medium; the shelves were littered with the worst sort of empty-headed rubbish, and I, being a young man who fancied himself worthy of reading something with a bit more smarts, began drifting from the four-color pages.

Comics and I parted ways.

No one who grows to love the medium, though, ever truly abandons it. It’s just one of those things, like Bazooka Joe bubble gum, Pop Rocks, and lawn darts: you know it’s no good for you, but damnit, who cares? So by the time the late 1990s were upon me I found myself wondering what was happening in the world of comics. Wondering what I had missed. Wondering if maybe, just maybe, I could rekindle the love affair.

It turns out I had missed a whole lot. There was this thing called The Sandman, apparently, that had very quietly become one of the most critically acclaimed comics of all time. I completely missed the boat! Just as I had left, this guy Neil Gaiman had come along and given the medium something remarkable.

So I figured I’d give it a shot — I’d try out a few books, see how I might feel about yielding once again to their garish delights. I bought Preludes and Nocturnes, the first Sandman collection.

…and the next several volumes quickly followed. It was a revelation. Comics could do this? They could be this? I knew the medium was capable of great things — after all, my mind had been blown in the ’80s by Watchmen, Frank Miller’s incredible Elektra: Assassin and Daredevil: Born Again, and Dave Sim’s Cerebus — but those had seemed like fleeting aberrations. Flukes. Surely no creator could be allowed to sustain such genius. I mean, these were comics, meant to be disposable. Fun but unimportant. Yet here I was, reading an epic work for the ages. Sandman spanned seven years and 75 issues (subsequently collected into ten novel-sized stories), growing in mythic grandeur with each new piece. I would never look at comics — what they were, are, and can be — the same way again.

I still don’t. I expect more from my comics these days. I expect good writing and smart stories and something more meaningful than Guy beats up Other Guy. I’ve developed a deep love for the nature of the medium; the things it can accomplish and the unique ways in which it can tell stories. I am no longer the same reader I was, and I owe that to Sandman.

It’s been a decade since I was first exposed to the series, and 20 years since The Sandman #1 was first published. With four gorgeous new Absolute Sandman hardcover collections sitting on my shelves, now seemed like the perfect time to revisit this series. How would it hold up? Would I still hold it in such high esteem? I’ve read a lot of really great comics since I first discovered Sandman, after all. I like to think I’ve become a more discerning reader. Would Neil Gaiman’s amazing series still read like it was working on an entirely different level, given all the comics and graphic novels I’ve read since?

As you’ll see over the course of this 10-part retrospective, the answer is yes. A resounding yes. Sandman remains a high-water mark not just for the comic medium, but for fantasy literature in general. It is every bit as vital today as it was 20 years ago when it first began publication.

I hope you enjoy reading along as I again plunge back into the world of Dream, Desire, Delirium, Death, and the rest of the Endless. Even better, take the plunge with me and re-read Gaiman’s masterpiece. You’ll be glad you did.

Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. His Weird Tales debut was last year’s “Whispers of the Old Hag.”

The new Weird Tales #352 features an exclusive interview with bestselling fantasy author Neil Gaiman. This fall saw the release of Gaiman’s new novel The Graveyard Book, and January 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of his comic-book masterpiece The Sandman — so WeirdTales.net will spend the next two weeks (starting Monday) revisiting The Sandman in “Recurring Dream,” a daily retrospective column by correspondent Eric San Juan.

But first, we asked Seattle-area WT contributor Lisa Mantchev to tell us what it was like when Neil visited her neck of the woods — specifically, the University of Washington — on The Graveyard Book tour this past October.

* * *

He’s signing. Books in stacks of eight await his signature, rendered in red-brown ink that flows from a fountain pen. Everyone here in the backstage green room keeps a close eye on Neil Gaiman and a closer eye on his right hand, which sports a splint on the middle finger: a souvenir from a recent trip to China. (The first rule of author signings is that you don’t ask the author how he ― or his hand ― is holding up. The second rule? See rule one.)

In passing, Gaiman wonders aloud why there is a clip-art leaf on the title page, when a bat or a tombstone would have been more thematically appropriate to a tome entitled The Graveyard Book. Everyone within hearing offers their suggestions (“Perhaps it’s meant to be the ivy near the Egyptian Walk?”) but there’s no denying that other things might look more like actual ivy, and Gaiman only shakes his head and moves on to the next title page in the next book.

A lot has changed since his first signing at the University of Washington Book Store years ago, where twenty people were in attendance. Tonight’s venue holds nine hundred, and by the time the reading starts at seven, the only seating available is in the balcony. Attendance didn’t jump fiftyfold overnight, though; there’s never been a lightning bolt or thunderclap in Gaiman’s career. Instead, a gradual storm has built one raindrop at a time: a cult following for Sandman whose membership jumped with the publication of American Gods and again with the release of the Stardust movie. No doubt the same will happen again when the Coraline movie opens in 2009. Hand-selling by supportive booksellers has been as vital as word-of-mouth by readers who each came to the Road of Gaiman by a different gateway work, as evidenced by the shifting piles of personal items now moving across the table: old review copies of Good Omens, co-written with the estimable Terry Pratchett; a Mirrormask DVD; a pamphlet of Snow, Glass, Apples; a hardcover copy of the Fragile Things collection.

In the chapel where the reading will take place, the audience is just as diverse: a beauty in full goth attire complete with crinoline and top hat; a young married couple with a toddler; people of various ages and means who arrive singly and in small groups. It’s Seattle, so they waited in the rain, in some cases for more than an hour, until the doors opened. It’s their chance to see the man many consider the rock star of the speculative fiction genre, the uncrowned king. Yes, he’s an award-winning, bestselling, internationally-acclaimed author, but he’s still “Neil for short”: amicable, approachable, and still very much one of us.

Before long, the moment has come: The sconces and chandeliers dim, the applause begins, and a single spot pours white light over Gaiman as he enters Stage Left. A ripple of laughter passes through the room when Gaiman informs the audience they will be seeing special advance footage of Coraline after the intermission, and he would appreciate it if no one would videotape it and put it on YouTube, because he knows he can trust them. Upturned faces smile and nod. With a smile that says, Good. I’m glad we understand one another, Gaiman launches into Chapter Four of The Graveyard Book: The Witch’s Headstone.

It’s a long chapter ― the longest in the book, in fact, and the original source material for the novel. Originally published, almost simultaneously, in the anthology Wizards and Gaiman’s collection M is for Magic, it is the seed that bore the darkly charming flower of The Graveyard Book. Gaiman swiftly renders Nobody Owens (Bod, for short) and his companions:

Abanazer Bolger had thick spectacles and a permanent expression of mild distaste, as if he had just realized that the milk in his tea had been on the turn, and he could not get the sour taste out of his mouth.

This is exactly the sort of thing Gaiman’s audience has come to expect and to love: words that sketch a vivid mental image, colored with his charming inflections. He’s a brilliant reader of his own work, pausing for dramatic effect in exactly the right place, pacing sentences just so, and always properly anticipating the laughter of those gathered in the pews.

“I wanted to hear his voice,” fan Elizabeth Coleman says afterward. “It’s such an expressive, melodious thing, and brings magic to everything he says, profound or mundane. In the Q&A, he turned even the most simple question . . . into a tale, but he was never long-winded.”

It’s all a perfectly balanced tightrope act: an author whose stories for children resonate with adults, whose comic book stories win World Fantasy awards, whose novels become movies filled with both CGI special effects and puppetry. And perhaps that tightrope act is simply one turn at the Mouse Circus, where everything is odd and enchanting and darkly mystical. ―Or, if not a tightrope, then the blade of a very special knife, the sort carried by Jack in opening scene of The Graveyard Book:

The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.
The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.

Gaiman walks the edge of that dark knife, weaving tales that cut his readers, that linger and transform their hearts and minds long after the author has departed a rain-drenched city.

Lisa Mantchev is the author of the fantasy novel Eyes Like Stars (forthcoming in summer 2009 from Feiwel & Friends). Her story “Six Scents” appears in Weird Tales: The 21st Century, Vol. 1.

WHISPERS OF THE OLD HAG
by Eric San Juan

copyright © 2008 / May not be reproduced without permission

* * *

The thing was made of light and shadow; skeletal, pale, with ribs like talons and deep eager eyes. I did not know the time. Didn’t care to know, really. Midnight; 4 a.m.; whatever. How could I care when it stood there, just outside my bedroom door, framed in moonlight and a clinging mist; a malevolent thing, angry and waiting? The time didn’t matter. All that mattered was that I was being watched.

I longed to scream, but the sound would not come. A hoarse croak. A gasp of breath. Nothing more. I was silent; immobile; paralyzed.

It’s impossible to recall how old I was when it first happened. Twelve. Maybe fourteen. The experience was terrifying, a mix of dread and horror and of being utterly overcome by something alien. The experience was no dream. It was real and true. And it would happen again.

Once, an unseen presence woke me in the night and sat on my chest. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it perched upon me. As it sat there pressing the air from my lungs, the walls filled with whispers. Most of them were incomprehensible, but at times snatches of words tormented me: accusations, laughter, distant discussion tantalizingly close to being understood. I strained to call to them, to tell them I was trapped, to beg to be released from this unseen prison, but again my voice was frozen.

On another occasion, I could see the presence. A curtain was spread across my doorway, pulled slightly open, and as I awoke from a soft afternoon sleep I saw it, a black shadow pacing back and forth just outside the room. “Who’s there?” I called, but no sound came. Again my voice was frozen. Again I could not move. Again the whispers came. Just beyond the curtain they chattered, always on the very edge of understanding.

The visits continued sporadically over the years. A woman I knew, a self-styled fortuneteller, the sort who thinks she knows the secrets of the universe, told me something was happening. That I was breaking through some wall. Some barrier. That maybe, just maybe, it was dangerous.

She wasn’t far off the mark. As it turned out, I was treading in territory that had tormented man for all recorded history. I was swimming in the blackest waters of night; grasping at nightmares made real. Yet it was not the journey into otherworldly hells she suggested.

I was suffering from sleep paralysis: a bizarre fluke of consciousness that occurs while on the borderlands of sleep, thrusting the victim into a place between dreaming and waking. A very scary place.

When one enters REM sleep, something called “REM atonia” kicks in, a state during which the body’s muscles do not move. You are, in essence, paralyzed. This is perfectly normal. It happens to every sleeper. In the case of sleep paralysis, however, the mind awakens, becomes aware and conscious ― mostly ― even while the body still sleeps. And then come the hallucinations.

The feeling of a presence, almost always malevolent, is common. The feeling of being watched, sometimes of a crushing pressure, is also typical. There is always dread. Always fear. Sometimes unbridled panic. And sometimes voices, barely understandable but tantalizingly recognizable. I’ve heard people chatting in the next room or just outside my window, familiar voices and alien voices, the voices of loved ones and the voices of strangers. Yet none of them were real.

“Not real” ― but for all the terror they brought me, they might as well have been. The foothills between waking and sleep are a harsh place, a landscape of half-seen truths and elusive lies. Tarry too long, dwell upon the seeming realism of the frightening episodes too obsessively ― believe too much of what you see ― and you could find yourself swallowed up by your own mind. This was the danger from which I ran.

I’d left fears of demons behind with childhood. Poltergeists, hauntings, ghosts; sure, the images could provide a chill, but the same could be said for anyone with a vivid imagination. This doesn’t mean we really believe in such things. We don’t. As a society, we’ve moved beyond taking such fears seriously. But hang on ― because humanity has a new terror of the night. A new presence that comes in the evening and whisks away the unsuspecting. Demons of the modern age. They come from space, drifting out of the sky bathed in cold lights, bringing their emotionless and distant violations with them.

The gray alien ― the now-familiar visage of the silent, petite, triangle-faced, giant-eyed extraterrestrial ― that’s today’s demonic visitor. Frighteningly inhuman; rendering people helpless; changing the way some live their lives. Alien abduction is a terror many do believe in. Could sleep paralysis explain these experiences? All the calling cards are there. Waking in the night, unable to move. The feeling of a presence in the room. Losing control of your body. Even a sense that time isn’t quite flowing right. Like pieces of some twisted puzzle, it all fits. So if these experiences are simply the result of sleep paralysis, are people investing themselves in the belief that they have been taken by aliens when the real explanation is something much less sinister?

It wouldn’t be the first time sleep paralysis has done exactly that. The belief that this experience is something more than a biological quirk in the body’s sleep mechanism has been around as long as man has feared the night. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare makes mention of “the Old Hag.” The Old Hag is a demon of the night right out of foggy old myths, describing an entity ― whether a witch, demon, or spirit does not matter ― that sits on its victim, rendering them unable to move and making it difficult to breath. Sound familiar?

The myth of the Incubus, a demon which lies upon sleeping women in order to violate them, may have sprung from the same source. Peer at the mosaic of language and things begin to fall into place. The Old English word for the Incubus was maire, which means “one who oppresses or crushes.” In German, it is mare. And from these we get “night mare,” or simply nightmare. What it all means is: “A perfectly normal sleep thing that scares the screaming holy fuck out of us.”

I recalled this one recent evening when, after having drifted off to sleep, I awoke, unable to move. Outside my bedroom window were voices. My father, I think, and my wife. Others, too. I could not understand them. And then something malevolent came into the room. And stood at the foot of the bed. And watched.

This experience was nothing new, not for me and not for mankind. From restless spirits to space-faring entities, from the Incubus to the gray alien, from Romeo and Juliet to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, we can cast our fears in a new guise. We can give it a new name and a new face. Yet ultimately, the haunts of our evening remain the same: a hiccup of sleep and a lack of understanding. Once I understood that, it was an easy enough demon to exorcize. I needed neither holy water nor holy man. No scientists; no laser beams; no necklace of garlic. Just some understanding . . . and the terror was no more. Sometimes, that’s all the exorcism you need.

Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. “Whispers of the Old Hag” appeared in print in Weird Tales #350.

Weird Tales editorial director Stephen H. Segal was recently privileged to be a guest at Dragon*Con, the nation’s largest fan-run fantasy/science-fiction/gaming/comics/etc convention. The entire event was spectacular, but Stephen particularly enjoyed taking part in a panel discussing how steampunk — science-fictiony stuff built on Victorian-era technology and aesthetics — has suddenly leapt from being a simple literary subgenre to an all-out alternative-style trend. Sure, there are great steampunk books (including a definitive new anthology coedited by WT’s own Ann VanderMeer), but now there are also steampunk fashion & jewelry designers, radio shows, and rock bands. Here, crossposted from Fantasy-Magazine.com, is Stephen’s take on what might be fueling the excitement: (more…)

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How do you write about a legend? Especially a legend who is still alive? R.J. Downes, a Toronto-based playwright, decided to take on Ray Bradbury, one of the most celebrated fantastic-fiction writers of all time, and his bonne vivante wife, Marguerite. The resulting drama, “Without Whom,” currently running at the Toronto Fringe Festival, is a fictionalized version of their relationship, with names fudged and facts tinkered with. In real life, Marguerite financially supported Ray’s early writing career, and the two remained married for 56 years, until she passed away in 2003. Downes, a prolific dramatist, helped produce the script for the Fringe, and plays a supporting role onstage as well. Weird Tales correspondent Robert Isenberg had the chance to hear the playwright’s thoughts the weekend of the show’s premiere. (more…)