Steel's "On the Salt Road"

Fair to say, Flora Annie Steel's short story "On the Old Salt Road" both surprised me and creeped me out. I've read a fair bit of Steel's work now and this wasn't like any of it. For one thing, it's a ghost story, which is not her usual fare but not that strange for the time. It even has the typical framing device of the main story being told to a group of people round the fire after dinner, one of whom writes the story we're reading. It's the story of the Major, from when he was a young officer in the Raj who had just buried his wife and child. Without telling you too much of the story, he falls into a suicidal depression and heads off on a "holiday" on an old salt road to do the deed. Salt roads were set up along trade routes and patrolled regularly to prevent smuggling, but had been abandoned by the time of the story. Some civil officers used them though when on tour. 

The ghostly experiences come upon the young man as if they were real, at no point does he think they're ghosts until a late discovery reveals the infant girl died years before. The bizarre part is when one of the figures in the vision is discovered to still be alive, but had herself recently felt like she was reliving the experience recently. Of course, the experience stops the officer's plan, so he can live to be the senior officer telling the story.

After one of the most awkward opening paragraphs I can think of, Steel produces one of her best stories. Once the Major starts his tale he manages to absorb you, so even though it's a long setup you feel for him. It helps that he is looking back with the wisdom of age, so the desperate feelings he was experiencing at the time are muted and left for the reader to imagine. 

The central "weird" moment is done brilliantly and evokes a mixture of fear and sorrow. This is not a scary ghost, but a tragic story playing out again. 

The main defects with the story, aside from that opening paragraph, are the infant girl's speech and the brief moment with the officer's servant. Steel has been criticised for her babyish children and this one is a classic example with her "Dot's un away" and "wants to make puff-puff-boom". Dot is also described in the most angelic terms as is Steel's want. It was a trend of the period but it doesn't help. The servant is thankfully mostly absent, he's only really included because to leave him out would not be realistic. So, the racist condescension he is shown by the Major, even in retrospect with the "wisdom"  of experience, also fits that realism. It's disgusting and stupid as always, but accurate and mercifully brief. 

The Scholar who came to Hobart

Why did Facebook suggest that page to me? If it hadn't I would never have known, never have seen ... it is useless to conjecture. I can only assume it was an algorithm and the rest was happen-chance. I mean, to suggest that some eldritch force was in play luring me to that place ... well that'd be crazy. You'd almost think ... I was using too many ellipses.

Fate-driven or otherwise it made the suggestion and, against my usual habit of not even noticing, I clicked the link. It was a bookstore, how could I ignore it? There on the page was the picture of a man. I could not see his face, it was hidden beneath a blue knitted mask covered with tentacles. Mad? ... I leave that to the ellipses to decide ... The man spoke of a gathering. An eminent scholar was coming to our city. I had heard of this gentlemen and read some of the Unutterable Horror he wrote. Why would someone so steeped in obscure lore come to our quiet city in the south? I had to know.

The gathering took place as the sun sunk beneath the mountain. Hobart plunged into twilight. I found the appointed place tucked away behind a church. Irony? I know not. It was a small room crowded with chairs. Books on child rearing were cornered one side. The man from the bookstore page was on the other, selling tomes of lore scribed by the visiting scholar or the madmen he studied. A dark-haired woman sold concoctions and brews to unwary patrons. Some were red, others white, still more came in cans. I knew only that drinking too much of any one of those elixirs would drive me wild. I'd probably end up laughing hideously in a corner.

The crowd that gathered was an odd mixture. Some older folk were there who could be termed "eccentric" by the undiscerning mind. Others wore flannelette shirts ... I feared these the most. A writer spoke first, he called himself Stephen Dillon, it is a name that irks me. I have seen it, I know I have seen it, but I cannot think why. He spoke of how he became involved with the tentacle-bringing prophet H.P. Lovecraft. The Call of Cthulu had reached him in a games shop in England in the 1980s. From there madness crept in. Now he writes tales of horror and insanity.

Next came a local man - one of the flannelette shirt wearers ... Andrew Harper his name was. He recalled a cartoon - one of which I was familiar - and told of an episode featuring Cathulu. He claimed the error in the name was because of a subeditor ... I was a subeditor. I also knew others, I let the insult pass. He spoke too of the past haunting the culture of the present. He spoke loudly. He ... gesticulated. He inspired ellipses ... He said the best Lovecraft was the Lovecraft that didn't try to be Lovecraft. And through the insanity that is context, that made sense to everyone present.

After a short interlude designed for patrons to imbibe the lady's brews or purchase the tomes of lore came the main act. The reason we were all there, the scholar took to the lectern. S.T. Joshi. There, I said it, that is his name. Be warned. He spoke of the tentacle-bringing prophet and his relationships with women. There weren't many so he could give a full history. His manner was friendly, his tone convivial. I tried not to be lured in, but found myself warming to his charm. I listened attentively as he shared his incredible knowledge about someone who, even as his tentacled creation grows famous in popular culture, remains largely obscure beyond the readers of horror and weird fiction.

The night finished with a "panel", where questions were put to the three speakers. They shared more information, joked, laughed and generally made for an interesting time. When that concluded I took out my copy of Joshi's Unutterable Horror to question his sense in publishing this madness. He smiled as I handed it to him and asked me if I wanted it personalised. His charm was too much. I said yes, told him my name. I confessed I had cited the work in my Masters thesis. He said that was interesting. Handed me back the book. I thanked him.

Next thing I knew I was outside, walking down near-abandoned streets in the middle of Hobart. It was after 9pm. If I went back, would that chamber be there ... I can't bring myself to look. Have I really used too many ellipses? Is that even ...

Keep dreaming!

First Response to Robert E Howard’s Pigeons from Hell

I just finished reading this delightful little horror story from Robert E Howard and I’m fairly impressed. It was originally published in Weird Tales in 1938, a posthumous publication. You can read it here.

It’s a classic horror in many ways, travellers stop the night in an abandoned house, only one leaves alive and that just barely. There’s an old legend of a violent and cruel family, there’s darkness that seems almost palpable, there’s dead men walking and terror-induced bouts of insanity.

At the heart of the mystery is voodoo, which I didn’t expect at first. It doesn’t go into too much detail, but does of course paint the practice as evil. The murderous creature in the house is a zuvembie, that is, a creature who used to be a woman but who is now a twisted creature with hypnotic powers that delights in killing people. I have no idea if there’s more lore about zuvembies but I may investigate later.

What was interesting was the portrayal of African Americans in this story. Usually Howard’s stories have non-whites as borderline savages or openly savages. Even the other story of his I’ve read set in America in relatively recent times, Black Canaan, has ‘blacks’ as the villains – the chief villain being a voodoo priest intent on killing ‘whites’. It’s degrading stuff and I have to pull a lot of mental trickery on myself to read it.

But this story, while it still has a voodoo man who’s made a pact with a demonic snake spirit and a vengeful ‘mulatto’, displays none of the usual hatred or condescension. And the villain is from a white family known and reviled for its cruel treatment of African Americans even post slavery. I’m not saying it’s an accepting story, there are still clear racial divides, as there were in society at the time, but it’s certainly a step up from Black Canaan.

Anyway, that aside, it is a good horror story with a nice atmosphere of impending doom. Some extended dialogue with theorising about, and attempted rationalising of, events does break the mood however which is unfortunate.

And what about the pigeons? Sadly, they’re just window dressing.

Keep dreaming!

Le Fanu’s Madam Crowl’s Ghost – Initial Reaction

Full disclosure, this was the second time I read this story, but my memories of it were vague at best. I had an image of the diabolical ghost from the end of the story in my mind but I remember feeling rather nonplussed by the story as a whole.

So why read it a second time? I think because I felt nonplussed and that didn’t make sense to me. Le Fanu entered my consciousness when I read Carmilla while studying vampires in my Honours year and he blew me away. If you haven’t read Carmilla, do it, the prose is beautiful. I then read the next story in the anthology I was using, Schalken the Painter. For the life of me I can’t remember what happens but I know I enjoyed it immensely; I must reread it too.

It was probably a year or two after that that I read Madam Crowl’s Ghost and I was quite surprised to be so disappointed. Having forgotten the details I couldn’t remember why such a master of 19th century supernatural thrillers would disappoint me. So I reread it to see if it was as drab as I recalled. It wasn’t.

I think the problem I had was it’s written in first person, which I love if it’s done well, and in the dialect of the narrator, which makes sense but in this case I think it probably threw me. The narrator is an old woman relating events from the first time she worked as a servant and her language is of the English working class from a century and a half ago. This kind of language is not conducive to feats of ‘high’ prose. Combine that with the late reveal which seems low key in modern terms and I think that was why I failed to be impressed.

Reading it again I appreciate the skill Le Fanu displayed in using the language of this elderly maid to build the sense of mystery around Madam Crowl. The story shows her in glimpses and through gossip, before a late scene where she scares the daylights out of the narrator. All that before she’s died, so the ghost only comes in right at the end, more as a way to reveal the answer to the mystery of the woman than anything else. Le Fanu builds the mystery through intimation and subtle hints which leaves us needing answers to solve the disquiet building in our minds and the narrator’s as she remembers the events of her youth.

By modern standards the story is a bit too anticlimactic and is paced rather slowly, but in the end that’s neither here nor there. It’s a strong suspense story of its day and demonstrates Le Fanu’s writing powers could match the dialectical challenges. It’s also interesting in the manner of its telling.

Most first-person narrations are given by people who only recently experienced the events they’re describing, at least in the last few years. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say there’s no discernable age difference or at least that age has nothing to do with story. Sometimes it will be an adult referring to events in childhood but I can’t think of any examples of that predating Madam Crowl’s Ghost (not that I’m an expert so that could be total rubbish). Having the story of an old woman told through the eyes of another old woman who is remembering meeting the first woman as a young girl changes things slightly.

That she was young at the time, and a maid where the titular character is aristocracy, gives us the mode of the story – fleeting encounters, gossip and innuendo. We’re also given her perspective which cannot help but have a heightened sense of fear due to her inexperience and the new surroundings.

But Le Fanu doesn’t spoon-feed us her terror with a close report of events; rather he shows it to us through the memories of an old woman. This costs him a certain immediacy in the key scenes but their vividness is now coming to us from years hence. These events have marked this woman for life and remained with her as fresh as yesterday. Even with her decades of experience since then the events of that time have lingered in her mind as a terrible mystery. It’s a tricky line but Le Fanu walks it skilfully.

The dénouement does wrap things up rather too neatly and the suspense is lost in the last couple of pages. Instead it shifts to the scandalous truth behind the mysterious old woman – a common enough ending for the time but it’s hard to read its efficacy these days when we’re much harder to be shocked. And that is likely the biggest reason for me not liking the story initially. I guess I’ve encountered the type enough now to enjoy the build of the story and not worry too much about the ending.

Keep dreaming!

Author Profile - Clark Ashton Smith

Clark Ashton Smith came from a poor background and spent much of his early life trying to earn money for his family. But even while young he displayed a love of story and a passion for language. Some of his earliest works were written as a teenager and they were strongly influenced by the Arabian Tales, an influence that would linger.

He abandoned prose for some years and was a fairly successful poet. After his first published volume he was taken under the arm by George Sterling and mingled with fellow poets of the time including Ambrose Bierce.

Nowadays he’s remembered for his short fiction works which he wrote primarily for pulp magazines like Weird Tales. In fact, in terms of the ‘weird’ fiction of the pulp era he was one of the three heavyweights along with Lovecraft and Robert E Howard, and while those two may be better known these days I would argue Smith is the better writer of the group.

The ties between the three, while primarily through letters, were highly influential however as they borrowed names and ideas from each other frequently. So the building and weaving of certain famous or infamous mythos began. Smith set many tales in Hyboria which shared and helped build Howard’s Hyperborean setting where Kull, Conan and Red Sonja ran about; and he used names from Lovecraft’s Cthulu mythos thus building on their renown and our knowledge of them within that crazy mixed-up universe.

Smith’s stories I must admit are not strong in plot, some of them barely even have one. Take The Abomination of Yondo, it tells of a man exiled from a harsh country into a desert known to contain horrors. We learn a little of why he was exiled but not a great deal, otherwise he simply walks on, encounters one monstrosity, continues on then encounters something so utterly terrifying he flees back to face torture and execution to escape the mad fear. Not much of a plot, but as we read it we drink in the details of the desert and its horrors, we sense the dread and the unnatural atmosphere of the place.

And that’s the key to Smith’s fiction – atmosphere. He creates the world we are reading about so vividly it really is like visiting the places ourselves. His use of language is rich and exorbitant, you may need a dictionary at times I know I did, and he clear took great delight in playing with words to build up these fantastic vistas and horrific scenes of death and worse. Make no mistake, these stories can be highly macabre, some seem to exist for no other reason than creeping you out. In that regard he was something of a successor to Poe.

I could say lots more about him of course but the best way to experience his writing is for yourself and I highly, highly recommend you do.

Keep dreaming!

Random Thesis Musing No 1

In her essay, On Ghosts, Mary Shelley laments the way the world is changing to a more rational, more understood and more linear place. The way the sun is known to be a star filled with gas as opposed to a mysterious orb that might be the chariot of a god, for instance. In this she neatly summarises a general feeling within the Romantic movement and with the Gothics in particular – that the new ways following the various revolutions at the end of the 18th century were potentially robbing us of our sense of wonder; hence the romanticising of the past and the insistence (at times) in the existence of the supernatural.

As progress has not slowed since that time it is little wonder these feelings have lingered and the rebellious medievalist spirit of the Gothics has continued in many forms of storytelling as well. But while mad monks, ghosts, mouldering castles and star-crossed lovers gave escape from the modernising of the world, Shelly went further and commented on the very progress she lamented in her essay.
In Frankenstein she inverts the supernatural threat by having the devils and monsters made by humans overstepping their mortal bounds as opposed to things beyond our mortal ken. In so doing she of course established an archetype and moved us closer to a genre which would become science fiction. Taking the novel with On Ghosts and her other major work, The Last Man, however we see a different tradition arise.

Shelley gives us a world we think we understand but do not. Her works threaten us with destruction because of this assumed knowledge and the failure to understand the greater mystery.

Taking this view, a new tradition can be seen to have risen from Shelley, one of a shrinking, rationalised world left at the mercy of the forgotten things, or inversely, the tragic lingering of the old ways against the rise of the new. The first half of this is best represented in HP Lovecraft’s Cthulu and Dream Quest stories, while the latter is seen in Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga. More recently, Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods combine both sides of the tradition.

Initial Response to ETA Hoffmann's The Sandman

When Delibes' ballet Coppelia featured in ABC Classic FM's Classic 100 The Music of France it reminded me that I had written a response to Hoffmann's story, on which the ballet was based, so I thought I'd share it with you now. Warning - spoilers. You can find the story here.

Hoffmann sets up the situation and the theme of the story straightaway through three letters. The first tells us of the terrible events in Nathanael’s childhood and the possible reappearance of the villain of those events in his life. The second is the rational explanation of Clara dismissing the whole Nathanael’s fears to his own mind and in the third he accepts them.

The rest of the story revolves around, to a large degree, the irrational fears he has and the rational explanations that may dispel them – if they are irrational. We read how his conviction in the mystical is so fired up, and Clara’s adamant rationality is so fixed, that he almost comes to blows with her brother. This ends with another Clara-inspired revelation that he’s just being silly.

He continues the debate in his own head when confronted with the seeming double of the old villain from his childhood. Rationality seems to win out until Nathanael looks through a ‘perspective’ at the figure of Olimpia whom he becomes obsessed with – and who appears to steal his eyes.

This irrational period during which he forgets his former life and woos Olimpia, who says nothing in return but stares at him always, is unlike his morbid fears and bears none of the similarities to the ‘dark presence’. He is bewitched.
Olimpia, to all eyes but his, is ‘too perfect’ and unnaturally stiff in her movements. Having lost his ‘perspective’ to her Nathanael only sees her as true perfection. When going to propose to her she is revealed as an automaton; the eyes of which were stolen from Nathanael by Coppola. Coppola – speaking with the voice of Coppelius, the childhood villain – steals Olimpia but throws Nathanael’s eyes back into him. After temporary madness Nathanael is once again ‘rational’ until he sees Clara through the ‘perspective’ and believes her to be an automaton too and goes mad. Coppelius watches on, possibly stealing the eyes back.

PERSPECTIVE
To me this story is about perspective. Nathanael’s perspective, for the most, is affected by the events of his childhood. He is told the story of the sandman, who steals children’s eyes – so their sight, their view on the world. When he spies his father with Coppelius they seems to be in some sort of alchemical experiment, possibly creating homunculi – all that’s needed are eyes.

Clara’s perspective is steadfast in its rationality. She suffers only a minor wavering in the description of the events but quickly returns to her disbelief in the mystical as an outside force. Her eyes are described in glowing terms – like a lake even. Her perspective then is sharp and unchanging.

Thirdly, we have Olimpia, whose eyes seem to ‘lack vision’ but are not blind. She is simply without a perspective; she sees but does not comprehend. Those eyes however draw Nathanael in through the glass ‘perspective’ of Coppola, and cause him to lose all perspective and see only her.

Only after this happens will her creator allow the public to see her. After Coppola/Coppelius steals her body, Nathanael gets his eyes returned. The rush of perspective drives him seemingly mad – but he has just realised he’s been tricked into an obsession with a ‘doll’ so his madness is not singularly surprising.

Clara’s clear, clean perspective restores his sanity, so he says. Seeing her through Coppola’s glass perspective however, he again loses his sanity and Coppelius seems to claim his ‘foine eyes’ once more. So Nathanael’s perspective is again stolen, he goes mad and dies. Coppelius disappears. Did he exist outside the mind of Nathanael? That remains unclear. He may have, Nathanael did have the glass perspective, or Clara may have been right and Coppola was a normal man Nathanael’s perspective turned into a childhood nightmare made flesh. Hoffman doesn’t say. It’s a matter of our own perspective.

If there were any moral behind this tale it would be to keep your clarity and not allow outside forces to alter your perception of the world. Clara remains true to her world view and ends up happily. Nathanael’s view changes with the wind and he dies violently.

September Reading

Thought I might do a quick review of what I've been reading this month - if for no other reason than keeping it clear in my own head. I already mentioned the Elric novels so that was a big portion of it.

The other big one was Robert Chamber's The King in Yellow. I got this from the University of Adelaide ebook site as it was mentioned in terms of Weird fiction and having influenced HP Lovecraft. It was weird all right but not always in the sense of the supernatural genre.

It's a collection of short stories, the first four of which make reference to a fictional play, the eponymous King in Yellow. This play is so artistically wrought that anyone who reads it, or at least the second act, is mentally disturbed by it or downright insane. This concept Lovecraft liked and he referenced the play or the places mentioned in it a few times. He also liked some of Chamber's style at times.

The rest of the stories in the book, which make up the other two-thirds or so, have nothing to do with The King in Yellow or Weird fiction whatsoever. They are predominantly romances about naive American art students in Paris. One of them, The Street of the Four Winds, was absolutely brilliant though. It wasn't about a student but was set in Paris. It's a simple tale of a man who is kind to a stray cat and tells him something of his history. The coincidence at the story's heart will break the reader's own, at least it did mine.

I confess the concept of a play so powerful it affects people's psyches to the point of madness did rather rub the bells of synchronicity. I've been thinking about Artaud's Alchemical Theatre and the role of theatre to create a reality beyond our own mundane existence. The 'liminal' space and the greater truths of myth and story than everyday banality. Anyway, somewhere in that idea is my Masters thesis, one day.

The other things I've read, in full, are W W Jacob's The Monkey's Paw and some Lovecraft shorts. The former is a classic of the Weird too, and I believe Lovecraft thought it such as well. It works on the premise of less is more, terror over horror, suggestion over detail. And it works well. Reminiscent of a Buffy episode too, I suspect it was involved somewhere.

The Lovecraft were Pickman's Model and The Shadow Out of Time. The latter is one of his slightly longer works, a whole 76 pages in eight chapters, and is about a man possessed by a mind of a Great One from several epochs before humans evolved and consequently possessed the body of the Great One for a few years. Like In the Mountains of Madness, his longest work I think, it's less gripping than some of his shorter pieces but the atmosphere of dread slowly works a pervasive spell over you and the history of the world and the Great Ones and Elder Gods etc is quite fascinating.

Pickman's story has a more immediate effect, following in the Poe mode of first person 'I know this is unbelievable but it's what happened okay'. The plot itself is quite see-through these days but the descriptions and atmosphere are classic Lovecraft who truly knew the language of nightmare.

Keep dreaming - but not about Great Ones I hope.