Dawn of the Digital Warnings

From 1984. Click for a better jpeg.

Do you remember those glorious early days of digital recording, when BIS albums would feature hot red WARNING labels on the front, and, in the back, a long list of hideous medical disasters that could result from unprotected playback? I remember that list:

-- Brain implosion

-- Torrents of blood gushing from ear canals

-- Bursting eyeballs

-- Teeth exploding from the upper jaw and embedding themselves in walls, pets, or other people

-- Disruptions of the space-time continuum and the entry into this world of raging undead abomination monstrosities.

Nonsense, most of it. No, my brain hardly ever imploded, and even if I ruined a few pairs of headphones with gore spills, had to pry a few molars out of brickwork, and fought off, with a woodshed axe, weirdly shrieking non-human intruders, you never heard me complain -- because you never heard me. The music drowned out everything.

Hitchcock faces THE BIRDS

Click for a better jpeg.

THE BIRDS. A few observations....

-- I have never been a fan of Hitchcock. I see him as a technician who sometimes focused on superb set-pieces at the expense of the film as a whole (FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT), or as a director who often shied away from the implications of his films and sabotaged their endings (VERTIGO). Something must have changed by the 1960s; I consider PSYCHO and THE BIRDS easily the best of his films, and ones that embrace their implications with courage.

-- THE BIRDS also vindicates the slow and methodical approach of Hitchcock's technique. By the time of the first bird attack at 25 minutes into the film, we have a good preliminary sense of the characters, of their circumstances, of the setting and its layout, of how one place connects (by road or by sea) to another. As the escalation occurs, the film can speed up transitions without our losing any sense of where we stand.

-- Jessica Tandy had the perfect eyes for a horror film. Alert, searching faces and skies, always glistening with anxiety to the point of near panic, they tell us almost everything we need to know about her character. I wish the horror field had recognized this quality and used her more often.

What Do I Want?

As I sit here to stare at the blank page and to worry about the upcoming book, I ask myself: What do I want?

What do I really want?

I want to show different ways to write horror fiction. These ways are not better than approaches used by other people, and -- I hope! -- not worse, but they are my ways, and they do the work I ask of them.

Along with methods, I want to show an imagery that is mine, based on dreams, on hillside wanderings near midnight, on things half-seen beyond the pines and aspens but felt right down the spinal chord. I trust my obsessions, even as they force me to question my competence in describing them.

I want to satisfy readers impatient with easy tricks and cliched concepts, readers with no tolerance for show-offs, bores, and fakes. Readers who toss books aside in disgust at such things are the people I respect as my friends and allies.

Above all, I want to be known as a writer who did his best even if the odds were against him, even if he had no patience for the postmodern smog or the zeitgeist of corporate consumerist fairy tales that guarantee public acceptance. I want to make other people with similar allergies and doubts feel less odd, less isolated, less alone. You are not the only ones who feel this way.

De Heredia versus Dr. Seuss

Click for a better jpeg, but don't expect a better parody.

"Quelle est l'ombre qui rend plus sombre encor mon antre?"
-- From LES TROPHEÉS, 1893.

As much as I respect the sonnets of José-Maria de Heredia, I do find some of his lines (unintentionally?) funny. That question from "Sphinx" would fit right into a translated book by Dr. Seuss.

I can admire his economy of means, his control of language, his refusal to pad the sonnets with images or metaphors that do not contribute to his planned effect, but at the same time, I don't sense any person behind the words, and I feel as if his focus on classical topics were an evasion of modern life.

In contrast, when Leconte de Lisle writes about distant cultures and distant places, I do get a sense of who he is, and this impression is reinforced whenever he denounces the modernity of his time, or stares into the future and sees a world without human beings. For all of the distance and objectivity that he shows in his work, Leconte de Lisle is there in his poems, while de Heredia seems absent in the sonnets

Am I being unfair? Am I missing a nuance of personality in the work? Perhaps I am... but I can't shake this feeling of concealment, of refusal to stand forward and to be himself.

Never Put Yourself Down

A friend of mine once told me, "Mark, you should never put yourself down, because there is a long line of people ready and waiting to do it for you."

If There is Any Reward at all to Writing....

For me, there is no challenge to understanding why a story falls apart; the mystery is to understand how a story moves beyond competence (in itself, easy to explain by technical terms) into the mysterious realms of truth and beauty that mean so much to the individual reader.

Anyone can learn to write with an acceptable degree of clarity, as long as that person understands the value of clarity. A few other people can learn the tricks of construction, pacing, euphony, tonal consistency, economy of means, all of the methods that bring fire to clarity, that make a story worth reading to the final page. Again, these techniques can be recognized, studied, and learned, but only if a writer wants to learn. Many, it seems, have no desire to gain this competence.

Beyond competence lies the realm of personal resonance, and writers have no control over their choice of readers. Even the best writers and the most attentive, thoughtful readers can fail to connect, because they simply do not share the same emotional tonality, because their sensibilities are not quite aligned, because they have lived utterly different lives with different experiences.

Given the troubled circumstances, what can competent writers do?

They can study themselves, know themselves. They can remain faithful to their memories, their moods, their tastes, obsessions, and outlooks. They can speak to themselves while writing as clearly and as engagingly as they can for strangers. They can pull up dreams and threads of their lives, while adding a narrative context that might help readers to see and think and feel in similar ways.

The odds are against them. Sometimes very good writers can fail to gain readers, and this might sour their efforts; it might even compel them to stop writing. But even as they strive and fail, writers can meet the challenge of being themselves. If there is any reward at all to writing, it might be this.

Lessons From Garbage: Pour It On, La Spina!

Click for a better jpeg.
Illustration by Boris Dolgov, who deserved a better story.

Things I have learned by reading garbage in WEIRD TALES, Lesson Three.

Never hunt for the single right verb or noun. Instead, bloat entire paragraphs with fumbling abstractions and needless qualifications:

"Being older than either of my two guests, I had, possibly, learned to be diplomatic; sufficiently so, at least, not to have thrust myself unnecessarily into a situation à deux where my tactful absence would have been better appreciated than my presence. I had seen nothing, after all, but Peter's restraining hand on Hank's restive shoulder, and the disappearing swirl of a girl's abbreviated skirts and long cloak into a part of the woods where the low undergrowth was not yet entirely denuded of foliage. All I had heard had been Hank's exclamation, coming almost directly upon the girl's scream. Peter must have been quick in his reaction.

"'Take your hand off me, you damned young cub!' had shouted Hank, with uncontrolled passion for which I did not at the moment entirely blame him. No man relishes the admonishing restraint of a youngster, in front of a woman particularly, no matter how much he may have deserved it."

You can darken this narrative smog by avoiding the simple past tense or even useful infinitives, and by gumming up the prose with present participles:

"We three men were hugging the open fire closely. The raw chill of that November night had closed in around us and the blazing logs yielded grateful warmth.

"Peter Murray was leaning forward in his chair, looking absent-mindedly into the leaping flames that sent flickering shadows to dancing on the walls behind us. Hank Walters was staring at Peter and I was watching both my guests with curious speculation that had risen in me since that afternoon’s encounter."

Never use a clear, simple verb like "to say," when you can type anything else along with an adverb:

"'She's done it! I knew she would!' cried out Peter frantically, and that gripping hand of his began to draw me forward through the woods recklessly."

. . .

"'Poppycock!' I retorted tartly."

. . .

"'You know perfectly well he didn't mean it,' I objected lamely."

Lamely, yes, but remember -- if one adverb is good, then two or even more can be just dandy:

"That reddish luminosity was bobbing unevenly up and down, as if it came from a lamp borne upon the head of a person walking rapidly, swimmingly, across uneven ground."

Did you notice that awkward repetition, that almost-end-rhyme? Stylistic gold!

Above all, avoid any straightforward account of a story's narrative. Complicate, complexify, discombobulate:

"Knowing Hank's proclivities, I could reconstruct the scene fairly well. He must have come upon the girl before she realized his proximity, and mischievously pulled off her pointed cap with the tassel that hung to her shoulder, confidently relying upon his vaunted masculine charm to smooth over the situation if it should unexpectedly tend toward the unpleasant.

"The girl had sprung to her feet, snatched for her cap, which Hank had thrust tormentingly behind him. Whereupon she had let out that eldritch scream. And the scream brought Knight-Errant Peter tearing out of the woods behind them, to remonstrate with Hank, who had naturally resented the interference. The girl had taken advantage of Hank’s momentary unguardedness to snatch, vainly, for her pointed cap, then had fled incontinently without it.

"With dismayed astonishment I had heard her scream, for it was not a scream of surprise; it was a cry of pure anger, of such depth and intensity that it started shivers running up and down my backbone. It was almost un-human in its expression of thwarted fury; arousing in me a powerful curiosity to see this girl who was so capable of such a strength of emotion. At the same time, I felt a dread of seeing her, as if she might prove to be more than my old eyes would care to take in."

Be your eyes old or be they young, may they soak up our lesson of WEIRD TALES garbage to the dregs.

-- Quotations from
"Death Has Red Hair," by Greye La Spina.
WEIRD TALES, September 1942.

Combined and Reduced Characters in "The Cat Jumps"

Click for a better jpeg.

Those of you who read my complaint about an August Derleth story crowded by too many characters most likely thought for a moment, and then said to yourselves, "Wait a minute, Dillon, what the hell are you talking about? What about Elizabeth Bowen? What about 'The Cat Jumps'?"

I agree with you! What about "The Cat Jumps?" Eight pages long, with at least thirteen characters (a few merely mentioned, but most of them active on the page), it somehow lets me process all of its people, and it keeps their story-functions clear.

Why does Bowen succeed where August Derleth fails?

In the opening pages, Bowen sets up two couples (the Bentleys, the Wrights), and establishes them immediately as two groups in opposition; in effect, she reduces four people into a clearly-divided pair, and makes their difference a central point of the story.

On page three, the Wrights welcome several guests. Here also, Bowen sets up two groups in opposition: Muriel (nervous, imaginative, and by the standards of everyone else, morbid), and the rest, who form a single unit of rational intellectuals not at all prey to the fears of Muriel.

(You could take this further, and say that we have only three groups to keep in mind: Muriel, the Bentleys, and everyone else who is unafraid and unconcerned.)

What we have, then, are thirteen people, but reduced into clear groups with clear differences between them, so that the reader has no need to stop and think about who is related to whom, or how so-and-so must not be confused with someone else. At the same time, the opposition of these groups, and their differing mental energies, turn the wheels of the plot.

The lesson, here, is that a crowded mess in one story can become a driving force in a second.

This, too: Almost any potential downfall in a story can be avoided or even justified by a writer's intentions and a writer's craft. Never underestimate the healing magic of skill.

Lessons From Garbage: Combine and Reduce the Characters

Click for a better jpeg.
Henry? Which one was Henry, again?

Things I have learned by reading garbage in WEIRD TALES, Lesson One.

Every character mentioned in a short story asks the reader to make a mental checklist of who is who, of who is related to whom, of who is doing what. This mental dogwork tugs the reader's attention away from details that might be more essential to the story; it also turns reading into a school assignment.

Combine. Condense. In a story five pages long, five characters could become three, or two. Even a longer short story can gain by having its characters reduced only to those needed for conflict.

Any reader willing to pick up a story deserves consideration. Be courteous and welcoming. Do not be August Derleth.

Roy Fuller, THE SECOND CURTAIN

Roy Fuller, THE SECOND CURTAIN, 1953, soon to be reprinted by Valancourt Books.

A few stray thoughts....

Every now and then, with reluctance, I begin to read certain novels if they are well under 200 pages long. Most I never finish, but Roy Fuller's Graham-Greenesque thriller kept me going to the end. How?

Fuller has never been one of my favourite poets. His war-time poems hold my interest by dealing with his own feelings and impressions; those written after the war seem less personal, and more preoccupied with other poets, other books.

THE SECOND CURTAIN is very much a book about a bookish life, but one that takes a hard look at its novelist hero as it dismantles him. The effect is both cruel and honest: this man, who fancies himself smarter and more insightful than most people, finds himself swamped and over his head in a crime that expands in both complexity and threat, and what is more, a crime that he has no competence to solve. Fuller shows the price paid for a life of emotional detachment and full devotion to books, art, and music at the expense of personal growth: a price too severe, a life too shallow.

The book moves rapidly, with a genuine, "pull the carpet from beneath your feet" surprise three-quarters through, an impressively-described pursuit through a crowded football stadium, a looming sense of risk. As a thriller, it functions through pacing and plot, and as a literary novel, dissects its protagonist and his delusions without mercy.

Still, from start to finish, what kept me reading was the solid British competence of the prose. Having squirmed and scowled through too many badly-written blobs, pulp and modern, I was held by Fuller's confident refusal to be "poetic" or convoluted, to sacrifice economy and clarity to market demands for bloated illiteracy. A modern writer, Stephen King or even worse, would have pumped this book into a 972-page mound of toxic waste, and made it dull, dull, dull. Fuller, to his credit and to my relief, wrote as much as the book needed, but nothing more.

As for the book's ending, I feel conflicted. The final pages are honest, which makes them perhaps grimmer than most readers would prefer. Yet as I lay in bed afterwards and thought about this ending, I realized that, from a certain perspective, it might actually seem hopeful. For the protagonist of THE SECOND CURTAIN, as for that man in a song by the Rolling Stones --

"You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, well, you just might find
You get what you need."

This, too, can bring a hint of necessary change.

Protonicus Moronicus

From the diary: Tuesday, August 2, 2019.

Last night, exhausted after a five-hour bike ride in this midnight heat, I took a shower, went to bed, and dreamt immediately that I was reading a play attributed to Shakespeare, called (and I kid you not):

PROTONICUS MORONICUS.

And now, three years later, for no good reason --

THE SPASTICALLY TRAGICAL HISTORY OF PROTONICUS MORONICUS.

PRINCE AVOCADO:
How fragrant are the roses of our state,
How dignified the columns and the laws;
Yet much, I fear, is undermined by day
And toppled in the dusk.

GRISTLE:
Beware, my prince!
These nagging undercurrents are the work
Of but one man, a blot upon the realm.

PRINCE AVOCADO:
Moronicus! Indeed, a warning cry:
For as the light of intellect will scatter
The scuttling roaches of the cellar crowd,
So too the pratings of an errant fool,
The bantam dance of squat, priapic bastards,
The twirlings of acephalic imposters,
Shall gad the wary mob to celebration.

GRISTLE:
Indeed, my prince. The blatherings of one
Incite the emulations of the many.

PRINCE AVOCADO:
Contagious are the dull, and dullest dire
Is he, Protonicus Moronicus!
Bring here this armpit of the nation state!

GRISTLE:
Bring forth Protonicus!

PROTONICUS MORONICUS:
Doy doy, doy doy!

PRINCE AVOCADO:
And thus I hear a simpletonic twang,
A string untuned upon a pea-brain's lute,
A siren call that turns our noble crowd
Into a hive of pixilated thick-ohs.

GRISTLE:
See how the common people prance and drool!

PRINCE AVOCADO:
Backbones of our grandeur! Citizens!
What would you have as pilots to your barque:
The pensive iambs of a bardic wit,
The dithyrambs cathartic of the great?
Or would you rather shuffle to a thud
Pounded by a pustule-minded clod?

CITIZENS:
Protonicus Moronicus! We want him!

PRINCE AVOCADO:
Oh fuck it all, this era falls apart!
The pratings of a dope are now anthemic,
High bugle tones for sheep and sheepish lice.

GRISTLE:
Hasten, Prince, an exit!

PROTONICUS MORONICUS:
Doy doy doy!

Howard Wandrei, "The Other"

Click for a better jpeg.

Howard Wandrei, "The Other."
ASTOUNDING STORIES, December 1934.

Although I've never had respect for Howard Wandrei (neither as artist nor as writer), I keep returning to this one short story.

The style is overblown, the story overlong, the characters not so much human as pulpoid:

"He jabbed the bell. He gave the knocker a boost for good measure and was pretty cocky about it. Then he yawned and blinked his eyes dopily, for it was morning, and Basil Sash's nights generally reeled....

[...]

"Then the door banged in again just as quickly as it had shut. A hand shot out, grasped him fiercely by the throat, yanked him inside.

"He swung his feet helplessly in the air. He plucked at an enormous hand which he found collaring his throat more and more tightly. Ingvaldssen had him off the floor and pinned to the door like one of his damned trophies. Sash's eyes bulged and darkened with blood.

"All at once the elephantine Ingvaldssen changed his mind. He gave the reporter a violent shake that came near to disarticulating the vertebrae and dropped him.

"'For a minute,' Sash choked out, 'I thought you were going to throttle me. Now, was that nice?'"

By this point, "The Other" has lurched beyond bad. I could forgive any reader for tossing the story aside and for moving on to something more believable.

Yet for all of its flaws, "The Other" develops into something interesting. Unlike so many pulp stories from the period that shared a Lovecraftian cosiness and offered a last minute reprieve to the human species, "The Other" leaps over the cliff. With a few well-chosen details, it implies that something terrible is free at last and will never be stopped.

I could never recommend so flawed a story to readers, but to writers, I would -- if only to give them a chance to see, for their own purposes and by their own standards, what does not work, and what does.

Abortion Rights

I believe that women have an inherent right to control their own bodies, and, in consequence, their own reproduction. I support their unrestricted access to contraception in all forms, and this includes abortion.

But something else comes into play, here:

As a heterosexual man, I support the readiness and reliability of contraception, which also helps to maintain my control over my own life. Even if I felt, somehow, perhaps in some hellish parallel universe, that women had no right to secure their own freedom, I would certainly want to ensure mine.

For this reason, I can't understand why any man would want to limit the reproductive freedoms of a woman. Does every man want to be a father, every time? Pardon my skepticism.

Yes, abortion is a woman's right, but the right to control reproduction belongs to all of us. People who restrict abortion are the enemies not only of women, but of men.

Is It Procrastination, Or Merely Good Sense?

Sometimes, what might seem at first like procrastination in setting to work on a story is actually a recognized fault in the planning stage: you skipped over a dead spot in the outline, your plot has a hole, your character assumptions are missing the emotional conflicts that can bring people to life, your story structure is less a firm skeleton than a seeping blob.

At times like this, it can be too easy to plow ahead and hope for the story to work despite its deformities, but I've learned to trust my hunches. If the outline stinks like a semi-liquescent groundhog, how likely is the finished work to smell as good as pecan pie?

Horror: A Choice Between Masks and Monsters

"Not many people are comfortable with horror -- I'm certainly not. But it does allow me to play with metaphors and imagery that would otherwise be too disturbing or too bleak for me to confront. It's like the difference between a monster and a monster mask: I can at least recognize a mask when I see one, but monsters can be hard to know."

-- From an email that I sent on Tuesday, May 12, 2015 to my sister, who does not read horror.

The Rocking Horse Winner (1949)

Click for a better jpeg.

Three superb horror films of the 1940s have experienced separate fates. DEAD OF NIGHT (1945) seems to have been recognized immediately as a great achievement. THE QUEEN OF SPADES (1949) developed its reputation over decades; it is now highly-regarded by many viewers and critics, but still not as well-known as it deserves to be. THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER (1949) remains obscure, rarely seen, rarely praised.

The reasons for this obscurity are themselves obscure. I would call THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER as frightening and as beautifully crafted as DEAD OF NIGHT or THE QUEEN OF SPADES. From the cinematography of Desmond Dickinson to the music of William Alwyn, from the hideous eyes of the horse itself to a production design that turns an ordinary middle-class home into a labyrinth of disconnected stairways and narrow corridors, from the often painfully intense performances to the well-paced and escalating direction, THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER provides everything a horror film should. It even anticipates a later film, REPULSION, in its use of expanding sets to imply a mental breakdown. Why, then, despite its obvious merits, has it never been popular?

The trouble, I think, has nothing to do with the film, but might perhaps be caused by the expectations of horror film viewers.

Many people see horror as a genre, and they bring to it the expectations of genre. Yet horror is actually a mood, and can be conjured up with an endless variety of plots, characters, metaphors, images, and settings, too many to be limited by the constraints of any genre. At the same time, many viewers prefer horror as escapism, as a way to substitute imaginary troubles for the complications of everyday life.

One expectation that people often bring to horror is a touch of the supernatural. Both DEAD OF NIGHT and THE QUEEN OF SPADES offer hints of the supernatural right from their opening sequences, and maintain these touches from beginning to end. In contrast, the supernatural elements of THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER gleam out later in the film, as a reflection of everyday troubles in an ordinary family, and these elements remain muted until the climax. The film offers tensions beautifully developed and sustained, but these are the tensions of life as we know it, not of life as we fear it might be just beyond human perception. The supernatural elements are integrated fully into the plot, and they bring a nightmarish power to the climax, but the tragedy at work, here, is a human tragedy, caused by human desires and human misperceptions.

This emphasis on tragedy and grief takes THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER far from any hint of escapism. At the end of the film, there is no hope for any return to normalcy, no suggestion that the story's evils can be repaired. What is done is done, and it hurts. This puts the film in a category similar to the bleak psychological dramas of Bergman, dramas that I consider the most harrowing horror films ever made, but films unlikely to win the praise of many horror viewers.

It saddens me. A superb horror film deserves a wide audience, yet sometimes, the viewers most likely to embrace a film of that type stay away. All I can do is to encourage as many people as possible to see THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER and to reach their own conclusions.

Every Day, I Remind Myself

Every day, I remind myself that the world is full of honest, compassionate, thoughtful, and courageous people who are completely ignored and have no authority whatsoever.

Robert E. Howard, "Red Nails"

Click for a better jpeg.

Because writers have intentions of their own, a reader should respond to any story as it reveals itself on the page, and not as it could have developed in the reader's imagination.

With all of this in mind, I consider my response to Robert E. Howard's Conan story, "Red Nails," unfair. Still, the conviction of my response forces me to accept it with obvious reservations.

To the adventure modes of Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Howard brought a distinctive touch of supernatural horror. This made his work stand out, but in various degrees of intensity. Stories like "The Shadow Kingdom" and "Worms of the Earth" emphasize their moods of dread and strangeness, while other stories focus more on physical action. For the most part, Howard's Conan stories fit the second pattern.

In that sense, I feel that "Red Nails" became a lost opportunity. The story develops into a tale of action and physical conflict like many other Conan stories, but it begins as a tale of potential horror.

The primary source of this mood comes from the setting, an apparently-deserted city that is in fact one vast building with cavernous hallways and balustrades in perpetual twilight, where dying factions who have never set foot outside ambush and torture each other in the darkness.

As a writer, Howard lacked the visual precision of Clark Ashton Smith, but like Smith, he understood the value of setting as a narrative engine. His vast building offers little in the way of any physical presence, but it does provide expressionistic hints of jade green, blood red, and cat's-eye gleams from supernatural gems. As Conan wanders through each dim hallway, he drags the reader along to find what he finds; this propels the story with a sense of immersion despite the absence of detail.

For me, this immersion works best early in "Red Nails," when Conan has no idea of where he is and of what exactly he is witnessing. He uncovers hints of a twilit war fought by crazed people, and the result is a mood of morbid strangeness that I wish Howard had maintained right to the end. Instead, Howard explains everything from top to bottom: who these people are, why they fight, how they ended up in this Gothic trap. To his credit, Howard's exposition never slows the narrative drive, but it does reduce an eerie sense of mystery into yet another typical Conan tale.

Many readers consider this a good Conan adventure, and as a tale of pulp swordplay and treachery, it does the job. Yet I wish that Howard had pursued his initial hints of that twilit building and its incomprehensible inhabitants. He had a setting of eerie potential that he turned into something ordinary, and I suspect that he felt the loss, because while the story goes on, he pulled more and more supernatural elements out of his hat in a patchwork effort to top himself. None of these escalations was necessary. What he had needed was right there, on the page, right from the start.

Writers have their own goals; as a reader, I should accept these, but every now and then, I feel as if other directions would have led to more striking outcomes. Like the feuding clans of "Red Nails," Howard the writer of horror clashed with Howard the writer of Conan, and in this battle, Conan won.

Robert E. Howard, "The Shadow Kingdom"

Click for a better jpeg.

From 1929, "The Shadow Kingdom" displays Robert E. Howard at his worst and best. The worst is clear on the page; the best remains harder to pin down.

As a writer for WEIRD TALES, Howard lacked the verbal precision and sensory immersion of Clark Ashton Smith, the grotesquely metaphysical imagination of C. L. Moore. What he did offer was a narrative drive that moved rapidly from one scene to the next, and the intensity of a specific emotional tone: the conviction of a world endlessly dangerous, yet one that could be fought. Howard wrote for an adolescent sensibility, which limited the range of his techniques and the scope of his feelings, but within these limitations, he was king.

As often happens with kings, Howard's charm tends to thrive in recollection, but it crumbles while the king scowls back at us. Once the pages have been closed, the stories become dreams recalled in a reader's mind, but the process of absorbing Howard's prose can drive attentive readers out of their minds.

Howard understood the demands of adventure, he understood the thrill of a rapid pace, but did he understand the needs of a human ear? Perhaps he never heard his prose above the clacking of the typewriter.

He let assonance bloat beyond control:

"The color and the gayety of the day had given away to the eery stillness of night."

- - - - -

"And so in a brooding mood Kull came to the palace, where his bodyguard, men of the Red Slayers, came to take the rein of the great stallion and escort Kull to his rest."

- - - - -

"'Strike at the skull if at all,' said Brule. 'Eighteen wait without the door and perhaps a score more in the corridors."

He cluttered his prose with end rhymes:

"They eyed each other silently, their mutual tribal enmity seething beneath their cloak of formality."

- - - - -

"'Tush. Be seated. Look about you. The gardens are deserted, the seats empty, save for ourselves. You fear not me?'

"Kull sank back, gazing about him warily."

- - - - -

"The windows opened upon the great inner gardens of the royal palace, and the breezes of the night, bearing the scents of spice trees, blew the filmy curtains about. The king looked out."

- - - - -

"'Did not Ka-nu bid you follow me in all things?' asked the Pict irritably, his eyes flashing momentarily."

- - - - -

"'Aye. Night and day you are watched, king, by many eyes.'"

- - - - -

"'Aye!' came Brule's scarcely audible reply; there was a strange expression in the Pict's scintillant eyes."

Bloated assonance and end-rhymes are the sickness of an early draft; most writers hear these flaws in revision and cut them out. Howard, I suspect, either failed to hear or failed to revise.

These are the limitations of Howard, but many people clench their noses, turn off their hearing, pretend to be blind, and read on. What keeps them reading?

The rapid pace is an obvious clue, but Howard's most reliable secret is a knack for making scenes vivid not to eyes, nor to ears, but to a specific emotional receptor that tingles at the touch of uneasiness and defiance:

"Valusia -- land of dreams and nightmares -- a kingdom of the shadows, ruled by phantoms who glided back and forth behind the painted curtains, mocking the futile king who sat upon the throne -- himself a shadow. [...]

"He was king of Valusia -- a fading, degenerate Valusia, a Valusia living mostly in dreams of bygone glory, but still a mighty land and the greatest of the Seven Empires. Valusia -- Land of Dreams, the tribesmen named it, and sometimes it seemed to Kull that he moved in a dream. Strange to him were the intrigues of court and palace, army and people. All was like a masquerade, where men and women hid their real thoughts with a smooth mask [...] And now a strange feeling of dim unrest, of unreality, stole over him as of late it had been doing. Who was he, a straightforward man of the seas and the mountain, to rule a race strangely and terribly wise with the mysticisms of antiquity? An ancient race --

"'I am Kull!' said he, flinging back his head as a lion flings back his mane. 'I am Kull!'

"His falcon gaze swept the ancient hall. His self-confidence flowed back…. And in a dim nook of the hall a tapestry moved -- slightly."

Even as the combination of anxiety and defiance can limit the emotional range of a narrative, it can supercharge with pulp intensity the tone that remains:

"'The night can hear,' answered Ka-nu obliquely. 'There are worlds within worlds. But you may trust me and you may trust Brule, the Spear-slayer. Look!' He drew from his robes a bracelet of gold representing a winged dragon coiled thrice, with three horns of ruby on the head.

"'Examine it closely. Brule will wear it on his arm when he comes to you tomorrow night so that you may know him. Trust Brule as you trust yourself, and do what he tells you to. And in proof of trust, look ye!'

"And with the speed of a striking hawk, the ancient snatched something from his robes, something that flung a weird green light over them, and which he replaced in an instant.

"'The stolen gem!' exclaimed Kull recoiling. 'The green jewel from the Temple of the Serpent! Valka! You! And why do you show it to me?'

"'To save your life. To prove my trust. If I betray your trust, deal with me likewise. You hold my life in your hand. Now I could not be false to you if I would, for a word from you would be my doom.'"

A story like "The Shadow Kingdom" represents an acquired taste, and like many such things, must work a spell on young readers or never take hold at all. I was caught before my 'teen years; I can understand the power of a narrow scope, I can even respect it, but as an adult reader, I clutch my ears at the scraping of this gawdawful prose.

Ambrose Bierce on Critics With Narrow Minds

Have you noticed that in many current reviews, anything at all close to horror is linked with King, Lovecraft, or Ligotti, no matter how little the work in question resembles theirs? Have you noticed that reviewers never compare new writers to Bernard Capes, or to L. A. Lewis, or to Ralph Adams Cram, not even when such a comparison would actually make sense? All too often, people who write about stories have a limited grasp of how wide the field has been, and so they pull out the first names -- the only names? -- that come to their minds.

This is nothing new; Ambrose Bierce had quite a bit to say about the failure of certain critics and reviewers to understand the width and depth of any field:

"Until Gabriel, with one foot upon the sea and the other upon the neck of the last living critic, shall swear that the time for doing this thing is up, every writer of stories a little out of the common must suffer the same sickening indignity. To the ordinary microcephalous bibliopomps -- the book-butchers of the newspapers -- criticism is merely a process of marking upon the supposed stature of an old writer the supposed stature of a new, without ever having taken the trouble to measure that of the old; they accept hearsay evidence for that. Does one write 'gruesome stories'? -- they invoke Poe; essays? -- they out with their Addison; satirical verse? -- they have at him with Pope -- and so on, through the entire category of literary forms. Each has its dominant great name, learned usually in the district school, easily carried in memory and obedient to the call of need. And because these strabismic ataxiates, who fondly fancy themselves shepherding auctorial flocks upon the slopes of Parnassus, are unable to write of one writer without thinking of another, they naturally assume that the writer of whom they write is affected with the same disability and has always in mind as a model the standard name dominating his chosen field -- the impeccant hegemon of the province."

-- Ambrose Bierce, "On Literary Criticism."
From THE COLLECTED WORKS OF AMBROSE BIERCE, VOLUME 10.
The Neale Publishing Company, 1911.

William Wordsworth: No Motion Has She Now, No Force

Wordsworth? Words words. Too many words, at too great a length.

Sometimes, though, he could hit the target with one shot.

A SLUMBER DID MY SPIRIT SEAL,
by William Wordsworth.

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

From
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, SELECTED POETRY.
The Modern Library, New York, 1950.

Emily Dickinson: That Long Shadow

Because I am not religious, I feel nothing when I read the many poems by Emily Dickinson that convey pious thoughts in conventional terms. What force me to sit up and take notice are the poems that evoke, in her own way, the unsettling mental states that precede religion....

[764]
by Emily Dickinson.

Presentiment -- is that long Shadow -- on the Lawn --
Indicative that Suns go down --
The Notice to the startled Grass
That Darkness -- is about to pass --

c. 1863

From
THE COMPLETE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, edited by Thomas H. Johnson.
Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1960.

Things Neglected, Never Seen

Symphonies that turn to acid yellow in crumbling boxes, paintings that fade in attic piles, sculptures that bulge and lose their shapes under centuries of lichen -- all of these hidden things are triumphs against the indifference of human perception and the blindness of universal entropy. Despite the odds, they were created; despite the silence, they sang; despite the utter lack of response, they spoke... if only to the needs and hopes of one solitary mind.

Isaac Babel On Revision

We were sitting on the parapet on the cliff. [Isaac] Babel was absent-mindedly throwing pebbles into the sea; they cracked like pistol shots as they hit the rocks.

'It's all right for you other writers,' said Babel, although I was not yet a writer. 'You can wrap things up in the dew of your imagination, as you put it! What an awful expression, by the way! But what would you do if you had no imagination? Like me.'

'Rubbish!' I said angrily.

He seemed not to have heard me.

'Not one drop,' he repeated after a long pause and several pebbles. 'I'm quite serious. I can't make anything up. I have to know everything, down to the last wrinkle, or I can't even begin to write. "Authenticity", that's the motto, and I'm stuck with it! That's why I write so little and so slowly. Because it's terribly hard. So much for Mozart, the joy of creativity, the free flight of imagination! I wrote somewhere, I'm getting old from asthma, a mysterious disease I've had from birth and inherited together with my weak constitution. But that's a lie. What puts years on me is every single short-story I write. I work like a black, like a navvy, as if I had to dig up Everest with my own hands. When I start, I never believe I'll have the strength to finish. Sometimes I could weep, I'm so tired. It stops my circulation. If I get stuck over a sentence, it gives me spasms. And I'm always stuck over a sentence!'

'But your writing is so fluent.' I said. 'How do you do it?'

'That's style.' He gave a senile giggle in imitation of Moskvin. 'Style! It's style that does it, young man, he-he-he! I'll write about the weekly washing if you like, and the prose might sound like Julius Caesar! That I seem to manage. But, you understand, that's not the essence of art, it's the bricks, or the marble or the bronze. Come, I'll show you how I do it. I'm a miser, a skinflint, but just for you!...'

By now, it was dark inside the house. Beyond the garden the sea rumbled more and more quietly with the approach of night. Fresh air poured in from the sea and drove out the sultry wormwood smell of the steppe. Babel lit a small lamp. The light fell on his glasses; behind them his eyes looked inflamed; he was always having trouble with his eyes.

He got a thick wad of typescript out of his desk; there were at least a hundred pages.

'Know what that is?'

I had no idea. Was it possible that Babel had at last written a full length novella and kept it a secret from all of us? I could not believe it. Babel, whose short stories were almost like telegrams! Who packed everything into the smallest possible space. For whom a story of ten pages was much too long and surely padded!

A hundred pages of his concentrated prose? No, it couldn't be!

I looked at the cover page, and saw the title 'Lyubka the Cossack'. This was still more puzzling.

'Didn't I hear that "Lyubka the Cossack" is a very short short-story that hasn't yet been published? Do you really mean you've expanded it into a novella?'

He covered the typescript with his hand and laughed, his eyes crinkling.

'It's "Lyubka" all right,' he said, blushing. 'And it's fifteen pages long. But these are the twenty-two versions -- two hundred pages of it.'

'Twenty-two versions!'

'What's so terrible about that?' he bridled at once. 'Look here, a work of art is not a pot-boiler. You write several versions of the same story -- so what? I'm not even sure the twenty-second is fit to publish. It looks as if it could still be tightened up. It's all this elimination that makes for power of language and style. Of language and style,' he repeated. 'You take anything -- an anecdote, a bit of gossip -- and you turn it into a story you yourself can't bear to put down. It glows like a jewel. It's round like a pebble. It hangs together by the cohesion of its parts. And its cohesion is so powerful that even lightning can't split it up. People will read it. And remember it. And they'll laugh over it, not because it's cheerful but because you always feel like laughing when somebody has brought something off. I have the nerve to talk about bringing it off only because we are alone. And you won't tell anyone about this conversation so long as I live. You must give me your word. It's no credit to me, of course. Goodness knows how someone like me, the son of a small broker, gets possessed by the demon or the angel of art. But whichever it is, I have to obey him like a slave, like a pack-mule. I've sold him my soul, and I have to write as well as I know how. It's my happiness, or my cross. More of a cross, I suppose. But take it away, and every drop of my blood will go with it and I won't be worth a chewed up fag-end. That's the work that makes a human being out of me and not just an Odessa street-corner philosopher.'

He paused, then went on more bitterly.

'I've got no imagination. All I've got is the longing for it. You remember Blok -- "I see the enchanted shore, the enchanted distance." He got there all right, but I won't. I see that shore unbearably far off. I'm too sober. But I thank my lucky stars that at least I long for it. I work till I drop, I do all I can because I want to be at the feast of the gods and I'm afraid they'll throw me out.'

He took off his glasses, and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his patched jacket.

'I didn't choose to be born a Jew,' he said suddenly. 'I think I can understand everything. Only not the reason for that black villainy they call anti-semitism.

'I came safely through a Jewish pogrom as a child, only they tore my pigeon's head off. Why?... I don't want Evgenia to come in,' he said softly. Put the door on the hook, will you? This kind of talk frightens her. She's liable to cry all night. She thinks I'm very lonely. Perhaps I am?'

What could I answer?

'So there it is,' said Babel, stooping short-sightedly over his manuscript. 'I work like a pack mule, but it's my own choice. I'm like a galley-slave who's chained for life to his oar but who loves the oar. Everything about it. Every grain of wood he's polished with his hands. If you use enough elbow grease, even the coarsest wood gets to look like ivory. That's what we have to do with words, and with our Russian language. Warm it and polish it with your hand, and it glows like a jewel.

'But I meant to tell you all I do, in the right order. The first version of a story is terrible. All in bits and pieces tied together with boring "link passages" as dry as old rope. You have the first version of "Lyubka" there -- you can see for yourself. It yaps at you, it's clumsy, helpless, toothless.

'That's where the real work begins. I go over each sentence, time and again. I start by cutting all the words it can do without. You have to keep your eye on the job because words are very sly, the rubbishy ones go into hiding and you have to dig them out -- repetitions, synonyms, things that simply don't mean anything.

'After that, I type the story and I let it lie for two or three days. If I can hold out. Then I check it again, sentence by sentence and word by word. And again I find a lot of rubbish I missed the first time. So I make another copy, and another -- as many as I have to, until I've cleaned it all up and there's not a speck of dirt left.

'But that's not all! When I've done the cleaning up, I go over every image, metaphor, comparison, to see if they are fresh and accurate. If you can't find the right adjective for a noun, leave it alone. Let the noun stand by itself.

'A comparison must be as accurate as a slide rule, and as natural as the smell of fennel. Oh, I forgot -- before I take out the rubbish, I break up the text into shorter sentences. The more full stops the better. I'd like to have that passed as a law. Not more than one idea and one image to one sentence. Never be afraid of full stops. Actually, my own sentences are too short -- that's because of my asthma. I can't talk for long. The longer the sentence the more I get short of breath.

'I take out all the participles and adverbs I can. Participles are heavy, angular, they destroy the rhythm. They grate like tanks going over rubble. Three participles to one sentence, and you kill the language. All that "presenting", "obtaining", "concentrating" and so on.... Adverbs are lighter. They can even lend you wings in a way. But too many of them make the language spineless, it starts mioaling [SIC].... A noun needs only one adjective, the choicest. Only a genius can afford two adjectives to one noun.

'The breaking up into paragraphs and the punctuation have to be done properly but only for the effect on the reader. A set of dead rules is no good. A new paragraph is a wonderful thing. It lets you quietly change the rhythm, and it can be like a flash of lightning that shows the same landscape from a different aspect. There are writers, even good ones, who scatter paragraphs and punctuation marks all over the place. They can write good prose, but it has an air of muddle and carelessness because of this. Even Kuprin used to do that.

'Line is as important in prose as in an engraving. It has to be clear and hard.

'My twenty-two versions of "Lyubka" gave you a shock. They are all part of the weeding, sifting, pulling the story out into a single thread. There can be as much difference between the first and last version of a book as between a greasy bit of packing paper and Boticelli's "Spring".'

'It really is slave labour,' I said. 'A man should think twenty times before he decides to become a writer.'

'But the most important thing of all,' said Babel, 'is not to kill the story by working on it. Or else all your labour has been in vain. It's like walking a tight-rope. Well, there it is.... We ought all to take an oath not to mess up our job.'

From Chapter 16, in
STORY OF A LIFE: YEARS OF HOPE, by Konstantin Paustovsky.

Translated by Manya Harari and Andrew Thomson.

Harvill Press, London, 1968.

The Red Laugh: A Psychotic Universe

"The Red Laugh," by Leonidas Andreief (Leonid Andreyev), 1904.
Translated by Alexandra Linden.
T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1905.

Click for a better jpeg.

Since the 1970s, I have always gone back to Leonid Andreyev with similar feelings: admiration for his concepts, frequent bafflement at the directions these took, and a constant frustration as I peered at his work indirectly through the smog of translators. In plays and short stories, Andreyev had something to say, but how he said it, and why, often left me in the dark.

On the other hand, a novella that fascinates and frightens me despite clumsy translation is "The Red Laugh." To call it (as many have) a story about the horrors of warfare, or even (as a few have) an allegory of post-traumatic stress disorder, is to miss the point. One might as well call PSYCHO the story of a woman who runs away with stolen money: a description accurate but too limited.

No; "The Red Laugh" is about something even more unsettling than battlefields and crippling wounds.

'I am afraid of crowds -- of men, when many of them gather together. When of an evening I hear a noise in the street -- a loud shout, for instance -- I start and believe that... a massacre has begun. When several men stand together, and I cannot hear what they are talking about, it seems to me that they will suddenly cry out, fall upon each other, and blood will flow. And you know' -- he bent mysteriously towards my ear -- 'the papers are full of murders -- strange murders. It is all nonsense that there are as many brains as there are men; mankind has only one intellect, and it is beginning to get muddled.'

In "The Red Laugh," war is only the beginning. Wounded, exhausted soldiers have become infected on the battlefield by a shared psychosis. When they finally return home, this mental illness grows and spreads to poison their families, their cities, and eventually, it seems, reality itself.

At first, dreams and daylight perceptions become strange:

Those children, those innocent little children. I saw them in the street playing at war and chasing each other, and one of them was already crying in a high-pitched, childish voice -- and something shrank within me from horror and disgust. And I went home; night came on -- and in fiery dreams, resembling midnight conflagrations, those innocent little children changed into a band of child-murderers.

Something was ominously burning in a broad red glare, and in the smoke there swarmed monstrous, misshapen children, with heads of grown-up murderers. They were jumping lightly and nimbly, like young goats at play, and were breathing with difficulty, like sick people. Their mouths, resembling the jaws of toads or frogs, opened widely and convulsively; behind the transparent skin of their naked bodies the red blood was coursing angrily -- and they were killing each other at play. They were the most terrible of all that I had seen, for they were little and could penetrate everywhere.

I was looking out of the window and one of the little ones noticed me, smiled, and with his eyes asked me to let him in.

'I want to go to you,' he said.

'You want to kill me.'

'I want to go to you,' he said, growing suddenly pale, and began scrambling up the white wall like a rat -- just like a hungry rat. He kept losing his footing, and squealed and darted about the wall with such rapidity that I could not follow his impetuous, sudden movements.

Violent impulses become uncontrollable:

...In the eleventh row of stalls. Somebody's arms were pressing closely against me on my right- and left-hand side, while far around me in the semi-darkness stuck out motionless heads, tinged with red from the lights upon the stages. And gradually the mass of people, confined in that narrow space, filled me with horror. Everybody was silent, listening to what was being said on the stage or, perhaps, thinking out his own thoughts, but as they were many they were more audible, for all their silence, than the loud voices of the actors. They were coughing, blowing their noses, making a noise with their feet and clothes, and I could distinctly hear their deep, uneven breathing, that was heating the air. They were terrible, for each of them could become a corpse, and they all had senseless brains. In the calmness of those well-brushed heads, resting upon white, stiff collars, I felt a hurricane of madness ready to burst every second.

My hands grew cold as I thought how many and how terrible they were, and how far away I was from the entrance. They were calm, but what if I were to cry out 'Fire!'... And full of terror, I experienced a painfully passionate desire, of which I cannot think without my hands growing cold and moist. Who could hinder me from crying out -- yes, standing up, turning round and crying out: 'Fire! Save yourselves -- fire!'

A convulsive wave of madness would overwhelm their still limbs. They would jump up, yelling and howling like animals; they would forget that they had wives, sisters, mothers, and would begin casting themselves about like men stricken with sudden blindness, in their madness throttling each other with their white fingers fragrant with scent. The light would be turned on, and somebody with an ashen face would appear upon the stage, shouting that all was in order and that there was no fire, and the music, trembling and halting, would begin playing something wildly merry -- but they would be deaf to everything -- they would be throttling, trampling, and beating the heads of the women, demolishing their ingenious, cunning headdresses. They would tear at each other's ears, bite off each other's noses, and tear the very clothes off each other's bodies, feeling no shame, for they would be mad. Their sensitive, delicate, beautiful, adorable women would scream and writhe helplessly at their feet, clasping their knees, still believing in their generosity -- while they would beat them viciously upon their beautiful upturned faces, trying to force their way towards the entrance. For men are always murderers, and their calmness and generosity is the calmness of a well-fed animal, that knows itself out of danger.

Cities far away from the battlefields become war zones, and then finally, zones of chaos where illusions crush the real in a shockwave of universal psychosis: the Red Laugh.

The crowd, like a living, roaring wave, lifted me up, carried me along several steps and threw me violently against a fence, then carried me back and away somewhere, and at last pressed me against a high pile of wood, that inclined forwards, threatening to fall down upon somebody's head. Something crackled and rattled against the beams in rapid dry succession; an instant's stillness -- and again a roar burst forth, enormous, open-mouthed, terrible in its overwhelming power. And then the dry rapid crackling was heard again and somebody fell down near me with the blood flowing out of a red hole where his eye had been.

In its focus on shared mental breakdown as a growing pandemic, as a type of non-traditional haunting, "The Red Laugh" reminds me of three other stories, but with significant differences.

In THE CROQUET PLAYER, by H. G. Wells (1936), people in a small district are "haunted" by violent impulses from humanity's biological history, with implications that this infection might have spread out into the greater world:

'So long as I was actively employed I kept going, but as soon as I got home I found myself slumping. I could eat nothing. I drank a lot of whisky and instead of going to bed I fell asleep in an arm-chair by the fire. I awoke in terror and found the fire nearly out. I went to bed and when at last I got to sleep the dreams closed in on me and I sat up again starkly awake. I got up and put on an old dressing-gown and went downstairs and made up the fire, determined to keep awake at any cost. But I dozed there and then went back to bed. And so between the bed and the fireside I dragged through the night. My dreams were all a mix-up of the poor scared old lady, the almost as pitiful old man, the ideas the museum custodian had put in my head and, brooding over it all, that infernal palaeolithic skull.

'More and more did the threat of that primordial Adamite dominate me. I could not banish that eyeless stare and that triumphant grin from my mind, sleeping or waking. Waking I saw it as it was in the museum, as if it was a living presence that had set us a riddle and was amused to hear our inadequate attempts at a solution. Sleeping I saw it released from all rational proportions. It became gigantic. It became as vast as a cliff, a mountainous skull in which the orbits and hollows of the jaw were huge caves. He had an effect -- it is hard to convey these dream effects -- as if he was continually rising and yet he was always towering there. In the foreground I saw his innumerable descendants, swarming like ants, swarms of human beings hurrying to and fro, making helpless gestures of submission or deference, resisting an overpowering impulse to throw themselves under his all-devouring shadow. Presently these swarms began to fall into lines and columns, were clad in uniforms, formed up and began marching and trotting towards the black shadows under those worn and rust-stained teeth. From which darkness there presently oozed something -- something winding and trickling, and something that manifestly tasted very agreeably to him. Blood.'

And then Finchatton said a queer thing. 'Little children killed by air-raids in the street.'

In QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, the television play by Nigel Kneale (1959), something terrible and toxic lurks at the heart of human sentience, waiting to be freed. When finally released, it turns London into an alien-directed slaughterhouse. Here, as in THE CROQUET PLAYER, the damage is real but limited; ways are found to deal with infection, or at least to avoid it.

More devastating is the mass hysteria that destroys "The Republic of the Southern Cross," in the story by Valery Brussov / Bryusov (1907). While "Southern Cross" maintains a tone of journalistic detachment, so that its implications become disturbing in contemplation, "The Red Laugh" is visceral, disturbing on the page. "Southern Cross" turns its horrors into a history lesson; "The Red Laugh" turns them into experience.

This visceral focus on blood, broken bodies, and the struggles of nightmare is what survives translation in Andreyev. If read "through" the words instead of "by" the words, "The Red Laugh," in English, becomes a great horror story. If it seems less frequently-encountered nowadays than it was in the past, then it might also become, for many new readers, a striking discovery.