Peter Tennant's Favourite Horror Stories of 2013 – Part One

Peter Tennant, who reviews books for the magazine Black Static, has posted a list of his favourite horror stories of 2013 (Part One). Very much to my shock and delight, Mr. Tennant has included several stories from In A Season Of Dead Weather.

Also mentioned are stories from the Tartarus Press anthology, Dark World, from the Steve Rasnic Tem collection, Onion Songs, from a This Is Horror chapbook by Conrad Williams, and from a Spectral Press chapbook by Paul Kane.

2013 is off to a fascinating start!

No Special Artifice, No Special Credit

"How nice, 'to meet a mermaid washing her silken sark by the stream' in the words of the learned L. C. Wimberly, author of Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads. He says this was 'evidently common experience; no special artifice was needed to get such a story believed.' In which case no special credit would have been obtained by telling it. In which case no special reason was needed to make it up. How’s that for remorseless logic? And has anyone ever spoken of remorseful logic? Don’t answer that. Washing her silken sark by the stream: ever such a lovely alliteration; remember the bear sarks? Who went berserk? Serk or sark, then, means skin… or garment… and, by extension, skirt: to which it is obviously related; and shirt, just a bit less obviously. A cutty sark, in small letters, is a short garment, and, by extension, either a loose woman or a cut-down sail. The Cutty Sark was a famous sailing vessel, and a brand of whisky is named after it. I was once, like the wedding guest in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, seized hold of, in England, by a very old man who proceeded to tell me that one of his cousins had been the last second mate on the ship Cutty Sark and that another of his cousins had shot the last man killed in a duel in England. It would have been even more interesting and to the point had he himself been an ancient mariner, but he was actually an ancient dentist. From time to time, though, I have had a mental image of a sailor, clad in a cutty sark, having had a drink of Cutty Sark, sent aft (or would it be forward?) to trim the cutty sark of the Cutty Sark. Whilst so engaged he espies a woman a-washing her cutty sark; 'A mermaid!' he cries. Says the second mate: 'No, she is only a cutty sark.' Ah well."

-- Avram Davidson, Adventures in Unhistory.

A truly wonderful ebook, by a truly wonderful writer.

http://us.macmillan.com/adventuresinunhistory/AvramDavidson

One Frame in the Long Film Strip of English

Language is our key to the past and our ticket to the future. If we abuse it, if we pretend that our whims about grammar and spelling are more important than clear communication, then we shut ourselves away from the long corridors of history.

He's Only Human

Here it is, the first review of All Roads Lead to Winter:

http://yawattahosby.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/book-review-all-roads-lead-to-winter-by-mark-fuller-dillon/

Ms. Hosby says, "Keep smiling," and I will, I will.

Ce qu’on rêve, ce qu’on adore et ce qui ment

"L’Astre rouge," by Leconte de Lisle

Along with George Sterling, the most interesting poet I've read in some time has been Leconte de Lisle; and like Sterling, de Lisle often "casts a cold eye" on human existence with a cosmic perspective that both frightens and fascinates me.

One concept that seems to have haunted de Lisle is the idea of a dead universe, frozen and still for eternity, locked in what he calls, in another poem, la Nuit aveugle -- but here, in this poem, he adds a wounded, staring eye at the centre of non-existence: mindless, pitiless, eternal.

I suppose this work appeals to me, because it brings to mind those nightmares that plagued me when I was four years old: vast looming or spinning things in the sky, my screaming attempts to warn people who would not look up, the universe dissolving into dust and nothingness within a silent instant.

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Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle
From Poèmes tragiques, 1884 (édition de 1886).

L’Astre rouge

Il y aura, dans l’abîme du ciel, un grand Astre rouge nommé Sahil.
(Le Rabbi Aben-Ezra.)

Sur les Continents morts, les houles léthargiques
Où le dernier frisson d’un monde a palpité
S’enflent dans le silence et dans l’immensité;
Et le rouge Sahil, du fond des nuits tragiques,
Seul flambe, et darde aux flots son œil ensanglanté.

Par l’espace sans fin des solitudes nues,
Ce gouffre inerte, sourd, vide, au néant pareil,
Sahil, témoin suprême, et lugubre soleil
Qui fait la mer plus morne et plus noires les nues,
Couve d’un œil sanglant l’universel sommeil.

Génie, amour, douleur, désespoir, haine, envie,
Ce qu’on rêve, ce qu’on adore et ce qui ment,
Terre et ciel, rien n’est plus de l’antique Moment.
Sur le songe oublié de l’Homme et de la Vie
L’Œil rouge de Sahil saigne éternellement.

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Although I'm certainly no translator, and I could never do justice to de Lisle, I'll offer an extremely quick, ugly and inadequate approximation of this poem:

"There will be, in the abyss of the sky, a great red star named Sahil. -- Rabbi Aben-Ezra

"On the dead continents, lethargic waves swell in the silence and immensity, where the final shiver of a world has trembled; and from the depth of tragic nights, only red Sahil burns and stings the waves with its blood-covered eye.

"Through the endless space of naked solitudes -- this inert abyss, deaf, empty, identical to the void -- Sahil, the supreme witness, the lugubrious sun that makes the sea duller and the sky blacker, broods with blood-red eye over the universal sleep.

"Genius, love, sorrow, despair, hatred, envy, everything we dream, everything we adore, everything that tells a lie, Earth and sky -- nothing remains of that ancient moment. On the forgotten dream of Man and Life, the red eye of Sahil bleeds eternally."