Dirda on horror
I would normally excerpt the below on Substack Notes, but as it's Dirda…
In praise of weird fiction, horror tales and stories that unsettle us
To prepare for the Necronomicon Providence conference, I read — and re-read — great works by H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Aickman and other masters of supernatural fiction.
Review by Michael Dirda
August 8, 2024 at 11:00 a.m. EDT
Once more, the stars are right. On Aug. 15, I’ll be flying from Washington to Providence, R.I., to attend NecronomiCon, which runs from that day until Aug. 18. Originally focused on H.P. Lovecraft and his circle, this biannual literary festival now bills itself as “the international convention of weird fiction, art, and academia.” I’m not sure if “weird” is meant to modify “academia,” though it might be a reference to the — alas, fictional — Miskatonic University in nearby Arkham, Mass.
As usual, there are several tracks of programming, mingling author readings with panels focusing on Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Franz Kafka, Leonora Carrington, Angela Carter, Margaret St. Clair, W.H. Pugmire and many others. I’ll be on two: “From the Night Land to the Dreamlands: Parallels and Convergences in William Hope Hodgson and H.P. Lovecraft” and “The Cowboy and the New Englander: The Correspondence of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft.”
To prepare for Providence, I’ve recently been reading some newly published, con-appropriate books. First, there’s “The Weird Tales Boys,” by Stephen Jones (PS Publishing), a compact illustrated survey of the lives, achievement and influence of Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, the big three of the original Weird Tales magazine. While there’s little discussion of individual works, Jones — a noted editor of contemporary horror fiction — does summarize each writer’s aesthetic principles and general outlook on life. For example, Lovecraft wrote that “to me all mankind seems too local and transitory an incident in the cosmos to take at all seriously.” He brought that same cosmic viewpoint to his own writing: “When all else fails, I never fail to extract a sarcastic smile from the contemplation of my own empty and egotistical career.”
Howard, we learn, drew on his dreams for many of the adventures of Kull, Bran Mak Morn and Conan: “I am never in these dreams of ancient times, a civilized man. Always I am the barbarian, the skinclad, tousle-haired, light-eyed wild man armed with a rude ax or sword, fighting the elements and wild beasts.” Howard also believed — in the words of a character in “Beyond the Black River” — that “barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always triumph.”
As usual, Smith is somewhat shortchanged. His irony-laden fantasies often exude a lush, hothouse decadence, whether they are set on the lost continent of Hyperborea or in far-future Zothique. To sample Smith’s prose and poetry, look for “The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies,” edited by S.T. Joshi (Penguin).
In his monograph “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Lovecraft praises Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” as probably the greatest of all weird tales. In fact, a strong case could be made for Blackwood as the dominant British writer of supernatural fiction in the first half of the 20th century. He is certainly the most various. This past year, Hippocampus Press began to issue hefty trade paperbacks of “The Collected Short Fiction of Algernon Blackwood,” also edited by Joshi. The first two installments, “The Willows and Others” and “The Nemesis of Fire and Others,” cover stories published between 1889 and 1910, including the six adventures of the occult investigator John Silence. Future volumes will feature such classics as “The Wendigo,” “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” and “A Descent Into Egypt.”
Blackwood’s best work overlaps with that of M.R. James, the undisputed master of the classic ghost story. Few people know James’s work more intimately than Robert Lloyd Parry, who impersonates the author in stunning one-man performances of his “ghost stories of an antiquary.” Lloyd Parry — who is scheduled to again be onstage at this year’s NecronomiCon — has also emerged as a scholar of writers influenced by James. Back in 2020, he assembled “Ghosts of the Chit-Chat” (Swan River Press), featuring eerie tales by some of those present when James read his first story, “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book,” to the Cambridge University club of the title.
That elegant volume is now complemented by the equally elegant “Friends and Spectres,” spotlighting work by participants in a Cambridge University debate on the existence of ghosts. James supported the case for the spectral. Following an astute introduction and excellent biographical headnotes, Lloyd Parry reprints two versions of James’s “A Night in King’s College Chapel,” as well as stories by, among others, F. Anstey (best known for the comic classic “Vice Versa,” in which a Victorian father and son switch bodies) and Adrian Ross, author of that unsettling novel “The Hole of the Pit.”
All the writers of “Friends and Spectres” wrote before World War II. In the decades afterward, Robert Aickman gradually emerged as mid-century England’s finest writer of “strange stories.” In 2022, R.B. Russell brought out a welcome biography of that enigmatic author, which should now be supplemented by “Robert Aickman: Selected Letters to Kirby McCauley” (Tartarus Press).
Kirby McCauley started off as a young fan of Aickman’s writing, but the two men shared many sympathies, convictions and prejudices. Eventually, McCauley, who died in 2014, became a literary superagent, representing not just Aickman but also Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, and host of other horror and science fiction notables. It’s a pity that we don’t have McCauley’s side of this correspondence, since Aickman periodically makes tantalizing statements such as “I entirely agree with what you say about Shirley Jackson.” Did the two dislike Jackson or adore her?
We do learn that Aickman admires the novels of Knut Hamsun, the films of Leni Riefenstahl and Ingmar Bergman, the music of Frederick Delius, and the work of Thomas Mann. Mann, he says, “deals with the supernatural better than any other writer I know,” and he claims him as a major influence. When McCauley sends him “The Surly Sullen Bell,” he rhapsodizes — quite rightly — about the wonderful ghost stories of Russell Kirk, then better known as a political theorist and the author of “The Conservative Mind.”
In later pages, many of the letters deal with contracts, reprint rights, gripes about agents and failed movie deals. The young Ridley Scott, no less, hoped to make a film of “The Inner Room” but couldn’t assemble the financing. As he grows older, Aickman complains that the noise in his apartment building prevents him from writing, fears the world’s descent into a “new barbarism,” and hints at “grave misfortunes” and personal unhappiness. Still, on any page of this immensely readable book you will find some memorable pronouncement, whether about the merits of Arthur Wing Pinero’s plays or the “quiet sad beauty, difficult to find elsewhere” of La Rochefoucauld’s “Maxims.” Of his own art, Aickman declares in his very first letter to McCauley that “ghost stories … are properly a form of poetry — and therefore, of the first literary importance (the good ones of course).”
It’s unlikely that Aickman would have cared for the work of the late Michael Shea. For years, I meant to read him but managed to do so only when the estimable Valancourt Books reprinted his collection “Polyphemus,” with a new introduction by Laird Barron. Its very dark highlight is the long story “The Autopsy,” a tour de force of visceral shocks orchestrated around two favorite Lovecraftian motifs, alien possession and body horror. So intensely graphic a story wouldn’t normally be to my taste, but I can recognize a masterpiece when I encounter one.
I’ve only dipped into “The Theory of the Weird Tale” (Sarnath Press), in which that industrious scholar Joshi assembles observations about supernatural fiction by its actual practitioners, starting with Horace Walpole in the 18th century. Undertow has just issued a new, not-to-be-missed collection of Canadian ghost stories, “Northern Nights,” edited by Michael Kelly; it features chilling work by Richard Gavin, Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Simon Strantzas, among others. For a longer read, there’s “Horror Movie,” Paul Tremblay’s novel about a disturbing 1990s film never shown in its entirety yet now about to receive a reboot. Does that sound like good idea to you? Only one member of the original’s cast is still alive, but he remembers what happened.
As we all know from that tiresome T-shirt, there’s so little time to read all the books you’d like. True enough, but in the case of the writers and stories mentioned above, you will actually gain a few extra hours: They’ll keep you reading way past your bedtime, afraid to switch off the light and go to sleep.
https://wapo.st/3WHraOw