D. Thin

A dozen classic tales of cosmic horror and the weird collected here from Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, Ambrose Bierce, R. W. Chambers, M. P. Shiel, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Henry James, Walter de la Mare and H. P. Lovecraft. I enjoyed every single one, however, in order to share a more specific taste of what a reader will find in this New York Review Books (NYRB) volume, for the purposes of my review, I'll limit my observations to the following three:

THE WHITE PEOPLE by Arthur Machen
Welsh author Arthur Machen looked askance at his surrounding late nineteenth-century society’s infatuation with material progress and thinking all the vast mysteries of the universe can be reduced to science. His tale, The White People, one of the most influential works of horror/supernatural fiction ever written, addresses the consequences of such misguided notions in the personage of Ambrose, a devotee of occult literature, who tells his visitor Cotgrave that modern man is rapidly losing spiritual depth and the capacity to know the meaning of true sin and evil. As part of his teachings, he permits Cotgrave to borrow one of his rare treasures, The Green Book, a thin volume written by a young girl now long since dead. The contents of The Green Book is, in effect, the main body of Machem’s tale. And, let me tell you folks, The Green Book makes for one captivating and exhilarating read, touching on many alluring topics and themes, the following among their number:

Secret Knowledge and Gnostic Wisdom
“I must not write down the real names of the days and months which I found out a year ago, nor the way to make the Aklo letters, or the Chian language, or the great beautiful Circles, nor the Mao Games, nor the chief songs. I may write something about all these things but not the way to do them, for peculiar reasons.” So begins the young narrator (picture her as you would Alice in the tales of Lewis Carroll) about the secret knowledge she speaks of. And it is a knowing she was told as a very little girl: “the little white faces that used to look at me when I was lying in my cradle. They used to talk to me, and I learnt their language and talked to them in it about some great white place where they lived.” We hear echoes of the great Gnostic text, The Hymn of the Pearl, of how we truly belong to a higher, more spiritual realm that we have since long forgotten.

Paganism and Nature Cults
She tells of her adventures with her nurse when she was five, how they went along a path through a wood and how they came to a deep, dark, shady pool. She’s left by her nurse to play with white people who emerged from the wood to dance and play and sing. Further on she sees the white people drink a curious wine and make images and worship them. Arthur Machen was steeped in the pre-Christian pagan religions and the various descriptions here – woods, pools, singing, dancing, playing, drinking wine, creating and worshiping images – are common to all nature cults not only in Europe but throughout the world. When the little girl relays her experiences to nurse, the nurse becomes frightened and tells her she was only dreaming and never to repeat what she has seen. And for good reason! Nineteenth century Wales is still very Christian and all of what she experienced would be labeled as “pagan” by her parents and others and she could be severely punished.

Goddess Worship
The narrator conveys more detail of her encounter, how there was “a beautiful lady with kind dark eyes, and a grave face, and long black hair, and she smiled such a strange sad smile.” Along with paganism and the natural world, goddess worship played its part in pre-Christian religions and still is a vital presence within many other world religions such as Buddhism and the various Hindu religions from India. Of course, the appearance of a goddess would pose a serious threat to the prevailing male-centered, male-controlled Christian religion. And the narrator being female adds an additional charge of danger to the equation since females, even little girls, possess such a direct connection to intuition, emotions, feelings and the earth.

Jungian Archetypes
As part of her adventures, the narrator comes upon “the big round mound.” The University of Richmond has an entire project dedicated to prehistoric round mounds. And round mounds have so much affinity with mandalas thus they can be included in an analysis of the mandala archetype as developed by psychologist Carl Jung. As Jung has written, “The mandala is an archetypal image whose occurrence is attested throughout the ages. It signifies the wholeness of the Self. This circular image represents the wholeness of the psychic ground or, to put it in mythic terms, the divinity incarnate in man.” As we follow our young guide through her Green Book, we can read between the lines to detect how rich the connections Arthur Machen has made of his narrator’s account to the world of myth, spirit and the quest for psychic wholeness.

Shamanism
Again and again our little girl writes of her fantastic encounters, as when she “crept up a tunnel under a tree” and “the ground rose up in front of me, tall and steep as a wall, and there was nothing but the green wall and the sky.” This is the language from the world of the shaman. Anthropologist Michael Harner has engaged in years of research of tribal cultures and writes extensively on the “shamanic state of consciousness” where the shaman will enter either the lower world or the higher world to gain knowledge and power so as to benefit the health and well-being of the tribe. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how in tribal cultures our narrator would quickly be initiated as one of its shamans.

“I dream in fire but work in clay.”
― Arthur Machen (1863–1947)

THE DAMNED THING by Ambrose Bierce
In his book The Spooky Art, Norman Mailer addresses the presence and power of evil, how it can take various forms to exert a destructive influence in our material world: “If a Creator exists in company with an opposite Presence (to be called Satan, for short), there is also the most lively possibility of a variety of major and minor angels, devils and demons, good spirits and evil, working away more or less invisibly in our lives.”

Well, with this Ambrose Bierce tale, we are given an instance of such a destructive force. However, this force makes itself known by penetrating, on some level, into the visible world. It is this “on some level,” the shadowy, not quite within the spectrum of human vision and human hearing, that makes the tale eerie in the extreme - the force takes on form, sort of, outside our normal human senses, but it is there – it moves, it screams, it can become violent.

The dark beauty Ambrose Bierce’s telling is all in the atmosphere and the timing – there are four short chapters: Chapter I begins: “By THE light of a tallow candle, which had been placed on one end of a rough table, a man was reading something written in a book. It was an old account book, greatly worn; and the writing was not, apparently, very legible, for the man sometimes held the page close to the flame of the candle to get a stronger light upon it. The shadow of the book would then throw into obscurity a half of the room, darkening a number of faces and figures; for besides the reader, eight other men were present. Seven of them sat against the rough log walls, silent and motionless, and, the room being small, not very far from the table. By extending an arm any one of them could have touched the eighth man, who lay on the table, face upward, partly covered by a sheet, his arms at his sides. He was dead.”

Chapter II features the entrance of a young short story writer and journalist by the name of William Harker who was near Hugh Morgan when Morgan was mauled by a mysterious force. Harker reads out loud his account of the happening. Harker departs the gathering in Chapter III but before he leaves he asks the man with the book he recognizes as Morgan’s diary if he can see it. "The book will cut no figure in this matter," replied the official, slipping it into his coat pocket; "all the entries in it were made before the writer's death." Lastly, Chapter IV is the contents of Morgan’s diary – horrifying, ghastly, dreadful, creepy, weird, and last but not least, sinister and spine-chilling. A tale not to be missed.

“All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.”
-Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

SEATON'S AUNT by Walter de la Mare
This Walter de la Mare is one of the most chilling tales I’ve ever read. One prime reason is the presence of the aunt who could very well be in league with the devil or other diabolical forces or simply has a keen paranormal ability to read the inner thoughts of those around her. The idea that a being, even if that being is God let alone an old woman, can read our thoughts in such a way that strips us of our privacy, that is a gross invasion of privacy, is most unsettling and disturbing. The Gothic atmosphere created and the flawless timing of the narrator’s telling (the first part as a visiting schoolboy; the second part as a young adult) makes for one scary read. Walter de la Mare’s writing here is to too subtle and nuanced to call this a ghost story, but its close.

Here is a quote from the tale when, along with Seaton, his fellow schoolmate, the narrator approaches the aunt’s house: “She was standing at an upper window which opened wide on a hinge, and at first sight she looked an excessively tall and overwhelming figure. This, however, was mainly because the window reached all but to the floor of her bedroom. She was in reality rather an undersized woman, in spite of her long face and big head. She must have stood, I think, unusually still, with eyes fixed on us, though this impression may be due to Seaton's sudden warning and to my consciousness of the cautious and subdued air that had fallen on him at sight of her. I know that without the least reason in the world I felt a kind of guiltiness, as if I had been 'caught'. There was a silvery star pattern sprinkled on her black silk dress, and even from the ground I could see the immense coils of her hair and the rings on her left hand which was held fingering the small jet buttons of her bodice. She watched our united advance without stirring, until, imperceptibly, her eyes raised and lost themselves in the distance, so that it was out of an assumed reverie that she appeared suddenly to awaken to our presence beneath her when we drew close to the house.” Again, not a tale to be missed.

“An hour's terror is better than a lifetime of timidity.”
― Walter de la Mare (1876-1953)… (mehr)

Well, this was an NYRB, and I started it on Halloween . . . but I guess "cosmic horror" isn't for me. I just wasn't horrified, and mostly I was bored. There is a lot of description in all of these tales, and very often they are "told" to others, which drags them out more. Where there was dialogue, I was more interested, and I enjoyed parts of some of the stories.

One of the narrators, in Vernon Blackwood's story, "The Willows," says of the willow trees, "They moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible." These stories didn't touch mine.… (mehr)

This book is an odd duck: rather than a primer on or survey of weird fiction, this collection seeks to be more a study of the contemporaries and progenitors of Lovecraft's style. So you'd think they'd be assuming that you've read Lovecraft's stuff, but at the very end(?) it includes Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space". This might well be for comparison or completeness, but the inclusion almost compulsory, like you CAN'T do any collection of weird fiction without including at least some Lovecraft.

That said, the collection itself is revelatory and even pretty enjoyable for the most part. Viewing the collection through the lens of Lovecraft, it takes on an almost combinatorial feel—mixing and matching, excluding and including the various elements that we think of when we survey Lovecraft's work. Shiel's "The House of Sounds" takes the theme of sensory over-stimulations leading to madness, and outdoes "The Fall of the House of Usher" in turn. Machen's "The White People" does the same sort of unworldly lore and descent into hidden codes and ritual, but in a bit different context than usual. And most refreshingly, the collection shows that many of the key elements of weird fiction are not necessarily tied to a racist world-view as much as they disgustingly are in some of Lovecraft's.

Of course, some of the stories fall flat or are boring reads; the genre isn't really known for tidy writing or plotting in general, and seeing so many of these in one place negates the novelty that usually carries some of the weight. But many of the stuff is better than Lovecraft's efforts, and certainly deserves some of the attention that's almost singularly accorded to his work. Plus the NYRB has a rad Charles Burns cover that's refreshingly loud compared to their usual tone.… (mehr)