Catholic & Cosmic Horror

Last month I wrote about Christmas and cosmic horror, about Flannery O'Connor and H.P. Lovecraft. I quoted from a letter by Flannery O'Connor to her friend Betty Hester. The quotation I had is actually only an excerpt. Following is the full quotation, plus a part of the same letter that precedes it and may give it some added context:

     I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact and nothing covers it like the bald statement. However, I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary, and guilty. To possess this within the Church is to bear a burden, the necessary burden for the conscious Catholic. It’s to feel the contemporary situation at the ultimate level. I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. This may explain the lack of bitterness in the stories.

     The notice in The New Yorker was not only moronic, it was unsigned. It was a case in which it is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.

     I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man [Is Hard to Find] brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard, but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe there are many rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

From Flannery O'Connor's first letter to Betty Hester, dated July 20, 1955.

Betty Hester was still living when The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor was first published. She wished to remain anonymous and was called "A" in the book. The excerpt above is from page 90. There are further quotes and commentary on this and related letters, commentary written by Maria Popova and found on the website The Marginalian, here. By the way, chickens without wings makes me think of men without chests.

I concluded what I wrote last month as follows:

An atheist or materialist is certainly capable of apprehending horror on a cosmic scale, but can his apprehension compare to that of a Christian, or perhaps more specifically to that of a Roman Catholic? I don't know. But I would like to read more from Flannery O'Connor's letter and to learn more about her conception of horror, in other words, what in her view is the "right" horror. She may or may not have been writing about horror on a specifically cosmic scale, but in Christian teaching is there much space that separates personal from cosmic horror? Or does cosmic horror descend into our lives when given a chance, distilled from vastness into potent, earthly, personal horror?

Like I said, I don't know whether an atheist or materialist is capable of apprehending cosmic horror in the same way that a Christian can. I also don't know whether a Roman Catholic specifically is more attune to cosmic horror than are other Christians. But writing what I wrote got me thinking about related things. So here goes . . .

Catholicism stands alone or almost alone in Christianity as an ancient religion. It originated literally in the ancient world. It is connected by unbroken links to the life and time of Christ and to its origins in the Levant. Not only did Catholicism arise in the ancient world, it also arose in a pagan and pre-Christian world. In contrast, Protestant religions arose in an already civilized and thoroughly Christianized world, specifically in Europe, out of direct contact with ancient, Asiatic, pagan, and pre-Christian gods and ways. Owing to its time and place of origin, the Catholic Church was in direct contact with these gods and ways. I think that's an important point when it comes to cosmic horror, for the old gods of ancient Asia and Egypt were of a kind not encountered in Medieval or Modern times--at least until now, for, although they were banished in Ancient times, they have since returned.

Flannery O'Connor wrote to Betty Hester again on August 2, 1955. Among her words:

One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for. (p. 92)

So again, she returned to the Nietzschean idea that God is dead. Nietzsche made his observation in 1882, near the end of a century of progress and science, also of skepticism about God, faith, and religion. Also during that century, Weird returned. (Weird, however, is not an old god and is in fact not a god at all.) By the way, looking for Nietzsche in Flannery O'Connor's letters is what led me to her first letter to Betty Hester, for I didn't know when I searched that Betty Hester was "A," and "Hester, Betty" is not in the index. It was only by happenstance (or maybe not) that Nietzsche's name is in the same letter as the excerpt I had previously found about the "wrong" horror." I don't know whether "A" refers to Betty Hester's anonymity or to her last name, which is the same as Hester Prynne's Christian name in The Scarlet Letter. The scarlet letter in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel (or romance) is of course "A."

After I wrote at Christmastime, Will Oliver left a comment explaining what Flannery meant when she mentioned the "right" horror. He concluded: "The cosmic horror is not that we are insignificant in a vast, indifferent universe, but that we are quite significant but too poor in faith to recognize that fact." Flannery O'Connor wrote: "nobody believes in the Incarnation" and "[m]y audience are the people who think God is dead." In his essay "It's All Cosmic Horror Without Christmas," Brandon Morse emphasizes God as our protector against "things more powerful and terrible than we can imagine. Things that would annihilate us if they weren't restrained." These are demons, terrible entities, dark forces. They are one possible source of our sense of cosmic horror. In his Letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul wrote:

For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)

"heavenly places," meaning not heaven but the spiritual realm that exists above and outside of the mundane. Mr. Morse also writes about the Abyss "like a dimension of space-time so removed from God's love that going there is nightmarish even to the most evil of creatures." If we live in an ordered Cosmos, then the Abyss (or Void) exists outside of it. If demons and old gods dread going there, perhaps it's only because they originated in the Abyss and know what it's like to exist there, once and again in exile. Even they crave God's company. Absent from Cosmos, tenanting Chaos, perhaps they descend into gibbering madness, as with Lovecraft's old god Azathoth.

Ancient, Asiatic, pagan, and pre-Christian peoples worshipped and sacrificed to the principalities, powers, and rulers of darkness. These were the old gods--Baal, Asherah, Moloch, and so on--sent into exile by the advent of Christianity. But once "the people who think God is dead" began proliferating, the old gods found their way back. If we disbelieve in God and the Incarnation, then we no longer have a protector, and cosmic horrors once again impinge upon us. Old gods return. Atheists and materialists are correct in their apprehension of cosmic horror. What they fail to understand is that they have broken down the walls and thrown open the gates to such things by their disbelief. By their disbelief, they have forsaken the only power that can guard them from horrors and save them from insanity and despair. Maybe to Flannery O'Connor the "right" horror was her recognition that "nobody believes in the Incarnation," that they instead believe that "God is dead." By this formulation, No-God equates to horror.

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Two more points:

First, one of the successes of Catholicism is that it has tied itself to reason, including to ancient Greek sources of knowledge and wisdom. Cosmos is ordered. It obeys laws. An understanding of it and its Creator is open to us through reason. The Abyss or Void is, in contrast, disordered, chaotic, irrational. It invites these selfsame things that are within us. To be drawn by disorder, chaos, and irrationality is to be drawn to the Abyss. To be drawn by order, law, and reason is to be drawn to God: Flannery O'Connor loved St. Thomas Aquinas and read his Summa Theologica every night before shutting her eyes. (p. 94)

Second, one of the great wonders of Medieval and early Renaissance art is its fantastic visions of hell and damnation. Call it Catholic horror art. I'm not sure that those who disbelieve in God are capable of such extraordinary and inspired visions, but the artists who created them lived in an age of faith. To them, these things were real and close at hand. They lived with hope, but they also lived with dread. All of that showed in their art.

A third point will wait until next time.

The Last Judgment, detail, by Giotto, a fresco executed in 1303-1305, in the Arena Chapel, Padua, Italy.

Giotto's fresco makes me think of this cover of Weird Tales, created by Margaret Brundage for the issue of September 1941. The cover story is "Beyond the Threshold" by August Derleth, another Catholic author. I haven't read the story. I can't say that it's about judgment or damnation. I also can't say that Margaret Brundage was inspired by Giotto's image. (Even the color scheme is the same.) Instead, call this a case of artistic convergent evolution.

Original text and captions copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

A Lovecraft Sighting at Christmas

An essay about God, Christmas, and the birth of Jesus Christ is a strange place to find a discussion of H.P. Lovecraft, but that's where I came upon another Lovecraft sighting. As a bonus, there is also the phrase cosmic horror in the title of the essay. The essay is called "It's All Cosmic Horror Without Christmas," and it's by Brandon Morse. Go to the website RedState in order to read it. Mr. Morse's essay is dated today, December 23, 2025.

I'm planning to write more about cosmic horror in 2026. I'm afraid I haven't exhausted that topic yet. There is always more to read, more to learn, more ideas about which to think and write. One of my topics in the new year will be August Derleth on H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, also a possible difference between horror and terror.

August Derleth was a Roman Catholic. H.P. Lovecraft was famously an atheist or materialist, at least at the surface, or at least a few layers down from the surface. I doubt that they would have agreed very much on what constitutes cosmic horror. I'm not sure that Derleth would have had the same kind of depth in his thinking as Lovecraft. In any case, in his essay, Brandon Morse approaches cosmic horror from the side of the believer. His approach gives us something different to think about in terms of cosmic horror. He even mentions the horrors of the Abyss. One difference  between the Christian and Lovecraftian viewpoints is that Lovecraft did not allow for a protector. We live at the mercy of malign entities. The Christian on the other hand believes that in God we have a protector of matchless power, thus Mr. Morse's title.

The following quotation is from Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). Since reading it, these words and the idea underlying them have been on my mind:

"I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man [Is Hard to Find] brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard, but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. . . . When I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror." (From a letter to Betty Hester, July 1955; presumably the ellipses are not in the original.)

An atheist or materialist is certainly capable of apprehending horror on a cosmic scale, but can his apprehension compare to that of a Christian, or perhaps more specifically to that of a Roman Catholic? I don't know. But I would like to read more from Flannery O'Connor's letter and to learn more about her conception of horror, in other words, what in her view is the "right" horror. She may or may not have been writing about horror on a specifically cosmic scale, but in Christian teaching is there much space that separates personal from cosmic horror? Or does cosmic horror descend into our lives when given a chance, distilled from vastness into potent, earthly, personal horror?

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Robert W. Chambers & the Language of Cosmic Horror

Robert W. Chambers' name is the first to appear in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (#367, published in 2023). This is in "The Eyrie," which used to be a letters column but has become simply a place for the editor to write about whatever pleases him. If you have ever read Chambers' book The King in Yellow (1895), you might recognize aspects of cosmic horror in its pages. I believe it to be there anyway. Chambers' early take on cosmic horror has been an inspiration for other writers in this now popular sub-sub-genre of fiction. I'm not sure that his take exists in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, though. The authors in that issue seem to have gone down a different road, actually two parallel roads laid down a long time ago by Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Fort. There are two prevailing themes, too. One, from the former, has to do with peering into voids. The other, from the latter, has to do with our existence as mere property of higher and more advanced intelligences. Both are pessimistic or negative, even somewhat nihilistic. Both can be applied in the writing of cosmic horror stories.

If you have read Weird Tales #367, you might have noticed the appearance and reappearance of the words void and abyss. If this were Pee-Wee's Playhouse and those were the secret words, there would have been a lot of screaming. There must be, I think, lots of different aspects of cosmic horror, or different ways of writing about it. The authors in that issue seem to have limited themselves pretty badly, though. So were they required to apply certain narrow interpretations of that term by the editor, or were they free to look into their own interpretations and simply settled on more or less the same across the board? I don't know. Either way, I don't think things went very well. Writers of genre fiction are supposed to let their imaginations roam. The writers in the Cosmic Horror Issue seem to have kept theirs pent up.

The words void and abyss are not in The King in Yellow. There is no cosmos, cosmic, universe, galaxy, or galactic either. Chaos appears, but it's used in conventional ways (x2). There is mention of stars, but most of these are in the first half of the book, black stars being a recurring phrase (x4).

Following are two passages that come close to the language of cosmic horror but don't quite get there. From "The Street of the First Shell":

"And through the smoke pall the lightning of the cannon played, while from time to time a rift above showed a fathomless black vault set with stars."

From "The Yellow Sign":

With eyes starting from my head I peered into the darkness, but when he came into the room I did not see him. It was only when I felt him envelope me in his cold soft grasp that I cried out and struggled with deadly fury, but my hands were useless and he tore the onyx clasp from my coat and struck me full in the face. Then, as I fell, I heard Tessie's soft cry and her spirit fled: and even while falling I longed to follow her, for I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now.

I think what happened here is that Chambers wrote too early in the history of weird fiction or genre fiction and, much more broadly, too early in--or before--the modern era. Although there were lots of scientific discoveries regarding astronomy and physics in his time, Albert Einstein's postulations of special and general relativity were still in the future, as was Edwin Hubble's discovery, more or less, of a greater universe outside our own galaxy. (Hubble's discovery was reported in November 1924 when the first issue of the revived Weird Tales was on the newsstand. He presented it in person on January 1, 1925, or one hundred years ago last month. So 2024 or 2025, depending on how you look at it, is the centenary of our awareness of the universe.) Also still in the future were modern art, modern music, modern poetry and fiction, the terrible disasters of World War I and the Russian Revolution, and a proliferation of isms that grew out of and fed into these many developments. A popular writer of the late nineteenth century could have looked upon human existence from a cosmic perspective, but I'm not sure he could have seen very far, nor would he have had necessarily the background or experience to write what is, very often--too often--nihilistic fiction. Cosmic horror need not be nihilistic, but in the hands of too many of the authors in Weird Tales #367, that proved to be the case. We could have had something different, something with more imagination, insight, vigor. We could even have had a taste of Chambers-style cosmic horror and his fin-de-siècle ennui and decadence. But that wasn't to be, I guess, and I wonder why.

Next: More on Robert W. Chambers.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

The Last Picture Shown

Many years ago, author Jeff VanderMeer wrote an essay called "Moving Past Lovecraft" in which he objected to what he called the adulation, imitation, fetishizing, and commodification of H. P. Lovecraft. He wrote that soon after his wife, Ann VanderMeer, resigned as editor of Weird Tales magazine. There was a controversy and some conflict in all of that. One of the principals, Marvin Kaye, has since died. Mr. Kaye was without a doubt an admirer of Lovecraft and the old Weird Tales. He was born less than a year after Lovecraft died. You could say that he had come to contemporary weird fiction from out of its past.

The 100th-anniversary issue of Weird Tales, published in 2023, is a themed issue. The theme is cosmic horror. Wikipedia, that fount of all knowledge, lets us know that cosmic horror is a synonym of Lovecraftian horror. All three essays in the Cosmic Horror Issue mention Lovecraft. One of the essays and one of the stories begin with epigraphs from his pen. Several of the stories have Lovecraftian themes, content, props, motifs, and so on. Although Jeff VanderMeer urged us to move past Lovecraft, we never have. It looks like he failed in his effort . . .

Except that there is an illustration in Weird Tales #367 that seems to acknowledge one of his complaints against contemporary authors who continue to admire, imitate, fetishize, and most especially commodify Lovecraft, his works, his concepts, and his approach to weird fiction. The unsigned illustration is the last to appear in the Cosmic Horror Issue and occupies the last page. It has the look of a trompe-l'œil painting and shows an album cover resting on a woodgrain tabletop. The album cover is a takeoff of Nevermind by Nirvana. It shows a larval Cthulhu swimming after a hundred dollar bill on the end of a hook. The illustration is ironic, even cynical. It's curious that the editor and publisher of Weird Tales would print it. They seem to recognize that they and many of their authors are chasing after Cthulhu cash and Lovecraft lucre. Evidently they don't feel any shame or embarrassment in that. They would be laughing to the bank except that I don't think Weird Tales is much of a moneymaking operation. Maybe I'm wrong.

I'm not exactly on Jeff VanderMeer's side in this, but you have to admit that an awful lot of writers, artists, and other creators, not just now but for the past many decades, probably going back to the 1940s, are milking a cash cow and will no doubt continue to do so for as long as they can. It would be better, I think, if writers would put the cow away and create something new and original. But again, I don't think they're up to it. It's a lot easier to copy and imitate things created by others and to go on doing that for all of your life. And that's what our popular culture has become, a mix of imitation, adaptation, remakes, sequels, prequels, pastiches, and, worst of all, shameless copying and outright theft of other people's ideas. It's no wonder there is so much product placement in the Cosmic Horror Issue, for the fiction itself and all of its themes and content have become commercial products. Cosmic Horror, like so many other genre names, has become a brand, and the authors writing in these genres have seemingly become hucksters and exploiters.

Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Call of the Void -- L'appel du Vide" by Carol Gyzander

Carol Gyzander is a poet, author, and editor. Her story "Call of the Void -- L'appel du Vide" is the last in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. I think she's an American, even if her story has a Canadian-style bilingual title. The English half of her title echoes that of "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft. That's probably not a coincidence. The Nietzschean void is right there in the title, too, also probably not a coincidence. Word must have gone out to prospective authors for this issue that they would get extra points if they used void (or abyss) in their stories and titles.

"Call" is five and a half pages long, with a full-page illustration on the main title page and a one-third page snippet of it reused in the interior. The font in this story is pretty large, needlessly so, I think, unless you're an editor running short on material but still trying to fill out 96 pages of your magazine. If you're an editor relying on your friends to write stories for you, and you find that you're running short, you might need more friends. Either that or the ones you have should write more sustained works. I wouldn't count on that very much, though. I'm not sure they're capable of it. More than one of the stories in this issue falls short of full development. They start out with a good germ but fail to reach their full potential. Anyway, the large font used in "Call" is just another indicator of the thinness of content in this issue of Weird Tales. I don't plan on reading any future issues, though, and so I will probably never find out if this thinness is a trend.

"Call" kicks off with product placement in its first paragraph. The lone character Ellen doesn't just have a camera. She has a Nikon D850. Some product. If I look at this magical Internet, I find that a Nikon D850 is a $2,000 piece of equipment. That's not just product placement. It's very conspicuous consumption on the part of the author. And already I have a bad taste in my mouth. Then there is another high-end product, Keurig, placed in the story. There are still other proper nouns in "Call." Some are place names, but even they seem like product placement. The author seems to be saying, "Look at me. These are the places where I have been and with which I am well familiar," translated (by me) into, "I have insider information. My use of these names will substitute for any and all description of the places they represent, what they might signify in my story, or what they might mean to my character. If you don't know what or where they are, well too bad for you."

I won't single out Carol Gyzander here. Several of the authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue have done the same kind of thing, and I wonder why. Why put your knowing in front of us? Why not put yourself away and tell your story? Why are you drawing attention to yourself when the attention of the reader should be on your story, its characters, and its events? Anyway, I remember going to a lecture at a university not many years ago. Before the lecture began, I heard a woman in the audience (I didn't know her) talking about going to Syria, as if going to Syria were a bullet point on her resume. Are we supposed to impressed by these things? I'm not sure. Anyway, there is even a name--Alzheimer's disease--for what killed the main character's mother in Ms. Gyzander's story. I take this as a kind of product placement, too. I guess if you give a thing a name that everyone can simply look up on the Internet, you don't have to do any explaining, meaning, you don't have to do any writing. The reader can just open another window or tab on her screen as she's reading. She could even have a tab for every commercial product you have mentioned in your story and make her purchases along the way. Put another way, in using the names of products (Alzheimer's disease and Arches National Park being, essentially, the names of products) you have relieved yourself of the responsibility of writing. I guess that's what brandnames are for. They're a kind of shorthand that gets right to the knowing, impulsive, status-seeking, and commercially or materially acquisitive part of the brain, wherever that might be. No thinking is really required. I could go on complaining, but I guess we have to realize that this is just how people talk these days, and the way people talk creeps into the author's prose. And here I thought prose was supposed to rise above the level of everyday talk.

I'll finish up. The main character Ellen, a photographer, goes alone into the desert. She has a kind of vision-quest. People have done this for a long time. Jesus did it. He refused the vision or temptation placed before him, though, by Satan. Ellen on the other hand goes for it. I say "main character," but really Ellen is the only character in "Call," for once again, as in "Mozaika," we have a woman alone, an artist, absorbed in the things that, I guess, fill and overfill the thoughts of countless numbers of women in this western world. Ellen's mother is on her mind, just as Myrna's is in "Mozaika." Both characters are lone artists, caught up in their careers and activities. Are these things the main themes in women's literature? In the lives of western women? If so, "Call of the Void -- L'appel du Vide" is made for readers of a certain type. I would say that it has narrow appeal, but then much of what appears in the Cosmic Horror Issue is written from a narrow viewpoint and may have narrow appeal. If you're an atheist or materialist, if you have a dark view of life and the world, if you're wrapped up in yourself and your own thoughts, if you're a fanboy or an ardent consumer of American popular culture, you'll probably find much here to like. What is there for the rest of us, though? Anyway, too many of these stories are too much like a TV show or a movie, and one of them is actually a comic book story. The best, most complex, and most interesting or entertaining stories in this issue--"Concerto in Five Movements" by Ramsey Campbell, "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson, and "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan--are not TV-like or comic book-like. They are real fiction, despite any product placement or other flaws or shortcomings they might contain.

Fiction is supposed to be more and to offer more than a script, a screenplay, or a treatment for some medium or form other than real prose printed on the pages of a book or magazine. But authors of today seem to have watched too much TV and too many movies over the course of their lives. They have probably also read too many comic books and played too many countless hours of video games. Reading and the craft of writing seem to be in decline, probably as a result of these things. (Nancy Kilpatrick may be onto something in her story "Mozaika.") Reading takes effort, as does writing. Maybe readers and writers aren't up to the task anymore, even though the results of both reading and writing can be so very richly rewarding. Only a couple of the stories in the Cosmic Horror Issue seem to have been written by authors whose imaginations were formed primarily by reading. Few of them seem to be dedicated writers of fiction in prose. I can't imagine any of their stories--or possibly only a couple--ever being anthologized or reprinted except in the authors' own collections. But then many such collections are essentially vanity publications. In fact, Weird Tales itself, in its latest incarnation, seems to be a vanity publication, a resume builder, or a little sandbox in which a little clique of authors--seemingly all friends of the editor, some talented, some far less so--have gathered to play.

The world has changed since the first Weird Tales of one hundred years ago.

Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson-Part Three

We associate the image of Dionysus with that of Pan, the piper. Pan appears in an early work of cosmic and pagan horror, The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen (1894). There is madness and despair in that story, just as there is madness and despair in The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and the short story "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson. This madness and despair, as well as murder, horror, and death, are brought on by seeing and hearing things that are supposed to be beyond human ken, by peering into abysses, and by close encounters with Chaos, the Void, and Evil itself, incarnate. There is piping in Lovecraft, too. It is associated with his god Azathoth, the so-called daemon-sultan who is seated at the center of "Ultimate Chaos."

In The Great God Pan, there are many strange and terrible events. One of these is a bizarre and horrifying transformation undergone by a woman, among other things of woman into man. The passage describing this transformation is too long to give here. You will find it in Chapter VIII, The Fragments.* People who believe the human body can be altered in its fundamental form should read this passage and recognize the kind of horrors they're trying to bring into our world. In the story of Genesis, read from around the Moon on Christmas Eve 1968 by the Apollo Eight astronauts, God said, "Let there be light." The creation of life follows. In this scene of transformation from Machen's story, there is "the negation of light." That negation is followed by death.

There is in The Great God Pan a reference to Nodens, "the god of the Great Deep or Abyss."** Abysses are elsewhere in Machen's story. So is void:

"[. . . ] the voice of articulate-speaking men echo in the waste void that bounds our thought."

Articulate and intelligible speech, then, pushes back the bounds of the void, just as God spoke his Word, thereby banishing it. Word is positive and creative. Being atheists and probably many of them nihilists, authors of and believers in cosmic horror want instead for us to be bound ever more closely by the void, for it to encroach upon us until we are annihilated. They want, I suspect, Creation to contract and Chaos to reign. The language of the Void, then, is gibberish to us. If we translate it into our language, we go mad, or we lose the will to live. Remember that in the essay preceding his story, Mr. Wilson describes cosmic horror as a genre in which "Chaos reigns." (p. 49)

The Great God Pan has been, I think, an inspiration for much weird fiction and horror fiction, from the works of the devout, such as William Peter Blatty, to those of the skeptical, such as H.P. Lovecraft. F. Paul Wilson mentions The Exorcist and Lovecraft in his essay "Abrahamic vs. Cosmic Horror." He also writes that The Great God Pan "can be rightly viewed as a paradigm of cosmic horror." (p. 49) He seems to have looked to that paradigm in writing his own story. So did the other authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue look to The Great God Pan as well? Or did they consult with Mr. Wilson before they began?

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One more thing: In The Great God Pan, there are the names Helen and Mrs. Beaumont. Another Helen is in the Iliad, just as Dwight Bonneville's given name is originally from Ancient Greece and refers to Dionysus. As for his surname, it echoes Mrs. Beaumont's, for Bonneville means "good town," while Beaumont means "beautiful mountain."

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*The description of that final transformation makes me think of a similar scene near the end of The Thing, John Carpenter's film adaptation of John W. Campbell's story.

**There is also this, from a letter quoted in the story: "I am like a traveller who has peered over an abyss, and has drawn back in terror." Is this the source of the title of Francisco Tignini's story "The Traveler"? Dwight Bonneville in "The Last Bonneville" could say the same thing except that he has embraced the abyss instead of being terrified by it.

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I think "The Last Bonneville" is the best story, or the most enjoyable, so far in the Cosmic Horror Issue. Part of that is because of its humor and its tone. Also, we don't have to get ourselves wrapped up in an author who seems wrapped up in himself. Mr. Wilson's story moves, whereas the others are more nearly static. That's what happens when you put Americans into their cars. I guess I should point out that Mr. Wilson is an American, whereas Paul Cornell is British, and Caitlín R. Kiernan, though now an American, was born in Ireland.

* * *

Finally, a couple of things that are wrong. One has to do with the story, in which the authorial voice duplicates in some places the voice of the driver De Groot. We need only one subjective voice. The other is in the Wikipedia entry on F. Paul Wilson, in which he is first described as a "medical doctor," then as a "Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine." It's not his fault or the fault of Weird Tales magazine that there is a lack of precision in his Wikipedia biography. I will point out, though, that the practice of osteopathic medicine grew out of osteopathy, which was just another in a long line of nineteenth-century pseudosciences, some of which still plague us. Can't we be done with pseudosciences, especially when it comes to the practice of medicine? Can't we be done with the lies, hoaxes, and propaganda, the money-grubbing and status-seeking, most of all the Mengele-level experimentation and butchery of what is supposed to be prevention, treatment, cure, and care of the human body and the human soul?

* * *

One last question in regards to "The Last Bonneville": who is in Nevada?

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley 

"Cosmic vs. Abrahamic Horror" by F. Paul Wilson

"Cosmic vs. Abrahamic Horror" by F. Paul Wilson is the third and last essay in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. The text of Mr. Wilson's essay is a little less than two and a half pages long. There are two illustrations. One is a half-page, main-title illustration showing a man (wearing a blue turban), a woman, and a crying boy in a Renaissance-like tableau. The man and woman have tentacled faces. The spot drawing at the end of the essay also shows tentacles. Again, we were supposed to have something new in Weird Tales #367. Tentacles have been in genre fiction since at least The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, published in 1897 and 1898.

Mr. Wilson's essay is the best of the three in this issue. Unlike the first, it's not a list. Unlike the second, it's not written in an academic tone, nor does it use academic-type language. There are lots of names and proper nouns in his essay, but that's as it should be, for Mr. Wilson is exploring history, culture, and so on.

I think Mr. Wilson gets pretty well to the essence of weird fiction, a sub-genre that could be included in Abrahamic horror. He writes: "Abrahamic sensibilities involve an orderly cosmos ruled by a provident Creator who watches over the domain he created because He cares." (p. 46) In that ordered cosmos there are laws. To break them is to transgress. F. Paul Wilson writes that vengeance and retribution are brought down upon transgressors. I have used the word punishment, but I think we're talking about the same thing.

I have also written that in weird fiction there is a crossing over of some kind. The literal meaning of the word transgress is "step across, step over, or go beyond." In his essay, Mr. Wilson writes of the typical Abrahamic horror story plot: "You have transgressed by wandering into a territory claimed by another and so a toll must be exacted." (p. 47) That's essentially the plot of the weird tale.

F. Paul Wilson brings up Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist and the intrusion of evil into the world. "Why is it intruding? To corrupt us via doubt and fear so we'll abandon the Creator. But again, why? Simple: because we matter." He continues in the following paragraph: "And there beats the heart of Abrahamic horror: Humanity matters." In contrast, he writes that cosmic horror does not "recognize any value in your humanity." (p. 47) I guess you could say that in cosmic horror, because it is materialistic, humanity is matter.

Neither of the authors in the first two essays in Weird Tales #367 defines cosmic horror very well, if at all. F. Paul Wilson does, though, and you wonder why we needed the other two:

• "Cosmic horror paints a portrait of human insignificance." (p. 49)

• "Chaos reigns." (p. 49)

• "Abrahamic horror is spiritual; cosmic horror is materialistic" (p. 49)

And this is why, I think, there is so much appeal in cosmic horror to its readers and writers, for they are or appear to be nonbelievers. They think of themselves and their existence--of all human existence--as meaningless and without hope. And being nonbelievers, they are and must needs be materialists. I don't know about you, but I would not want to shrink my mind that way. I would rather keep it open and expansive. By the way, the three bulleted quotes above are in the exact middle of the Cosmic Horror Issue. On the opposite page is an advertisement. So maybe we should be call this the Cosmic-Commercial Horror Issue.

Mr. Wilson mentions what he calls "the hoariest and most familiar horror clichés." (p. 47) Another word for these is tropes, and they are on full display even in fiction that is supposed to be new and brave and fierce. He also indicts about half of the works so far in this issue with this simple statement: "The scholar who ventures too close to the abyss or opens a passage to the Other Side and pays a hideous price are a dime a dozen," (p. 49), for in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, there are the following stories:

• "The City in the Sea" by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, in which a scholar ventures too close . . .

• "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, in which an atheist-materialist and possibly autistic TV watcher ventures too close . . .

• "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan, in which an unnamed physicist, serial killer, and probably also atheist (as is the author of the story) ventures too close . . .

Yeah, a dime a dozen. I wonder how the other authors represented here feel about F. Paul Wilson's statement, for it's more or less a prediction of how they would fall short in writing stories that were supposed to be different and new.

To open his essay, Mr. Wilson refers to "this Catholic boy who discovered cosmic horror at age thirteen [. . .]." (p. 46) He was that boy of course. I don't know where he stands now as far as his beliefs go. That's none of my business. I'll just point out that Mike Mignola was also raised Catholic.

In his closing, F. Paul Wilson addresses the conflict of his title, writing, "Both approaches have their place, and the Abrahamic will go on as long as there are those who believe, just as its antithesis will persist as long as there are those who don't." (p. 49)

I think that means forever.

I'll close my essay by suggesting that F. Paul Wilson's idea of Abrahamic versus Cosmic horror could be related to Jack Williamson's idea of Egyptian-Hebraic versus Classically Greek stories of Dystopia and Utopia, which gave us, respectively, weird fiction (among other things) and science fiction (also among other things).

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan-Part Two

The narrator in "Night Fishing" has a cosmic horror problem. We get a hint of that in the first column of the story as it appears in Weird Tales #367:

There's a hallway that seems a lot longer than it can possibly be.

Dread stretches time and space.

Time and space being the dimensions and scales in which cosmic horror operates.

Telling about night fishing with his grandfather, the narrator relates to his psychiatrist: "We'd just drift around out there on the lake, the stars wheeling overhead--I swear there were more stars in the sky when I was a kid. I look up now at night, and it's like something came along and ate most of them." Remember the image of the zero: a gaping maw. Remember the consuming, engulfing void: now an eater of stars.

Instead of using an epigraph, the author of this story, Caitlín R. Kiernan, quotes from other works within its main body. These include a traditional song called "There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea" and the poem "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" by Dylan Thomas, which also has imagery of the sea. (Another variation on a theme in the Cosmic Horror Issue.) There is also an allusion to a story by a long-ago teller of weird tales, paraphrased from an idea by an author before him.

Read on . . .

In Mr. Kiernan's story, there are these words in italics, which he uses to connote quotations from other works:

I think we're fished for.

Right away, I recognized that as an idea originally in The Book of the Damned (1919), the first of Charles Fort's four books on strange and anomalous phenomena. In Chapter 12 of that book, Fort concluded: "I think we're property," meaning, we are the property of races alien to Earth. This, I think, could very well have been the origin of the ancient astronauts hypothesis so popular today. And it's one of the two main themes I have identified in the Cosmic Horror Issue, or one of two main sources of these feelings of cosmic horror about which its authors write. We have this vast cosmos in which to work and yet they have come up with only two sources of horror at our apprehension of it. At least Mr. Kiernan put these things together in interesting ways, even if they are, again, meta-references.

Eleven years after The Book of the Damned was published, author Edmond Hamilton had a story called "The Space Visitors" in Air Wonder Stories. The date was March 1930. His story was reprinted in Startling Stories in September 1939, the month in which the Second World War began. Hamilton's story is a Fortean story--or a storified plot really--of a visitation made by aliens to Earth. (Storified is my new word. There were lots of storified plots in the early years of science fiction.) The aliens' purpose is unknown except that they seem to be studying us. Their study is, however, extremely destructive and heedless of human life and pain. In the story, a Dr. Jason Howard, of Gotham University no less, theorizes on the matter at hand:

Did we live at the bottom of an ocean, an atmospheric sea? Were we merely crawling things upon earth's surface, to be fished for and examined curiously by unimaginable beings and vessels far above?

Emphasis added. As in the Cosmic Horror Issue, there is imagery here of the sea. And coincidentally or not, Hamilton's second banana to Dr. Howard has the same surname, Ransome vs. Ransom, as C.S. Lewis' hero in his Space Trilogy of 1938-1945.

Soon after the allusion to an allusion to Charles Fort, there is an allusion to another, earlier figure. The narrator of "Night Fishing" has purchased a box containing some objects from an estate sale. Unfortunately, these objects--or is it just one self-transforming artifact?--have strange properties. He wonders about it. Then he writes:

     I stare at the box, and I imagine it stares back at me.

And now Friedrich Nietzsche rears his head, for in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), he wrote:

     Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Emphasis added again. This aphorism is from Chapter 4, being all of No. 146. In my Vintage edition of 1966, it appears on page 89. Nietzsche wrote a prelude to a philosophy of the future. Remember that the protagonist in The Incredible Shrinking Man saw himself as a possible man of the future.

And so we have that word again, abyss, roughly equivalent to void, and the condition of chaos that preceded God's speaking Cosmos into existence. Abyss is also in the imagery of the sea, as in the scientific term abyssal zone, or that layer that is among the deepest in the ocean. The word abyss is also in "Dagon" by H.P. Lovecraft, one of the earliest stories--if not the earliest--in Weird Tales (Oct. 1923) that has in it cosmic scales and cosmic scope. It's also in "The Call of Cthulhu," which appeared in "The Ghost Table" Issue of Weird Tales in February 1928. Both usages are in regards to the depths of the sea. Dagon is from the sea, but Cthulhu is from the stars.

So, from Charles Fort comes the idea that there are aliens among or above us, who own us, prey upon us, or are fishing for us, and from Friedrich Nietzsche comes the image of the abyss as not just emptiness but something that is watching us, waiting for an opening through which it might gain access to our world.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

What Is Cosmic Horror?

Weird Tales #367, from 2023, is a themed issue. The theme is cosmic horror. I'm not sure that a themed issue is a good idea. What happens if you as a reader don't like the theme? Well, you go elsewhere for your reading, and your money follows you. That was one of the really good things about the original Weird Tales: no matter what your tastes were when it came to weird fiction, fantasy, or even science fiction, you would probably find something you liked in every issue.

There has been a proliferation of genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres in genre fiction. It's pretty ridiculous actually. I'm not sure why there should be such proliferation except that I think everybody is trying to be extraordinary. Democracy has its discontents. People ask themselves, if we're all equal, how am I to stand out from everybody else? How am I to show myself to be above others? One way of doing it, I guess, is to make yourself extraordinary within a subset or sub-subset of our larger society and culture, even if you have to invent that subset or sub-subset for yourself. The other day, I wrote about an interview that one contributor to the Cosmic Horror Issue conducted with another. In his introductory paragraph to that interview, Nicholas Diak wrote of "The Forest Gate" by Samantha Underhill: "Using cosmic horror and existential dread poetic styles, this poem . . ." and so on. So I guess cosmic horror and existential dread are poetic styles and the proliferation extends into not only genres but also forms and styles. I have used the word proliferation here. Actually I think it's a balkanization of culture, more accurately an atomization. People working in culture are in pursuit of the infinitesimal, for if you can divide culture finely enough, then you can be extraordinary within your own self-created infinitesimal. If your world is your navel, then you can easily occupy your whole world. You can be within it the greatest of anything and everything you can think of.

So what is cosmic horror? Well I'll let you know that my title is a trick. I don't know what it is. But then I didn't invent the thing. I'm not sure that it even exists. The other day, I pointed out that cosmos and chaos are opposites. Cosmos is order. It is the universe. It's where we live and it's a place governed by laws. Although there is emptiness in the universe, the emptiness is not what counts. The important parts lie among the emptiness. If time is what keeps everything from happening all at once (a quote attributed to Ray Cummings), then emptiness--space--is what keeps everything from happening all in the same place.

Chaos is cosmos' opposite. It is disorder, confusion, emptiness. The Online Etymology Dictionary explains its meaning as "gaping void; empty, immeasurable space." The original Greek word, khaos, means "abyss." Those two words, void and abyss, appear again and again in the Cosmic Horror Issue. That was my point in suggesting that cosmic horror should probably be called chaotic horror, for the horror appears to be in encounters with or contemplation of the void or the abyss. Alternatively, this invented, theoretical, or critical (versus natural, organic, or evolved) sub-sub-genre could be called abyssal horror or voidal horror. There isn't any such word as voidal, I guess, but if we can invent one thing, we can invent another.

I have a copy of Otto Struve's Elementary Astronomy, published in 1959 and reprinted in 1961. Struve's book is brimming with black-and-white photographs of immense galaxies and countless stars. In the first page of text, there are numbers representing immense quantities: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the observable universe, a like number of cubic inches of almost empty space in the Milky Way galaxy. That's a lot of zeroes, kept from emptiness or void by an initial non-zero integer. More such numbers appear on the next page. These, then, are cosmic scales, cosmic here having mathematical value but being empty of any value judgments, or at least any outright negative value judgments. Dr. Struve was a dispassionate scientist after all. Even though they are cosmic, we can still write about things of this scale. Otto Struve did it in his textbook. Other authors have done it in their fiction. I should add that zero represents nothing. The numeral looks like a hole, an opening, a gaping maw.

I guess cosmic horror is an expression or a feeling of horror that arises from apprehending or contemplating the cosmic scale of the universe. Maybe it's not the cosmos itself that gives rise to this feeling, though. Again, cosmos is order. Chaos is its opposite. In the biblical story of the creation of the universe, what we call cosmos was preceded by chaos, emptiness, a void:

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep

or:

the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep

or:

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

(Genesis 1:2)

We live in an atheistic and nihilistic age. Maybe the horror that some people feel in their contemplation of the universe is the horror not of cosmos but of the void that preceded it. In intervening and in his act of creation, God put an end to chaos. The void, which was non-existence, is now doubly non-existent. There cannot be a void if there is cosmos. But people don't believe in God any longer. I suspect that many if not most of the authors and poets who contributed to the Cosmic Horror Issue are non-believers, if not atheists, materialists, nihilists, or even anti-natalists, as Thomas Ligotti (not a contributor to this issue) so famously (or infamously) is. And so if there is not God to keep back the void--if it can poke through wherever he is not on watch--then horror might emerge and erupt and engulf. If you don't believe in God, then maybe you must fear the void.

In his first paragraph of Elementary Astronomy, Dr. Struve wrote that the word astronomy is from two Greek words, the first, obviously, for "star," the second, significantly, for "law." To fear or to feel horror at the great scale of the universe in terms of both space and time is, I think, off the mark. It is to ignore the fundamental order and lawfulness of the universe. There are people who feel small or insignificant, their lives essentially meaningless, when they think about the immensity of the universe. Why should that be? They're having, I think, an inappropriate response. I would say that their response is actually self-centered, possibly tipping into a kind of solipsism. If you feel this way, you need to get over yourself. If you think these things, you're actually putting yourself at the center of the universe in that you're thinking about the effect the universe has on you and that your feeling this way is somehow significant, that it is indicative of something that is out there instead of in here. Or maybe you're trying to make of yourself the universe, or vice versa.

Carl Sagan had a better view of it, I think. He saw us as the products--perhaps the end-products--of an orderly universe. "We are star stuff," he famously said in his series Cosmos. The stars have existed so that we might also exist and grow to contemplate them, ourselves, and the cosmos in which we live. We are the mind and consciousness of the cosmos. He gloried in the immensity and magnificence of that great structure, process, and more after which he named his show. I still remember a montage from Cosmos over which exultant music, composed by Beethoven, played, a montage of us, made from star stuff, formed from the dust of stars, set about our tasks of living, thinking, loving, and creating.

At the end of his novel Contact, Dr. Sagan indicated that the universe is actually designed, a curious conclusion for an atheist. And though he might have been an atheist, he was obviously not a nihilist, nor was he negative, depressed, anxious, or fearful in his contemplation of the universe. He could hardly have studied it and accomplished what he did if he had felt those kinds of feelings. In that he was wise. Those who are horrified by the cosmos are, I think, unwise.

I suspect that cosmic horror is actually not based on anything especially serious or meaningful. As Nicholas Diak wrote in his essay, it's actually something done for fun. We like thrills. We like to be scared. Especially when we return from reading, return to what is safe and sure. I think it best to look at it this way, that cosmic horror in storytelling is done for fun. Unfortunately, most of the works in the Cosmic Horror Issue are pretty limited in their approach to cosmic horror. Again, there seem to be two main themes or images in these pages: the void or the abyss, and the alien presence. If there is a cosmos through which chaos occasionally breaks through, and if there is actually a genre of cosmic horror, then the possibilities for telling stories within that genre would seem vast, theoretically endless. Why limit ourselves? Why have the authors of cosmic horror so limited themselves? Maybe it's because we as a culture--and the creators of our culture in particular--have run out of ideas. And maybe we have run out of skills, too, and so we accomplish almost nothing of note.

Now comes the really fun part in all of this, for opposite cosmic horror is cosmic insight, cosmic happiness, cosmic transcendence. Richard Matheson, a teller of weird tales, wrote the screenplay for The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). In the end, that film shows itself as a vehicle for an uplifting, even exultant, philosophical and theological conclusion. Here are the final words spoken by the title character (with my own paragraphing of a transcript of the narration):

I was continuing to shrink, to become . . . What? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world?

So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.

I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens, the universe, worlds beyond number. God's silver tapestry spread across the night.

And in that moment I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of Man's own limited dimension. I had presumed upon Nature. That existence begins and ends is Man's conception, not Nature's.

And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away and in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something too.

Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too.

To God, there is no zero.

I still exist.

"My fears melted away," he says. "To God, there is no zero." Those, I think, are proper responses as we contemplate the cosmos. And I should point out that The Incredible Shrinking Man closes with swelling music played over photographs of the stars and galaxies, just as in Otto Struve's book, which is full of so many zeroes, all of them made from nothing into something by God's word and law.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"The Forest Gate" by Samantha Underhill

"The Forest Gate" by Samantha Underhill is the first poem in Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue. This work is included under the heading of fiction in the table of contents, but it's clearly a poem. So what happened here? A mistake? Or is this another example of a lack of precision in word and meaning so common in our century?

Samantha Underhill was, by her own account, born in Appalachia. She is a poet, author, educator, researcher, voice actress, and audio reader and narrator. Her poetry collection Sadness of the Siren appeared in 2022. The forward is by Jonathan Maberry, editor of Weird Tales. So it looks like Ms. Underhill is another insider. I don't detect any TV or comic book work in her resumé, but it could be there nonetheless. She has done audio work related to the Lord of the Rings. That's fitting, I would say, for someone named Underhill.

"The Forest Gate" is a somewhat long poem of twelve stanzas of four lines each, plus a closing couplet. The lines are long, and the rhyme scheme AABB. It is printed using a large typeface and has a dark, apocalyptic, illustrative background, similar to an American-Romantic painting of the early nineteenth century. The whole thing takes up four pages in this issue, more, really, than what is needed. But as I have indicated, the content in Weird Tales #367 is thin and there's a lot of padding in its pages. Abysses and voids appear on many of them and there seems to have been a lot of effort put into stretching this thing to 96 in all.

I like this poem and its lush, vivid imagery. I like that it's a change of pace in the Cosmic Horror Issue, not only for its form but also because it stands alone and is separate from all other works. It exists in a world all its own, a dark, fantastic, dream-like world. This is high fantasy, I guess, or a Poesque work. Maybe after all it's related to the image of Poe's city in the sea. And now I notice the expression "[s]tar-spawned nightmares" and start to think that H.P. Lovecraft is lurking on its edges as well. The mood is different in "The Forest Gate" than what has come before. This is a poem of course, but it's also the work of the distaff side of humanity. I guess I wouldn't expect anything less than difference.

Ms. Underhill touches on the two main themes or images I have detected in the Cosmic Horror Issue. There are of course the dark parts and the cosmic parts. The poem is dark and the word cosmos appears more than once here. But those aren't the two I mean. Actually, the first of the two themes or images I have mentioned and about which I'll write more is of the abyss or the void. Samantha Underhill writes of a "shimmering void" and "the unlimitable void of space," also the aforementioned "[s]tar-spawned nightmares of the abysses of night." Towards the end, the narrator is "[s]wallowed by the abyss." If there is imagery here similar to that found in "The City in the Sea" by Edgar Allan Poe, then I would like to point out that the word void also is in that poem.

Abyss and void, void and abyss. If this were Pee Wee Herman's Playhouse and these were the secret words of the day, we would all be screaming really loudly--a lot in this issue.

The abyss or the void seems to be tied up with cosmic horror. I'm not sure why that is. Cosmos is from a Greek word meaning "order." The origins and meaning of the word are why Carl Sagan chose it as the title of his 1980s television series. In contrast, abyss refers to "depths of the earth or sea; primordial chaos," according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. I have added the emphasis to the word chaos here because its meaning is essentially the opposite of cosmos. Chaos--disorder, emptiness, or confusion--came first. Then there was Cosmos, which is where we live. Maybe the correct term for this ill-defined sub-genre or sub-sub-genre should be chaotic horror. Remember here that Lovecraft's god Azathoth--perhaps his supreme god--rules from a "black throne at the centre of Chaos." Look for the sea and for depths in Poe's aforementioned poem.

As for void--I would say that the void and the abyss are far more closely related to each other as words or concepts, and so they can stay together I think.

The second theme or image I have detected is what Samantha Underhill alludes to as "some monstrous alien race." She doesn't develop that idea in her poem. That's not what this is about. But there will be more on this theme and image in the next few works in the Cosmic Horror Issue. And connected to these two themes and images--the void and alien races--will be two real-life historical-literary figures, one for each. You have seen their names before in this blog. There are even labels for them appearing on the right on your screen. But that will be only after a while.

There isn't any meta-content or self-references or insider information in "The Forest Gate" as far as I can tell. If you're looking for that kind of thing, go to "Piercing the Veil of Reality: Cosmic Horror Stories in Weird Tales #367," a series of interviews carried out by Nicholas Diak, a contributor to Weird Tales #367, and posted on his website. The date was April 26, 2023. In addition to interviewing Samantha Underhill, Mr. Diak interviewed Angela Yuriko Smith and Carol Gyzander, who also contributed to this issue. There's another image in mythology and fantasy that comes to mind as I discover these things, that of the worm ouroboros, which swallows its own tail.

Before leaving Mr. Diak's website, I thought I would quote a blurb from therein:

A century later, even after a few turbulent decades, Weird Tales is still regarded with prestige and as a premiere publisher of pulp stories, including the cosmic horror genre it pioneered. 

He posted that on April 26, 2023, in other words during the centennial of Weird Tales. So at some point, someone connected with the magazine realized that this was an anniversary year. I'm glad to know that. And I would agree that Weird Tales still carries with it a cachet, although that was earned in the first third (or maybe only quarter) of its hundred years. (What used to be a magazine has turned into a brand and a commodity.) I'm still not sure about cosmic horror, though--whether it's actually a thing or not.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"When the Stars Are Right" by Nicholas Diak

The second feature in Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue (2023), is an essay called "When the Stars Are Right: The Weird Tales Origins of Cosmic Horror" by Nicholas Diak. Mr. Diak has an advanced degree from the University of Washington. Presumably he is an American. He is a writer and scholar interested in movies, music, comic books, and horror fiction, including the works of H.P. Lovecraft. His interests, then, match up with those of the other contributors to this issue. It looks like Weird Tales #367 is still, with this essay, the work of insiders. Mr. Diak has his own website. You can reach it by clicking here.

"When the Stars Are Right" is an essay of six pages all together. This includes a full-page illustration on the title page, four reproductions of Weird Tales covers from the 1920s through the 1940s, and a half-page illustration of tentacles at the end. That illustration is essentially filler. An enlarged part of it is used as the backdrop for the title page. Tentacles as a shorthand image representing weird fiction have become a cliché or, to use an academic kind of word, a trope. I wonder if we can all resolve to end it, to write and create new things and put some of the old ones (maybe some of those Old Ones, too) behind us. After all, new is the promise of the first essay in the Cosmic Horror Issue, editor Jonathan Maberry's brief introduction in "The Eyrie."

Nicholas Diak's essay begins with an epigraph. This is the second to appear in Weird Tales #367. The first is from Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The City in the Sea." The second is from H.P. Lovecraft's poem "Nemesis," from Weird Tales, April 1924, or one hundred and a half years ago.

Mr. Diak's essay is scholarly or academic in its structure and tone. For example:

     This article aims to celebrate cosmic horror by showcasing its unique attributes: genre staples, meta and self-referential qualities, repudiation of reality, its sense of awe, and finally its delightfulness. (p. 15)

So maybe at last we have a definition of cosmic horror. Even so, I'm not sure that it's quite complete. Also, I see three different things mixed up in that sentence. First are things from outside the story itself, namely "genre staples" and "meta and self-referential qualities." I take "genre staples" to be just another term for conventions, tropes, or clichés. I have been writing about those qualities of what is called cosmic horror already in this series. I have also written about meta-references and self-references.

Next are things that are part of the story itself or that exist within the story as part of its plot, theme, mood, and so on, namely "repudiation of reality" and a "sense of awe." I think these attributes extend into weird fiction and fantasy fiction as a whole. A sense of unreality, even if it is fleeting, is an essential part of weird fiction, I think. So is a sense of awe. Awe is a feeling we have all experienced (I hope) as we gaze into the night sky, in other words, into the cosmos. I'm not sure that anyone has ever felt horror in so gazing. Maybe I'm wrong. I think it would take a sick person to have that kind of feeling in contemplating the stars.

Finally, there is the "delightfulness" of cosmic horror. Mr. Diak explains what he means later in his essay when he calls cosmic horror fun to read. I won't argue with that. I'll just point out that fun is a reaction of the reader. And so we have preparations made by the author in the first pair of attributes, the story as a kind of sealed container of the second pair, and the reader's reaction in the last single attribute.

There are lots of names of authors in Mr. Diak's essay, including a list in the first paragraph. That list includes the name of another contributor to the Cosmic Horror Issue. If an essay can have a meta-reference or self-reference, then this is it. Mr. Maberry is also mentioned here, towards the end. I think we'll have to take Nicholas Diak's word for it that Weird Tales is enjoying a period of "current prosperity." Count me skeptical. Otherwise I don't see these names as examples of name-dropping or listing. You already know how I feel about those kinds of things.

I'll admit that I like reading non-fiction about science fiction, weird fiction, and fantasy. I like to see a mind at work. I like history and criticism that have behind them a thesis rather than just as chronicles of events. That's why I can say that Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler is an exciting book. So I'm predisposed to liking a well thought-out essay. Unfortunately, the space here is too limited, and I'm still not sure we have a very good--or at least a very thorough yet concise--definition of cosmic horror as a sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of fantasy fiction.

In his essay, Nicholas Diak looks at stories by Lovecraft as well as by Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, C. Hall Thompson, and Clark Ashton Smith. I was surprised to find Thompson's name in this essay. As far as I can tell, he has seldom been talked about in the company of the other authors mentioned here. In 2019, I wrote a series on C. Hall Thompson. You can access the first part of what I wrote by clicking here. I have at least one more part to write in that series, based on information I did not have in 2019. I hope to get to that soon.

Like I said, there is a scholarly and academic tone and academic-type language, too, in "The Stars Are Right." For example, there is in the first paragraph the use of the passive voice, one of the scourges of academic writing. The author calls "The Call of the Cthulhu" a "text" instead of what it is, which is a story. The phrases "cosmic horror texts" and "cosmic horror canon" appear on the last page of the essay, also the word "tropes." It's good to notice and point out the use of tropes or clichés in any kind of storytelling. Those things are probably okay in storytelling for children. They should probably be left out of it for adults. "Text" and "canon" are pretty horrible words, though. My advice to any scholar is to throw them away. They're not texts, they're stories. And the only real canon I know of is in the Catholic Church.

* * *

Nemesis
by H. P. Lovecraft

     Thro' the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
          Past the wan-moon'd abysses of night,
     I have liv'd o'er my lives without number,
          I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

     I have whirl'd with the earth at the dawning,
          When the sky was a vaporous flame;
     I have seen the dark universe yawning,
          Where the black planets roll without aim;
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

     I had drifted o'er seas without ending,
          Under sinister grey-clouded skies
     That the many-fork'd lightning is rending,
          That resound with hysterical cries;
With the moans of invisible daemons that out of the green waters rise.

     I have plung'd like a deer thro' the arches
          Of the hoary primordial grove,
     Where the oaks feel the presence that marches
          And stalks on where no spirit dares rove;
And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers thro' dead branches above.

     I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains
          That rise barren and bleak from the plain,
     I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains
          That ooze down to the marsh and the main;
And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things I care not to gaze on again.

     I have scann'd the vast ivy-clad palace,
          I have trod its untenanted hall,
     Where the moon writhing up from the valleys
          Shews the tapestried things on the wall;
Strange figures discordantly woven, which I cannot endure to recall.

     I have peer'd from the casement in wonder
          At the mouldering meadows around,
     At the many-roof'd village laid under
          The curse of a grave-girdled ground;
And from rows of white urn-carven marble I listen intently for sound.

     I have haunted the tombs of the ages,
          I have flown on the pinions of fear
     Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages,
          Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:
And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

     I was old when the Pharaohs first mounted
          The jewel-deck'd throne by the Nile;
     I was old in those epochs uncounted
          When I, and I only, was vile;
And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.

     Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,
          And great is the reach of its doom;
     Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,
          Nor can respite be found in the tomb:
Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.

     Thro' the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
          Past the wan-moon'd abysses of night,
     I have liv'd o'er my lives without number,
          I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

* * *

In his poem, Lovecraft used the word abyss. That word and a similar word or idea--void--will come up again in this series. It seems to me that there are two common and I guess connected ideas behind the stories in the Cosmic Horror Issue, the abyss or the void being one of them. Also, note Lovecraft's allusion to "the far Arctic isle." Was he referring to Hyperborea? Or to Ultima Thule? Are these two imaginary places related somehow?

In reading about Ultima Thule, I came across Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Dream-Land," from 1844. I see some similarities between "Dream-Land" and "Nemesis." Note the archaic contractions in both, also the use of such words as "tarns" and "ghoul" or "Ghouls," and again the reference or allusion to Ultima Thule. Remember, too, that Lovecraft wrote a story called "The Colour Out of Space." Did he get his title from Poe's phrase "Out of SPACE--Out of Time"?

* * *

Dream-Land
by Edgar Allan Poe

By a route obscure and lonely,   
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,   
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly   
From an ultimate dim Thule--
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
       Out of SPACE--Out of TIME.

Bottomless vales and boundless floods,   
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,   
With forms that no man can discover   
For the tears that drip all over;   
Mountains toppling evermore   
Into seas without a shore;   
Seas that restlessly aspire,   
Surging, unto skies of fire;   
Lakes that endlessly outspread   
Their lone waters--lone and dead,--
Their still waters--still and chilly   
With the snows of the lolling lily.

By the lakes that thus outspread
Their lone waters, lone and dead,--
Their sad waters, sad and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily,--
By the mountains--near the river   
Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever,--  
By the grey woods,--by the swamp   
Where the toad and the newt encamp,--   
By the dismal tarns and pools
   Where dwell the Ghouls,--   
By each spot the most unholy--   
In each nook most melancholy,--   
There the traveller meets, aghast,   
Sheeted Memories of the Past--   
Shrouded forms that start and sigh   
As they pass the wanderer by--   
White-robed forms of friends long given,   
In agony, to the Earth--and Heaven.

For the heart whose woes are legion   
'T is a peaceful, soothing region--   
For the spirit that walks in shadow   
'T is--oh, 't is an Eldorado!
But the traveller, travelling through it,   
May not--dare not openly view it;   
Never its mysteries are exposed   
To the weak human eye unclosed;   
So wills its King, who hath forbid   
The uplifting of the fring'd lid;   
And thus the sad Soul that here passes   
Beholds it but through darkened glasses.

By a route obscure and lonely,   
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,   
I have wandered home but newly   
From this ultimate dim Thule.

* * *

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley