The question of our times remains unanswered: is Tolkien better than Lovecraft? Or is the New Weird better than both?
Round 13! Karen Harber's Up the Side of the Air weighs in on behalf of Tolkien, with the story of a girl who gets apprenticed to an aging wizard, despite neither of them being very happy with the arrangement. Things work out the way every story about an old grump having to take care of a child works out, but along the way the girl stumbles across a magical secret not even the wizard knows, and then the wizard fights a sorcery duel and desperately needs his apprentice's (cheating) help. In the end, she saves the day by reusing a spell she got wrong in a new context where the mistake changes from a bug to a feature. The story also addresses basic sexism, arguing that females can be of use to males; very Booker T. Washington "cast down your bucket where you are" logic.
It's not bad, but it colored within familiar lines.
What about Lovecraft's champion for this round, acclaimed blackpill pusher Thomas Ligotti? His entry, The Last Feast of Harlequin, presents a cinema-ready spin on the old investigator-in-a-small-town-discovers-uncanny-horrors story.
An anthropologist learns about a mysterious clown festival and a related unsolved murder in a small town, and thinks "I gotta investigate that." Lovecraft was a fan of anthropology (although I doubt a person with his low threshold for non-WASPs could have cut it in the field) and anthropologists, like detectives, have license to enter alien territory in search of hidden truths, so it makes sense to build a horror tale around an anthropologist. While I have no idea what a proper anthropologist would make of the protagonist's choices, Ligotti does portray the hero thinking about cultural investigation in a serious fashion, and realizing things I wouldn't have picked up on. For example, there are two sets of clowns... one set is a fig leaf of a response by upstanding citizens of the community to the second set; a desperate distraction from an unfaceable secret. It's a smart spin on the Wicker Man style "The whole community's in on the conspiracy" story. This time the whole community knows, but most of them dread it, and refuse to acknowledge the dire truth.
I wrote about another Ligotti story, A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing, earlier in this series, and I didn't much like the one. I found it too evangelical, too overt in its peddling of Ligotti's nihilism. This story is rather similar, but it avoids overt messaging in at least two ways. Firstly, it allows narrative to work on its own terms, offering an engrossing story instead of a symbolist parade.
The second way requires some explanation. One question I think is worth asking about any horror story is: who's getting libeled? Texas Chainsaw Massacre libels poor rural workers. The Exorcist libels wayward teens and promiscuous youth culture, along with the mentally ill and the addicted (horror is multivalent, even in its libels). Lovecraft's own The Call of Cthulhu libels everybody who isn't white, since it claims that BIPOC people are hiding a god from the ofays.
In Last Feast of Harlequin, Ligotti plays a witty trick: he libels himself. Nihilists are to blame.
For the New Weird, K. J. Bishop offers The Art of Dying. A trio of celebrity adventurers in the urban imaginary struggle not against an assailant, but with the performative insistence by one of the crew that she, Mona, is sick to the point of death, a one-woman Munchausen-by-proxy that becomes a quartet, as she, her companions, and an intrusive young gossip columnist travel through town, seeking the right place to lie down for the last time. Spoiler: an obvious sacrificial lamb is selected to die in her place. While I doubt that Bishop is a Trump worshiper, the resolution of the story works in a way that will make sense to anyone with a MAGA cap.
The story reminded me of New Weird charter member M. John Harrison's novel In Viriconium, which also involves a sick socialite gradually giving up the ghost while her companions shamble around a grotesque city and try to aid her. Bishop may not take the sentence-by-sentence risks of the observationally acrobatic Harrison, but she keeps things darkly ambiguous; her loyalties are not obvious.
Verdict: I enjoyed Ligotti's gothic detective story most. Harber's mildly feminist wizard story felt like an overlong wikipedia synopsis of itself. I've read Bishop's story twice now and still can't make my mind up about it. Something about its climactic cruelty leaves me queasy, and while the story's ability to stir troubled ambiguities may be a mark of its power, I'm going to give the win to Team Lovecraft.
Round 14 begins with The Naga by Peter S. Beagle, author of The Last Unicorn. If you've read many myths and fairy tales, you've encountered stories of humans who find romance with a supernatural figure, and the troubles that rise from such forbidden pairings. This is one such, as a rather useless ruler marries a gorgeous woman who claims to be the human form of a shapeshifting creature known as a naga. She won't reveal her true appearance to him, but they agree that they will meet every night without fail, with death as the price of failure to abide by this vow. I thought I could see where this was going. I was wrong.
Enriched by her love, the ruler becomes a more compassionate and helpful ruler, but you can't please everyone, and a violent rebel faction creates very real danger for the ruler and his bride. The climax was an operatically emotional sequence that made me gasp, and almost brought me to tears. I am rarely so moved by prose. I don't trust emotional response as testimony to artistic merit; after all, in 2020 it doesn't take a lot to inspire a big rush of emotion. Still, I think my reaction had more than a little to do with Beagle's storytelling skill, and insight into love.
For Lovecraft, it's James P. Blaylock, with The Shadow on the Doorstep. An enthusiast for aquariums and exotic fish relates how he keeps visiting squalid, short-lived aquarium stores that might be run by the same person... and might be up to something uncanny. There are, so far as I can tell, no overtly supernatural or horrific elements in this story; only suggestions and suspicions. Has our storyteller stumbled onto the fringes of a secret outpost of Innsmouth, Lovecraft's harbor town of human-fish hybrids, or is he pizzagating a respectable, if rundown, business? The recurring owner of these businesses is an asian man, or different asian men whom the narrator can't tell apart, so yellow peril is an ugly factor.
I've read and enjoyed a novel by Blaylock (The Last Coin) which was an unabashed supernatural adventure in a whimsical contemporary mold; nothing in that treat of a novel prepared me for the diffuse melancholy of this submersion. If it weren't encased in a volume with a creepy monster on the cover, it would be possible to read this story and never realize that anything Lovecraftian was being invoked. A keenly observed tour of grubby business ventures, for those (like me) who are charmed by such things, and a tantalizing dance on the edge of paranoia.
The New Weird shows up with At Reparata, by Jeffery Ford. Reparata is a palace founded by a wealthy eccentric, who has set himself up as ruler over a court peopled with derelicts whom the king adopted and ennobled. They've found that being gifted with titles and responsibilities which cater to their aspirations transfigures them into their best selves, and the community thrives, until the sad day when the Queen dies and the ruler sinks into misery. Through magic, his misery is siphoned from him in the form of an enormous mothlike creature, which flies about devouring almost everything. The obvious point, that one must learn to live with grief, since it cannot be removed, is detailed with deft storytelling, but more importantly, Ford depicts the role of the community in helping one to deal with grief. This is an unusual story for this anthology, in that it ends with optimism, community, and love.
Verdict: Wow, this is a competitive round. Beagle's Naga struck with the most force, Blaylock's Shadow crept quite stealthily, yet in the end, I find Ford's Reparata to be a revelation. It offers a vision of damaged people creating a working community, and working together through love and compassion; it's a vision that never feels false or cloying. It's a model of fantasy literature that suggests ways forward for society, and I for one feel the need for such.
Round 15: Mike Resnick tries to do right by Tolkien with Revolt of the Sugar Plum Fairies. A batch of tiny fairies arrives in a normal guy's modern home, vowing to take revenge on Walt Disney for misrepresenting them in Fantasia. The guy directs them to Tinseltown, and they leave. Then they return, having gone Hollywood.
Resnick spins jokey dialogue as if auditioning for a staff position on a 60s sitcom, and if you really like 60s sitcoms, you might enjoy this silly jape.
For Lovecraft, Gene Wolfe brings Lord of the Land. Another anthropologist, this time interviewing a family of hill folk. One of them tells the anthropologist an enchanting tale of weirdness, but the earnest young scholar picks up on subtle social cues amongst the family that suggest the tale is a diversion, or a warning. There's something unhealthy in the family dynamic, and this stranger is about to face it if he doesn't skedaddle.
"Compassion" isn't the watermark of most stories that end up in Lovecraft tribute anthologies, but Wolfe is a warm exception to that rule, and as in much great horror of the late 20th century, he bends scare-story tropes to acknowledge the hidden wounds of family abuse.
The New Weird offers Letters from Tainaron by Leena Krohn. These epistles come to us from a traveler exploring the mores of a land where people's physical forms are in flux. The local culture is thick with secrets, taboos and folkways that are not for general distribution. It's all expressed in Calvinoesque slivers; traces of Barthes and Kafka are also evident, but Krohn's focus on metamorphosis goes further back, to an Ovid who is less concerned with love and desire than with the natural processes of life cycles, and how aging and death are absorbed into the roles we play in one another' lives.
Verdict: Given a choice between hillbilly horror or arty EuroFantastique, I am stymied, but this isn't a balanced consideration of differing but equal merits; it's a Smackdown, and the winner of this Smackdown Round is the New Weird, because each of its vignettes felt new-made yet deeply rooted, and also probably because I'm conflicted about Appalachian stuff, as a product of the American South, while I'm unconflicted in my enthusiasm for chilly European fantastic literature.
Round 16!
In order to make the count round out correctly, Tolkien gets a twofer of tales set in elusive medieval dream realms. The first: Winter's King by Jane Yolen. After a troubled birth, a boy relies on caretakers who can't connect to the child; he is either a changing or autistic, depending on how you look at it (and I believe Yolen is building the story around the doubling of these perspectives). Finally, the child either dies of exposure or goes to meet the Elves of Winter for whom he is a figure of destiny. Yolen creates a double helix of tragedy and fulfillment, allowing the boy to be a simultaneous misfit and king. Irony and sincerity, sorrow and fulfillment, vie for control of the story, and the reader is the final judge.
Also for Tolkien, Gotterdammerung by Barry N. Malzberg. a party of adventurers petitions a wizard for help finding a lost magical ring. As in Tolkien, the ring has great power and carries heavy consequences. The wizard's principled refusal, and the adventurer's confusion, make it clear that this won't be a day of heroic triumph. But then things twist, and twist agin. Duplicity upon duplicity turns this into a cunning and rather noirish tale.
Both of these are brief and dense, like my favorite poems.
Lovecraft's champion is the remarkable Ramsey Campbell, with The Faces at Pine Dunes, about a family traveling around Britain in a camper, looking for the right community in which to settle. The parents have a grotesquely horrid marriage; their young adult son wants to break free from them, but his employment history hasn't panned out, so he's financially dependent on these loveless, toxic people. They settle in a town with a witchy forest, and the young man soon finds an okay job and a great girlfriend. He also begins to realize that his parents have deeper secrets than he could have guessed, and that they didn't come to this town by happenstance.
Rosemary's Baby and Young Goodman Brown are in the mix of this story, which follows a Lovecraftian structure as the hero explores secrets rooted in eerie locations and twisted people. Horrifying reveals. Big monsters. Bad family dynamics taken to an occult extreme. Campbell may be unmatched among contemporary horror writers for his ability to set the scene. He describes locations with such fluid evocation that I can practically feel the damp, and his psychological acuity is a match for any number of New Yorker approved writers.
The New Weird responds with The Ride of the Gabbleratchet by Steph Swainston. In this story, excerpted from a longer work, a trio of heroines teleport themselves from one world to another, fleeing an equally mobile enemy, The Gabbleratchet, which is essentially a zombified variant of the Wild Hunt. Swainston describes creatures like the Gabbleratchet with verve and vividness, but for me the shifting, whimsy-indulging tone caused the story to stall out quite a bit. I'm not one to insist on narrative momentum for its own sake, but indulgences need to pay off one way or another. In one world they meet Doggerel Dogs, who live up, or down, to their name. The payoff of Doggerel Dogs is that there are Doggerel Dogs.
I'm not including them in this Smackdown, but the New Weird volume includes several essays about the subgenre, in one of which Swainston declares that "Elves were the first against the wall when the revolution came." This reader would gladly do a prisoner exchange; take back your doggerel dogs, and return the elves. Not that I'm a reactionary, but if the revolution is this close to being a direct-to-video Phantom Tollbooth sequel, I'm not interested.
Tolkein's reps are strong, but Lovecraft wins this round, by virtue of locations so foggy they practically dampened my clothes, and characters I'd skirt around down at pub. The big finish has an infodump quality, but loads on horror after family horror enough to bind bad parents with cosmic nihilism in ways that make far too much sense.
Next time is the last time for this series. Take good care til then!
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