“Diane, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Today, dear listener, we go both current and retro with a guest review and opinion piece by writer/journalist Paul StJohn Mackintosh, no stranger to these pages, on the entire three series of that iconic television show, Twin Peaks.

Having not watched Twin Peaks ourselves since it originally came out (when we were fairly obsessional over Special Agent Dale Cooper), we were keen to see what Paul made of it all, and as usual, he brings his critical razor with him. As well as interpretations which you may or may not share.  So pour yourself a cup of damn fine coffee, put your feet up on that log, and prepare for the fray…

WARNING – THIS ARTICLE DOES CONTAIN SPOILERS, PARTICULARLY IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN SERIES THREE

Usual disclaimer: All views expressed by guest writers are their own, not those of the site or owners; photos are copyright their originators, and shared here under fair use for review purposes only.

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Locked Down in the Black Lodge: Twin Peaks 30 years on

by Paul StJohn Mackintosh

 

The calamitous year 2020 marks, among other things, the 30th anniversary of the release of Twin Peaks. As it happens, I spent my coronavirus lockdown in Budapest catching up on the series on HBO. I hadn’t even realised that the 2017 Season 3 sequel/continuation had been released. I hadn’t rewatched the original series since it came out in 1990-91, which gives some idea of my own credentials as a David Lynch fanboy. All the same, after binge-watching all three seasons, I had a few reflections on the series that I thought I’d share.

For one thing, the original Twin Peaks has worn remarkably well with time. It’s amazing how in retrospect the original puzzles, frustrations and longueurs that seemed to gall so badly back in the day now feel relatively straightforward and untaxing. Perhaps televisual narrative technique has just finally caught up with David Lynch, but the original Twin Peaks now feels to me effectively paced and well-judged in bringing off its reveals. Mike the one-armed man reveals the true nature of Bob in more or less completely explicit detail in Season 2 Episode 6, laying to rest the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer aside from the small detail of finding his earthly vessel. Similarly, Windom Earle’s data dumps bring us up to speed pretty fast on the nature of the Black Lodge, and why he’s seeking it (like any James Bond villain, it’s to rule the wuuurld…) Hindsight is always 20:20, but still, Twin Peaks Season 1 and 2 seem far more satisfying and fulfilling on second viewing.

There is much to seriously like in the new Season 3 as well. Many not-so-lesser characters get a healthy slice of the narrative, and in some cases their story arcs and character development are brought to a satisfying resolution. Deputy Hawk gets a fitting share of screen time, although unfortunately often in service to Magical Indian-type cliches about his heritage. Gordon Cole and Albert Rosenfield play a solid double-act alongside new FBI Special Agent Tammy Preston, providing some really meaty investigative scenes. Deputy Andy and his new fellow Deputy Bobby Briggs also mature well as characters with the passage of time, as does Ben Horne, now apparently the man of integrity he set out to become at the end of Season 2. Margaret Lanterman the Log Lady, in Catherine Coulson’s last screen appearance before her sad death from cancer, delivers depth and pathos without even getting up from a chair.

Not everyone comes off so well. Doctor Jacoby and Nadine Hurley have a kind of platonic romance, while Ed Hurley and Norma Jennings finally achieve happiness together after 25 years, but their stories feel hardly worth the screen time devoted to them. The same applies to many of the new characters wheeled on for Season 3, who often come across as rushed ciphers compared to their deeply realized forebears a generation back. One good thing to say about them is that at least the season’s plot doesn’t dwell on them too much.

Laura Palmer herself is back, and apparently resurrected, or at least rediscovered in an alternative timeline, in the last episode of Season 3. There are many hints along the way that “Laura is the One,” still a figure of great metaphysical significance in the cosmology of the Twin Peaks universe, yet her true role, and why she’s back, are still left unclear at the end of the season. However strong a presence she is when she is onscreen, it’s hard to feel much of an emotional charge at her return.

Other aspects of Season 3 are better at delivering the air of spiritual profundity and enigmatic depth that Lynch could often conjure in the first two seasons. The black-and-white scenes in the strange palace above the purple ocean in Season 3 Episode 8 are some of the lushest, richest essays Lynch has ever managed in that personal idiom, and they also tell the origin story of both Bob and Laura Palmer in wordless but completely effective mime. In those scenes, Lynch hasn’t needed to make one single concession towards more explicit, articulated narrative, yet he’s managed to get the point across beautifully and completely. Those scenes work so well that you wish there could have been more like them, not less. For sure, the initial atomic explosion in the episode runs on a tad long, especially compared to the much shorter bursts of fire in the 1990-91 series, like some tribute to the StarGate scenes in Kubrick’s 2001 without space pods.

We also get even more, and better, clarification of the various symbols and tropes aired in the first two seasons. All those electric wires and conduits? Well, electricity, it turns out, is the metaphor for a form of spiritual energy, same as the good or black fire of “fire walk with me.” And the Good Giant of the Black Lodge (or Waiting Room) is the Fireman – a figure who controls, starts, stokes, or puts out fires. And so on. The proliferation of doubles is explained by that old Tibetan trope of tulpas or thought-forms, manufactured people imitating their originals. Even the pyramidal Twin Peaks symbol is revealed as a disassembled figure-of-eight infinity symbol.

THE COOPER CONUNDRUM

With Laura Palmer out of the picture for most of the season, and Twin Peaks timesharing with other settings, it’s time to address another centre of gravity for the original seasons that feels a whole lot more lightweight now that it’s been moved to the axis of the entire narrative. If the new Twin Peaks is the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Dale Cooper, then this one of its least satisfying aspects. Dale Cooper in the original series was already more than a little arch and stereotyped, a woodentop personalization of post-Cold War America’s renewed romance with its image of itself that the whole show captured, with its small-town setting and earth tones. Twin Peaks became a phenomenon partly by channeling that zeitgeist, but that often regressive spirit, and Dale Cooper with it, have arguably aged a whole lot worse than Kyle MacLachlan has. “Kyle plays innocents who are interested in the mysteries of life,” Lynch once said to GQ Magazine.

That whole valorization of innocence was already pretty odd from the creator of Blue Velvet, and it looks even more so now. A recent history of fake news and the lies that American tells itself to feel good about itself is entitled “American Exceptionalism and American Innocence.” Dale Cooper spends much of Twin Peaks 2017 as a Forrest Gump-style holy fool, magically bringing prosperity, uncovering wrongdoing, healing souls, mending marriages and families, redeeming criminals, triggering penitence and confession, and sending the evil to their doom a’whoring with their own inventions. (Remember that Forrest Gump came out in 1994, soon after Twin Peaks, and in 1995, National Review included it in its list of the “Best 100 Conservative Movies.”) Any conservative Forrest Gump fan would be pleased to see that Twin Peaks is still almost pure white, with other ethnic groups, Michael Horse excepted, barely represented at all. And Good Dale or Dumb Dale is a pure-white all-American boy.

Dumb Dale does at least provide quite a few comic moments, deadpan or otherwise, but his intent and his impact on those around him remain consistent throughout. And when Dale finally does wake to full self-remembrance and super-competence, with his “I am the FBI” thumbs-up, he comes across as just as much the cardboard cutout as he was as Dumb Dale. Kyle MacLachlan does a reasonably good, glacial job of his antithesis and nemesis, Doppelganger Dale, but there’s no resolution or even direct confrontation between them. Doppelganger Dale is shot before the Good Dale even arrives on the scene. The Good Dale is given a few final scenes of grittier, less self-conscious heroics in the last episode of Twin Peaks 2017, beating up three churlish Texan rednecks, but I don’t see that they succeed in re-establishing him as the hero figure he was in the Nineties.

If Doppelganger Dale and Good Dale had faced off, Orphan Black style, for a climatic resolution, then perhaps we’d be looking at a finale worthy of Twin Peaks’s past – and its issues. Instead, we get a final confrontation with Bob, Dale Cooper’s ultimate enemy, Laura Palmer’s real killer, the monster behind all the acts and mysteries that brought the entire series into being, which is reduced to a few rounds of volleyball with a green gardening glove. I don’t know whether that busted flush was down to Frank Silva’s sad passing, leaving him no longer available to play out a fitting denouement. But I’m sure that Lynch could have wrapped up the Bob story arc in a more effective style. Instead, we’re left with a sometimes fascinating but ultimately inconclusive concluding episode, wherein Cooper may have engineered some kind of time loop that saves Laura Palmer from her original fate, and certainly meets up with her in a very altered form (or yet another double?) in Texas. So yes, Bob is dead and Laura is alive; hooray. Except there now is supposedly another even bigger, badder nemesis somewhere further down the line, in the shape of Jowday, or Judy, who gets even less of an airing this time round than Bob did in the first two seasons. Once again, I’m denied a climax. My satisfaction is deferred – I can’t reach for the metaphorical tissue of catharsis.

I don’t believe for one moment that this is some kind of post-modernist wet dream of Lynch wilfully, wittily subverting the conventions of conventional narrative and denying resolution as some kind of critique of traditional social and ethical expectations. I do strongly suspect that it has a lot to do with a more fundamental psychological motive that I detect signs of throughout Lynch’s career. Maybe I’m just projecting myself, but see what you think.

Mystification, occultism, obscurantism, delay, evasion, sleight of hand, are all wonderful ways of not letting your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Think of the hackneyed use of masks in fiction, film and drama, to liberate the secret self; or that hoary old trope, the dark twin, double, or doppelganger. And yes, those last Black Lodge scenes in the culminating episode of Twin Peaks season 2 were practically a wall-to-wall parade of doppelgangers. Subsequent to which, the Good Dale gets locked up in the Black Lodge for the next 25 years, while the Bad Dale goes out into the world to wreak Evil (capital letters advised). If you accept that Kyle MacLachlan has been Lynch’s proxy or onscreen alter ego (oops, there goes another doppelganger…) ever since Blue Velvet, how do we read this? The evil Lynch is out there in the world?

Not that I think Lynch has much to feel guilty about – except under simon-pure Puritan-child scarlet-lettered American expectations. But Twin Peaks is still full of hot chicks getting off on having bad stuff done to them, a Fifty Shades theme that crops up in Lynch’s oeuvre all the way from Blue Velvet via Wild At Heart and Fire Walk With Me to Lost Highway. And in Season 3? Well, we get an innocent bobby-socked Sarah Palmer back in 1956 being orally penetrated by a very ugly bug from the same radioactive point of origin that produced Bob. We get Doppelganger Dale stifling and shooting a half-naked vixen who’s working for him. And it’s worth noting that the only woman with any degree of power and agency in Series 3 who isn’t an actual killer, Special Agent Tammy Preston, is still presented very much as a sex object in tight skirts. Bad enough.

You have to wonder if there’s a side of David Lynch which he has never been quite able to accept, and instead projects onto various Icons of Evil, capital E. Maybe he didn’t ever want to make explicit how much he identified with Leo Johnson, or the snaggle-toothed molester in Wild At Heart, or Mr Eddy in Lost Highway, or Frank Booth, or Bob. Does he have wild Bobs in his cellar? In another timeline, like the alternative forks instanced in Twin Peaks 2017, Laura Palmer would be a high-achieving career woman and active member of her local BDSM community, instead of the exemplary sacrifice to David Lynch’s inability to accept and assimilate the dark side of his own nature. For that matter, Bob might be another member of the same group, redeemed by acceptance and self-acknowledgement, his needs safely contained within the bounds of social acceptability and his own wise convenience.

As a counterexample of a more recent televisual masterpiece that absolutely nails its ending after four seasons, while validating the entire principle of endings and resolution, let’s take Mr. Robot. Written by an Egyptian American and starring one – unlike Lynch’s chalk-white team – the show saves its biggest reveal for the very final episode in its run, and presents us with a surprise that, as far as I know, wasn’t predicted by any fan-theory forum, and which completely reframes the entire series, right back to its very first few minutes. Your entire conception of what you’ve been watching for months and years is turned on its head. And Sam Esmail managed to keep it under wraps right until the end. The emotional force and pathos of that resolution is matched by its sheer bravura execution. What supreme mastery of the televisual art – from narrative to fan community management. Now that’s how, and why, things should end.

There are still tantalizing teasers out there from Mark Frost that a Season 4 could happen, but given the many years and immense effort required to film Season 3, I’m not holding my breath. I’m not especially excited at the idea either. Dipping into fan-theory land, I bet you that a final resolution to Twin Peaks 2017 would reveal that Sarah Palmer has been harbouring the evil force Jowday/Judy since that run-in with the ugly bug in 1956, putting Laura Palmer in the unhappy position of having not one but both parents possessed by sadistic, abusive inhabiting spirits. After all, Sarah’s already shown she can take her own face off to rip a guy’s face off. Would it be worth waiting another few years and sitting through another 11 episodes to find that out? Or is David Lynch’s last bow the latest fruit of a career-long failure to own his own shit? If so, how fruitful repression can be. But if he owned up, at least we might get a happy ending. With tissue.

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Paul StJohn Mackintosh is a Scottish poet, writer of weird fiction, translator and journalist. Born in 1961, he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, has lived and worked in Asia and Central Europe, and currently divides his time between Hungary and other locations.

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IN UNCONNECTED NEWS, FULLY FUNDED BUT STILL ON THE GO FOR A FEW DAYS: The Kickstarter Campaign for Sherlock Holmes & The Great Detectives, coming from Belanger Books…

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/belangerbooks/sherlock-holmes-and-the-great-detectives

 

We have to note with sorrow the loss of weird fiction writer Joseph S Pulver Sr, after a long struggle with debilitating illness – and yet sorrow will not be his legacy. We’ve already seen wonderful images of The bEast, with well-deserved recognition of his value to the field, and his encouragement of others, over the last few hours. There is much yet to be said, and Joe will remain a Presence in weird fiction for a long time to come.

Any contribution we might make is negligible compared to the views of those who knew him and his work far more intimately. We dislike sudden gushing pretences of close association – we’ve spilled beer over many noted authors, but didn’t exactly form a life-long bond because of it. So we might have stopped there, but as we reflected on Joe’s passing, we also recalled that this very month four years ago, April 2016, many of us were celebrating his particular gift,  his memorable personality, or his great love for The King In Yellow, that abiding creation of Robert W Chambers.

As a result, a rather neat resource was created at the time – for those who are not that familiar with Joe or his writing, and for those who just want to enjoy remembering. His friend and fellow author Mike Griffin* collated links to a wonderful range of pieces about Joe, and listed them on the GriffinWords website. We recommend browsing though these, written by many leading weird fiction folk.

https://griffinwords.com/2016/04/16/the-new-math/

That’s it, really. You can now go read some Pulver.

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Should you want to carry on below, for our lesser part that same April, we decided to pursue a slightly different route. Intrigued by Joe’s fascination with tKiY – and having long had our own obsession with Chambers’ stories – we explored the literary origins of lost Carcosa itself, and interviewed renowned artist Michael Hutter, who produced his own cycle of stunning Carcosa paintings.

*Almost  a year later, we did interview Mike Griffin as well, concerning his own inspirations and his first novel, Hieroglyphs of Blood and Bone.

The Devouring Hieroglyphs of Michael Griffin

We present this long piece on Carcosa again, slightly edited, in memory of His Yellow Highness, Joe Pulver…

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MUSINGS ON CARCOSA

It’s our great pleasure today to welcome German surreal artist Michael Hutter to the site, especially as his  range of stunning illustrations includes the Carcosa cycle, a theme which crosses into so many works of strange fiction.

Before we interview him, we should say a little about Carcosa itself, Pre-eminent among the classic authors who have written of this haunted city are the Father of Carcosa, Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913?), the Master of the Yellow Sign Robert W Chambers (1865- 1933), and of course H P Lovecraft.

(The question-mark by Bierce’s date of death is due to his disappearance, with a last supposed letter dated December 1913. There is still no satisfactory explanation of when – or indeed where – Bierce died.)

If there is a beginning to our trail today, then it lies in An Inhabitant of Carcosa. This story by Bierce was first published in the San Francisco Newsletter in 1886, and then included as part of his collection Can Such Things Be in1887. It’s a short piece, and appears at first to be about a man who awakens from sickness to find himself in an unfamiliar landscape. You’ll have to read the story to grasp what else might be implied. It can be found online.

Alternatively you can listen to an audio version:

The narrator in the above version is Otis Jiry.

Robert W Chambers built on An Inhabitant in his stories of the Yellow Sign, collectively known as The King in Yellow. He used and re-interpreted some of Bierce’s names, and his stories refer to a play, similarly called The King in Yellow, which says more about Carcosa itself.

Reading this forbidden play brings new insights into the universe, as well as despair or utter madness. People have said the latter about greydogtales, mind you.

Where Bierce placed the city of Carcosa in the apparent past, in Chambers it is to be found on the shores of Lake Hali in the Hyades, either far from our own planet or in a dimension/universe apart from ours.

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink behind the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies,
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead,
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
Lost Carcosa.

—“Cassilda’s Song” in The King in Yellow Act 1, Scene 2

Some think that Bierce was drawing on an imaginative view of the French medieval city of Carcassonne, which was called in Latin Carcaso. Sadly, although we’ve been to Narbonne, and slept in a public park in Perpignan (the gendarmerie were not amused), we’ve never been to the great walled city itself.

There have even been suggestions that Bierce knew of a song/poem by Gustav Nadaud (1820 – 1893), Carcassonne. This seems questionable, as the nearest date we’ve found so far for Nadaud’s piece is 1887, the year after An Inhabitant was published. However, it is quite possible that the work was in circulation before that. Carcassonne the poem is about a man who will never see that ‘fabled’ city, and is quite interesting in itself in that it evokes a sense of how strange and wonderful the city is.

‘They tell me every day is there
Not more or less than Sunday gay:
In shining robes and garments fair
The people walk upon their way.
One gazes there on castle walls
As grand as those of Babylon,
A bishop and two generals!
I do not know fair Carcassonne,
I do not know fair Carcassonne!’

Check out the full poem by Nadaud if you like to pursue these threads – that’s also easily found online.

A number of gifted contemporary writers have continued exploring Carcosa and related concepts – too many, in fact, to mention here. Joseph S Pulver Sr (1955-2020) alone contributed numerous stories and poems to this ‘area’, as well as encouraging so many other writers to visit the Hyades – and there have been some excellent anthologies in recent years. Amongst other projects, Joe edited the highly-regarded Chambers tribute anthology  A Season in Carcosa in 2012, for Miskatonic River Press.

THE CITY AND THE ARTIST

Relating to the above, our guest is artist Michael Hutter. Despite informing us that he doesn’t talk well about himself or his art (and the fact that our German is very rusty), he was still kind enough to participate in a full interview for greydogtales – and to send us loads of artwork to accompany the interview. We feel somewhat honoured that he was willing to take the time, and have tried to illustrate the post with as many of his works as we could.

Michael Hutter is a German painter, illustrator and author who studied at the University of Applied Sciences in Koln under Professor Marx, a painter himself who produced a number of challenging expressionist works. Michael has had many solo exhibitions in the last thirty years, in addition to providing illustrations for fantasy books, heavy metal albums and other media, and once said of his paintings:

“In my opinion truth is somehow an illusion anyway. I mix that with my obsession, passions, desires and fears and choke what happens in the abyss of my personality back on the surface.”

Let’s get down to our interview.

greydog: Michael, thank you so much for joining us. We, and many of our visitors, are enormous fans of your art. Do you have a central vision for your work, a set of principles, or is it a more unconscious process?

michael: I try to follow the logic of dreams, it’s an unconscious process.

greydog: Much of your art is presented as a number of themes – Inkubi, Carcosa, Games in Purgatory und so weiter. Do you work intensively on a particular theme or concept for some time, or do you collect together pieces with common aspects later on?

michael: One idea or “story” usually has several aspects. I try to find them all and tell it to an end. This is how the work-groups develop. Sometimes I realise during working on it, that it is a series, on other occasions I know it from the beginning. Sometimes I start with the idea of a story and develop the pictures from there, sometimes it is the other way round: I start with one (or a few) picture ideas and realise during painting or drawing that there is a connection, sometimes a story, sometimes just a feeling. You see, it’s a bit complicated…

greydog: We’re not experts, but we see obvious echoes of Hieronymus Bosch, the Surrealists, Tarot art and even non-European elements. Are there particular artists from the past who you feel influence you?

michael: I think influence is overrated. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants. And those giants have been influenced themselves by others who have been before them and so on. Of course Bosch is important to me, but so are many others. If I want to do justice to all, the list would grow much too long (and quite boring as well). The interesting thing about an artist is not where he is coming from, but what he or she might add to the evolution of art.

greydog: Yes, a fair point. Your work is described variously as surreal, magical and visionary. Do you feel part of the Visionary Art movement, as promoted by Laurence Caruana?

michael: I feel part of the evolution of art, but not to any smaller group or sect.

greydog: A number of artists (and aspiring artists) read greydogtales. Could you tell us something about the main techniques you use?

michael: I prefer traditional techniques like oil, tempera or watercolour. I do my ink drawings with a dipping pen and my graphic works are mostly etchings.

Most of my oil paintings are done in a very precise three layer technique, the “Carcosa” cycle is an exception: the pictures are painted in one layer – fast and quite “impressionistic”.

greydog: We’re not very familiar with contemporary German art. Is there much interest in your work in your home country, or do you look more to the international scene?

michael: I’m not very familiar with contemporary German art either. It seems that the official art scene is quite hostile against fantastic art in my country. I’m much more interested in the international scene, and thanks to the web I have good opportunities to show my works in all parts of the world that have free access to the internet.

greydog: This is the first time we’ve seen your photographic work. The Ancestors Gallery and Inkubi and Sukkubi present disturbing and distorted views of humanity. Is this a period from your past, or do you still produce these kind of pieces?

michael: Hmm, it’s rather a period from the past. I really like these photoshop works, they were very inspiring to me and had a big influence on my painting and drawing, but in the end I really prefer the unique character of traditional works. And I prefer the haptic surface, the brushstrokes or the feeling of fine lines that you can feel with your fingertips to what comes out of an inkjet printer.

greydog: We are also great admirers of Santiago Caruso from Argentina, whose pictures share certain aspects of surrealism with some of your own. Are you familiar with him?

michael: I saw some of his works on the internet and liked them a lot.

greydog: Your Carcosa illustrations are absolutely superb. We know many enthusiasts of writers like Robert W Chambers and Ambrose Bierce – do you read much early and weird fiction yourself?

michael: No doubt, weird fiction has a big influence on my work, I have always read a lot. I think I was about sixteen when I discovered Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and it hit me like an epiphany. Literature (specially if it deals with the strange and uncommon) still has a very big influence on me.

Again my “list of influences” would be too long and boring for this short interview. But to mention a few – of course the classic writers like Poe, Lovecraft, Chambers, Smith and so on. Very important is the Bible (maybe the cruellest book I have ever read), the fairy tales of the Grimms, Mervyn Peake’s “Gormenghast”, also I’m a great admirer of Thomas Ligotti… and now I’m so unjust to stop this list.

greydog: And finally, do you have a major direction or project for the year to come?

michael: Doing the paintings, especially the altarpiece for a huge cathedral, sculpting a city of eerie doll-houses, transforming the Book of Genesis into a Lovecraftian graphic novel… there are lots of ideas but the trouble is, that life is not long enough to do everything that I’d like to do…

Currently I’m finishing a project that occupied me for over two years: “The Kranzedan” a cycle of (very) short stories, drawings and oil paintings. I’m trying to put this material together as a book, still not knowing how and where to publish it.

greydog: Many thanks for joining us – we look forward to your new works, and we hope that The Kranzedan will emerge soon.

Another of Michael’s earlier projects was Melchior Grun, five ballads told and drawn by him, tales of a wandering medieval minstrel, Melchior Viridis. With baroque illustrations to accompany the text, Melchior travels areas, “which had never before seen a Christian”, and is confronted with the sins of the flesh and malicious contemporaries. This was a limited edition which is no longer available as far as we know.

You can obtain copies of the following, but only as a German language e-book. Die Dämonenbraut (The Demon Bride) is written as a fragment of the memoirs of Richard Upton Pickman. H P Lovecraft fans will recognise the name from Lovecraft’s 1926 story Pickman’s Model about an artist who creates horrifying images and is banned from his Boston circles.

Die Damonenbraut at Amazon UK

And Michael Hutter’s website is here:

http://www.octopusartis.com/

“The history of art is littered with Great Men and the Muses they use as stepping stones to brilliance. In this shockingly lyrical, endlessly rich and luxurious nightmare of a novel, the Muse turns.” AuthorJayaprakash Satyamurthy, on Anonyma.

And… we’re back in the saddle. Which isn’t quite true, because we fell out of the saddle when we were about fourteen, due to a grumpy horse and a faulty girth strap, and never rode a horse again. But never mind. Our real meaning is that, after being a bit busy elsewhere, we have some terrific articles, reviews and interviews lined up once more. And probably a ‘Lurchers for Beginners’ piece on our twenty years with a lurcher pack, further down the line.

But weird fiction, spiced with peculiar detectives and classic supernatural tales, is one of our staple food groups, so today we have a brand new review of Farah Rose Smith’s Anonyma (2019).

We can also report that the campaign for Sherlock Holmes & the Occult Detectives was a massive success. This chunky two volume anthology, edited by old greydog, will be out early Summer from Belanger Books (details another time). Occult Detective Magazine #7 is almost completed, and should be ready at the start of May, and more of John Linwood Grant’s own strange tales are due out as the year stumbles on. Resistance is futile (but if you do resist, please do it quietly and try not to leave stains).

Another anthology in Belanger’s new Great Detectives series is going through the campaign stage right now, including JLG’s slightly tongue-in-cheek novelette ‘The Curate’s Curious Egg’. Should you be interested, this features the meeting between Holmes and Professor Augustus S F X Van Dusen, ‘The Thinking Machine’. Created by Jacques Futrelle at the start of last century, this irascible logician manages both to amuse Holmes and infuriate poor Dr Watson.

Other authors have highlighted classic detectives such as Carnacki and Father Brown, so this should be well worth a look. The project is fully funded, but you can check out the details and rewards here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/belangerbooks/sherlock-holmes-and-the-great-detectives/description

It’s worth adding that during these troubled pandemic times, it’s hard for authors and publishers to get their work noticed – book launches have been cancelled, as is only sensible, and physical bookshops are struggling – even online book delivery is at the back of the priority list.  Jim Mcleod and the folk at the Ginger Nuts of Horror site are doing their best to alert readers to new weird and horror stuff through their Pandemic Book Launches, and you’ll find a lot of news there in safe Interwebby form.

https://gingernutsofhorror.com/index.html

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Totally unconnected with any of the above, the mice are also back, running around our decrepit kennel, feasting in the fruit bowl and gnawing behind the bookcases. Our dogs can face rats, but mice are too small and quick, the little imps. Whilst we do act if things get out of hand, we rather like seeing a little dark-eyed wood mouse cleaning its whiskers by the back door. Some say infestation and mouse urine; we say life does its thing.

Although devoid of small cute rodents, today’s main piece is by author Dave Jeffery, who has kindly joined us as a reviewer to help plough through our backlog of review material, and to highlight some brand new works as they appear – which may even make us seem more current than we usually do. On with the show…

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ANONYMA by FARAH ROSE SMITH

Reviewed by Dave Jeffery

“Compelling, disquieting, and beautifully constructed.”

A young woman finds herself at the heart of a surrealist cult, its enigmatic leader – Nicholas Bezalel – following the doctrines of an isolated and esoteric occultist architect in order to build a new artistic, transgressive movement. The titular ANONYMA becomes both muse and sacrifice. As she is offered up in a ritual to connect this world to the next, she begins her journey into the twisted, depraved landscape of the after world.

The basic premise of Smith’s 2019 novel is deceptively simple and does not give a hint of the quality and complexity of writing that awaits the reader within the pages that follow. Smith employs an engaging narrative that flows like a bitter stream through themes of abuse, dysfunctional love, and the dark nature of humanity.

The imagery is lyrical and profane, a contradictory literary landscape where beauty and decadence are entwined to evoke deep rooted emotional reactions as the story ebbs and flows. Just as the eponymous ANONYMA charts her quest through the underworld, so too does the reader share this experience, as though taken by the hand – a companion – so that the protagonist does not have to suffer alone.

The strength of the book can also be its weakness. Its surrealist, transgressive nature is bound to lose readers who prefer a linear narrative; thus, it is not likely to ever go mainstream. But that is not what is important here. Smith has, just like Bezalel, set out to create pure art through the sequential, negative experiences of its protagonist.

Many view this book as an unsubtle metaphor for feminism’s battle against gender status quo, and – in some part – I can understand this perspective if ANONYMA is taken in and analysed on a superficial level. But the book is way too complex to relegate its content to a quick scan, it must be placed beneath the microscope, its sum part studied and understood.

ANONYMA is about personal growth in adversity, it is about retaining the essence of personality and being, despite what challenges are brought to bear on a life. Despite its disturbing content, the book has uplifting themes as it draws to its conclusions, giving hint to the constructs of rebirth into better times, the trials of a heinous experience giving a fragile sense of hope.

Overall, ANONYMA is compelling, disquieting, and beautifully constructed by an incredibly talented writer.

Highly recommended for those who enjoy surrealist, transgressive horror and bizarro fiction, or those who would like to read something a little different from conventional genre literature.

Anonyma is available now:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07N497CPL/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_GqxNEb120VW15

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Dave Jeffery is an accomplished author who writes Adult/Young Adult horror and contemporary fiction, and screenplays for award-winning films. You can find him at his website, below:

https://davejeffery.webs.com/

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Do be careful, stay safe, and we look forward to seeing you again in a few days. You may not be here – maybe the cat needs ironing, or that leaking roof needs fixing – but we just like looking forward. It’s a hobby…

“In all weathers you might have seen that hulking old woman, with her vague, staring, reddish face, trudging through the streets…”

A monstrous appetite, a man from the waves, a child’s fractured visions and more. It’s no secret that we like peculiar stories. They don’t have to be from any particular genre, but they have to be darned odd. And whilst there are many fine and well-known classics in the short story form, we also like finding forgotten gems – and wondering why on earth they were forgotten.

So today we highlight six more examples of these, reminding you of our general rules in such articles – the stories should be:

• memorable for their themes, key elements or imagery;
• different from the usual fare in some way, either in style, approach or resolution;
• free of the standard vampires, werewolves, witches, zombies and cthulhoids for a change;
• lodged in one’s memory long after the book is closed.

This time we bent our previous ‘overtly supernatural’ rule occasionally, as we are on the edge of talking early weird fiction rather than standard ghosts and hauntings fare…

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NOTE: All of these can be hunted down somewhere on-line, though ‘Nightmare Jack’ can be hard to find, and is probably most easily located by buying the Ash-Tree e-book of Metcalfe’s stories:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B007KM9P2K/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_lx-EEbW31Z9PS

The Vernon Lee first came out in Vanitas, which can be found on Project Gutenberg; ‘The Case of Mr Lucraft’ is on Project Gutenberg Australia. Jerome’s ‘Silhouettes’ can be read here:

https://americanliterature.com/author/jerome-k-jerome/short-story/silhouettes

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1) ‘NIGHTMARE JACK’ (1925)

John Metcalfe

A long tale of theft and wickedness in Burma, and of final fates in London Town. Dark and fascinating, as it draws you in to the doom of men.

‘ “I shall give you the story as at last he told it to us those ten years back in the upper room of the little, black inn at Shale, whilst the sweat broke and glistened on his face and the horror gathered in his eyes.” ‘

Occasionally difficult in places because of the rendition of Nightmare Jack’s style of speech, but intense and full of eerie references:

‘ “Whilst the wind without raced up against the yellow tide and his face within went grey upon the pillow, that little, whispering man spoke to us—by his frantic hands and eyes as much as by his dying mouth—of the mythos of the Web and Loaf, and the faded terror of the Triple Scum…” ‘

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2) ‘THE BIRD IN THE GARDEN’ (1912)

Richard Middleton

Published posthumously, this tale, like the Jerome below, is difficult to settle in any genre. You might pass it off as a weird  observational piece, or as a  domestic horror story, or as some form of early magical realism. Do give it a try.  Middleton, who died young, is unjustly neglected, and the whole posthumous collection The Ghost Ship and Other Stories is a very sound acquisition.

‘It was in the morning after they had just been watered that the plants looked and smelt best, and when the sun shone through the grating and the diamonds were shining and falling through the forest, Toby would tell the baby about the great bird who would one day come flying through the trees—a bird of all colours, ugly and beautiful, with a harsh sweet voice. “And that will be the end of everything,” said Toby, though of course he was only repeating a story his Uncle John had told him.’

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3) ‘SILHOUETTES’ (1894)

Jerome K Jerome

How you would classify this very serious piece by Jerome, we couldn’t say,  even though we keep re-reading it. It has horror in its nature, but is not supernatural (we don’t think). Suffice to say that it’s odd, disquieting, with scary aspects of a child’s point of view.

‘After what seemed an endless time, we heard the heavy gate unbarred, and quickly clanged to, and footsteps returning on the gravel. Then the door opened again, and my father entered, and behind him a crouching figure that felt its way with its hands as it crept along, as a blind man might. The figure stood up when it reached the middle of the hall, and mopped its eyes with a dirty rag that it carried in its hand; after which it held the rag over the umbrella-stand and wrung it out, as washerwomen wring out clothes, and the dark drippings fell into the tray with a dull, heavy splut.’

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4) ‘THE CASE OF MR. LUCRAFT’ (1888)

Walter Besant & James Rice

A most curious story and one of our favourites for its unusual study of human appetite. A warning, though – it is marred in places by its period portrayal, and the dialogue, of a black servant (though he may also not be what he at first seems). Worth knowing about, but certainly with that proviso.

‘I sat down in the nearest chair, and looked round the room. The first thing I remarked was that I could not see the door by which we had been admitted. The room was octagonal, and on every side stood some heavy piece of furniture; a table with glass, a case of bookshelves, a sofa, but no door. My head began to go round as I continued my observations. There was no window either, nor was there any fireplace. Then I felt a sudden giddiness, and I suppose I fell backwards on my chair. It was partly the faintness of hunger, but partly it was the strange room, and that old man glaring at me with his great wolfish eyes.’

An introduction to Walter Besant, by author Matt Wingett, can be found in our archives here:

http://greydogtales.com/blog/portsmouth-humgrummits-and-walter-besant/

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5) ‘THE LEGEND OF MADAME KRASINSKA’ (1892)

Vernon Lee

Lee (or Violet Paget, as she was outside her writing) is well enough known, but many of her complex tales are overlooked these days. Whilst her style can be painstaking and dense,  she also provides memorable imagery in her works. Sora Lena lurks long after you close the book…

‘ “Do you want to know the story of poor old Sora Lena?” asked Cecchino, taking the sketch from Madame Krasinska’s hand, and looking over it at the charming, eager young face.

‘The sketch might have passed for a caricature; but anyone who had spent so little as a week in Florence those six or seven years ago would have recognised at once that it was merely a faithful portrait. For Sora Lena—more correctly Signora Maddalena—had been for years and years one of the most conspicuous sights of the town. In all weathers you might have seen that hulking old woman, with her vague, staring, reddish face, trudging through the streets or standing before shops, in her extraordinary costume of thirty years ago, her enormous crinoline, on which the silk skirt and ragged petticoat hung limply, her gigantic coal-scuttle bonnet, shawl, prunella boots, and great muff or parasol; one of several outfits, all alike, of that distant period, all alike inexpressibly dirty and tattered. In all weathers you might have seen her stolidly going her way, indifferent to stares and jibes, of which, indeed, there were by this time comparatively few, so familiar had she grown to staring, jibing Florence. In all weathers, but most noticeably in the worst, as if the squalor of mud and rain had an affinity with that sad, draggled, soiled, battered piece of human squalor, that lamentable rag of half-witted misery.’

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6) ‘HAUNTED’ (1918)

Gwendolyn Ranger Wormser

From her only known collection, The Scarecrow and Other Stories – a collection which contains a selection of striking tales, and should certainly be more widely circulated. Few these days seem to have even heard of her.  Again, a number of her tales come closer to what we might call weird fiction than straight horror.

What the protagonist in ‘Haunted’ is or was, and quite what is his final fate, remains to be seen…

‘He could never remember where he had come from, or what had happened. All that he ever knew was that far out by the nets in the early morning they had come upon him and had brought him in to shore. Naturally, the fishermen had questioned him; but his vagueness, his absolute lack of belief that he had ever been anything before they had snatched him from the waters, had frightened them so that since that day they had left him severely alone. Fishing folk have strange, superstitious ideas about certain things. He had borne the full weight of their credulous awe. Perhaps because he, himself, thought as they thought. That he was something come from the sea, and of the sea, and always belonging to the sea.’

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You can find our original Tales that Linger here, with a range of twelve supernatural suggestions, here:

http://greydogtales.com/blog/twelve-tales-which-linger/

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We should also mention the members of the Boiled Bones Facebook Group, who suggested other striking ‘lingerers’ which were somewhat unusual, amongst them:

Ralph Adams Cram ‘THE DEAD VALLEY’ (1895)

D K Broster ‘CLAIRVOYANCE’ (1932)

David Grinnell ‘THE RAG THING’ (1951)

A E D Smith ‘THE COAT’ (1952)

If you don’t know these already, all four should be of great interest to enthusiasts of strange stories.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/213679486368857/