What would you choose for your daily dose of weird fiction? Insane Lovecraftian gibberings as minds break down on exposure to cosmic horror? A growing sense of futility and failure when the truth of the world reveals itself? Or perhaps a lingering, bitter-sweet recognition that we are not meant to know what existence really is, but that we must persevere regardless? And while we’re asking questions, what has Peter Cushing got to do with writer Sheridan Le Fanu and his great-uncle? Come inside, stranger, and sit yourself down on this oddly-shaped iron chair…

Why We Don’t Know What We’re Doing

Greydogtales is not one of those gosh-darned clever literary sites. We don’t worry about genre questions a lot, but we like to poke a stick at things now and then. Last year we ran five particular ‘weird fiction’ features which garnered an unexpected amount of attention, and we thought we’d revisit those articles very briefly, a final farewell. And add new stuff, some of our usual semi-scholarly quotes, and peculiar trivia, because… because it’s what we do.

Each of those features considered aspects of weird fiction and its writers, from old-timers H P Lovecraft and Fritz Leiber, to current explorers John Langan and Michael Wehunt. In the process we travelled with some unexpected bedfellows, such as Lodovico Ariosto and G K Chesterton. We’ll start gently with a musing or two on the subject at hand…

There is no definition of the genre, if it is a genre at all. Maybe it’s an animal that you only recognise when you see it, different for each person. Apart from the broad themes we mentioned at the start, ‘weird fiction’ can include:

• Transgressive horror stories questioning current social mores;
• Ghost stories which break the traditional boundaries, questioning the nature of who haunts who;
• Re-interpretations of classic horrors, even vampire tropes, which twist the roots of where such fears come from;
• Dark fantasy tales which shed the typical pseudo-Medieval trappings;
• Questioning speculative fiction along the lines of Philip K Dick, Zelazny, and Delaney;
• Bizarro works of satire and subversion;
• Magical realism and surreal visions stemming from writers like Kafka and Borges.

We can try and say that modern weird fiction has a predominant psychological element, that we are the monsters, but that doesn’t pin anything down either. The weird tale of the early Twentieth century had its psychological nightmares; today’s fiction has its physical monstrosities. Quiet horror is another term for some contemporary weird fiction, but can be surprisingly hard to define as well.

So we don’t really know what we read or what we write, in short. China Mieville expressed one view in the Guardian newspaper:

“I don’t think you can distinguish science fiction, fantasy and horror with any rigour, as the writers around the magazine Weird Tales early in the last century (Lovecraft in particular) illustrated most sharply. So I use the term ‘weird fiction’ for all fantastic literature – fantasy, SF, horror and all the stuff that won’t fit neatly into slots.”

May 2002

In his extended essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, H P Lovecraft himself laid out the genre as he saw it back then:

“The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain – a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”

1927, revised 1933/34

And we featured Lovecraft in our top three features last year…

Blasphemous Polyps – Quick Sale Due to Incipient Insanity

Musing on H P Lovecraft’s work and his impact on weird fiction is a popular past-time, though not without its pitfalls. In May 2016 we opened up the topic of New Lovecraftian weird fiction, mentioning Paula Guran’s Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, and were delighted that John Langan and Michael Wehunt provided us with exclusive comments on their contributions to the anthology.

cthulhu may not live here any more

Add in Bobby Dee’s Sex and Cthulhu Mythos, and we had a major spike in website hits. Which was nice.

In July we dared to question Great Cthulhu Himself, and looked at the mythological basis of two maritime monstrosities who populate weird fiction and fantasy, Cthuhlu and the Kraken. Spoiler: Our conclusion was that neither are perhaps as ‘squiddy’ as people think – and that Alfred Lord Tennyson is still a good read.

krakens and cthulhus – squids no more

The other HPL-related feature we ran which broke the usual records was our inadequate contemplation of the connections between theosophy and weird fiction in December. Assisted again by scholar Bobby Dee, who provided some fascinating HPL letter extracts, it’s a subject which deserved far more time. We peppered it with as many notional fancies and trivia as we could fit in, and received a lot of interest in it.

h p lovecraft and the lords of venus

When Irish Eyes are Scary

On to some olden days connections now. Re-reading the HPL essay reminded us that the term weird fiction is supposed to have originated with Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73), author of such scary stories as “Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter” and “Green Tea”.

Lovecraft wasn’t a great Le Fanu fan, though he thought Green Tea superior to the other pieces he’d read by the Irishman. If you’re interested, you can read a discussion of HPL’s exposure to Le Fanu on the wormwoodiana site here:

wormwoodiana

M R James, who would not perhaps have wished to be included in the weird fiction movement, said of Le Fanu (lecture to the Royal Institution of Great Britain):

“Only one novelist known to me ever refers to Sheridan Le Fanu as an acknowledged authority or master in the particular line to which he devoted himself: the name of this writer is respectable but not more. It is James Payn. Probably if the works of Andrew Lang ever have a concordance made to them, the name of Le Fanu will be found to occur in it. But the fact remains that Le Fanu is not at the moment the occupier of any particular pedestal. There has never been a boom in his writings. I am not anxious for one, though if it comes I shall be prepared to concede the great author of booms, Poet Gosse, several points or bisques.

I do not then claim for this author any very exalted place, but I desire to advance the claim that he has attained supremacy in one particular line: he succeeds in inspiring a mysterious terror better than any other writer.”

March 1923

If Le Fanu can be seen as a Founding Father of weird fiction (rather than merely as someone who coined the phrase), it’s because he tended to imply his monsters bit by bit, and let the style and tone of the story do its work. And maybe the subtle disquiet used in some of his stories did help shape later works by other writers. From James again:

“…how does he contrive to inspire horror? It is partly, I think, owing to the very skilful use of a crescendo, so to speak. The gradual removal of one safeguard after another, the victim’s dim forebodings of what is to happen gradually growing clearer; these are the processes which generally increase the strain of excitement. “The Familiar” and the concluding chapters of Uncle Silas are the best specimens of this. And again the unexplained hints which are dropped are of the most telling kind. The reader is never allowed to know the full theory which underlies any of his ghost stories, but this Le Fanu has in common with many inferior artists. Only you feel that he has a complete explanation to give if he would only vouchsafe it.

“Who was the person who, in Uncle Silas, was heard to say “Fly the Fangs of Belisarius”? Where did Minheer Vanderhausen take his wife to? What was the rationale of the mysterious coach and the lady and her servants who brought Carmilla the Vampire to the house where she was to find a new victim? And what exactly was it that passed when Lewis Pyneweck and the hangman came to see Mr Justice Harbottle? We are never told. The trick of omission or suppression may be used in a very banal fashion, but Le Fanu uses it well.”

ibid

(Quotes copyright N J R James, full lecture notes text available courtesy of Ghosts and Scholars archive – james on le fanu )

In 2014, Swan River Press of Dublin released the commemorative anthology Dreams of Shadow and Smoke, which featured ten new tales of the fantastic and macabre written in celebration of the bicentenary of Dublin’s “Invisible Prince”. It’s unfortunately out of print, but does lead us to one of our surprise successes of the year, where we celebrated Swan River’s new edition of The Pale Brown Thing. This was Fritz Leiber’s ‘precursor’ or ‘companion’ to his justly celebrated novel Our Lady of Darkness, a book which should be read by all weird fiction enthusiasts. You can read all about it here:

the pale brown thing & a dose of de quincey

The last feature which entered our Top Five came from the same roots as we started with today- what is weird fiction? So we stood up and named five books which may not be found on the usual lists, each of which is part of, or has contributed to the development of, this beguiling non-genre. Again, we had a most positive response.

five weird fantasy books not on fantasy lists

And that’s our round-up of the five most popular weird fiction posts on greydogtales during 2016. So there.

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Graphic and Novel

Whilst we’re on the topic, we almost opened a can of weird worms after we interviewed Paul St.John Mackintosh in October. We’re not cautious in the fiction we consume (or produce, for that matter), but we try to keep greydogtales itself accessible to all tastes. Paul’s fascinating collection Blowback contained two or three stories which despite the quality of the writing were hard to discuss directly on the site because of the subject matter. This sparked a discussion about weird fiction – what it was for and how far it should go.

Paul, who is a delight in debate, and not a shy communicator, then wrote a piece for his own blog which explored some interesting points.

“Primarily, I want to expand on what I’ve been saying about quiet horror, compared to other types of horror. This isn’t intended as a blanket criticism of quiet horror as a sub-genre (whatever my reservations about pressing any definition of a sub-genre into service as a marketing category), but more as a prophylactic against lazy, pedestrian, or otherwise imperfectly realized quiet horror, as well as a reminder that other styles of horror do exist, with reason. If anything, it’s a plea for some – but not all – quiet horror writers to spread their wings and raise their game, as well as a cautionary note about the sub-genre’s shortcomings.”

You can read the whole piece here:

quiet horror-unquiet horror-disquieting horror

And our original interview with him is below:

transgressions, lovecraft and inner demons

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The Pre-Stoker Awards

We’re now planning our 2017 programme, and… what? Peter Cushing? Oh yes. Well, you remember that Le Fanu chap, from above. He also wrote the famous Carmilla vampire novella (1871-72), which came well before Bram Stoker’s Dracula and included some serious lesbianic themes, although expressed carefully for the sensibilities of the time.

20^th century film adaptations have variously toned down or ramped up the overt lesbian aspects. Possibly the most familiar version will be the Hammer Film Productions, released as The Vampire Lovers (1970). This starred Ingrid Pitt in the lead role, Madeline Smith as her victim, and, of course, Peter Cushing. Vampire Lovers is sometimes described as part of the Karnstein trilogy of films, which includes Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil.

Not only was Cushing also in Twins of Evil, but he has an earlier connection to the works of the Le Fanu family. The noted playwright Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan (1751– 1816) was Sheridan Le Fanu’s great-uncle, and The School for Scandal is amongst those works of his which are still well known.

This play, first performed in 1777, introduced the conniving characters Lady Sneerwell and her cousin Miss Verjuice, though sadly Verjuice was written out in some revisions. Sheridan was one of those constant tinkerers.

“The School for Scandal is the quintessential creation about people blabbering about people. Here is sham, snobbery and betrayal in full regalia…”

Critic Alvin Klein

It’s a witty play and observant even now, with only the odd dodgy bit. And would you believe it, Peter Cushing was in it many decades ago, performing as part of the Old Vic company with none other that Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. There’s proper trivia for you, dear listener.

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In the next week or so: All sorts of strangeness, but probably something on Adam Nevill’s new book Under a Watchful Eye. And don’t forget to make it look as if you’ve voted for greydogtales as mega-best website in the Critters awards. It only takes a quick email adress to make us famous-ish…

critters web-site awards (open until 14th January)

Twiglet was a dog. A classic dog, the sort you got in Enid Blyton books. She had that certain smell when she got wet; she was full of adventure and eager to explore with her so-called master (me). She passed on in July 2016, at the age of sixteen plus, and left a large, chocolate labrador shaped hole behind. So it seems fitting, six months later, to celebrate the unexpected last three years of her life, when she suddenly found herself part of a lurcher pack. Which must have been a bit of a surprise.

She’d already had a strange association with one lurcher. Jade was a Bedlington x wolfhound x greyhound sort of a lurcher, one of those mixes you can’t ever fully identify. For thirteen years, Twiglet lived in a home with no definite alpha dog. Jade was crackers. High prey instinct, tendency to bite the calves of people she didn’t know, neurotic enough to throw herself through a window-pane to get at the postman, and so on. A night-pacer, never settled, and too unsure to be boss. Even the behaviourists were a bit flummoxed by her.

Twiglet loved Jade in her own loyal way – even though they would fight if one of them felt trapped. We came home one day to find that they’d got stuck in the bathroom together, and the walls were sprayed with blood. I’ve seen hack-and-slash horror films which paled in comparison. We’d only been out for an hour or so, but they’d managed to jam the door shut after them and go to it with a vengeance. It was one of those scenes where the police pathologist looks at the ceiling and says “From the length of the blood spurt, the victim was *alive* when the knifeman struck!” Thankfully, it turned out to be from those sort of ear wounds which bleed a lot but don’t even need tape or stitches.

Despite this, if Jade was outside and dinner was served, Twiglet would bark to tell her (and us). She signalled every opportunity for food or walkies so that Jade knew what was happening. And she kept us updated on how Jade was doing. The most touching moments were when the old lurcher started to lose the use of her back legs. After that, if Jade collapsed in the garden, or upstairs, Twiglet would come to us and bark until we went and picked Jade up. “What’s that, Lassie? Mr McGregor has fallen down the old mine shaft? We’re on our way.”

Perhaps it wasn’t surprising then that when we lost Jade (also at about sixteen years), our chocolate labrador went into a distinct decline. She started peeing inside sometimes, moping around the house, and lost much of her vigour. We thought it could be her own gradually failing physical health, but it was more psychological. She was mourning.

It should be said that Twiglet was a stubborn dog. Mind-numbingly obstinate, in fact. If she wanted a cup of tea (which she always did), she would sit and stare at me for at least half an hour until I gave in and passed the cup down to her. If she wanted to go somewhere, she would shove me and the furniture out of the way.

We planted seriously prickly, thorny bushes in key parts of the garden to channel her. She slammed her way through the densest, spikiest hedging imaginable, as if it were candyfloss. She lay down where she chose. In doorways, on the bed, on your feet. It didn’t matter what you said to her, or how much you attempted to use ‘training’. She did what she wanted, when she wanted.

But we wanted her to be happier, and to recover from the loss of Jade. There was something which Twiglet needed, and we were pretty sure that it was canine companionship. We tried introducing her to a puppy, but she was having none of that. A rescue worker suggested that we let her enjoy her ‘golden years’ as she was, alone, but that didn’t feel right.

So we looked out for another dog, maybe an adult who would be more ready for an old dog’s ways. Another labrador, perhaps, or a placid animal who wouldn’t be bothered, and wouldn’t bother Twiglet. We would let them meet a number of times on walks, have a new dog around more in stages, and maybe she would accept another presence in the house, after a while…

Which is why we suddenly ended up with two large, highly active longdogs we’d never met, driven hundreds of miles on spec from the other end of the country. Obviously. Being a devout lurcher enthusiast, I confess that I was a major moving force, though the Editor-in-Chief had to admit that they were appealing. I loved Twiglet, but boy, these two were too good to miss. Mega-fabulous deerhound/greyhound crosses, urgently needing a new home, factory-set for long walks and wild runs.

(We were fortunate in our back-up, as well. Lurcher Link helped with every stage, and organised a foster so that all possibilities were covered. They were thorough in all the right places, and incredibly helpful. More at lurcher link online )

Don’t get me wrong. We had discussed at length, and were prepared for, the possible downside. Twiglet backed into a corner and snarling, fights for dominance, even Twiglet refusing to bond at all. We couldn’t entirely dismiss that buried fear that it would make her feel that she was no longer important and push her into a faster decline. If Jade had been hard work for her, then what was this fresh Lurcher Hell we’d concocted for a tired old lab, content to snooze in her basket for the rest of her days? Two Jades at once, two longdogs who were pre-bonded and didn’t need her in the way.

At the same time, she wasn’t thriving as she was, so…

Twiglet’s reaction to this momentous event couldn’t have been more surprising. Unlike her previous responses, she was interested in these two. Within days, all thoughts of tentative foster were over. Django and Chilli were staying. Within weeks, everything had changed:

• Her continence and her mood improved visibly;
• She jostled at the food bowls to get her portion of raw food, as if she’d been raised on it;
• She queued up at the door to have a walk with the lurchers, even on days when she was wobbly on her pins;
• Recognising Chilli’s dominance, she and Django became immediate buddies, even to the point of snoozing together while Chilli claimed the best chair.

It also highlighted how disturbed Jade had been. These two were well-balanced little donkeys. Django was perhaps the Jade that Twiglet had always secretly wanted – less mad, more comfortable to doze with, and totally disinterested in fighting, biting or throwing a wobbly. By the end of the first month, Twiglet had become an honorary ‘lurcher’, as much a part of the pack as anyone.

And she became leaner and fitter on the bones and raw food diet. We’d had doubts about shifting her to it at her age – thirteen or fourteen. Not only did she love it, but she shifted from Poo Categories 3 and 4 to a permanent Category 5 (see lurchers for beginners: poo for more graphic details). That was, to be honest, a big bonus for all humans concerned. A big, semi-continent labrador is not always the sort of talking point you want at dinner. There are only so many smells you can blame on your guests. “Been at the sardines again, Lady Fortescue?”

I miss Twiglet dreadfully, even six months after her death. You do when you get so close to a dog. I spent more time with her than I did with any human. The great thing, however, is that the longdogs gave her a new lease of life. A few weeks before we got Django and Chilli, the vet had warned us that she might not see the year out. Instead of fading away, she had three and a half more years which were lively, full of canine companionship and healthy competition.

Sometimes, whether by accident or design, you find out that you did the right thing. Farewell, little juggernaut of my heart.

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Back in a couple of days with the weird stuff. In the meantime, do vote for greydogtales as a jolly nice website at the Critters Awards. All they ask for is an email address, and it might mean Django gets an extra chicken carcass…

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Wondering what three books you should have bought last year? Then wonder no more. Come with us, dear listener, and you can scoff at our choices, and point out that you wrote something far better. Or complain that we failed to mention Eric Pumley’s Bumper Book of Chainsaw Maintenance for Girls, which your Aunt Edith absolutely adored. And where is Uncle Harold these days, anyway?

2017, huh? Only seven years after Helen Mirren escaped from Jupiter, and a transfigured Dave Bowman announce that ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT BELGIUM. By luck, Arthur C Clarke’s novel 2010 was written in 1984, and Orwell’s 1984 was itself written in 1948. Nine years later, my mother gave birth and said “Right, I’m not doing that again.”

So this year will bring my sixtieth birthday, if I make it. Never take anything for granted, I say. I’ll be writing very fast this year, just in case. In the meantime, we like to do some sort of review of the year gone by, so we will. In bits.

This first bit, dear listener, is bookish, as you might have guessed from above. But we’re not going to reel off a long gabble of the great stuff that came out in 2016. When you’re our age, a) You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to on your own blog, and b) You can’t remember half of what you read anyway.

Instead, we’ll praise three peculiar books from 2016 that we do remember, and thus we shall remain typically idiosyncratic. It’s always unfair, of course – we had bleak dystopian horror from Rich Hawkins, warped Orford Parish whimsy from Tom Breen, cracking paranormal adventure from Willie Meikle, and we discovered Sword and Soul through the energetic Milton Davis. And we thoroughly enjoyed works such as Michael Wehunt’s collection Greener Pastures, Ted E Grau’s novella Sometimes They Don’t Come Home (both excellent), and many others. Decisions, decisions. But “Thirty Seven Books We Liked” would merely be a list to be checked off or ignored.

We chose to bite the bullet, and so here are our picks of the year, in no especial order.

Purchase links for all three can be found on the right-hand sidebar

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Creeping Waves

by Matthew M Bartlett

Building on his earlier Gateways to Abomination, this year Bartlett (as he is known to his tax inspector) gave us something which brooded and spat and oozed. Why is it here on our tiny list? Because this exploration of the author’s twisted Leeds, Massachusetts is both a collection and a single inter-related story in its own right. It is horrific and yet wryly funny, coherent and yet fragmentary. The author draws with enormous skill on a dark and troubled psychogeography, the trivia and banality of daily life, and the kind of history which sucks you down into the blackness. The result is a small wonder.

Creeping Waves is, in short, its own beast (possibly some sort of goat). Whether you like this sort of thing or not, it’s hard to forget. We absolutely loved it. You can read Gateways first, because Creeping Waves does have the same roots, but you don’t have to. Dive in, and be worried…

(We interviewed the author, along with Tom Breen, here tag team horror , and also wrote our own warped response from Leeds, Britland, on Brian O’Connell’s site The Conqueror Weird here conqueror weird )

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The Surgeon’s Mate: A Dismemoir

by Alan M Clark

An entirely unusual animal, and as memorable as Creeping Waves, but for other reasons. Alan M Clark has a history of writing history, and is very good at marrying a sense of humanity with the bones of what did happen (or may have happened) in the past. So, for example, despite our doubts about the overuse of Jack the Ripper as a literary theme, he chose to walk another path and brought new light to bear on the subject. Instead of re-visiting tired tropes, he portrayed the private and tragic lives of those women who died in Whitechapel, in an excellent series whose latest book, A Brutal Chill in August, emerge last year.

A Dismemoir is different again, and such a dark fancy that it stuck with us. This time we have the author’s genuine autobiographical notes, covering such issues as his marriage, alcoholism and almost fatal brain lesions, and yet we also have a work of Victorian fiction. Or is it? Delusion is explored as hospital monitors beep and troubled relatives call, while a century before, a man creeps through fog-bound streets, dragging his own psychopathic needs along with him. Perhaps, for us, the surprise page-turner of the year. We started it for mundane review purposes and finished because we really needed to. Odd, and well worth a visit.

(We interviewed Alan here, and also talked about his award-winning artwork – dark arts, dark lives )

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Corpse Roads

by the Folk Horror Revival

Our last book is here because there’s too much inside to leave it out. Over five hundred pages of classical verse, new poetry and stunning photography from the Folk Horror Revival movement (edited by Andy Paciorek and Katherine Beem). Unlike the other two, it’s a browser (although oddly enough you could probably browse Creeping Waves and probably still get the same effect as you would from linear ingestion). The sheer range of the musings in Corpse Roads makes it a recommended work – you can go for the Yeats and Spenser, Poe and Keats, or dive into the work of dozens of modern poets. This includes many works specifically written for the collection.

In addition to individual works on loss and darkness, it includes themed sections such as The Poetry of the Dead, The Poetry of War, and The Poetry of the Living. You can go poetical for hours, or you can just enjoy the evocative black and white photography, which adds so much to the verse and the impact of the collection.

(We provided an outline, with some choice illos and extracts here, on corpse roads bound, and went into the subject of corpse roads themselves here corpse roads again.)

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Now we must go and write notes of apology to authorial friends who we didn’t include or highlight. And explain why there’s no science fiction, no fantasy and so on in our top three. Back soon, and don’t forget to pretend to vote for greydogtales in the Critters awards…

critters web-site awards (open until 14th January)