Weird Murmur

    Brian Evenson, "It Does Not Do What You Think It Does" in  Good Night, Sleep Tight  (Coffee House Press: 2024).   We have largely shed the Cartesian myth that our own motivations and psychological drives are transparent to our minds. Contrary to the myth, we don’t have indubitable access to our inner mental states, and we often behave in ways that we don’t understand or frequently misunderstand. We think we have one set of reasons for doing something, but it turns out, there are causes and hidden psychological drives that better explain our behavior. Therapy often reveals surprising motivations behind our actions–you don’t do what you think you do! Brian Evenson’s “It Does Not Do What You Think It Does” focuses attention on this phenomenon. What is the “it” in the title that we misunderstand? Tellingly, the man in Evenson’s story hears the answer repeated to himself over and over before interpreting the rest of the phrase; he hears: “YOU.” It is we who do no...

Arthur Machen, "The Happy Children" in The Masterpiece Library of Short Stories , ed. J. A. Hammerton (Educational Book Co: 1920). Read for free here Through its tone and use of description, this story delivers a unique kind of weird creepiness. In addition, the central horror is simultaneously terrifying and non-threatening—a great example of how the very existence of something can horrify even when the thing itself is recognized as something that means no harm. It is worth noting the inspiration that Lovecraft took from this story. Not to diminish Lovecraft, but, in some ways, “The Happy Children” does Lovecraft better than Lovecraft before Lovecraft ever did it!   The description of the old town and the procession to the abbey on the hill is certainly reminiscent of Lovecraft’s “The Festival.” Machen’s story also features impossible geometries folded into architecture and even a gambrel roof makes an appearance!  

  Nebachadnezzar, William Blake (1795) Marcel Schwob, "The Death of Odjigh" in The King in the Golden Mask  translated by Kit Schluter   (Wakefield Press, 2017). Schwob's story can be read through the lens of Thomas Ligotti or Peter Wessel Zapffe, that is, as a work of philosophical pessimism. As the dying world comes to its end, the wolf slayer Odjigh faces his own personal crises of an emerging conscience. Odjigh, by gaining a kind of self-awareness, regrets his role as a hunter and positions himself as an observer and critic standing outside of nature. As he sees the violence around him and pities the suffering of living creatures, he laments existence itself: "Odjigh, deep in his heart, regretted the jigging of the nacreous fish in the meshing of the nets, the serpentine swimming of the conger eels, the heavy gait of the tortoises, the sidelong trot of the gigantic wall-eyed crabs, and the lively yawns of the earthly beasts, hairy beasts decked in scales, beasts...

Meghan Arcuri, "Going, Going" and Adrian Ludens, "Resistant to Change" in  Where the Silent Ones Watch , ed. James Chambers (Hippocampus Press: 2024). In William Hope Hodgson’s novel  The House on the Borderlands , little is said of the Recluse’s sister, Mary, and, in part, it is this absence of information that makes her a fascinating character. The reader can’t help but wonder about the old man’s sister. Two short stories from the James Chambers edited anthology  Where the Silent Ones Watch  pick up on themes of Mary’s story, albeit in two different ways. In her short story “Going, Going,” Meghan Arcuri takes the strange and awkward background role that Mary plays in Hodgson’s work as an opportunity to explore the psychological horror of not being seen. The protagonist of Arcuri's story gives a little away and those around her, particularly her partner, take much, much more. She slowly loses herself and disappears from the view of those around her. It is a cre...

Michael Cisco, "Night Hearing" in  Where the Silent Ones Watch , ed. James Chambers (Hippocampus Press: 2024).  This is the short story that got me to finally tackle William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land , which I read for the first time last month. If you haven't read The Night Land , Cisco's "Night Hearing" will excite your imagination and likely set you craving for more一it certainly did that for me. Or, if you've already made the journey in search of Naani/Mirdath and are looking for something that shows tremendous respect to the Hodgson while adding more to sink your teeth into, "Night Hearing" isn't to be missed. Cisco imagines the Night Land before the sun has completely died. The monsters are on their ascendancy, and people await the call to the Redoubt. It is wonderful to discover (or re-discover more about) the Monstruwacan, The Master Word, The House of Silence, The Towers, the ab-humans, and the Young Watchers. If you need an...

  Jack Vance, The Miracle Workers in Astounding Science Fiction , July 1958. We often look back to our superstitious ancestors with derision, and the people in this novella are no different; however, Vance has flipped the binary: empirical methods of  controlled experimentation become the ancient superstition while jinxmanship and hoodoo are the advanced practice of more civilized and evolved culture. In many ways, this novella turns the work of David Hume on its head. The Principle of Induction, at the core of scientific practice, becomes a mystical platitude. Experimentation is scoffed at and thought to be childish. The effectiveness of scientific methods would be admitting miracles into our ontology, and we know such things are impossible. 

H. G. Wells,  The Island of Dr. Moreau  (1896). "Poor brutes! I began to see the viler aspect of Moreau’s cruelty. I had  not thought before of the pain and trouble that came to these poor victims after they had passed from Moreau’s hands. I had shivered only at the days of actual torment in the enclosure. But now that seemed to me the lesser part. Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau — and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred me. The Things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at last to die painfully. " It may come as a surprise but the above was not written by Thomas Ligotti! It is H.G. Wells from The Island of ...

  Robert Aickman, "The Fully-Conducted Tour" in Compulsory Games edited by Victoria Nelson   (New York Review of Books, 2018). The magic of Aikman is that he always creates a pervasive and unsettling sense of wrongness that a reader just catches out of the corner of the eye. From the paperwork necessary for the tour to the flaking paint and general untidiness of the manor to the lack of any commentary on an ornate door by a tour guide who has been otherwise thorough, all this contributes to a strange atmosphere wrapped around the theme of being left behind. The thought of being left behind has a strong emotional valence for human beings. It can be a source of fear and alienation but also a source of relief. Like hanging out at the back of a fully conducted tour, we both want to be alone and part of the group. As our protagonist faces being left behind by his wife, who is dying of a terminal illness, he leaves his wife behind at the hotel to tour an old Italian villa alongsid...

Haruki Murakami, "Birthday Girl" translated by Jay Rubin from  Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman  (2006). This story is a different approach to typical grant-your-wish tales and raises questions about how one tries to decide what wish to make. What you wish for is certainly tied up with your identity—your hopes, desires, and fears. But, if you don’t know what you would wish for because you don’t know what kind of person you’ll be in the future, and you don’t know what you would’ve wished for 10 years ago because you were different then. What the hell are we?  We start to look rather ephemeral. 

  Chi Hui, "The Woman Carrying a Corpse" translated from Chinese by Judith Huang, from The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories , 2023. Read for free at Reactor Magazine This story is thought provoking. Issues of futility, how our lives and actions come to have meaning, and our relationship to the dead are all interesting topics brought out in Hui's story; however, I'm going to murmur about something else: The story brings to mind how explanations that involve citing reasons for actions are different than explanations that involve citing causes for actions. While it might be natural on first reflection to think of reasons as simply causes, and as such, reduce all explanations to causal, the story points to a couple of features of reasons-explanations that distinguish them from causal explanations. We tend to muddle the two up, but reasons have a normative component that causal explanations simply don't have; reasons justify an action, but causes can't justif...