Weird Murmur

  Arthur Machen, "N" in The Cosy Room and Other Stories (Rich & Cowan, 1936). Sitting over drinks, Arnold, Harliss, and Perrott reminisce about the London neighborhoods, streets, and architecture that have changed for the worse over time. The old, narrow, and crooked streets, the charming jumble of different shapes, styles, and building designs, the enchanted mix of architectural eras, all now flattened to practical, uniform, and straight lines in a modern age that erases the spirit of a place to replace it with the concrete, the functional, and the mundane. Through memory and imagination, these men peel back that modern facade and recall the old days and the old ways. Without moving from their chairs, they mentally walk the streets of London and its suburbs as the city once stood. There is something eidetic about the tour. As the men talk, they can see the old Strand as it once was. In a telling moment, Arnold even gives directions to the now non-existent St. James’s M...

  Mark Samuels, "The White Hands" from  The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (Tartarus Press: 2003). The work of Mark Samuels is compelling. Like other writers with a strong voice, all of his short stories feel connected, each thematically supporting the others. Samuels often riffs on provocative themes and ideas about weird horror fiction itself, and it is to those ideas that I briefly turn, with a focus on “The White Hands,” all the while recognizing that other stories by Samuels support his ideas. Two principles emerge (these are often put in the mouth of Alfred Muswell or other disciples of Lilith Blake, all fictional characters in Samuels’ stories): 1. The Isolation Principle: Isolation, particularly in the face of death, disease, or madness, is the essence of weird horror fiction. As Muswell tells John Harrington, “Mental isolation is the essence of weird fiction. Isolation when confronted with disease, with madness, with horror and with death. These are the re...

Jon Padgett, "Organ Void" in The Secret of Ventriloquism  (Dunhams Manor Press: 2016). "Organ Void" brings together philosophical pessimism, gross body horror, Padgett's notion of borrowed realities, and a symbol that triggers gnosis reminiscent of Robert W. Chambers' Yellow Sign. Padgett’s story packs a heavy punch and is ripe for giving a reader’s subconscious free rein.   The story starts with Rose, driving her VW Bug on an interstate exit while listening to a recording of a self-help guru. She stops to help a presumably homeless person who is carrying a cardboard sign that reads " ORGAN  -VOID ." But the narrative facts are constantly shifting, and what is really going on is far from being that straightforward. Throughout, Rose's reality morphs seamlessly between her being a kind and compassionate commuter, to being a homeless person herself living under a freeway, to being a confused patient in a hospital treated by a Dr. Gord Onavi (an an...

Thomas Ligotti, My Work is Not Yet Done , (Mythos Books: 2002) Interpretations of Ligotti’s so-called “corporate horror” that treat it primarily as a critique of consumerism or the corporate workplace can feel much too narrow in scope. Ligotti’s vision is larger than that, and My Work is Not Yet Done is a prime example of a novella that exceeds the label of “corporate horror.” I recommend readers turn to Moreau Vazh’s excellent analysis of the novella on the blog Taskerland (link below). The Taskerland insights reveal a profound depth to the story that goes unnoticed. Vazh is always a great source for penetrating elucidations of Ligotti's work, and I strongly encourage anyone interested to explore Taskerland. I won't be offering anything like the depth and breadth of criticism that you will find there. Instead, this murmur focuses on one specific idea: there is a tight analogy between "being a corporation" and "being corporeal," and that a category mistak...

  Álvares de Azevedo, Noite na Taverna [ A Night in the Tavern ] (1855). Translated by Maurício Búrigo for Universitas Press (2025). Published posthumously in 1855, Álvares de Azevedo's novella drips with soul-crushing perdition, moral depravity, and the kind of deep-seated pessimism that Ligotti will systematize some 150 years later in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race . The novella is a series of tales swapped among five men in a tavern. The stories they share are filled with vile debauchery and romantic excess; it is a wild little book. I will focus on Bertram's story, an adventure tale of sorts that stands as an illustration of key Ligottian themes including the absurdity of our survival drive, the detestable nature of Hope, and consciousness as a cruel trap that brings with it the awareness of the horror of existence while at the same time compelling our continued participation in it. The raft scene of Bertram's tale finds the storyteller, the captain, and the c...

  Clark Ashton Smith, "The Last Incantation" in  Weird Tales , June 1930. Read the story here at The Internet Archive Readers of genre fiction are used to encountering the dangers of necromancy. Time and time again, protagonists give in to the strong temptation to bring back a long-dead loved one, only to find “they’ve come back wrong.” From Stephen King’s Pet Sematary , and W. W. Jacobs' “The Monkey’s Paw” to John Langan’s The Fisherman , grief brings out some of the most powerful human emotions. The fantasy/horror fiction of Clark Ashton Smith is filled with necromancers, diabolists, and all types that are into raising the dead. Smith’s short story “The Last Incantation” features an aging sorcerer thinking back to a long-lost love of his youth, but Smith flips the script. The change, the off-ness that is sensed, not only comes from the object of the raising. Particularly if the long years of time and experience have passed, the mourner too has changed, and that change c...

  Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams , (1907).  Lucien Taylor, the main character of Arthur Machen's novel T he Hill of Dreams , takes himself to have solved the mystery of the alchemists when he hits upon the primacy of the imagination and language over physical reality. The historical, popular focus on the alchemical transformation of lead to gold is myopic and that change is usually understood in a way that largely misses the point. For Lucien, the change is a matter of a shift of mind, imagination, and conceptualization. Finding the base world appallingly cruel and miserable, Lucien changes it. For him, things start with language, with words; words to generate images in the mind. Finding the right words, the right poetry, the right prose--this is the magic. The magic is powerful and all too effective. Lucien ends up transforming himself into something non-human and that comes with a cost. The default interpretive view is that the price Lucien pays is much too high, but it i...

Christopher Slatsky, "Professor Cognoscente's Caliginous Charms Carnival" in  The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature  (Grimscribe Press, 2020). Cosmic horror often features sorcerers in possession of powerful, dangerous, cursed, and ancient texts that reveal our lives to be shams and that what we believe to be important is not really important. Those who have glimpsed the secrets discover that we live in a world of shadows, that the real world sits behind our illusions of reality. Such forbidden knowledge, such truths, often drives such a seeker to madness. Sometimes images of stage magic, ventriloquism, and puppetry are invoked to suggest that our sense of reality is just a kind of trick. The subtext is that we live in a world of illusion. We go on with our lives, just playing a role and taking it to be all-so-important, when really it amounts to nothing—a mere shadow of what is truly real. This familiar line of thought expresses a kind of philosophical pessimism that evokes ...

  Stanislaw Lem, Solaris,  1961, translated from Polish by Bill Johnston (2017). Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris is a deeply profound reflection on human psychology, moral obligation to non-human persons, and our naivete concerning the search for alien intelligence. The novel also challenges the very possibility of contact with any alien intelligence that engages the world with a vastly different non-human conceptual scheme and paradigm. It is a fifteen-year-old girl on a tour of the Solaris Institute that sums up the challenge and the failure of the scientific approach to contact. After seeing a film reel of the formation of one of the baffling, beautiful, and complicated structures created by Solaris, she asks, “What’s it all for?”   The question gets to the heart of the problem. The scientists who are so interested in intelligent contact have no answer because their empirical methods and their language of description are not equipped to answer questions of purposiveness and...

Junji Ito, Remina  (Shogakukan and VIZ Media: 2005, 2020). Ito’s work surgically draws a sharp contrast between human-caused horror and cosmic horror. The cosmic horror of this story hits on a grand scale, highlighting our insignificance in terms of time, speed, size, and causal impact. As Remina nears Earth, it remains totally indifferent, utterly destructive, but morally neutral and uncriticizable. But, despite our insignificance, humans cause an immense amount of suffering. Even our loving connections turn poisonous and lead to disaster. This book is horror through and through. It manages to show how vulnerable and insignificant we are and, at the same time, how much terror and pain we have the power to cause. We are immensely horrible, pathetic and feeble.