Weird Murmur

Nathan Ballingrud, The Strange (Saga Press: 2023). This is weird science fiction that leaves you with a sense of cosmic awe!  I am fascinated by the take on alien otherness here. It reminds me of the manner in which Adrian Tchaikovsky approaches the other, but then Ballingrud takes it a step further; he picks at a Ligotti-like paradox within our own natures: an unfathomable alien mind, but at the same time, a reflection of our own bifurcated and contradictory selves. We are alien to ourselves. With a child protagonist, Ballingrud exposes the vulnerability of human survival, the lies we tell about our concept of justice and what is fair, and the naïve notion that we have any idea what is really going on. Maybe we are nothing more than a disease.

  Linda Niehoff, "Fever Girls" in Weird Horror, Issue 4, Spring 2022, Undertow Publications. Read the story here on Weird Horror Magazine's website Having recently come under the influence of Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future” (2022) and Sebastián Lelio’s “The Wonder” (2022), I couldn’t help but see this weird story as a reflection on another perverse, deep-seated, paradoxical aspect of human beings (see Ligotti): we so much want something more out of our lives that we will kill ourselves to get it. To seek out sickness to feel better, to die in order to live. And the horrific cherry-on-top that Niehoff delivers here: in the end, it is even worse than all that and nothing at all what we expected. This one is worth digging into!  

  Clark Ashton Smith, "The Seven Geases" in  Weird Tales , Vol. 24 No. 4, October 1934. Read the story here on the Internet Archive The themes of this myth are at one with Ligotti’s philosophical pessimism. Humankind, distilled into the character of Ralibar Vooz, begins a senseless quest to kill for sport (to hunt the Voormis). He is soon made a diplomatic pawn (a useless one as it turns out), an offered sacrifice, beginning a repetitious cycle of the human being used as a mere means. Paradoxically, it is humanity that uses itself as a mere means and brings about the vicious cycle that results in its own doom, for it is actually a human who sets Ralibar off under the control of the first geas. Under the geases, the paradox of freedom without freedom is borne out as humanity is exposed as the living puppet that it is. As it turns out Ralibar, in virtue of his humanity, is an outsider, always out of place, an abomination to all he meets, useless and ultimately a kind of failure...

  Ken Greenhall, Hell Hound (Zebra: 1977). The emotionally dark characters and the exploration of courage, trust, and strength make this story much more sophisticated than one might expect based on the cover! I’m still trying to formulate what this strange and violent coming-of-age story is all about. The interesting and complicated relationship between the humans and the dog Baxter allows for focus on the differences, if any, between human nature and beastly nature. Have you read this haunting book?

John Langan, The Fisherman: A Novel (Word Horde: 2016). Langan's prose, his incredible descriptions of the awful, and his deft handling of emotionally complicated themes all in the context of a story of cosmic horror is impressive. I'm always interested in that strand of Mythos stories that explore different psychological reactions to the weird, and I appreciated the contrast between the reactions of Abe, Dan, Rainer, and Jacob to the unbelievable. If you haven't yet read this novel, you won't want to continue reading this post. Below contains a HUGE SPOILER: There is an interesting hint of something new here: While Leviathan is certainly awe-inspiring and affects cosmic dread in us, left to its own devices, it is unlikely to harm. The existential threat emerges from the actions of Der Fischer and his attempts to capture. With that said, even just the existence of the black ocean and a creature of that scale veiled just beyond our experience is horrifying.

Michael Shea, Fat Face (Axolotl Press: 1987). The story is a fun one to unpack, and this murmur points to a thematic layer that is particularly striking.    Like Dyer's discovery at the Mountains of Madness, this too is a story of times changing—a story of the degeneration of a culture that has come to merely mimic the accomplishments of the past in a cheap and unskillful way. Look at what the Parnassus has become! As the Hollywood office buildings flaunt gaudy pseudo-Mesopotamian architectural excrescences that are even now past their so-called swanky age, another power shift looms. The streets are being abandoned, and Patti clings to a community that no longer exists. The time of Shoggoths, who can't even be bothered to form their bodies into passable human form, is upon us.     Does Arnold, the newspaper vendor, offer hope?

 Clark Ashton Smith, "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" in Weird Tales , May 1932 Read the restored version here for free If you are wanting to jump into some Clark Ashton Smith short fiction for the first time, you won't go wrong starting here. Smith delivers a tale reminiscent of Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" without the extra 30,000 words, and leaves the reader drawing a more horrifying conclusion than one draws from Lovecraft's classic. As is typical of Smith, the prose here is a delight, and the story manages to spark the imagination and draw the reader into a doomed exploration of ancient ruins on the Mars landscape. With some great horror that will remind many of the film Alien , this one might actually manage to scare you!

Fiona Macleod, "The Sin-Eater" in The Sin-Eater and Other Tales  (1895). Read the story here on Gutenberg The notion of a sin-eater, a person that through funerary ritual can take on the sins of the deceased, is ripe for a weird tale, and Fiona Macleod certainly delivers one here. From the melancholy setting, to the down trodden characters, to the unsettling superstitions that folks believe in (sort of), this story drips with sadness and frightful gloom. These eerie elements working together result in a haunting story of madness and the supernatural (maybe).  The characters have their doubts that the sin-eating practice has merit. Nonetheless, they partake in the ritual, and Neil Ross even tries to manipulate it for his own revengeful ends. Well, things don't work out quite as expected. Curses are nasty things!  

Nathan Ballingrud, "The Monsters of Heaven" in North American Lake Monsters  (Small Beer Press: 2013). Even in heaven there are monsters of a particularly insidious type, helpful in cruel and terrible ways. But it's the best we can hope for.  This is one of my favorite stories from the book. It leaves my imagination stuck with disturbing, sick, and wet images of creatures not understood. The grief, sorrow, and confusion of Brian’s and Amy's lives are set against a backdrop of the supernatural, and the weird aspects of the story are somehow simultaneously subtle and striking. The horror hits home when you realize the mundane aspects of the story are just as confounding and scary as the supernatural one.  The narrative brings to focus aspects of our humanity that are unique to us, but, at the same time, horrifying and pitiful: the power to imagine, to fantasize, to sublimate, to pull the wool over our own eyes just to have it continually ripped off to see the ugly trut...

Mary Berman, "Things Found in Richard Pickman's Basement and Things Left There" in Weird Horror, Issue 2, Spring 2021, Undertow Publications. In H.P. Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model," little did we know that while Thurber told his frightening story to Eliot, someone else, Mrs. Eliot, stood in the darkened doorway as secret witness to Thurber's terrifying tale of his discoveries at Pickman's house in North End. In "Things Found in Richard Pickman's Basement and Things Left There," we find out how Mrs. Eliot uses that information to horrifying ends and that she is, in fact, to be feared more than Richard Upton Pickman.  Like Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model," Mary Berman's tale is told from the perspective of hearing one side of a conversation, but the tables are turned. There is a new story to tell and it is  Thurber  who must listen to  Eliot , though this time, it is Mrs. Eliot with voice. This story has deep themes ...

Meghan Arcuri, "Found and Lost" in  Under Twin Suns: Alternate Histories of the Yellow Sign , ed. James Chambers (Hippocampus Press: 2021).  My opening murmur is usually spoiler-free; however, this post reveals some details that particularly spoiler sensitive readers may wish to avoid. The King in Yellow stories that I enjoy the most are usually the ones that capture the mood and mystery of the original Robert W. Chambers—the stories that don't answer the questions. In that tradition, two of my favorites are Karl Edward Wagner's "River of Night's Dreaming" and Sarah Read's "The Inn of the Fates." Although certainly parts of Arcuri's short story retain the yellow-mystery and leave the reader with lots of questions, "Found and Lost" is, first and foremost, a cleverly creative story that gives us a peek into what Mr. Hawberk and Louis Castaigne, from "The Repairer of Reputations," are doing when they are off-page in the...

 Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz, "Crampton" a script of an unproduced episode of "The X Files," 1998.  This feels exactly like the script you’d expect if you asked Thomas Ligotti to write an X-Files episode! It includes a strange town, stage magic, clowns, mannikins, a psychic hotline, ventriloquist dummies, and plenty of philosophical pessimism. The script is terrifying, but, at the same time, the humorous banter between Scully and Mulder is spot on. Specific scenes masterfully inform the abstract themes of the episode. Illusion becomes reality when the FBI concocts a fake cover story that spins out of control. The themes of solipsistic idealism—that nothing exists except what is currently conscious—are reiterated when a restaurant eerily shuts its lights off and closes once Scully and Mulder leave the parking lot. At one point a costume is stripped away, revealing no one underneath. There is a telling dialogue where a retired FBI agent, who used to work fraud ca...

Sarah Read, "The Inn of the Fates" in Under Twin Suns: Alternate Histories of the Yellow Sign , ed. James Chambers (Hippocampus Press: 2021).  Sarah Read's story captures the imagination in a similar way that Robert W. Chambers'  The King in Yellow  does. In the same way that Chambers doesn't give us all the answers and leaves things mysterious, this one is weird in all the right places! It is a King in Yellow story in the tradition of Bierce, Chambers, and Wagner with no Lovecraftian detours—an absolute delight.    This one has a lot of "oh, that was cool" moments. Which one grabbed you?

Artwork by Dan Rempel Rex Burrows, "The Forest Has No Immediate Plans to Kill You" in Weird Horror , Issue 3, Fall 2021, Undertow Publications. Read the story here on Weird Horror's website Both fun and horrifying, the story works well on different levels. I particularly like the questions that it raises once it sits with you for a while.  That we actually fear something else becoming like us—doing things that we would do—that is a horrifying commentary on consciousness and self-awareness. And then it gets worse; the forest pulls another trick from our own book: it rationalizes its actions to its victims.

Thomas Ligotti, "Flowers of the Abyss" in Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (Carroll and Graf: 1991).  It is the madness of things all the way down; it seems foundational. The threads of this story fold in on themselves in fascinating ways. The solution to the madness is just more madness—the town gathers its torches.  There is more going on in "Flowers of the Abyss" than I can figure out, but one theme that is worth more thought is the relationship between fear and the impossible/the contradictory/the paradoxical/the mad. That tie between the two is something prevalent in many early works of weird fiction: Arthur Machen, in particular, comes to mind.   

Nicole Cushing, "The Suffering Clown" in  The Mirrors  (Cycatrix Press: 2015). Snuck into the anthology, this King in Yellow story is handled with precisely the right touch. Cushing has a way of distilling philosophical pessimism into something that delivers a gut-punch. It has clowns in tatters with cosmic connections; its got grime, hopelessness, and loss. Ultimately, we must sell out and reconcile ourselves to living in this sham of a world. Have a great weekend!

M.R. James, "A View from a Hill" in A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925). Read the story here on Gutenburg I was inspired to give M.R. James' "A View from a Hill" a re-read after coming across Sarah Coomer's fantastically eerie illustration. With a touch of weird science and a dab of necromancy, this story delivers some great characters, beautiful descriptions, and uncanny happenings. This is one of my favorite James stories, and it leaves enough unanswered questions to make readers work for their own interpretation   Illustration, A View from a Hill, Sarah Coomer https://www.sarahcoomer.co.uk/

 Fritz Leiber, "Smoke Ghost" in Unknown Worlds , Vol. 5 No. 3, October 1941. Read the story here on the Internet Archive Among other things, the story works as a critique of environmental harm attributable to industrialization, and Leiber's conception of ghosts as the personification of twisted aspects of society, the environment, and ourselves is the coolest! This is an eerie tale that leaves us wondering what it wants, when it will return, and what will it look like. What did you think about Mr. Wran's reaction on the roof at the end?

Robert E. Howard, "The Man on the Ground" in Weird Tales , Vol. 22 No. 1, July 1933.   Read the story here on the Internet Archive Illustration by Greg Staples Not an oft-read story of Howard's, this gem is about the power of hatred, and its ability to overcome death itself. "The Man on the Ground" highlights the things that Howard is good at: thrilling action, violence, and the American West!   Incidentally, the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales is spectacular. Along with Howard's short story, the issue contains H. P. Lovecraft's "The Dreams in the Witch-House," Hazel Heald's "The Horror in the Museum, and Clark Ashton Smith's "Ubbo-Sathla."

  Justin Dowling, "The Arm" in Weird Tales , Vol. 6 No. 1, March 1954. Read the story here on the Internet Archive To compensate for losing an arm in an accident, a man dedicates himself to making "his left arm the strongest arm in the world." Sound pulp enough? It gets wild, and things don't go well! The flawed story explores themes of control, obsession, and guilt. It is told from the perspective of a friend of the injured man, and it is just as much a story about the narrator as it is about the arm-obsessed accident victim. Despite its flawed presentation, there are things worth exploring here. What redeeming qualities did you find in this forgotten story?

Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom  (Tor.com, 2016) In part, the book sub-textually explores why we’ve, up until now, only heard the skewed and misleading account of the Red Hook horror through the legacy of Lovecraft’s story. It is interesting to see the original “The Horror at Red Hook” itself become a kind of cover up story—that is something Lovecraft does all the time with the news reports of mythos occurrences, and here, it is turned against his own tale.  Among other things, there are some neat ideas about our subconscious perceptions of others being like cast spells. In addition, Black Tom’s motivation for throwing-in with such an awful entity is thought-provoking; this goes some way toward giving one answer to that age old question: why would there ever be mythos cultists? 

Nicole Cushing, "The Company Town" in The Mirrors (Cycatrix Press: 2015), 71–5 We are all already living in the company town. Moved here without being asked and working so hard for what we don’t really want.