Month: December 2018

Weird Fiction Review #3: The Fisherman

NOTE: This is the third of ten reviews of contemporary weird novels. An overview of the project can be found below.

The Fisherman, published in 2017 by Word Horde (a small press specialized in speculative / supernatural fiction run by Ross Lockhart in Petaluma, CA), is John Langan’s second novel. His first, House of Windows (2009) and his numerous short stories (collected in Mr. Gaunt and Other Easy Encounters (2008), The Wide, Cavernous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (2013), and Sefira and Other Betrayals (2016)) are all in the genre, and he’s an active member of the online horror/speculative/weird tales community, with articles and interviews in e-zines such as Nightmare and Weird Fiction Review. His blog Mr. Gaunt provides links to his many projects, including an interview with Peter Straub and the anthology Creatures (2011), co-edited by Paul Tremblay, whose latest novel will be discussed in this series.

The Fisherman received a fair amount of press from mainstream reviewers, such as the New York Times and NPR, further indicating the popularity of weird fiction today. Writing in the Times, Terrence Rafferty calls it “superb,” citing its ability “ to sustain the focused effect of a short story or a poem over the course of a long horror narrative,” and making a favorable comparison to Robert Aickman, whose resurrection is one of the more salubrious results of the return to the weird. I can’t agree with Rafferty’s assessment, but his terms—the effort to “sustain the focused effect” associated with poetry—point in the right direction. The Fisherman provides a contemporary object-lesson in some of the foundational “poetics” of the genre. Langan gets many elements right—his themes, plotting, and narrative frames all contribute to his novel’s considerable weirdness; but his overly methodical prose detracts from this affect. Consequently, this novel provides insight into the relation between aesthetic techniques that contribute to the effect of supernatural horror that contemporary fiction might evoke. Before turning to Langan’s novel, I will quickly sketch a few observations regarding the “poetics” of weirdness in relation to the modern literature of ‘sensation.”

As I suggested in my first post of this series, I treat weirdness as both an affect in the psychological sense—a feeling that names a certain relation between the subject and its object, in which the latter is regarded as meaning more than is immediately discernible—and the name of a genre with a long history in the field of literature, broadly conceived. I say “broadly” because one of the most intriguing qualities of weird fiction—one of its weirdest features—is its appearance in texts commonly regarded as “high art,” or canonical literature as well as in genre, pulp, or sensational fiction. It is unlike most other genre fiction in this regard.

To briefly explain: in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Pierre Bourdieu describes the “literary field” as a set of social practices within the broader field of cultural reproduction. Within this field, distinctions are made by writers, critics, and the reading public between “the degree of consecration . . . between styles and lifestyles” associated with genres (122). His case studies are Flaubert and Baudelaire, whose aesthetics define the modern perception of capital “L” Literature in terms of its “autonomy,” a condition also realized in the writers’ relation to the market in material and social capital. At one pole we find bohemian or avant-garde poetry, published in little magazines for no money, but consecrated by the heroism of the aesthetic “purist,” starving for the sake of his art and contemptuous of even sympathetic critics. At the other extreme, we have the “Theatre de boulevard,” which Americans might think of as Broadway. Here it’s all about money. Bourgeois entertainment lives or dies by its ability to capitalize upon the fluctuating tastes of its fickle audience. Lodged between these poles are the “psychological,” “society,” and “naturalist” novels, as represented by Zola, Hugo, etc. The contemporary field in the United States looks nothing like this, of course. Bourdieu doesn’t attempt to account for the mode of mass production that emerges in the twenties, which scholars refer to as “the culture industry.” Yet the process by which social/aesthetic/political distinctions are made—the structure of taste—remains remarkably robust.

For the modern U.S. reading public, “sensational” writing was (and remains) a nebulous region within the broader field, roughly commensurate to “genre fiction,” the subcategories of which are often named by sensations: “horror, romance, mystery, thrillers,” etc. These genres, developed in dime magazines, the pulps, and paperbacks, are neither autonomous nor consecrated by bourgeoise critics and scholars. Within most of these genres, such as the western, the mystery story, or science fiction, writers of considerable merit may produce work worthy of the attention afforded to Literature, but in so doing they are working against generic constraints. Fantastic or weird fiction does not fit easily into this aesthetic taxonomy. As a genre, it emerges among Gothic romances, such as The Castle of Otranto (1764), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and the “Arabesques” (themselves derived from Ovid and 1001 Arabian Nights) written by Hoffmann in the early 1800s. From Daniel Defoe’s “A True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs. Veal” (1706) to Edith Wharton’s “Afterward” (1910), canonical authors have always written weird tales.

Edgar Allan Poe, obviously enough, is the figure for the uneasy relation between these two poles of the field of fiction. He was and remains “edgy”: his poems, stories, and essays are the subject of both scholarly dissertations and the idle enjoyment of adolescents. He was a hero for avant-garde bohemians and a politically conservative editor of gentleman’s magazines. His approach to literature uncannily appears on both sides of what would become the modern terrain of assessment. In essays, reviews, and the stories themselves, Poe offers a minute appraisal of his own poetics. “I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect,” he wrote in “The Philosophy of Composition,” his explanation of the entirely rational method by which he produced his sensational poem, “The Raven.” (503; (in this post, quotations from Poe are from Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Poetry and Tales, edited by James M. Hutchisson. Broadview: 2012). For Poe, a literary “effect” was like a dramatic “point”; thus his essay takes us ‘behind the scenes’ of poetic composition to reveal “the painful erasures and interpolations—[…] the tackle for scene-shifting—the step-ladders and demon-traps—the cock’s feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.” (504) Readers of a romantic inclination have taken this essay to be tongue-in-cheek: its minute poetics of one of the most successful entries in the small genre of weird poetry (other entries include Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover”) must be the work of inspiration. How could such intense sensation be produced by mechanical means? But Poe is not putting us on; he makes versions of the same argument in several reviews and exemplifies his logic in numerous stories.

His analysis of “effect” is oddly physical. It begins with the length of time an average reader may be expected to sit with a text. “The initial consideration was that of extent,” he argues, “If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression—for, if two sitting be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and every thing like totality is at once destroyed.” (504) In his review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (several of which are weird), he extends the reader’s temporal experience from lyric poetry to short stories. He begins his favorable review by defending the short story as a “poetic” genre. Because “the unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance,” he writes, “true poetry” can only exist “within the limit” of “what might be perused in an hour.” (525-6) This is because “All high excitements are necessarily transient”: the sensations we experience when reading do not last long. He likes Hawthorne’s tales because they take “a half-hour to one or two hours” to “peruse.” One need only read any of Poe’s most sensational stories—“Ligeia, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Oval Portrait,” “The Black Cat,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “The Cask of Amontillado”—to know how much he cherished brevity. These stories take twenty minutes to an hour to absorb, even when reading closely. When it comes to claiming the reader’s attention, originality is the most important factor, but it doesn’t require inspiration. Original impressions may be produced by combining previously successful effects. The “wise” writer “invents … incidents” that can be “combined” to produce the “preconceived effect.” The result should be an intense compression of effects, such that “In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.” (526)

Following Poe, let’s assume that the effort to sustain a poetic intensity—the production of a new sensation (or variation on a dominate sensation) in every line—is a vital quality of what I am calling “sensational” fiction. Here we encounter an interesting conundrum. All fiction generates sensation; this may even be its most important quality: its “purposeless purpose,” to condense Kant. Throughout much of the twentieth-century, “genre” fiction also describes “low” or “popular” or “kitschy” fiction. In this loosely cultivated part of literature’s garden the violence of sensation is stripped of the moral and ethical requirements of naturalism, the delicate sensibilities of a realism developed in the “novel of manners,” and the radical critique of form offered by avant-garde novelists and bohemian poets. Because the pulp and paperback publishers gambled on volume over quantity, flooding the market with thousands of stories each month, “sensational” fiction is closely equated with a boring or brutal prosaicism. Little to no time is spent, by authors or publishers, cultivating style. If “all high excitements are necessarily transient,” and the goal is to produce a large number of these short-lived sensations, there was no time to search for “le mot juste,” which is why pulp fiction is the nadir of modern aestheticism as such. The premise of “The Philosophy of Composition,” and its underlying logic of cause and effect, “set the stage” as it were for pulp formula. Poe articulates a simple mechanics for producing marketable sensations. Yet at the same time, his insistence upon the lyrical compression that creates an intense correspondence between each word or utterance and the story’s final impression is one of the qualities that so delighted Baudelaire. In short, Poe’s notion of sensation contains the seeds that will flower in both pulp and avant-garde forms of modern fiction. There’s nothing original in this observation; my point is just that a poetics of weird sensation runs both within and against the grain of twentieth-century genre fiction. In the American context, Lovecraft, deservedly or not, inherits Poe’s position within the field; his pulp stories have been consecrated by academia and enjoy a sort of bohemian notoriety.

Poe’s notion of compression also helps to explain why so many weird tales are short stories. The greater the length, the more difficult it is to sustain any given sensation, weirdness included. Thus, when Rafferty argues that The Fisherman sustains poetic intensity over its 266 pages, he implies an enormous accomplishment: one that Poe attempted only once, in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. This observation is supported by a key point made by Langan and repeated by several of The Fisherman’s reviewers: that he worked on the novel for twelve years. It suggests the painstaking process of autonomous aestheticism, a devotion to the novel for its own sake. The comparison to Aickman, a singularly powerful stylist within the field of “strange” stories, further re-enforces this view. We are asked to approach the novel as a sort of “pure” aesthetic project, despite its generic origins. The attempted “expansion” of Poe’s formula for sensational stories into a novel also implies a movement across the terrain of literary sensibility—from the pulps toward the “mainstream” of psychological realism. In my view, this expansion fails in a very particular manner, one which reveals an inherent tension between weirdness as a sensation and the weird tale as a genre.

Poe famously chooses “melancholy” as “the most legitimate of all the poetical tones,” and therefore the chief effect to be sought when generating the sensations deployed in “The Raven” (506). His notion of melancholy combines “beauty” with “sadness.” (This as distinct from the “homeliness” and “passion” that he combines to produce tales of horror (such as “The Tell-Tale Heart” or the “The Pit and the Pendulum,” in which squalid, grotesque environments establish the setting for terror). With an infuriating literalism—“it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring from direct causes” (506)—he determines that “the death . . . of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world—and equally it is beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover.” (508) Langan follows this advice to the letter. His narrator Abe is grieving the death of his wife Marie, “and us married not two years,” drinking heavily, and about to lose his job, when he takes up fishing to hold onto life (3). When a coworker in his office named Dan suffers a similar loss—his wife and young twins are killed in an auto accident that is partially his fault—these “men without women” (the title of the novel’s first section) begin fishing together, spending what used to be “family time” in the woods: “For the rest of that summer, on into early fall, as we roamed the Catskills, fishing streams I’d fished on my own, trying some spots that were new to me, I learned a little about Dan’s wife, and about his family, too.” (25) As Dan grapples with his loss, he confesses to an uncanny feeling: “I have the strangest thoughts lately. I swear I do. When I look at things—when I look at people—I think, None of it’s real. It’s all just a mask, like those papier-mache masks we made for one of our school plays when I was a kid. What play was that? It seems like it must have been Alice in Wonderland, but I can’t remember. I wish I could remember that play. I wish I could. All a mask, Abe, and the million-dollar question is, What’s underneath the mask?” (28-9) Weirdness is promised in the tone and guise of melancholia, and because we are told on page one that the present narrative is motivated by the loss of “a good friend, most of my sanity, and damn near my life,” the sensation is doubled. As the allusion to Alice makes clear, the strangeness of grief will take us to both sides of reality’s looking glass.

Two additional frames for weirdness are developed early on: the trope of the fisherman’s “tall tale” (the “one that got away” is given grotesque meaning) and intertextual correspondences to Moby Dick. The novel begins with a quotation from Melville and the sentence “Don’t call me Abraham: call me Abe.” Our Ismael “know[s] a story or two. That’s what fishermen are, right? Storytellers.” (1) The accumulation of these conceits early on follows Poe’s formula for developing an intensity in which “no word written” may not be given significance in relation to “the one pre-established design.” Langan establishes a rich terrain on which to evoke weirdness: we might distrust the narrator’s senses, subject as they are to melancholic fantasies, distrust the story related by Dan, also warped by grief, and further regard the whole story as the work of a playful fabulist. This is all very promising, but despite the narrator’s insistence that “a story doesn’t have to be fitted like some kind of prefabricated house—no, it’s got to go its own way” (2), there is also something labored in the prose, much as though the narrative were a prefab house being put together by someone not at all confident in their carpentry. Langan’s gambit appears to be the extension of details, provided by an untutored but thoughtful narrator, so that the events of a weird tale are spread across chapters rather than paragraphs. But the narrator’s meandering opinions do not compress resonant conceits. For example:

It wasn’t until late February of that next year that I finally had [Dan] over for dinner. Despites its abbreviated length, February’s always struck me as an especially bleak month, at least in these parts. I know it’s not the darkest month, and I know it’s not the coldest or the snowiest month, but February is gray in a way I can’t explain. In February, all the big, happy holidays are gone, and it’s weeks and weeks—months, even—until Easter and spring. I suppose that’s why whoever decides these things stuck Valentine’s Day smack dab I the middle of the month, to help lighten its load. To be honest, though, even when I had a reason to celebrate the fourteenth, I still thought of the second month as a bleak time. I think this was part of the reason I invited Dan to join me in a meal, and why, when I opened the door that Saturday night and saw him standing there, ushaven and obviously unshowered, wearing an old track suit reeking of mothballs and mildew, I wasn’t as surprised as I might have been, especially considering that, when I’d seen him on Friday, he’d been his usual tidy self. (26)

Regarding the psychological/natural atmosphere established in the first six sentences of this passage, let’s remember how Poe evokes the same feeling in “The Raven”: “Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; / And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.” Obviously, prose doesn’t need to be this compressed, but weird fiction, focused upon the singular sensation its genre promises, weakens rapidly when extraneous signifiers are introduced. Poe knows that we know what December’s like, whereas Langan seems to think his readers are not familiar with February’s bleakness. The extension of sympathy produced by such utterances generates a static of unnecessary information. It’s “extraneous” because the narrator is being all too rational, affirming a shared experience, rather than undermining it. The narrative voice, despite being positioned as a melancholic teller of tales, possesses no obsession. To put it another way, the loss is missing. The neurotic compulsions promised by the plot do not find expression in the narrative voice. For example, in a story told by a fisherman there is remarkably little mention of lures and reels, bait and casting and all the other fishing stuff I know little about but expect when reading such a tale. By my very rough estimate, there are fewer direct references to fishing in these 260 pages than in Hemingway’s, “The Big Two-Hearted River,” a subtly uncanny fishing tale that comes in at about 12 pages. We are told that fishing is a lifeline, but it’s not treated as such. These (absent) references would potentially contribute to the narrator’s weirdness in a way that explanations of Valentine’s Day do not. (By contrast, Valentine’s Day plays a vital role in the weirdness evoked by Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock: see my post below.)

Fortunately, The Fisherman weaves a much denser web of weird conceits than those so far established. Here again we might observe various mechanism for producing weird effects, in themselves “formulaic,” which Langan deploys. The next conceit the novel initiates involves fabulation and framing: tales within tales. Abe and Dan hear about a special fishing spot in upstate New York named “Dutchman’s Creek.” On their way to check it out, they stop at “Herman’s Diner on Route 28, just west of Wiltwyck.” In the diner, under a weird painting (“This painting was so old, so begrimed with the smoke of a thousand omelets and hamburgers, that only by diligent and careful study could you begin to develop an idea of its subject. The canvas was such a mess of masses of shades and shadows that I half-suspected it was some kind of giant Rorschach Test. “(41)), Herman tells Abe and Dan a story which occupies the next 147 pages: more than half the entire novel. As we enter this frame, the narrator explains that after surviving the events of the novel, “I wanted to copy down everything I could recall of what Howard had said, get all of it exactly right.” He writes for four days straight, getting all the details correct: “I understood that the story had passed to me, that somehow, Howard had tucked it inside me.” Not only that, but he discovers, in the act of writing, “details . . . Howard hadn’t included. . . And yet, at the same time, every last detail I wrote down seemed familiar. I had the maddening sense that, even though Howard hadn’t related anything like the complete story to us, I had carried it with me out of the diner.” (46)

This framing device has the potential to initiate a secondary system of weird referents. We can doubt the story that Herman tells, and we can doubt the narrator’s retelling. As touched upon in previous posts, the secondary or tertiary narrative frame is an age-old convention in weird fiction, with roots in 1001 Arabian Nights and The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, for example. As Poe recognizes in the introduction to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the “fictional” frame may in certain instances be used to impart realism at the same time. Properly handled, the truth can be stranger than fiction, at least within fiction.

Langan immediately multiples the narrative frames. In Abe’s transcription, Howard begins by explaining that his story comes from Reverend Mapple, “minister at the Lutheran Church in Woodstock and what you’d call a local history buff.” (49) The minister’s story is a retelling (supplemented by his own researches) of an account of life on the banks of “Deutschman’s Creek” (as it was known in the 1910s) told him by Lottie Schmidt, a German immigrant whose father worked on the construction of an enormous reservoir built in the Catskills. These conceits—the amateur researcher whose observations resonate with the testimony of an unreliable narrator—are also common mechanisms for producing weird effects: variations on this formula were particularly favored by weird modernists, such as M. R. James, Machen, and Lovecraft. Frazier’s The Golden Bough is the obvious inspiration for this “antiquarian” weird tale, in which an increasingly obsessed / horrified narrator pieces together a glimpse of the impossible thing from folklore, second/third party testimony, and direct observations of archaic rituals.

Unfortunately, The Fisherman doesn’t use these devices in a manner that generates weird effects. The problem of “extraneous” information generated by the rational / sympathetic narrator in part one is reproduced on a larger scale in the novel’s second part—precisely because of the numerous supplements that are allowed. Lottie’s tale is supplemented by Rev. Mapple, whose story is supplemented by Howard, whose story is supplemented by the narrator’s own mysteriously “familiar” yet additional details. I suspect that Langan’s intent was to create the degree of detail associated with naturalism or psychological realism, thus allowing readers to become absorbed in the immediate exigencies of the weird events that Lottie witnesses, but this turns out to be a poor choice. Each narrator’s sympathetic supplement is used to generate transparency, rather than the inherent artifices of a palimpsest. For example, Howard’s story begins:

Anyway, as far as the record shows, the Indians left [the town that would become Dutchman’s Creek] alone. And for a long time, until the eighteen-forties, not much of interest happened there. The other towns in the Esopus valley grew up around it. The hemlock tanneries were established and became a thriving concern—that was the big business here, the tanneries. Then, one summer’s day, this man comes riding out of the west, along the turnpike. He isn’t much to look at. Even for the time, he’s a little fellow, with black, stringy hair—kind of greasy—and a black, stringy beard that hangs down from his chin like a cheap disguise. […] This man comes riding on a one-horse cart, and there isn’t much remarkable about either horse—a brown nag that wearing the same thick coat of dust as the man’s clothes—or the cart. Oh, except for the cart’s wheels: apparently, their rims are twice as thick as they need to be, and covered in pictures. Actually, this is a little unclear. Some folks who see the man making his slow way along the turnpike say that the wheels are wrapped around with symbols like hieroglyphs, you know? While others declare that the wheels are decorated with pictures that look like writing but aren’t… (54)

Such passages—the story within the story is composed of many—fail to feel weird because, again, they lack an account of loss—in this case, the loss of information ordinarily generated by the researcher’s fetish for accuracy. All the narrative frames painstakingly established a few pages before are abandoned. To which narrator are we to ascribe evaluations such as “not much of interest happened,” “kind of greasy” “making his slow way along the turnpike,” “rims twice as think as they need be,” and so forth? Who exactly are the “folks” who declare the symbols hieroglyphic in the face of “others” who say they only look like hieroglyphs, but are actually illustrations? Where did this debate take place, anyway? Was there a meeting in the town square? Does it evolve from competing versions of a local legend? Or have these details been added by Mapple, Howard, or Abe? As with the narrative voice, the lack of lack produces an abundance of stability that dispels the weirdness evoked at the level of plot. The stranger comes to town, odd things are seen at a certain old house; in later years the abandoned house, which must be razed before the reservoir can be built, becomes a kind of impossible place—ultimately [spoiler alert!] a portal through which a magic fisherman seeks to land an unholy cosmic leviathan. But I found it difficult to care because nearly all the realist details Langan’s narrator(s) reconstruct(s) fail to contribute to the sensation he promises. There are a few moments of weirdness, but finding them felt much like my few attempts at fishing: a lot of waiting around between bites.

A moment near the climax of the story Howard tells in the diner crystalizes this problem of positive narration. Within Howard’s story, the entrance into the magician’s house is focalized on Lottie’s future husband, Jacob. We are told that “it will be from Jacob Schmidt that Lottie will learn the events of that afternoon and evening; although it will take her the better part of two decades to hear all of it. Neither her father nor her mother nor Italo will say anything about what happens … up at the Dort house.” (120) The obscurity of the information, passed from Jacob to Lottie to Mapple to Howard to Abe to us, is emphasized, but not enacted in the narrative. Instead we get:

Jacob is prepared for the interior of the house to be dark. He isn’t prepared for it to be full of trees, evergreens, from the feel of their branches. . . . A dim light whose source Jacob cannot locate renders the trees visible. The evergreens extend far back into the house. . . . Overhead the trees are so high ad so dense he can’t see the roof. Nor is the floor visible, though it feels more like dirt, rather than wood or stone, underfoot. Jacob supposes it makes sense. If you wanted to fill your house with a forest, you would need soil to plant it in.
  My God, he thinks, I’m reasoning like a crazy person. (141)

The thing is, he’s not. He’s being quite reasonable, especially in his self-awareness. The lack of unreason is magnified by the prose style; this scene includes several sentences that I removed because they convey nothing necessary to the effect. The old mansion turns out to be a façade: the door leads not to a man-made interior, but to an otherworldly landscape—an ocean where the leviathan is being hauled ashore over centuries. Within the generic formula, it’s a wonderful idea. It combines weird tropes (the eeriness of an abandoned dwelling, the portal to a dream world) in an original way. And, unlike Lovecraft Country, discussed in the previous post, we are presented with a thickly-textured world. But, oddly enough, this itself is the problem. We are given far too much information in far too rational a light. We know exactly what Jacob thinks and feels, and the account is rendered in a logical, coherent manner. Each sentence bears the weight of too much non-sensational signification. Where else would one expect to feel a floor, save “underfoot”? This precision drags the cosmic horror we are meant to encounter too much into the light.

The third act begins when Abe and Dan leave the diner. Abe feels “disjointed” by Howard’s story, which has apparently taken only a few hours to tell, despite the many hours it took to read. Dan seems nonplussed. When Abe asks for his reaction, he says “I think if that shaggy-dog story had been any hairier, . . . it would have been a carpet.” (199) Does he really think so? Or does he discount Howard’s story in order to persuade Abe to visit the fishing spot, despite this lengthy warning? They go, of course—initiating an ascent into the mountains which is also a decent into the fantastic. They encounter strange fish (again rendered in reasonable, non-horrified prose: “The fish’s face, as I’ve said, was rounded, its eyes a pair of large, forward facing sockets. No doubt, its resemblance to a human skull had factored into my initial shock at its appearance.” (210)) and the ghost of their dead wives and children. The leviathan is encountered for a second time. However, because we’ve already encountered it in Lottie’s story–despite the numerous conceits meant to give us indirect evidence–the narrator’s encounter with the creature is superfluous. He wakes up the hospital and wonders how much of it was a dream.

This critique is not meant to be mean-spirited. My goal has been to isolate a quality of the prose that separates weirdness as sensation from weirdness as generic formula. The novel presents a good case study for the effects of style because the tropes it deploys are so promising. The melancholic narrator, fisherman’s fable, romantic setting, story within the story, and impossible thing are conceived of with originality and knit into a serviceable plot. Yet the reference to Aickman remains misguided. Readers familiar with his stories—”Ringing the Changes,” “The Hospice,” “Residents Only,” “Hand in Glove,” “No Time is Passing”—will recognize the problem. While Aickman evokes the strangeness of mundane life, surrounding his characters with circumstances that are about 90% ordinary, his diction and syntax renders the mundane in a consistently odd light. In an Aickman story the natural world is rendered with a poetic intensity that makes every word count, so much so that we frequently encounter utterances that are themselves nearly indecipherable because they resonate on so many levels we don’t know how to attribute them.  

The issues raised here around psychological realism, the novel’s position in the literary field, and the production of weird effects also inform the next post in this series, on Paul LaFarge’s The Night Ocean.

Weird Fiction Review #2: Lovecraft Country

NOTE: This is the second of ten reviews of contemporary weird novels. An overview of the project can be found here. The previous post introduces many of the ideas discussed below.

Lovecraft Country,Matt Ruff’s sixth novel, was published by HarperCollins and nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Jordan Peele, Misha Green, and J. J. Abrams are currently adapting it for an HBO TV series. Like Peele’s film Get Out (2017), this novel explores the relation between American racism and supernatural horror. Like Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, analyzed in the previous post, it “replies” to Lovecraft’s racist fantasies by contrasting the horror of black magic with the violence faced by Black Americans in an earlier period of the nation’s history. Whereas LaValle’s novel is set in 1920s New York and uses the“Lovecraft mythos,” Ruff’s much longer novel (372 pages) is set in Chicago and Massachusetts (not to mention another planet) during the mid-1950s. The central protagonist is Atticus Turner, but its episodic narrative also follows the adventures of his father Montrose, uncle George, aunt Hippolyta, cousin Horace, and others. Each episode attempts to re-situate a popular weird trope in the context of Black life on the cusp of the Civil Rights movement. There are haunted houses, an interplanetary portal, a Jekyll and Hyde episode, and an animate doll. A loose plot, in which the black family must contend with a country-club-like sect of white magicians, links the episodes.

In the broadest terms, such as those used by S. T. Joshi in Supernatural Horror, Lovecraft Country counts as Weird Fiction: it features numerous encounters with supernatural creatures and magical forces; but it’s difficult to imagine either Lovecraft or Todorov appreciating it, because it lacks the genre’s primal atmosphere of hesitation. Much like Mat Johnson’s Pym, Ruff’s novel promises a critique of weird racism but (after a few chapters) fails to deliver either the sensation of weirdness or much of a critique. Ruff’s other novels are categorized as Speculative Fiction; based on this novel, he appears more interested in the Sci-Fi and Fantasy aspects of speculation than in Weird Fiction proper. In what follows, I salvage those aspects of the novel worth attention, while using it to explain why contemporary attempts as weird fiction often fail.

The most interesting feature of Lovecraft Country is its sustained meditation on racism and pulp fiction. A sequence of scenes related in the opening pages outlines the problem of “reading while black” as Ruff sees it. The novel begins in 1954, with Atticus Turner, a veteran of the Korean war, driving home to Chicago from Jacksonville, Florida, where he was discharged from the Army. His attitude toward the white racist power structure is made eminently clear: “Around one p.m. he reached the Ohio River, which marked the border between Kentucky and Indiana. As he crossed the water on a bridge named for a dead slave owner, Atticus cocked his arm out the window and bade Jim Crow farewell with a raised middle finger.” (2) But if he thinks he’s left white power behind, he’s soon set straight. When a tire blows (“A Southern tire, Atticus thought: Jim Crow’s revenge.” (2)), he can’t get service at a white-owned mechanics. Fortunately, he’s carrying The Safe Negro Travel Guide: this novel’s rather baldly named version of The Negro Motorist Green-Book, a guide for negotiating segregation while on the road published by Victor Hugo Green from 1936-66. In the novel, Atticus’s uncle George and aunt Hippolyta are the publishers of this guide. With it’s help, Atticus locates “a Negro-owned garage in Indianapolis, some fifty miles away.” (3) Despite the distance, the mechanic, whose name is Earl, drives out to fix the tire—and then offers Atticus dinner and a bed for the night. Over dinner, Atticus and the mechanic discuss their favorite science-fiction authors: “they talked about Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov, . . and L. Ron Hubbard, . . . and the Tom Swift series, which Earl had loved when he was young but which embarrassed him now, both for the books’ depiction of Negroes and for the fact that as a boy he hadn’t noticed it. . .” (5) The next morning, on the road again, Atticus is pulled over by an Illinois state trooper, who becomes suspicious upon observing various paperbacks in Atticus’s car. “Anything in the trunk?” the trooper asks. “My Army uniform. Some books,” Atticus replies. The scene unfolds:

“What kind of books?”

“Science fiction, mostly.”

“Science fiction?And this is your car?”  […]

“What’s this?” The trooper picked up a gift-wrapped object that had been at the bottom of the box.

“Another book,” Atticus said. “It’s a present for my uncle.”

The trooper tore off the wrapping paper, revealing a hardbound volume. “A Princess of Mars.”He looked sideways at Atticus. “Your uncle likes princesses, does he?” (6-7)

This is the bind that Atticus and other characters face, and that the novel asks us to face as well. In scenes like this one, it raises the question J. M. Tyree asked (see the previous post): is American genre fiction inherently racist? Most if not all the writers referenced in these passages were social conservatives who deployed racial stereotypes in a casual way; the black characters must contend with the knowledge of this, but it’s lost on the white patrolman, who doesn’t realize the deeper irony implicit in what today we’d call his “microaggressions.” The Safe Negro Travel Guide (which the trooper confiscates) signifies the novel’s alternative to genre fiction: antiracist nonfiction. The dynamic Ruff develops between fiction and reality, reading and driving, black and white authorship and reading habits, authority and resistance, is compelling. I wish I could report that the novel continued to complicate this theme, but the structures of feeling introduced in these early scenes don’t change much in the pages that follow. One reason for the lack of dynamism can be glimpsed in the above scenes—except for its central antagonist, the novel is unrelenting in its depiction of black characters as generous, reasonable, upright, and kind, and its white characters (primarily policemen) as suspicious, irrational, devious,and cruel. It reverses the hierarchy of racial representation deployed by Edgar Rice Burroughs or L. Ron Hubbard, but it retains the simplified characterizations found in racist stereotyping and much genre fiction.

When Atticus makes it to Chicago, we meet his uncle, proprietor of “the Safe Negro Travel Company,” (9) and his twelve-year-old cousin Horace (who we later learn is the author of the first comic books to feature a black woman superhero, discussed below). Although uncle George publishes nonfiction, “his deepest passion and most of his shelf space” is reserved for “science fiction, fantasy, mysteries and detective stories, horror and weird tales.” We learn that “Atticus’s shared devotion to these mostly white-authored genres had been a source of ongoing struggle with his father.” (12) The story flashes back to years earlier, when Montrose catches his son reading “At the Mountains of Madness” and schools him by finding in the public library a copy of Lovecraft’s poem, “On the Creation of Niggers.” (HPL’s racism is discussed in the previous post.) Atticus is shamed out of his youthful appreciation, but he still remembers the pleasure he took in these stories,which are regarded several times as like “old friends.” (15) His reminiscences are interrupted by the beginning of the plot, which arrives in the form of a letter from his father, who has recently left for Arkham, Massachusetts (“it’sin Lovecraft Country,” Atticus quips) in order to pursue an investigation into the family ancestry. Atticus’s deceased mother’s grandmother has left a mysterious “legacy” which Montrose hopes to uncover. We soon learn that the town is actually Ardham, Mass.—the “k” is a misprint—but that it’s in the middle of Devon county, a “sundown town” where the sheriff shoots at black motorists without hesitation. In case you didn’t get the point about fictional and actual racism, the sheriff is compared, unfavorably, to a shoggoth three times in as many pages. Soon, Atticus, George, and a convenient romantic lead named Letitia Dandridge (“Letitia, a year younger than Atticus, had for a while been the only girl member of the South Side Futurists Science-Fiction Club” (29)) are on their way to rescue Montrose from whatever trap has been laid for him in rural New England.

Weird fiction is most often related to horror fiction, but the best weird tales depend more upon suspense than horror. Terrifying monsters and/or gruesome tortures may await, but weirdness requires a sense of not knowing, of suspecting or fearing what will come, far more than it requires the horrible outcome. Many weird stories dwell in the uncertainty as to whether anything is happening at all: are there ghosts in this castle? Probably not, since ghosts don’t exist. But what if…? In this, weird fiction bears a closer resemblance to the murder mystery than it does to much speculative fiction. In Poe’s “tales of ratiocination” (think “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”), the reader is aligned with Dupin in the desire to solve the mystery. This produces a generic suspense used throughout the mystery genre. In Poe’s weird stories (think “The Cask of Amontillado”), the crime has yet to be committed; the reader dreads and delights in the realization of the monstrous thing. We are compelled to explore the castle, if only to confirm that nothing’s there. Much more could be said about Poe’s structure of dread, but for present purposes it suffices to observe that uncovering a mysterious horror motivates a form of suspense that weird fiction shares with crime fiction. This can be sharply distinguished from the expectation and discovery enjoyed by readers of fantasy and sci-fi. In these genres, a new reality is presented to the imagination; the “real world,” who mechanics are threatened in mysteries (which affirm the known) and weird tales (which undermine the known), is partially abandoned in fantasy and sci-fi. The goal of readers (and usually protagonists) is to learn more about this alternative reality. Characters may of course be caught up in suspenseful plots and may discover hideous creatures, but because this is a voyage into the unknown, rather than an attempt to hold onto the known, our expectations are inflected differently from the start. The suspension of disbelief is much more optimistic; ultimately, whatever happens in Middle Earth or on Mars will be a wonder to behold, and it can’t touch us where we live.

The first third of Lovecraft Country is occasionally weird, thanks to its development of numerous intersecting threads of suspense. Focalized on Atticus, we increasingly encounter episodes of strangeness, which develop the primal hesitation. An unusual car seems to follow them and intervenes on their behalf, cutting off a truck full of racist firemen who are pursuing them. They learn about the history of their destination. “I never realized just how strange a place it is,” their informant explains, adding “Ardham’s more of a mystery.” (40, 41) It promises a mysterious landscape: “’This is the most detailed map I could find,’Marvin said. ‘Most don’t even hint at a road through the forest, but it exists.’” (41) Late at night, on this strange road, Atticus and George are captured by the town sheriff, who seems prepared to execute them on the spot,when strange sounds are heard in the woods: “Out in the darkness, a big something slid or was dragged along the ground. They heard the snap of another branch,and another, and the groan of an entire tree being shoved over.” (52) Realism faulters when the characters shrug off the unseen force that rescues them, but our sense of weirdness increases when they reach their destination, a manor house that seems lost to time, with a butler who’s not only expecting them, but ushers them in through the front door. “’Mr. Turner, I presume,” the man said. ‘Welcome to the Ardham lodge, sir.’” (59) All of these are examples of the conventional ways that weird tales build suspense, and they work well enough. The suspense produced by the apparent absence of racism at Ardham lodge is one of the novel’s more thoughtful attempts to develop weirdness from a Black perspective. The white folks in this castle are respecting us. There must be something wrong….

Atticus and company are shown to sumptuous rooms in the lodge, and the novel returns to its ruminations on fictions and realities by introducing a time-honored weird trope: the mysterious book. In his room, Atticus discovers a bookcase full of his favorite author:

The lowest shelf was Lovecraft Country: Algernon Blackwood, Robert Block, August Derleth, William Hope Hodgson, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, and the man himself. Finger-walking over the book spines, Atticus stopped at a reader leather-bound volume that stuck out conspicuously from between The House on the Borderland and Beyond the Wall of Sleep.

The cover of the red book was embossed with the half-sun symbol and the words BY-LAWS AND PRECEPTS OF THE ADAMITE ORDER OF THE ANCIENT DAWN. (65)

The Adamites—a cult of feuding magicians, whose machinations embroil the Turner family for the remainder of the novel—combine science with necromancy in the “real” world of the novel, just as the Lovecraft circle attempted to combine cosmology with supernaturalism. Thus the “truly magical” text is embedded with fictional weird texts, symbolizing the porous nature between actual and fantastical worlds. But this passage is also a good example of why Ruff’s novel fails to generate the reading experience promised by this collection of names. For one thing, it’s rather silly to imagine these authors side by side in 1954. The scholarship and publication that would put them into such a neatly arranged library wasn’t begun in earnest until the 1960s. It’s a minor example of a larger problem: the novel’s tendency to eschew historical realism. The “pastness of the past” is seldom realized. (This has major implications for how racism is imagined, discussed below.) More importantly from an aesthetic perspective, no effort is made to present these mysterious by-laws as strange or unaccountable. Readers familiar with “the Lovecraft circle” will know how the genre treats such texts, which hint at obscene blasphemies and wonders beyond comprehension. They are obscure, frightening, full of potency. Turning them into a version of “Robert’s Rules of Order” is a kind of deflationary joke, aimed at the whiteness of these staid, traditional alchemists, but it comes at the expense of any underlying weirdness. Before long, the reader will be asked to accept magic as an ordinary part of this world.

It turns out that their hosts are the Brathwaite clan. The present-day Brathwaites are descended from Titus, a “slave trader from Boston”who, as Atticus puts it, “owned by mother’s great-great-great-grandmother.” (67) One of Atticus’s maternal grandmothers was raped by Titus or one of his sons, making Atticus the youngest descendant of their bloodline. Consequently, the “rules” of their magic rituals require his presence (as well as that of the youngest Brathwaite, a necromancer named Caleb) at an elaborate ceremony—hence the luring and kidnapping of his father. The ceremony opens a portal, but Caleb uses it to kill some Adamites with whom he’s feuding, so the ultimate secrets are preserved. Caleb thanks the Turners for their help and gives them a magical gift. As the butler explains, “in addition to repairing your car, Mr. Brathwaite made a small modification to it that he believes you’ll find agreeable. . . A dash of immunity. From now on, you should find you’re much less likely to run into trouble on the road. Law enforcement officials, in particular, will tend to treat you as though you’re invisible to them.” (104) In short, a Cloak of Invisibility for the Negro Motorist. Cool. But by now we have passed fully into a fantasy world—one in which magic is an ordinary part of daily life. We have passed from Lovecraft Country into Hogwarts.

Atticus and company return to Chicago and the novel’s only truly weird episode concludes. From this point on, supernatural forces are regarded with an underlying indifference. We are left with the more typical fantasy plot: a race to gather various artifacts that function as keys in the ultimate ritual. Rival factions of the Adamites use conventional and supernatural means to acquire them, with the Turners attempting to survive by assisting and foiling various schemes. The narrative develops a campy cheerfulness as it submits its characters to a smorgasbord of fantastic fiction’s clichés. In “Dreams of the Which House,” Letitia attempts to integrate a white neighborhood. She ends up with a haunted house, but the ghosts end up scaring away neighborhood segregationists! In “Abdullah’s Book,” George and Montrose attempt to steal a magic book from the Museum of Natural History; the relation between this Book of Names and the dread Necronomicon is dragged out for several pages without consequence, save learning that Lovecraft didn’t know his way around Arabic names (hardly a revelation). In “Hippolyta Disturbs the Universe,” we learn how hard it is for a black woman to be taken seriously by the scientific establishment in the 1930s and 40s. With another wink at Lovecraft, nine-year-old Hippolyta follows the discovery of “Planet X” and proposes that it be named Pluto. It is, of course, but credit goes to a little white girl! Grown-up Hippolyta then travels to a dangerous planet in a distant solar system, observes a vaguely Lovecraftian alien (“the sphere suddenly burst open like an orange turning inside out, dark rind splitting to reveal a wriggling white pulp. Dozens of pale tentacles shot out, wrapping around the man’s limbs…” (204), and escapes in time to enjoy hot chocolate with her husband. In “Jekyll in Hyde Park,” Caleb Brathwaite gives Letita’s sister Ruby an elixir that turns her into a white woman she names Hillary. She enjoys her newfound power and freedom: “Many white people, men especially, smiled at Hillary as they went by her, but what was really noteworthy was that the ones who ignored her, ignored her in a different way than they would have ignored Ruby. There was no side-eyeing, no pretending not to see her while wondering what she was up to; she didn’t require attention. She was free to browse, not just individual establishments, but the world.” (235) In “The Narrow House,” Montrose meets the ghosts of a lynched family and recalls his own memories of surviving a race riot. In “Horace and the Devil Doll,” the youngest member of the Tuner clan must escape an automaton that recalls a modernist classic of weird fiction, Richard Matheson’s “Prey,” in which an African doll attacks a white woman. Running across a South Side park, young Horace is confronted by a white cop who immediately draws his revolver and prepares to shoot the child. “Then the scene seemed to telescope, as an invisible cable attached to the policeman’s back yanked him into the air and sent him flying into the trees…”(338) He’s been saved by Caleb Brathwaite! As the “invisible cable” suggests, at this point we’re so accustomed to the supernatural it can be described with the simplest of mechanical metaphors. It’s the kind of magic one encounters in unoriginal B-movies, comic books, and video games: invisible force fields generated by flicks of the magi’s wrist, and so forth.

The various strands thread together into a climax I skimmed through; I won’t bore you with the details. What begins as weird fiction ends as an adventure story. The shift in tone and texture is clearly signaled in“Hippolyta Disturbs the Universe,” which turns from weird fiction to comic books. When nine-year-old Hippolyta trains her telescope on Planet X, we’re told: “It was a magical moment, and in the comic-book version of Hippolyta’s life, it changed everything. Reality was different, of course.” (185) Yet of course Hippolyta’s “reality” involves interplanetary travel—the novel has already abandoned weird realism in favor of superhero narratives. Indeed, as Hippolyta investigates the cosmic portal, she frequently notices parallels to her son’s comics: “she recalled the ocean-dwelling squid men of Europa from Orithyia Blue #5”; “This reminded Hippolyta of the booby-trapped airlock the corsairs of Neptune had used to knock out Orithyia Blue in issue #4…” (193) The Interplanetary Adventures of Orithyia Blue is a comic that “Horace had created … after Hippolyta suggested that it might be nice to read a science-fiction story about a woman for a change.” (175) The heroine, based on his mom, is a “graduate of the Howard Astrotechnical College class of 2001 and the solar system’s best troubleshooter.” (175) She gets involved in complicated adventures, full of “political intrigue” and humor: “the question was not ‘Will Orithyia survive?’ . . . but ‘Will she get to the store before the toy department closes?’” (176) The series has at least twelve issues. Pause to consider the suspension of disbelief required to imagine that a twelve-year-old, without any formal training, can create a year’s worth of professional-quality comic books. The average superhero comic is put together by at least four or five professionals—writer, pencil artist, inker, colorist, letterer, several editors, etc. These people work on each issue as a full-time occupation (whereas Horace also goes to school, plays with friends, etc.) It staggers the imagination: but not to produce a weird effect. On the contrary, this background information is meant to anchor the characters in their real world. It therefore exposes the texture or style of the “reality” that composes Ruff’s universe. It is the same as that used in superhero comics. It makes a nod to reality but fills its world with exceptions to that reality; it exaggerates and simplifies.

While further demonstrating the importance of realism to weird fiction, this approach also has significant consequences for the antiracist work Ruff’s novel promises. Justin Bortnick, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, summarizes the problem:

if you have come to this book looking for new or groundbreaking insights on racism in America or even racism in Lovecraft’s work, you will be disappointed. It never gets further than talking about how racism is bad. It does a fair job of painting the various micro- (and macro-)aggressions those without privilege experience, as well as providing scenery that speaks to the ways that the lack of privilege influences one’s life . . . the message is that racism is worse than Lovecraft’s fictional universe-destroying, insanity-inducing, multi-eyed, bloblike shoggoths, but I don’t think this was an embattled position in the first place. The conclusions one draws from seeing these two types of horror juxtaposed are too obvious to feel impactful. Perhaps Ruff’s real motive is more defensive: Atticus goes out of his way to defend Lovecraft as a writer… [However] there is very little Lovecraft in the book (especially for a book with Lovecraft in the title). The superficialities are there — strange cults, rituals in the night, monsters with more body parts than strictly necessary — but none of the psychic horror…

For me, the novel’s “comic-book reality” also raises questions about the politics of representation. Comic book narratives such as Orithyia Blue rely upon an allegorical mode. As in the recent furor over Black Panther, we are incited to celebrate the heroic representation of figures that stand for under-represented political subjects at the cost of a realistic assessment of the problem. The question of how much realism is “enough” is debatable and may itself be a terrain of struggle. The chief effect in Lovecraft Country is like that found in Soviet propaganda of the 1930s and 40s: its exaggeration simplifies realities, providing fantastic solutions to real-world problems, and obliterates history. In Ruff’s novel, white people are bad and black people are good. Racism is treated with slightly less nuance that one finds in the oft-repeated claims “they hate our freedom” or “the only way to stop bad guys with guns is good guys with guns,” etc. The 1950s are imagined as a period of unending racial antagonism: the color line is enforced swiftly and mercilessly by a host of white segregationists, who seem to populate every corner of the city, the heartland, and New England. At the same time, the novel’s continual focus on police violence resonates with Black Lives Matter. The police are a presence that could only be imagined after the massive escalation and militarization of cops that began in the late 1970s. The novel imports a contemporary view of racism into a past, erasing the entire history of Civil Rights and the carceral racism that developed in response. It imposes upon the 1950s a “good guy / bad guy” political logic that belongs to our contemporary age. Ruff, whose white, seems anxious to make every person of color in the novel a paragon of virtue. Montrose initially appears to be a rather rough-hewn guy, but his occasional violence is explained and excused as necessary “tough love.”

As Bortnick points out, Lovecraft Country is equally shallow in its grappling with weirdness. It makes numerous allusions to the Weird Tales-era writers but fails to evoke the sensations for which they are prized. I began this series of posts by quoting Justina Robinson’s prediction, back in 2003, that “Literature is going to SF and try and take the entire thing over by main force”; Ruff’s novel suggests the truth of this sensibility. Published by HaperCollins, it appears to exploit the trend in weird / speculative fiction with considerable cynicism. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the readers and writers of weird tales, along with other pulp genres and comic books, were often subjected to public shaming. Weird stories were (and are) regarded as adolescent, merely sensational, nonliterary pap for the masses—often with good reason. Lovecraft’s racism, I think, is often conflated with these more aesthetic qualities, which is a mistake (if only because Lovecraft was a sophisticated racist; he has many ‘childish’ qualities, but is far-right politics are not one of them). Lovecraft County’s costly cover makes twin promises: that it will indulge in Lovecraftian horror, and that it will make the genre more palatable to literate audiences by offering a critique of his racism. Yet as we’ve seen,it is far less successful in either direction than The Ballad of Black Tom, which approaches the problem from within the genre. It’s not difficult to see how Lovecraft Country would provide fertile grounds for TV series in the style of Get Out, but this adaptation confirms the adage that bad books make good movies. No doubt Ruff and others involved will prosper from this adaptation, but weird fiction will not. Much like what happened during the “horror boom” of the 1980s, genuinely weird stories don’t fit the conventional narratives imposed by / chosen for capitalization.

The next post, on John Langan’s The Fisherman, will take us into a different set of concerns. Langan’s novel is an earnest attempt at prolonged weirdness which raises interesting questions about the genre’s use of framing devices, embedded narratives, and prose style.