Month: April 2020

Strange Trees

The Aesthetics of Ecology in Weird Fiction

Before English prose had assembled itself into the forms that we recognize as the short story and novel, a generic strand of weird fiction had coalesced in horror narratives, such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

THIRD APPARITION 
Be lion-mettled, proud, and take no care
Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are.
Macbeth shall never vanquished be until
Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill
Shall come against him. He descends.


MACBETH That will never be.
Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earthbound root? Sweet bodements, good!
Rebellious dead, rise never till the Wood
Of Birnam rise, and our high-placed Macbeth
Shall live the lease of nature, pay his breath
To time and mortal custom.

Macbeth is pleased because, despite the ghosts and witches, despite his own daring and capacity for sin, if there’s one thing he knows, it’s that trees don’t walk. “That will never be,” he states, with flat certainty. There is no force, earthly or ethereal who can “impress the forest.” The stationary and stubborn nature of, well, nature is unconditional. Indeed, the restoration of justice occurs when in Act V, a lookout reports “a moving grove.” Macbeth rushes to meet the weird sisters’ prophecy–leaving the safety of Dunsinane (“Our castle’s strength / Will laugh a siege to scorn”); he has been tricked, of course–he was right in the first instance–tree’s can’t move!

Or can they?

Color Out of Space (2019) Dir. Richard Stanley

Inspired by Richard Stanley’s adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” (2019; HPL’s story first appeared in the September 1927 issue of Amazing Stories), I interrupt my reviews of contemporary weird fiction to discuss one of the genre’s most interesting themes: the impossible thing as an ecosystem.

As a genre, weird fiction emphasizes the uncanny suspension of belief in reality by presenting characters and audiences with a potentially supernatural entity; introduction of this “impossible thing” causes characters and audiences to experience what Tzevtan Todorov calls a “hesitation”: a part of the narrative when we can’t decide if the impossible thing is a delusion or signifies a new reality. This is what happens in Macbeth, and it occurs in countless weird tales, from Gothic romances to the contemporary novels discussed in previous posts. Weird fiction can be distinguished from the neighboring genres of fantasy and science fiction on the grounds of this hesitation. Weird fiction maximizes the hesitation, whereas these other, much more modern genres, minimize it or eliminate it entirely. In Middle Earth, Narnia or Xanth, conscious and mobile trees are merely part of the landscape, along with unicorns, centaurs, dragons, and whatever other strange creatures can be invented. Similarly, science fiction proposes the possibility of animal-plant-like creatures that arrive on earth from some other world, where such life is possible. It doesn’t prolong the hesitation, but accepts the impossible creatures as real within the narrative. Here I am thinking of John Wyndham’s marvelous The Day of the Triffids (1951), which was made into a decent film in 1962 by Steve Sekely (who also made what must be the first Nazi zombie movie, Revenge of the Zombies in 1943). It doesn’t take too long to discover that roving and rapacious plants from another planet have arrived on earth; the question is what to do about it.

Organized around this hesitation, a lot of weird fiction uses the possibilities of plant consciousness to question the foundational taxonomy that separates life into kingdoms. There are six kingdoms in modern biology: Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaea, and Bacteria. Since plants, animals, and fungi are visible to the naked eye, most weird tales play on the commonsense differences between these kingdoms, such as by giving trees consciousness or mushrooms mobility (not to mention a powerful appetite). But plant monsters are only part of the story; the more intense weirdness is generated by qualities of the narrative that do more than blur scientific classifications. I refer to those aspects of the story that play with the modes of perception by which we distinguish between “natural” and “human” worlds.

Versions of this aesthetic (dis)orientation has been mentioned in various contemporary studies of weirdness, such as Graham Harmon’s Weird Realism, David Peak’s The Spectacle of the Void, and Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet, all available from Zer0 Books. Rather than review these reflections, I want to focus upon a particular strain of weirdness by calling attention to stories that generate uncanny hesitation by thinking about the impossible thing not as a singular entity but as an ecosystem; the monster is a region of the forest, a portion of the field, a landscape. I argue that in these stories, the impossible thing is one or another version of an aesthetic biology. Neither art as an imitation of life, nor life as an imitation of art, but life and art as singular entity (much as today we like to think of viruses as part biological and part mathematical). In short, when authors set out to create weird ecosystems, they confront a foundational orientation–one which organizes the world into “art” and “life,” the “human” and “natural,” the aesthetic and the biological. In Lovecraft’s story, the ecological monster is also a color. But while “The Colour Out of Space” is the most popular weird tale of this kind, it is far from the best. In what follows, I survey some of these stories, closing with an assessment of Stanley’s film.

First, a little brush clearing. Any number of weird stories imagine strange landscapes and animal-vegetable hybrids as monsters. The magical forest can be traced back through Renaissance and classical texts to ancient myths. Modern versions of the forest can be found in Gothic novels, such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791) and Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1805). A decent contemporary version of the weird forest can be found in the French TV show, Zone Blanche (2017; known in English as Black Spot). In these narratives, the forest is treated as an uncanny “zone” within or alongside our world; like caves, the forest primeval is a place on the borderlands of not only civilization but reality. The forest marks an indistinct portal between our world and a fantasy world (one where monsters exist). (On the role of portals in uncanny narratives, see Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie). The hesitation is sustained so long as the protagonists can’t decide if they are merely lost in a strange place or have entered a parallel universe. While fascinating, this is not the trope we are pursuing here.

Let us also put aside the many wonderful vegetable monsters that inhabit strange lands or come from outer space or scientific experiment. The most obvious such creature is probably the singing flytrap in Frank Oz’s 1986 adaptation of The Little Shop of Horrors (which itself has a curious history, beginning with John Collier’s weird tale, “Green Thoughts” (1932)). Aficionados of pulp weirdness will be acquainted with the monstrous fungi described by William Hope Hodgson in The Boats of Glen Carrig (1907), and everyone should read “The Voice in the Night” for its remarkably depiction of of predatory lichen. Shambling vegetation enjoyed a cultural revival about forty years ago; as in Lovecraft’s story, it comes from outer space via meteorite in Dr Who: The Seeds of Doom (1976) and John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). It embodies swamp consciousness in Alan Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing (which began in 1982, alongside Wes Craven’s movie version of the comic book.) These narratives present us with amazing monsters, but they figure the dangerous plants as creatures rather than ecologies, and don’t address aesthetics.

The trees in the opening shot of Color Out of Space

While Lovecraft’s story features a meteorite carrying life from afar, this isn’t nearly as important to the story’s narrative, which leans on rumors and rural gossip, than it is to Stanley’s film. The more interesting qualities of “The Colour Out of Space” may be traced to Poe. The title of this essay comes from a passage in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Dehydrated and stifled in his hiding place below decks, our protagonist falls into a “stupor” and dreams of “deserts, limitless and of the most forlorn and awe-inspiring character” in which “strange trees seemed endowed with a human vitality and, waving to and fro their skeleton arms, were crying to the silent waters for mercy, in the shrill and piercing accents of the most acute agony and despair” (Pym, 276-7). Pym’s dream becomes a reality for the characters of Lovecraft’s story; near the climax they witness an unspeakably strange phenomenon:

 What had been disputed in country gossip was disputable no longer, and it is because of the thing which every man of that party agreed in whispering later on that the strange days are never talked about in Arkham. It is necessary to premise that there was no wind at that hour of the evening. One did arise not long afterward, but there was absolutely none then. Even the dry tips of the lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and the fringe on the roof of the standing democrat-wagon were unstirred. And yet amid that tense, godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving. They were twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness at the moonlit clouds; scratching impotently in the noxious air as if jerked by some alien and bodiless line of linkage with subterrene horrors writhing and struggling below the black roots.

Read “The Colour Out of Space” online here.)

The other notable feature of Lovecraft’s story–the mysterious color–also derives from Pym. Arriving upon the mysteriously warm island near the South Pole, the crew of the Jane Guy discover an indeterminately weird landscape–one which Pym primarily defines in terms of what it’s not: “The trees resembled no growth of either the torrid, the temperate, or the northern frigid zones and were altogether unlike those of the lower southern latitudes we had already traversed. The very rocks were novel in their mass, their color, and the stratification; and the stream themselves . . . had so little in common with those of other climates that we were scrupulous of tasting them…” (Pym, 348). Only one feature of this alien landscape is given positive attributes: the water, which “was not colorless, nor was it of any one uniform color–presenting the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple, like the hues of a changeable silk. This variation in shade was produced in a manner which excited profound astonishment in the minds of our party . . .” (Pym, 348). Lovecraft makes full use of this trope; in his story, “a dim though distinct luminosity seemed to inhere in all the vegetation, grass, leaves, and blossoms alike, while at one moment a detached piece of the phosphorescence appeared to stir furtively in the yard near the barn” and the color takes up residence in the well. Thus, “Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone with a pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about ‘the moving colours down there.’”

The madness of a color living in the well does not ultimately derive from the “cosmic horror” disclosed by the recognition of a trans-dimensional entity; the wellspring of it’s weirdness is not the impossibly objective nature of the universe, but the uncanny recognition that the natural world is only another fold in the aesthetic structure of reality. Poe devoted two stories to this “enigma”: “The Domain of Arnheim” (1847) and “Landor’s Cottage” (1849), which he referred to as a “pendant” to the earlier tale. These texts are themselves curious hybrids, being neither story nor essay. In the first, Poe speculates at length upon a problem he conceptualizes in this way:

 that no such combination of scenery exists in nature as the painter of genius may produce. . . In the most enchanting of natural landscapes, there will always be found a defect or an excess—many excesses and defects. While the component parts may defy, individually, the highest skill of the artist, the arrangement of these parts will always be susceptible of improvement. In short, no position can be attained on the wide surface of the natural earth, from which an artistical eye, looking steadily, will not find matter of offence in what is termed the “composition” of the landscape. And yet how unintelligible is this! In all other matters we are justly instructed to regard nature as supreme. With her details we shrink from competition. Who shall presume to imitate the colors of the tulip, or to improve the proportions of the lily of the valley? . . . No pictorial or sculptural combinations of points of human liveliness do more than approach the living and breathing beauty. . .

Poe’s stories can be read on Project Gutenberg here.

The problem is a overlap between two regimes of perception: one in which the aesthetic totality of the landscape is regarded as a human supplement to the natural order, and one in which nature’s infinite variety under-girds art’s mimetic impulse. In “Landor’s Cottage,” Poe presents this contradiction as it might be experienced by an ordinary man out for a stroll in the forest. Our narrator is lost but not nervous when he comes across a peculiar track:

 just as I had begun to consider whether the numerous little glades that led hither and thither, were intended to be paths at all, I was conducted by one of them into an unquestionable carriage track. There could be no mistaking it. The traces of light wheels were evident; and although the tall shrubberies and overgrown undergrowth met overhead, there was no obstruction whatever below. . . The road, however, except in being open through the wood. . . bore no resemblance to any road I had before seen. The tracks of which I speak were but faintly perceptible—having been impressed upon the firm, yet pleasantly moist surface of—what looked more like green Genoese velvet than any thing else. It was grass, clearly—but . . . so short, so thick, so even, and so vivid in color. Not a single impediment lay in the wheel-route—not even a chip or dead twig. The stones that once obstructed the way had been carefully placed—not thrown-along the sides of the lane, so as to define its boundaries at bottom with a kind of half-precise, half-negligent, and wholly picturesque definition.

The narrator’s musings on this strangely perfect passage underscore Poe’s effort to conceive of a zero point–a point of coexistence or nonrelation–between the natural and aesthetic world:

Here was art undoubtedly—that did not surprise me—all roads, in the ordinary sense, are works of art; nor can I say that there was much to wonder at in the mere excess of art manifested; all that seemed to have been done, might have been done here—with such natural “capabilities” (as they have it in the books on Landscape Gardening)—with very little labor and expense. No; it was not the amount but the character of the art which caused me to take a seat on one of the blossomy stones and gaze up and down this fairy-like avenue for half an hour or more in bewildered admiration. One thing became more and more evident the longer I gazed: an artist, and one with a most scrupulous eye for form, had superintended all these arrangements. . . Everywhere was variety in uniformity. It was a piece of “composition,” in which the most fastidiously critical taste could scarcely have suggested an emendation.

The composite perfectibility of the landscape is figured in Lovecraft’s story as a glossy but inedible cornucopia:

The pears and apples slowly ripened, and Nahum vowed that his orchards were prospering as never before. The fruit was growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss, and in such abundance that extra barrels were ordered to handle the future crop. But with the ripening came sore disappointment; for of all that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not one single jot was fit to eat. Into the fine flavour of the pears and apples had crept a stealthy bitterness and sickishness, so that even the smallest of bites induced a lasting disgust.

Here we see the appearance of bounty without its substance; the animate color turns the vegetables into splendid images while robbing them of use value. This move, I think, is one way that the genre of weird fiction reflects upon itself. For what is weird fiction but the spectacle of fantastic realism without the substance attributed to literary naturalism? Because weird fiction simultaneously elaborates and undermines fictional realism (whereas realist fiction sustains the fantasy without hesitation), it is regarded as “sensationalist” and lowbrow. Lovecraft’s story hints at this relation between art and life, but doesn’t address it as directly or thoughtfully as other narratives do.

Cram’s slim volume of weird tales

Among the precursors to “The Colour Out of Space,” two stories stand out: Ralph Adams Cram’s, “The Dead Valley” (1895) and Algernon Blackwood’s The Man Whom the Trees Loved (1912). Cram is a fascinating architect and author who attempted a revitalization of Gothic sensibility in stone and word. Lovecraft praises the all-important atmosphere of dread in “The Dead Valley,” which is available online thanks to the Library of America. The story is relayed by an anonymous narrator, as it was told to him by Olof Ehrensvärd, “a Swede” whose “stories of the far half-remembered days in the fatherland . . . grow very strange and incredible as the night deepens and the fire falls…” The narrative frame is important inasmuch as it foregrounds the unverifiable nature of the tale–a technique employed by Lovecraft in his story, which is told as a summary of rumors heard second- or third-hand by a surveyor who is bringing modernism (in the form of a reservoir) to rural New England.

Olof and a traveling companion lose their way in the woods at night, and end up on the lip of a strange fog-filled valley. Overcome by an unidentified source of terror, they flee. Weeks later, Olof makes his way back to the valley in daylight. He discovers

A great oval basin, almost as smooth and regular as though made by man. On all sides the grass crept over the brink of the encircling hills, dusty green on the crests, then fading into ashy brown, and so to a deadly white, this last color forming a thin ring, running in a long line around the slope. And then? Nothing. Bare, brown, hard earth, glittering with grains of alkali, but otherwise dead and
barren. Not a tuft of grass, not a stick of brushwood, not even a stone, but only the vast expanse of beaten clay.

I won’t spoil what happens when he enters the valley, except to say that he discovers a “skeleton tree” (shades of Poe) that seems to be part of a ecosystem (the fog is another part) that numbs the body and deadens the will of all living things that come into its zone. This story does not focus on aesthetics, but presents a marvelous vision of vampire ecology. I use that term loosely–neither Olof nor the narrator attempt to explain the phenomena. It’s effects are described in detail, but because entering the ecosystem causes one to became prey to its physical and psychical influence, little can be known. No theories are proposed.

Poe’s weird landscapes are ultimately the result of human ingenuity. Both his stories spin elaborate fantasies about what a man of genius could do with a couple million dollars (he wrote them in the last years of his life, living with Virginia’s mother in a small cottage in present-day Fordham Heights and taking long walks along the Bronx river, in a region that would become the New York Botanical Garden and Bronx Zoo). Cram’s biological entity marks a significant shift toward the modernist conceptualization of the impossible thing. It does not engage aesthetic discourse directly, but it does imagine the weird creature to be an ecological totality. The dead valley is not a creature in the landscape; it is a creature as the landscape.

Image from One Letter Words.com

When it comes to Blackwood’s strange trees, most fans of weird fiction will immediately think of “The Willows” (1907) or the descriptions of the northern forest in “The Wendigo” (1910). Both stories are Blackwood at his best, but here I would call attention to The Man Whom the Trees Loved. This novella, which perfectly balances humor with horror, focuses on the retired civil servant David Bittancy and his wife, Sophia. In act one, Bittancy discovers the work of a painter named Sanderson; Sanderson is not a good artist. In fact, “there was nothing else in the wide world that he could paint,” except for trees. On page one of this novel, the artist’s genius is discussed in terms that will recall Poe’s conundrum:

he caught the individuality of a tree . . . How he managed it was something of a puzzle, for he never had painting lessons, his drawing was often wildly inaccurate, and, while his perception of a Tree Personality was true and vivid, his rendering of it might also approach the ludicrous. Yet the character and personality of that particular tree stood there alive beneath his brush–shining, frowning, dreaming, as the case might be, friendly or hostile, god or evil. It emerged.

Blackwood’s story is available on Project Gutenberg here.

Blackwood imagines an untutored fidelity to nature which captures the “spirit” of the plant as though it were a conscious and willful being. Artless mimesis resulting in an image that reveals more than nature can objectively disclose. Note how in these passages, Blackwood relies on the peculiar quality of words to create impossible images. One couldn’t reproduce in oils the paintings he describes. (This feature of weird fiction has made film adaptations of many stories difficult; the camera’s objective gaze limits the possibilities for this kind of uncanniness.) The portraits of trees are themselves an impossible object, an “it” that “emerges” to thrill and terrify. I won’t give away the plot, but maybe I can tempt you, gentle reader, by adding that when Sanderson spends a weekend at the Bittacy estate, David confesses to a queer desire: although he loves his wife, he loves trees just as much–and now that the forest knows his secret, it begins to reciprocate…

While Blackwood is certainly capable of genuine horror–“The Willows” is among the most terrifying of all weird tales–The Man Whom the Trees Loved, like many tales by Hoffman, Poe, Bierce, Jackson, Borges, Tutola, Aickman and Saunders, derives weirdness from a mixture of horror, curiosity, irony, and whimsy. The third-person narrator frequently focalizes on Sophia, “daughter of an evangelical clergyman,” whose firm opposition to Darwinism embarrasses her husband. Her sentiment filters much of the narrative; while David doesn’t share her beliefs, he contributes to her vision of home and hearth. The narrator, however, regular expresses contempt for Sophia’s sentimentality. The result is a delightfully queer mixture of drawing room comedy of manners (shades of Wilde) and ecological horror. As the forest draws her husband into its grasp, Sophia tries to understand what is happening to him using a mixture of Christian metaphor and common sense. The impossible thing is a thought she can’t articulate–a view of the world in which morality is violently expanded to include the consciousness of the forest.

Amazing Stories September 1927

Lovecraft, of course, was incapable of or at least profoundly uninterested in writing humor; his narratives depend upon a mixture of intrigue, anxiety, disgust, dread and terror. All his most successful stories are variations on the detective and adventure plots made popular by the pulps. The truth is slowly revealed, culminating in scene meant to evoke “cosmic horror.” Spoiler alert! the ultimate revelation in “The Colour Out of Space” goes like this:

What it is, only God knows. In terms of matter I suppose the thing Ammi described would be called a gas, but this gas obeyed laws that are not of our cosmos. This was no fruit of such worlds and suns as shine on the telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories. This was no breath from the skies whose motions and dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too vast to measure. It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.

Here cosmic horror mingles with the pictorial perfections Poe imagined in their most abstract, modernist form: pure color. Lovecraft’s impossible thing is a discrete entity, but it permeates the landscape, poisoning the water and causing a range of physical and psychological transformations in the plans and animals that come within its zone.

The 1948 Arkham House edition

Three more recent stories imagine an ecological entity in the context of aesthetic discourse. Clark Ashton Smith‘s “Genius Loci” (1933) appears to draw equally on Blackwood, Cram, and Lovecraft. In his retirement, our narrator has “purchased an uncultivated ranch” in the country. He invites “one of the foremost landscape painters of his generation,” Francis Amberville, to visit for a few weeks. The narrative begins when Amberville comes back from his ramblings with sketches of “a very strange place.” Immediately, three aspects of the place are established. First, it is an “ordinary” landscape, hardly picturesque:

There is nothing but a sedgy meadow, surrounded on three sides by slopes of yellow pine. A dreary little stream flows in from the open end, to lose itself in a cul-de-sac of cat-tails and boggy ground. The stream, running slowly and more slowly, forms a stagnant pool of some extent from which several sickly-looking alders seem to fling themselves backwards, as if unwilling to approach it. A dead willow leans above the pool, tangling its wan, skeleton-like reflection with the green scum that mottles the water. There are no blackbirds, no kildees, no dragon-flies even, such as one usually finds in a place of that sort. It is all silent and desolate.

Smith’s story can be read online at Eldritchdark.com.

Second, Amberville is convinced that “the spot is evil.” Third, he felt “compelled to make a drawing of it, almost against my will…” These three elements are beautifully combined in the narrative. Smith’s narrator knows the spot, and relates local legends that touch upon it, but most of the story hinges on his viewing of the sketches and paintings which Amberville brings back. Is the increasing sense of evil that appears on Amberville’s canvases the result of his artistic contributions to the composition, or his ability to capture a supernatural entity that inhabits the landscape itself? And is his increasingly ill humor the result of his frustrations as an artist, a response to the narrator’s own frustrations (he grows tired of his guest), or the effect of a landscape that wants to be painted? The narrator and his guest are both sensitive artists, and the comedy of their interactions mingles with the horror of the oppressive landscape as deliciously as it does in Blackwood’s novella.

For more on this story checkout The Angry Scholar…

Ecological horror also informs T. E. D. Klein’s marvelous tale, “The Events at Poroth Farm” (1972). The story is told as an “affidavit” written by a young man named Jeremy “in room 2-K of the Union Hotel, overlooking Main Street in Flemington, New Jersey, twenty miles south of Gilead.” (I’m working with the edition of the story published in the second volume of Peter Straub’s American Fantastic Tales anthology, published by the Library of America.) Jeremy has paused in his flight from Gilead to compose this testimony, which incorporates his journal entries over the previous several months. In what will become a generic cliche (thanks in part to its use by the writers of the found footage masterpieces Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and The Blair Witch Project (1999)), Jeremy is a college student who learns about primitive practices that linger in the shadow of the modern economy. In this case, its “a religious community near New Providence that had existed in its present form since the late 1800s–less than forty miles from Times Square.” He is curious, and when he discovers that one of the Gilead families are advertising “for a summer or long-term tenant to live one of the outbuildings behind the farmhouse,” he decides its the best place to spend a summer in which he will preparing “for a course I plan to teach at Trenton state” on “the Gothic tradition from Shakespeare to Faulkner…” The “primary reason” for keeping this journal “was to record the books I’d read each day, as well as to examine my reactions to relative solitude over a long period of time.” As in Ewers’ “The Spider,” Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” and Blackwood’s “The Listener,” the diary form brings the question of narrative reliability to the fore. Are Jeremy’s observations to be trusted, or is he suffering from a paranoid delusion brought on by a chain of curious events during this Waldenesque summer?

The brilliance of Klein’s story lies in the slow accumulation of occurrences in the natural and social environment, each of which might be the mistake of an overly imaginative, isolated, and melancholic mind. For example, early in his diary, Jeremy writes:

Something odd just happened. I’ve never heard anything like it. While writing for the past half hour I’ve been aware, if half-consciously, of the crickets. Their regular chirping can be pretty soothing, like the sound of a well-tuned machine. But just a few seconds ago they seemed to miss a beat. They’d been singing along steadily, ever since the moon came up, and all of a sudden they just stopped for a beat–and then they beat again, only they were out of rhythm for a moment or two, as if a hand had jarred the record or there’d been some kind of momentary break in the natural flow…

In American Fantastic Tales, ed. Peter Straub, p. 237.

Note the overlap between mechanical, aesthetic and biological signifiers in this entry. The crickets “sing” like a “machine” and their “momentary break,” although analogized to a record, interrupts “the natural flow.” Klein’s innovation is to set everything but the framing narrative within the supernatural ecosystem Jeremy imagines or observes. As he reads through the Gothic tradition (“Tried to read more of the Stoker…”; “Read some Shirley Jackson stories over breakfast…”) every little peculiarity of country life becomes magnified in his perception, from a strange critter the cat drags in (“a large shrew, although the mouth was somehow askew”) to the social customs of the Poroth family (“Regular little funeral service over by the unused pasture. . . Must admit I didn’t feel particularly involved . . . but I tried to act concerned. . . I nodded gravely. Read passages out of Deborah’s Bible . . . said amen when they did, knelt when they knelt, and tried to comfort Deborah when she cried”). The imbrication of Jeremy’s aesthetic sensibility and events which increasingly seem to have a biological origin (is the cat infected? is something living in the swamp?) forms a spell-binding pattern. As in the weird diaries by Ewers, Gilman, and Blackwood, Klein’s narrator is a writer. The continual references to notable works in the genre we are reading inserts the uncanny ecology into a verbal rather than visual composition.

The combination of visual and verbal aesthetic discourse in Ramsey Campbell’s ecological horror story, “The Voice on the Beach” (1977) makes it the single best tale in this weird subgenre. The story is available in Alone with the Horrors, the collection of Campbell’s stories published by Tor in 2004. The narrator is a “compulsive writer” who has taken a bungalow on the British coast “to give myself the chance to write without being distracted by city life.” He is a bachelor. His friend Neal comes to visit, particularly to walk along the beach and enjoy the beauty and solitude of this quiet stretch of the shore. Neal becomes increasingly enraptured by the view and the sound of the waves, while the narrator finds them irritating. Neither is young, nor in particularly good health. Their squabbles, exacerbated by the narrator’s frustration with his own writing (shades of Ashton) provides a domestic counterpoint to the strange thing(s) that make the beach so oddly compelling and repellent.

At one end of the beach sit a number of abandoned houses, a desolate village they explore together. In one of the ruined houses, Neal discovers the tattered remains of a journal, some of which the narrator transcribes into the present account. “WHEN THE PATTERNS DONE IT CAN COME BACK AND GROW ITS HUNGRY TO BE EVERYTHING I NOW HOW IT WORKS THE SAND MOVES AT NIGHT AND SUCK YOU DOWN OR MAKE SOU GO WHERE IT WANTS TO MAKE [a blotch had eaten several words]…” “Ah, the influence of Joyce,” our narrator comments “sourly.” He mistakes the obscure testimony for artistic composition, while the patterns of sea and sand, of daily routines and words on the page–all begin to blur together. At one point, Neal develops a theory about the journal:

His low voice seemed to stumble among the rhythms of the beach. “You see how he keeps mentioning patterns. Suppose this other reality was once all there was? Then ours came into being and occupied some of its space. We didn’t destroy it–it can’t be destroyed. Maybe it withdrew a little, to bide its time. But it left a kind of imprint of itself, a kind of coded image of itself in our reality. And yet that image is itself in embryo, growing. You see, he says its alive but its only the image being put together. Things become part of its image, and that’s how it grows…”

Such passages hint at Campbell’s idea, but to fully appreciate the story one must enter the rhythms of its narrative, which ebb and flow with the tides and holiday lunches, the glint of sun on sand and the roar of waves at night. The impossible thing is a view of the beach–almost as though a picture postcard of the perfect holiday were consuming those who linger in the scenery.

Before quitting this ramble through weird ecology, I’ll mention three additional narratives–some of the best and most popular explorations of my theme. The first is Jeff VanderMeer‘s Southern Reach Trilogy, an epic expansion of “The Colour Out of Space”; the next is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979, an adaptation of Roadside Picnic), which is unquestionably the best visual narrative of an uncanny zone. The third is Stranger Things (which premiered on Netflix in 2016). No account of fantastic ecosystems would be complete without a thorough discussion of these narratives, which I will leave for another time.

Richard Stanley’s film is a faithful adaptation of Lovecraft’s story, set in contemporary New England, with a middle-class family in place of the backward Yankee farmers of the original. Stanley introduces contemporary themes, such as a wife (Joely Richardson, who was also in the 2009 adaptation of The Day of the Triffids) who has recently survived breast cancer and is trying to maintain a successful career online, and a daughter (Madeline Arthur) who cuts herself as the family descends into madness. The movie has its moments, but it can’t reproduce the best part of the original, which is my view is the obscurity Lovecraft throws like a veil over the events his narrator recounts. In the original, the surveyor comes across a “blasted heath” more than a little reminiscent of Cram’s dead valley. A considerable portion of Lovecraft’s narrative is occupied with passages detailing the lack of reliable information about what caused the blight:

In the evening I asked old people in Arkham about the blasted heath, and what was meant by that phrase “strange days” which so many evasively muttered. I could not, however, get any good answers, except that all the mystery was much more recent than I had dreamed. It was not a matter of old legendry at all, but something within the lifetime of those who spoke. It had happened in the ’eighties, and a family had disappeared or was killed. Speakers would not be exact…

For all that the reader learns about what may have happened a Nahum Gardner’s farm, the “facts” must be pieced together from a variety of unreliable sources, and everything is tinged with doubt.

Obviously, some of this is nearly impossible in film, although a greater commitment to the surveyor’s point of view would have helped. Although Stanely’s film is framed by the surveyor (played by Elliot Knight, who delivers the most memorable performance in the movie), it does not stick to this outsider’s perspective. The camera follows each character’s trajectory, more or less equally, never settling upon any one protagonist. I suspect that a more interesting version could have been made in the found footage style, along the lines of Mortal Remains (2013) or Butterfly Kisses (2018), both of which explore the recovery of documents that indirectly disclose the terrible truth behind urban legends.

Weird Fiction Review#6: Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids

Cantero Blumhouse / Anchor Books

This is the 6th in a series of 10 reviews of contemporary weird novels. For an overview of this project, see my first post in the series.

Edgar Cantero is a Spanish writer and cartoonist who’s published novels in Catalan and English. Meddling Kids (2017) was a New York Times best-seller, thanks to positive reviews from mainstream institutions, such as Publisher’s Weekly, USA Today, and NPR. He’s been enjoying some success: Bloody Disgusting, Geeks of Doom, the Financial Times, Indiebound have featured him recently.

As evidence of the “weirding” of contemporary culture, this popularity is notable, especially when we consider that Meddling Kids was published by Doubleday in collaboration with Blumhouse Productions—the company known for lucrative horror films, including Paranormal Activity, Get Out, Sinister and The Purge. Blumhouse is becoming a new kind of lateral entertainment corporation, specializing in weird experiences—alongside films, they produce TV, publish novels, and organize haunted houses, mazes and “scare zones” based on their productions. A multi-media, cross platform company that specializes in popcult weirdness. They have captured the market in B movie horror for all the best reasons.

From the perspective of the weird literary tradition (as though one could see with the eyes of the thing), Meddling Kids is a nodal point between horror (a mainstream subgenre of the weird that emphasizes supernatural monsters, from Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson to King and Rice) and several more contemporary slash fanfic elements. As reported on Wikipedia, Book Riot considered Cantero’s novel to be one of the best queer books of the year. (Book Riot’s interview with Cantero is a good place to learn a little more about him.) The novel’s weirdness resonates with several of its queer elements. Very basically (and Cantero’s devils are all in the details), this is fan fiction that explores a lesbian romance between two hetero cartoon figures, one of whom is often our protagonist. The genre-based cast features these competent and familiar final girls, accompanied by their Weimaraner and a dopey former classmate dude. Their exploits are rendered in a scintillatingly campy prose style. Everything is drawn with a sharp wit, if not always with a queer eye. Like George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (reviewed in a previous post), Cantero is a weird stylist. But while Saunders’ prose draws on historical and contemporary speech acts—the lingua franca of U.S. subjectivity—Cantero’s is visual and media-oriented: he “translates” visuals–in this case cartoons–into a novelistic framework, queering them along the way. It’s plot is a genre mashup, part teen romance, part Lovecraftian horror, part TV fan fiction. I won’t try to enumerate the ways in which Cantero’s novel recalls the weird tales of Hoffmann (particularly The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr) or Poe (particularly Pym), but my analysis reflects my appreciation of the book’s capacity for creating a weird world by combining semi-ironical allusions to popular texts. Meddling Kids belongs to the genre of weird literature, even though it’s too silly to be considered a horror novel and too tongue-in-cheek to be regarded favorably by the contemporary Lovecraftians, whose ontology is inflected by “dire realism”—a dour posthumanism that expresses an eco-nihilism in which the worst possible case is the most realistic. (See for example: Omidsalar, Alejandro. (2018). “Posthumanism and Un-Endings: How Ligotti Deranges Lovecraft’s Cosmic Horror” in The Journal of Popular Culture.) The popular in Meddling Kids manifests as a gleeful optimism that grows out of Cantero’s love of low-brow culture. It enjoys the same fast-paced superficiality, the genre leaping, explored in my previous post, on The Drive-Thu Crematorium, but with a much sunnier disposition, a playfulness in place of Bassoff’s pulp abjection.

SPOILER ALERT: There is only one spoiler for this novel, and it occurs before we get to page one. Between the title page and the first page of the prose narrative, we get the reproduction of an imaginary newspaper: The Pennaquick Telegraph of August 29th, 1977. A headline fills the page: “TEEN SLEUTHS UNMASK SLEEPY LAKE MONSTER.” Below the headline is an image of the sleuths, their quarry, and the arresting officer. One of the sleuths is a dog. If you existed within U.S. culture’s broad televisual penumbra since the 1970s, you’ve begun to recognize the subgenre. It was dominated by those Sunday morning cartoon teen sleuths known by the name of their impossible protagonist, Scooby Doo. According to Cantero, the original model was Enid Blyton’s Famous Five franchise, but the published text of Meddling Kids draws closely on Scooby Doo episodes. If you can’t stand the animated show originally called Scooby Doo, Where Are You? that’s all you need to know. Stop now, because the novel makes few (albeit thoughtful) deviations from the cartoon. If you’re still interested, you’ll be pleased to know that this novelization is so dedicated to “translating” the visual into the verbal that it achieves a weirdness that at least equals the pleasurable goofiness of the cartoons.

Hyperreality and Horror Narratives

Meddling Kids must be one of the most “postmodern” novels ever written—at least according to the hallmarks of postmodernism identified in the 1980s and 90s (by Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson, for example). The plot is a “procession of simulacra.” By modernist standards, it has no reality principle. The depth model of subjectivity and the logic of Naturalism (according to which sensation is shaped by forces beyond control or understanding) have been abandoned.Like Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, it’s critical and consumer success suggests a new normal in the publishing world—a tolerance for pastiche that used to be exceptional has become the new normal.

According to Jean Baudrillard, writing in the early 1980s, our world has become a “system of objects” dominated by “models of a real without origin.” (Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, p. 1). The map now determines the territory; “No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept. . . The real is produced from . . . memory banks. . . It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or a negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. . . It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere” (p. 2). Baudrillard fails to predict the return of the real in the form of global crisis (be it global warming or pandemic), but his analysis of popular culture predicts 21st century cultural phenomena from reality TV to Trump’s presidency with remarkable clarity.

The unreality Baudrillard describes—one in which “simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’”—has troubled writers of weird tales since the emergence of a modern sensibility in the early 1800s. But Baudrillard argues that in the 20th century (never mind the 21st) the “ground” of reality, be it idealism or materialism, has eroded. In hyperreality, the imagination, in order to remain apart from a consumer culture in sheen replaces substance, retreats into a world of hypercontrolled cuteness. This passage from Simulacra and Simulation resonates with several elements of Cantero’s novel:

The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. Whence the debility of this imaginary, its infantile degeneration. This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the ‘real’ world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere—that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to at the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness. (p. 13)

This sensibility resonates with Martin Scorsese’s recent comments about superhero movies resembling theme park rides. In a cartoon world, the shock is continual and unmitigated because it doesn’t matter—the ride always comes to the same end. Thus the Marvel universe, in which everything has shock but nothing has value. Scorcese mourns a cinematic realism he resuscitated in the 1960s (at the expense of working class and white ethnic stereotypes, not to mention the Manhattan of the 1960s).

Horror narratives have continued to grapple with the “adult” side of hyperreality in various ways. Two approaches suggest themselves. The first is an object-oriented or creature-based approach to the weird, the second is subject-oriented and metafictional. The difference between these approaches involves where and how they engage with the terrible pleasures of the simulacra.

In the B-movie entitled “Horror of the Simulacra,” the monster replicates/infects its victims, so that its prey (or protagonists) can’t tell who is what. This is the premise of many brilliant horror films, such as The Thing (1951; 1982) or Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956; 1978). In these movies, the strange thing masquerades as human before it manifests as the monster (an animated plant in both cases). John Carpenter’s The Thing stands in clear opposition to the other alien monster movie of 1982, E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial, which brought a new degree of childish cuteness into national culture. But in keeping with Baudrillard’s premise, we might say that narratives such as Carpenter’s are threatened by E.T.—they succumb to a form of enjoyment that disregards the attempts at cinematic realism in order to enjoy generic repetitions. Indeed, “Horror of the Simulacra,” as an imaginary title, dispels the uncanny suspense. Such a film, like many a Hammer production, would be appreciated as the object of playful derision, not fear. I use Carpenter as an example because he recognized this problem—his solution was to embrace campiness, resulting in Big Trouble in Little China (1986) and They Live (1988). These movies “reply” to the commercial failure of The Thing by doubling down on B-movie tropes. They partially absorb the simulacra by camping it up. Like the Scooby Doo TV series, Meddling Kids favors this approach. It relies upon B-movie monsters to establish a generic plot. We know the formula. It then ornaments the generic structure, with as much flavor and flair as possible.

I want to complete my weird analogy before proceeding. The B-movie entitled “The Simulacra of Horror” is quite different; it represents a much more radical approach to the threat of the simulacra monster. This movie is either a documentary about special effects in horror films, or it’s a post-Hitchcockian psychological thriller, along the lines of Antonioni’s Blowup (1966), Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) or De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) and Body Double (1984). In these films, the veracity of the image is doubted, and this doubt becomes the basis of the suspenseful (but not supernatural) plot. The simulacra is contained by the image; our inability to trust the cinematic realism—we don’t know if what we are seeing is what the protagonist is seeing–generates the horror. The horrible thing is the film itself. In these plots, an “adult” reality remains possible because the truth content of visual signification is the source of disorientation. Realism overcomes the comedy of generic repetitions. The plot, driven by the remediation of realism, tends to be original; there is little space in the presentation for a generic formula. The ultimate achievement in this direction is Carax’s Holy Motors (2012); this is not a horror movie, but it is profoundly weird. It includes a supernatural monster but mitigates its impossibility by presenting a narrative in which subjectivity is no longer coterminous with the body of the protagonist.

This is not the approach taken by Cantero. He give us a fantastical narrative within a thoroughly mainstream novel. (Just as the TV franchise to which he pays homage was carefully planned for a market demographic.) The same elements (impossible creatures, unreliable representations) are satirically entangled and disentangled in the comedic plots of Scooby Doo episodes. It’s fun, like a theme park ride. Its limited pleasures consist of taking apart and putting together generic tropes. The whole thing is driven by a wry pop-cult campiness, fueled by an endless stream of allusions and a comic book style. Cantero’s novel marks a new level in the ascension of fan fiction up the ladder of literary respectability. It is more literary than novelizations of movies, but more dedicated to pop-culture than even Sethe Grahame-Smith’s mashups, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) or Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (2010). I guess you could read it without knowing the TV show, but as someone who does remember Scooby-Doo, I’d say that the novel’s reconstruction of the TV characters, plots, and scenes is at least 60% of the (already attenuated) fun.

Scooby-Doo, What Are You?

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? was written by Joe Ruby and Ken Spears for Hanna-Barbara Productions; it aired in 1969, making a vigorous nod to popular versions of the counterculture.  It played on CBS until 1976, then on ABC until 1985. Warner Brothers made numerous spinoffs, including TV specials and feature-length films. The show’s premise drew on already popular teen sleuth narratives—The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew franchises. But the show’s “meddling kids” were a team of four, plus the dog. The titular hound embodies their collective id, but also serves as the transitional object for one of the crew’s members, Shaggy. This brilliantly designed character is essential to the show’s libidinal economy, which is pitched at the precise angle where the pseudo realism of teen adventure romances meets the Dr. Seuss like nonsense of cartoons. Allow me to explain, because the best part of Cantero’s novel is the way he translates this part of the original TV show into a new version of novelistic realism.

The Scooby Doo universe combines a strand of teenage sentimental realism with the metaphysical surrealism developed by Chuck Jones in Warner Brothers cartoons. By “teenage sentimental realism,” I mean a subtle but consistent atmosphere of heterosexual and homosocial desire, combined with a persistent attitude of meaningless irony, bolstered by an underlying faith in science. The irony is expressed by all the characters except Scooby and sometimes by the visual style. The realism is a narrative conceit borrowed from the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew (not to mention earlier generations of teenage sleuths), which allows our adventurers to accept the possibility of supernatural entities while always unmasking them as real-world criminals. By “metaphysical surrealism” I mean the conceit used by cartoonists like Jones to establish weird parameters for modernist cartoon realism. These parameters combine extreme physical malleability with indestructibility. Scooby Doo’s father is Wile E. Coyote, who could run in the air, accordion on impact, or get stretched and squashed without harm. He might limp for a few panels, or be all squashed up and dizzy, but a minute later he was ready to go. The show’s visual style combines this with a teen-sleuth realism. Most of the time, the extreme malleability happens to Scooby, and sometimes to Shaggy, but it occurs less frequently with the other characters. Like Scooby himself, these parameters are rubbery.

The success of the franchise may be attributed to the elegant way it allows these elements to combine. Fred and Daphne are a good-looking couple, your basic teen idols, like if the beefier Hardy boy was adventuring with Nancy. Velma and Shaggy are valuable if decidedly less hip sidekicks, like if Nancy’s friend George was hanging out with a scrawny version of the Hardy’s chum Chet.

In mimicry of 1970s teenage vagaries, no one is or isn’t a couple, But Velma and Shaggy are less of an item than Fred and Daphne. They haven’t made it because Shaggy still clings to his pre-Oedipal identity, which is embodied in a surreal dog.

Scooby’s cousin in the magical dragon that Pete discovers; his grandson is the teddy bear that comes to life for Mark Wahlberg in the Ted franchise. Fortunately for everyone, Velma sublimates her unreciprocated desire into rationality, which is why she’s always more skeptical of the supernatural than the others. The elegance I mentioned above emerges in the show’s ability to realize this psycho-social drama in a visual style that allows the dog (and those in its proximity) to undergo all manner of transformation without ill effects. Scooby can become a motorcycle, for example, or get swung like a baseball bat.

Scooby’s infinite malleability and ultimate invincibility make him a figure for the id, but he manifests pure desire in the narrative as well, such as in his endless hunger, his intense but short-lived episodes of fear, and his endless capacity to forgive and forget.

The Lovecraftians will damn me for comparing Scooby Doo to a Shoggoth (not to mention an Ancient Old One), but the formula is the same. In this case, the impossible object is what Todorov would call a “miracle”—the repressed thing figured as a character in the narrative without any doubt on the reader’s part. In Scooby Doo TV episodes, the ghoul is never a ghoul, the ghost is never a ghost, the phantom always turns out to be an ordinary thief. The impossible thing lies on the other side of the narrative—it’s one of the good guys (like E.T.).

Meddling Kids, Where Are You?

Cantero rewrites the relations between our teen sleuths without giving up the basic libidinal components; he rewrites the realism to include a supernatural entity out of Lovecraft. He establishes fictional realism, while maintaining stylistic surrealism. Like everything in the mass culture simulacra, the results are thrilling minute by minute but painfully meaningless in the long haul. Much like the bizarro fiction reviewed in my previous post, Meddling Kids deliberately moves too quickly to establish meaningful realism, but whereas Bizarro fiction is satirical and embraces the abject, Cantero’s novel is more like an ode to consumer culture; it embraces the cute and the cool.

A novelistic realism is partially established by making our teen sleuths into thirty-somethings who have succumbed to ordinary loss and desire. Their names and personal histories have been changed, but the structure of social relations established in the TV show is maintained. Their characters are realized through free indirect discourse. In Meddling Kids, Scooby is played by a non-cartoonish but focalized dog named Tim, while Daphne is played by Kerri and Velma is played by Andy. In the opening chapter, Andy attempts to “put the band back together” (46); they’ve drifted apart after that last adventure and the death of Peter, who plays the role of Fred and whose ghost haunts Nate, who is Shaggy’s substitute. A lesbian subplot is established by revealing Andy’s crush on the hetero Kerri. Several passages from an early scene between Andy, Kerri, and Tim demonstrates the narrative style that remains (tediously) consistent throughout the novel:

     “We are scared!” Andy countered. “We’ve been scared ever since! We never went back to Blyton Hills after that. . . Why aren’t we back in that house solving the real mystery?”
     “Because we grew up!”
     It went downhill from there, Tim noticed, watching the girls on the bed . . . a moody Mom and Dad are fighting look on his Byronian face.
     Kerri caught her breath, tired and sad. “We grew up, Andy. We grew apart. That’s life. . . We can’t spend our whole lives in Blyton Hills, chasing sheep smugglers and lake creatures.” . . .
     She lay down and switched the light off. The coils in the toaster glinted yellow in the dark, a poor but well-intended impersonation of a fireplace.
     Andy met Tim’s eyes, the dog’s profile outlined in the warm glow. They held a silent exchange for a minute or two, until Tim deemed it courteous to lay his head down, cose his eyes, and pretend to sleep.
     Kerri murmured in the brown dark, “Can you please take your arm off me? I feel smothered.”
     Andy’s right hand radioed a message: We’ve been spotted. And it fell back. (30-1)

The drama—the friends must decide if being grown up means they should ignore a past that continues to haunt them—and the subtext (Andy’s crush on Kerri) are about fifty percent of the novel’s thematic components (the other half is Peter’s ghost and the Lovecraftian horror). The dog’s mute eloquence is consistently part of the plot, although his role is far less than Scooby’s in the cartoon, due to the pretense of realism. In the above passage, the “coils in the toaster” are actually strands of Kerri’s orange hair, which actually glows, causing the “brown dark” by which Andy and Tim regard each other. This is a magical component—a cartoonish aspect—which is woven into the narrative through a focalization on Andy. We are not sure if Kerri’s hair actually glows, or if it does so only for Andy. Similarly, when Andy’s arm communicates with the rest of her soma as though it were on a secret mission of its own, the narrative style is precisely geared to keep the phenomenon halfway between free indirect discourse (i.e., Andy’s imagination) and a cartoon reality in which bodies perform these supplemental actions on a regular basis.

While ever present, the cartoonish qualities of this universe expand during the numerous action sequences. A early one occurs when Tim, Andy, and Kerri bust Nate out of Arkham asylum, in a scene more reminiscent of The A-Team than Lovecraft or Batman.  Tim trots into the asylum, past the various nurses and guards, carrying a rope with a large hook on one end. The rope is tied around Nate and “In the next heartbeat, Nate was quite literally fired off his armchair and through the human barricade of wards and nurses, scattering them like rubber bowling pins. By the time his backside touched the linoleum again he was already halfway down the corridor, zigzagging off the walls like a pinball, zooming toward the stairwell door . . . He touched about six steps in three floors. With his head” (51). This is something you’d find the Scooby Doo cartoons, with either Scooby or Shaggy undergoing the impossible punishment unscathed.

I’m struck by how much this top-selling young adult novel resembles Saunders’ award-winning Lincoln in the Bardo, discussed in an earlier post. Both books are dedicated to a comical, surrealistic narrative which is achieved through a neo-Romantic prose style. They are hyper-eloquent and dedicated to matching melancholia with silliness. Shortly after the above scene, Meddling Kids breaks into script format, which lends even more resemblance to Saunders’ genre-busting presentation of his story through epigrammatic speeches. In Cantero’s world, the silliness can be metafictional:

     NATE: I once spent five weeks digging a tunnel out of a clinic where I’d been admitted for two weeks.
     ANDY: (After rereading the lines above.) Why didn’t you walk out after the two weeks? (57)

The point here is to reproduce the goofy cartoon gags of the TV show by finding their literary analogues. To this end, Cantero keeps as busy as any Warner Bros. cartoonist, inventing hundreds if not thousands of such gags. Once these become customary, like a rhythm section, he introduces scenes from other genres, particularly pulp horror. The team discover passages from the Necronomicon and soon enough must confront lake monsters that are not jewel thieves in disguise:

It took some time for the human brain to comprehend. A few things could be established without ambiguity. It stood, or slouched, on two legs. And the upper limbs, overjointed as they were, might have been called arms. The limbs in between were harder to classify. . . And it had a face of a sort. Most of its head, wobbling sickly at the end of a twisty-tendoned neck, was blank, all smooth gray salamander skin; but a single feature, a deep barbwire impression from absent ear to absent ear, smeared with black blood, seemed to mark where the mouth was supposed to be.

If you are familiar with the countless versions of this almost unthinkable monster that circulate in pulp stories, comics, video games, TV shows, etc., you’ll appreciate the details of Cantero’s imagery. The balance between a Lovecraftian monster—one that punctures the characters’ reality by entering the text as a thing that is nearly impossible to describe—and a cute cartoonish satire of the same thing (the barbed-wire mouth between absent ears) is thrillingly precise. And thankfully, he knows that this mashup between the pseudo realism of pulp adventure stories and their cartoonish double makes for a delicious camp sensibility, which is leveraged time and again as the generic plot unfolds. It’s good antic comedy when Kerri and Andy argue over the effectiveness of various cartoon ploys when facing “real-world” necromancers:

     ANDY: Right. What if we lure him out and set a trap like last time? We build a Lake Creature Phony Express!
     KERRI: You expect a hundred-fifty-year-old necromancer to pull open a fake door in his own house, roll down two flights of stairs on a serving cart, and land in a fishing net? Also, no cart and no net.
     ANDY: True. (Thinks, then to Tim.) Feel free to jump in any time.
     TIM: (Tilts his head, resenting the pressure.)

This is a typical sequence from a Scooby Doo cartoon, with the dog’s expression providing the gag. This sequence is rendered with a post-Gothic literary realism—it obeys the laws of the known universe and the rules of decorum you might expect from Dickens, for example. Within this reality, the characters are astonished to discover monsters from a nearby universe—the world of pulp novels. Cantero juggles the generic expectations well. The plot has numerous, if rather predictable, twists and turns, like any good theme park ride. Like so many pop cult franchises these days, this is a knowingly generic form of weirdness. It’s weirdness emanates from a campy antic stylishness that allows Cantero to braid together genres with a wink. He leaves everybody more or less holding hands at the end, while unmasking various real-world and supernatural culprits. Literary realism is merely a style; one filter through which to render the characters in a fairy tale set in the magical forest of morning cartoons.