The H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival

It is with great joy and a bit of melancholy in my heart that I'm heading this afternoon to the last H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland. At this point it's not clear whether it's the last one ever or just a much needed break for Festival founder Andrew Migliore. As always it should be quite a weekend.

In addition to being a vehicle to promote independent films with Lovecraftian themes from around the world, the festival has expanded in the last few years to include Chthulhucon, a gathering of writers, scholars, editors and filmmakers, where the work of various weird tales authors and filmmakers are animatedly discussed. On Sunday, October 3, I will be moderating the panel, Ramsey Campbell: From Acolyte to Master featuring S. T. Joshi (noted Weird Tales scholar), Jason V. Brock (filmmaker, editor and publisher) and William F. Nolan (prolific author and screenplay writer, best known for Logan's Run). The panel runs from 2:30 to 3:30.

Thanks for the 15 year run Andrew! Next October will seem especially hollow without the Festival to look forward to.

A moderate return...

Here are the Journal of Weird Studies, quiet has descended on our solitary researches for far too long. It's time to stir things up. In a fit of unbridled creativity, we're blowing the dust off of our moldy keyboard and launching in with a minor entry. Ambitious plans are in the works for reviews of a couple of fairly recent books and some profile pieces on a few of my new favorite weird writers.

For now, I'd like to share a link with you. Noted weird tale writer and all around fabulous human being, Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire has just posted an intriguing, yet far too brief interview with my favorite critic of weird fiction, S. T. Joshi. S. T. provides pithy details on a number of his upcoming critical works and anthologies. For my money, the best part of the interview occurs when Wilum convinces S. T. to sing "Happy Birthday" to the late R. H. Barlow. Who knew S. T. had such a melodious voice? Knowledgeable word has it that S. T., a confirmed atheist, sings in a church choir! I will be spending the rest of my afternoon wrestling with that paradox. In the meantime, you can enjoy the interview.

A belated return

Life brings many surprises, some of them quite unpleasant and life altering.

Since my last post over a year and a half ago, the course of my life diverged into a path of profound and tremendous upheaval, including first and foremost a painful divorce. Such times call for the creation of a space to heal, a reassment of priorities and the will to rebuild. Despite the promptings of several dear friends, I felt little desire to post here. I was shell shocked and locked in survivor mode. Of course my interest in the field of weird studies never flagged. I read more than ever and felt that my love of weird fiction was a saving grace bestowed upon my wounded soul. More often than not, the words to express this love and gratitude failed me. So I've remained silent.

The course of my life is altering yet again. I'm emerging from the dark of the woods, and can see daylight and hope ahead. Good things are happening. Small and large blessings have been cropping up. I'm feeling the urge to write here again. Despite the pain of the last few years, I'm starting to understand that the path has always been right even through the darkest parts where there seemed to be no path.

This year I have the good fortune to be participating on a couple of panels at the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, Oregon. I have attended the festival, and occasionally reviewed it for VideoScope magazine, over the last ten years. I love this festival with all my heart and am thrilled to be a participant however small a role my part is in the overall scheme of the event. Naturally, I plan for my next few posts to be related to Festival topics and H. P. Lovecraft, the grand old master of cosmic horror and true connoisseur of the weird tale.

Thank you for reading. I truly am grateful for each and every one of you who takes the time to read my blog.

Journal Infestation

Here at the Journal we (the royal we, that is) have been suffering the effects of what seems to be a psychic invasion. The air positively permeates with the biblical sounds of uncontrollable wailing and the gnashing of teeth. Objects fly unbidden across the room. Doors slam unexpectedly. Harsh unpronounceable words uttered in gutteral tones emerge from thin air. Simultaneously some scoundrel has been siphoning funds from my bank account. These combined experiences has left me positively unmoored.

Being a man of fiery disposition and a potent shaman in my own right, I have not faced this invasion lying down, though I have resorted to burying myself under the covers during a few moments of intense attack. I've sought advisement though voodoo drum communiqués with several powerful houngans of my acquaintance. On Wednesday, a noted Exorcist from Ireland arrives to assess the situation. Furthurmore, I've been initiating nightly scouting expeditions into the astral plane to see if I can catch these poltergeists, or demons, or whatever manner of dark spirits they be, unawares, so as to serve them their psychic eviction notice, so to speak.

As for that money stealing villain...he will soon be on the receiving end of a black rot curse. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near the vicinity of his sexual organs when the spell hits in full force.

Needless to say, my blog entries will be infrequent until I have taken these matters in hand. I will try to post at least once a week, during moments when the spirits relent or when my mojo is strong enough to hold them at bay.

Thanks for your support. Godspeed!

Ghost Stories for Christmas Eve

Once again, my ambition outreaches realistic limits. The second installment of Christmas, A Ghostly Time of Year will not make its appearance until after Christmas. All three kids have been released from school for the holidays, and Lois is home due to her company’s recently adopted policy of mandatory holiday vacation. Thus I forgot to factor in having to battle for computer usage time, having to fend off the constant barrage of interruptions and questions from the little ones (three kids badgering you with holiday related requests are not conducive to serious scholarly research – I love you boys!) as well as my required (and enthusiastic!) participation in Lois’ extensive reconstruction of the living room to enable maximum holiday socializing - I love you, honey! Let the sound of the miniature violins swell as we come to the end of pathetic excuse making. Besides there are twelve days of Christmas, right?

To keep my readers from rioting in the streets over this revoltin’ development, I’m offering ten ghostly pleasures to enjoy if you're overcome with the urge to participate in this most august of Christmas Eve traditions. The first list is geared towards the novice reader, or towards those who maintain a staunch love for the classic tale. The second list has been provided for those more well-read in the genre, offering several delightful examples of the ghost story’s adaptability beyond the confines of gaslights, decrepit mansions and antiquarian interests. Due to my own self-imposed limits, I had to leave out renowned and worthy authors such as E. F. Benson, Oliver Onions, Edith Wharton, Henry James and a host of others from the classic era, and Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Robert Bloch, Glen Hirshberg and many others from the post-WWII era. In addition I left out a few of my favorite classic stories, including The Upper Birth by F. Marion Crawford and How Love Came to Professor Gildea by Robert Hitchins. The work of J. S. Le Fanu and M. R. James deserves lists of their own. It grieved me to limit myself to one tale from each.

Feel free to e-mail me with your own suggestions or post them on the comments page. We here at the Journal are always on the lookout for a good ghost story.

5 classic ghost stories to curl up with on a cold winter’s night:

1. Green Tea by J. S. Le Fanu
2. The Monkey’s Paw by W. W. Jacobs
3. The Ash Tree by M. R. James
4. The Damned by Algernon Blackwood
5. The Red Lodge by H. R. Wakefield

5 Twentieth Century Ghosts:

1. Smoke Ghost by Fritz Leiber
2. House Taken Over by Julio Cortázar
3. The Inner Room by Robert Aickman
4. Out of Copyright by Ramsey Campbell
5. The Specialist’s Hat by Kelly Link

Christmas, A Ghostly Time of Year: Part 1 – The Origins of the Literary Ghost

The dark of winter has descended over the northern hemisphere and the holiday season springs full upon us. For holiday revelers, the month of December ushers in a whirlwind of religious celebrations, gatherings with friends and family, office parties, decorations, carols of every musical genre assaulting the airwaves, open fires, and, for the materialist Western world, loads of shopping. Naturally for us here at the Journal of Weird Studies, the holiday season evokes different associations: namely, the time-honored, seasonal offering of the ghost story.

While ghosts in literature can be traced back to Homer, I suspect the true origins of ghostly tales extend far beyond the written record, down into the deep, dark ancestral well of prehistory, first raising its spectral form shortly after humanity became cognizant of death as a fact of life. The literary ghost story, however – a distinct form separate from true accounts of ghostly apparitions, fictional rewriting of true accounts or the use of ghosts as plot devices in literary works such as in The Odyssey or Hamlet – made its first appearance roughly two hundred years ago (1).

The question naturally arises: what characteristics comprise this distinct form? The best template I’ve found so far is from scholar Michael Cox’s introduction to The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories.

“The ghostly protagonists must act with a deliberate intent; their actions - or the consequences of their actions –rather than those of the living must be the central theme; and, most importantly of all, each ghost, whether human or animal phantom or reanimated corpse, must unquestionably be dead. From this it follows that there can be no rationalization of the ghost, no explanation of the events by natural causes.”

In other words, the ghost assumes primacy in the story; it’s conscious actions drive the plot and impact the fate of the story’s living protagonists. However, I would also put forth a few exceptions: (a) the ambiguous ghost - hauntings and encounters that could have a rational explanation, but which the author leaves purposefully open ended and uncertain; and (b) hauntings of the mind, where the ghost could also be interpreted as a manifestation of psychological elements warring within a character’s tortured psyche - conceivably a subcategory of the ambiguous ghost.

With these basic criteria in mind, the first true literary ghost story appears to be The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving (2). Collected in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (published serially in 1818-1820, and in one volume in 1820), Irving’s tale of a gangly schoolteacher’s late night encounter with the ghost of a Hessian trooper is one of the most famous American stories ever, thanks in large part to Disney’s animated adaptation. Irving leaves the ultimate fate of Ichabod Crane a mystery, though one character conjectures the theory that rival suitor “Brom Bones” Van Brunt, disguised as the Headless Horseman, scared Crane out of town. Tales of a Traveler (1824) proves that Irving’s earlier outing was no fluke. Part 1 of the collection, subtitled “Strange Stories by a Nervous Gentleman,” provides several fine examples of the form, the most successful being The Adventure of the German Student, a savage little tale with a gruesome denouement.

On the English literary scene, critics unanimously agree that Sir Walter Scott’s Wandering Willie’s Tale, an episode inserted in the novel Redgauntlet (1824), was the first masterpiece of the genre, if not the first composed (3). Willie relates an account of his ancestor Steenie Steenson and his descent into hell in order to retrieve a rental receipt from his recently deceased landlord, Sir Robert Redgauntlet. Despite having several undeniable ghosts, the story falls squarely within the supernatural fantasy category, sharing characteristics of folk tales that deal with journeys to the realm of faery and of encounters with Satan (4). After being summoned to the hellish counterpart of Redgauntlet parlour, Steenson faces three tests, the failing of which leads to the loss of his soul; he refuses to consume offerings of food and drink (consumption of faery edibles always led to a mortal’s perpetual entrapment in the realm), declines a request to play a musical tune with satanic associations, and rejects Redgauntlet’s demand that he return in a year’s time to pay his master (presumably Satan) homage owed for his former landlord’s otherworldly protection. Six years later, Scott presented a work solidly situated in the ghost story genre. The Tapestried Chamber tells of a retired soldier, General Browne, who is scared out of his wits by a late night visitation from an evil ancestress of his host and good friend, Lord Woodville. Scott’s contributions to supernatural fiction, though remarkable, were surprisingly few in number. In general, he remained wary of using supernatural motifs in his fiction (possibly due to the stigma of his early association with “Monk” Lewis), preferring to keep his historical fiction grounded in realism.

Over the next decade, two prominent authors associated with spectral fiction made their publishing debuts. Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu ranks as one of the greatest writers of supernatural fiction from the Victorian era. By the time of his death in 1873, he had left behind a substantial body of work, including classic tales such as Schalken the Painter, Green Tea, Carmilla, Squire Toby’s Will, Mr. Justice Harbottle, and The Familiar, as well as the novel, Uncle Silas. In his best work, the natural and supernatural worlds are deeply entwined, inseparable forces linked within the consciousnesses and subtle perceptions of his protagonists. Noted scholar E. F. Bleiler observes that in Le Fanu’s work

“…The supernatural is an unconscious element in the mind and it may leap into emergence when the barriers protecting the conscious ego are temporarily broken down….the larger implications of the mind as a microcosm of the universe also loom out, and potentially evil mental fragments may become hypostatized into semi-independent existence, to ally themselves with larger evil forces of which we are fortunately unaware.”

Unlike many Victorian era writers of supernatural fiction, Le Fanu had a clearly developed aesthetic of how the supernatural operates in fiction. It wasn’t enough for his stories to have the trappings of ghosts, haunted houses and supernatural creatures. The important factor for Le Fanu was examining the subtle effects these visitations had on the states of consciousness of his characters. Le Fanu’s impact on the ghost story deserves closer study, an effort that falls outside the realm of this particular article.

Even today, almost 140 years after his death, Charles Dickens remains one of the most famous and best-loved authors in the world. His novels, with their vivid depictions of lower class characters and their struggles to survive in a harsh and uncaring England, struck an immense chord with his Victorian readership, granting him immense celebrity during his lifetime. It’s hard to imagine how the novel would have developed without his overshadowing influence. Though his impact on the ghost story will be examined more fully in the next post, it should be pointed out that he published five ghost stories in 1836 (5), as part of his serialized first novel, The Pickwick Papers. The last of the five, The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton, published in the December 1836 installment, was, in retrospect, a foreshadowing of a future Christmas work to come.


Footnotes:

(1) Some scholars put forth Daniel Defoe’s story A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal (1706) as the first literary ghost story. In truth, the tale is little more than a fictional retelling of a then famous contemporary haunting. Defoe’s ghostly protagonist has the dubious distinction of being one of the chattiest ghosts in literary history, engaging in almost two hours of discourse with her good friend Mrs. Bargrave on topics ranging from Christian theology and the merits of religious verse to the nature of true friendship.

Later in the 18th century the Gothic novel, which shares more than a passing relationship with the ghost story, rose to prominence. These excessive and often quite sensational novels were steeped in supernatural trappings. More often than not though, the supernatural elements had rational explanations (the Scooby Doo cartoon mysteries have provided millions of children the world over with an excellent, albeit simplified, introduction to the common methods of plot resolution in Gothic novels, attributing the Scooby Gang’s run-ins with supernatural wonders such as UFOs, ghosts, vampires, and monstrous sea creatures to trickery employed to cover up the evil machinations of scheming old men hungry for money and/or property. Personally, I blame their encounters on the hallucinogenic properties of the Scooby snack). Acknowledged masters of the Gothic novel include Horace Walpole, Charles Robert Maturin, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis.

M. R. James posited the ballad form as “the direct line of ancestry of the ghost story,” and hesitated over bestowing first place honors to Sir Walter Scott’s verses, Glenfinlas and Eve of St. John, collected in the anthology, Tales of Terror and Wonder, edited by “Monk” Lewis.

(2) I’m sure British scholars will cry foul over this choice. How could an upstart Yankee possibly have composed the first undisputed entry in a genre typically considered as distinctly English?

(3) Note the publication date of Redgauntlet. Even discounting The Legend of Sleepy Hollow on grounds that the haunting could be explained rationally, Irving still shares primacy with Scott due to his undisputable contribution, The Adventure of the German Student, a minor masterpiece of the genre.

(4) Subtle distinctions between the various subgenres of supernatural fiction appear to be non-existent in the earliest parts of its history. The term “ghost story” is liberally applied not only to fiction containing actual apparitions of the dead, but also to stories that feature goblins, faeries, devils and other supernatural creatures. Perhaps these various beings were all considered denizens of different kingdoms within the immaterial (or spiritual) plane, thus accounting for their common grouping within the blanket term “ghost story.”


(5) These tales are The Lawyer and the Ghost, The Queer Chair, The Ghosts of the Mail, A Madman’s Manuscript, and The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton.

At Christmas, He'll Devour Your Soul

My wife is in league with the Elder Gods.

A few days ago, she returned from a business trip bearing a sealed shipping envelope. "This is for you," Lois said, quickly averting her eyes. She left the room in a hurry, slamming the door shut behind her. The package throbbed in my hands. What the hell could this be?

As I opened the envelope, a sickly green light emanated from within, filling the room with its nauseous tint. For a brief moment, the thought crossed my mind that Lois was trying to kill me, that she had somehow got her hands on a small particle of discarded radioactive waste, that I was now going to die a horrible death from being exposed to it. Then I saw the tentacles and the Santa hat.

Gingerly, I removed the idol from its faux wool bedding. Astonishment and horror filled me, yet also wonder and a strange sense of liberation. Humanity's struggle is over, I thought. The Old Ones have arrived to hurl death and destruction on mankind. I ran out of the room. Upstairs, in the living room, Lois stood by the Christmas tree. I proclaimed jubilantly, "We must situate the idol in a place of prominance on the coniferous throne of pagan worship!" Odd, that didn't sound like something I'd say. "Yes," Lois said, her voice dull and mechanical. "We must place the idol on the Christmas tree."

All through the night, the tree vibrates at a low frequency, an unhealthy glow radiating from its center. In a highly improbable turn of events, our children are begging us to cancel Christmas, anything to get rid of that corrupted tree, that horrid ornament. Even worse, our cat has gone missing. We last saw him writhing beneath the tree, scratching at the branches, yowling in unearthly fright. Late at night, I still hear his uncanny howling, faint and far away, sounding as if it originates from deep within the heart of the tree's trunk. I now suspect our Christmas tree houses a portal opening onto R'yleh.

Ever since Lois gave me the "ornament," its dead black eyes seem to be trying to communicate with me. My mind is not right. I've been having bizarre dreams of a jagged island looming in the midst of storm-tossed seas. Exploring its circumference, I come upon a doorway leading into a gargantuan building, conceived and constructed from alien geometries. As the doorway opens, tentacles wreathed in tinsel slither forth. My mind hovers on the verge of collapse as an immense voice, deep and gutteral, reverberates within my cranium.

MWRAWLKABRAHA BAKAXIKHEKH ZEPRAKLAXOSZOSO

"What's that, Mr. Cthulhu? You want me to compose a Christmas carol in your honor?"

IA! CTHULHU FHTAGN!

"But what of my immortal soul? Won't I be damned to hell for such blasphemy?"

ANTAKLOS MRADUK FHORN'N TEKALILI

"Oh, you've already eaten my soul?"

IA! CTHULHU FHTAGN!

"In that case..."

(sung to the tune of O Come All Ye Faithful)

O come all ye Old Ones
Loathesome and repugnant
O come ye, O come ye
to reign and destroy.

Tremble and fear him
from outer dimensions
O come let us abhor him
O come let us abhor him
O come let us abhor him
Cthulhu fhtagn!

I'm straining with every ounce of my being to stop myself from typing this next bit, but Cthulhuclaus compels me to tell you that you can purchase your own Christmas idol, I mean ornament, at the Etsy shop.

What doom have I wrought upon mankind?

I mean, merry Cthulhumas, or rather, Christmas.