Uncategorized | Postscripts to Darkness

Aug 19 2024

“The dread contemplation of infinity”: Some Thoughts on George M. Gould and Cosmic Horror Before Lovecraft

This post is based on the conference paper I delivered as part of the Henry Armitage Symposium, the academic track of NecronomiCon, held in Providence, RI, from August 15-18, 2024.

Abstract (TLDR!)

In order to better understand the extent and importance of Lovecraft’s conception of “cosmic horror,” we need to recognize it as a transvaluation of a term already widely circulating in the first thirty years of Lovecraft’s life. During this era, the term “cosmic horror” derived primarily from the (at the time, highly influential) writings of American physician, ophthalmologist and medical lexicographer, George Milbry Gould. This short essay builds on one small part of the larger argument of “The Birth of Cosmic Horror from the S(ub)lime of Lucretius,” included in the essay collection New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature, published by Palgrave in 2018 (if you’re looking for a peer-reviewed and properly citational version of the basic argument, use that.) I develop these connections further and more formally in my in-progress book, which offers a literary-historical genealogy of cosmic horror.

“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread”

Since the mid 20^th century, the phrase “cosmic horror” has been closely associated with the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. While Lovecraft’s critical and fictional writings did much to popularize the phrase and develop the concept of cosmic horror as a literary mode closely linked to a philosophical perspective, both the phrase and the emotion it designates have a much older and broader history. For example, American horror writer and philosophical pessimist Thomas Ligotti looks back to the writings of French scientist and Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal for an early modern conception of cosmic horror. Pascal wrote of his a sense of being “engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me; I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.” In Ligotti’s words, “Pascal’s is not an unnatural reaction for those phobic to infinite spaces that know nothing of them.”

“The S(ub)lime of Lucretius“

I’ve elsewhere argued that one can look back further and find a close conceptual and affective kin to what Lovecraft calls “cosmic horror” in the ancient world; namely, the reception of the Latin epic didactic poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius, whose presentation of a fluctuating universe arising from the unpredictable encounters between atoms falling through the void occasioned a reaction of mingled awe and horror from both many pagan and Christian writers of late antiquity (such as Cicero and Ovid on the one hand and Lactantius and Prudentius on the other), a reaction echoed by early modern writers including Thomas Hobbes, Lucy Hutchinson and John Milton, Gothic novelists including Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, Marie Corelli, and eventually, even Lovecraft himself, who by the 1930s repudiated his intense self-identification with Epicurean philosophy due to the foundational role the unpredictability of the clinamen, or atomic swerve, played in its metaphysical materialism, expressing a reaction of abject horror that ironically echoed that of most earlier theistic commentators (see my essay, “The Poet’s Nightmare: The Nature of Things According to Lovecraft.”)

“Anomalous Sources“

My focus here is more narrowly on the conception of cosmic horror that prevailed during the decades leading up to Lovecraft’s revaluation of the term; this conception was one advanced by George M. Gould. I’m not the first to point out Gould’s pre-Lovecraftian use of this term, although I am the first to explore its influence and significance. In a 2015 editorial, Paul Di Filipo explains that this literary mode is “sometimes dubbed ‘Lovecraftian fiction’ in honor of its most famous exponent …whose work helped to crystallize and codify the subgenre,” but also notes that the “phrase itself predates Lovecraft, being found even in such anomalous sources as George Milbry Gould’s (1848-1922) The Meaning and the Method of Life: A Search for Religion in Biology (1893).

Di Filipo’s characterization of “cosmic horror” in Gould’s writings as “anomalous” is ironic for two reasons. First, it reflects the reality that Gould remains most famous for his 1896 compendium, Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, a compilation that would remain at once a standard medical, and a widely popular, reference work for half a century. Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine has directly influenced a number of 20^thand 21^st century works of horror fiction, having often been used as a source of inspiration by writers and film-makers. For example, it was the source through which numerous horror creators found the apparently apocryphal case of Edward Mordrake, whose horrible story has inspired tales by Robert Bloch, episodes of TV series including Tales from the Crypt and The X-Files, and James Wan’s film, Malignant (2021.)

Annabelle Wallis in Malignant (2021), whose concept was inspired by an apocryphal case described in Gould and Pyle’s Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine

Second, di Filipo’s quip suggests that Gould’s concept of cosmic horror, unlike Lovecraft’s, is something of an oddity or outlier. In fact, while it has been almost entirely eclipsed by Lovecraft’s since the 1940s, it was widely influential from the early 1890s until the 1920s, and the subject of debate in medical, natural philosophical and theological discourses during that time. Gould wrote about cosmic horror frequently, not just in specialist medical and theological venues, but in widely read popular periodicals like The Atlantic. Gould’s conception of cosmic horror should thus be of interest not just to students and scholars of Lovecraft, weird and horror fiction, but should also interest students and scholars of early 20^th century American history, the history of medicine and the medical humanities.

George M. Gould

Gould served the Union in the Civil War and his youthful war experiences shaped his outlook, feeding his interest in both medicine and theology. These interests led him to study theology at Harvard Divinity School and later to study medicine at Jefferson Medical College. He graduated in 1889 and opened an ophthalmology office in Philadelphia, where one of his first clients was the poet Ezra Loomis (later better known as Ezra Pound) who would subsequently recommend Gould to James Joyce, who suffered from a variety of ocular problems. Gould edited the Medical News (1891-1895), the Philadelphia Medical Journal (1898-1900) and American Medicine (1901-1906), earning numerous offices and honors over the course of his career. During this period he also exchanged many letters with his older contemporary and fellow “literary physician” S. Weir Mitchell, best remembered for the “rest cure” treatment to which he subjected Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

“Morbid Vision”

Gould wrote most often on ophthalmology, but his legacy as a medical lexicographer is broad. His medical dictionaries sold nearly a million copies and he was also a prolific author of various literary works, including poetry and a series of what he called “biographical clinics,” or diagnostic biographies of famous artists and intellectuals, including Charles Darwin, Thomas de Quincey, and Gould’s friend and sometime correspondent, the writer Lafcadio Hearn. Gould’s “Biographical Clinics” often conclude that the peculiar perspectives of these influential figures is linked to their ocular abnormalities; he believed that “morbid vision” often leads to a “morbid metaphysics.” Indeed, for Gould, the eye was best understood as the external portion of the brain, and he pushed the connection of literal vision to rational thought to extremes – the eyes, for Gould, came to occupy a position of metaphysical privilege, much like the penis for his Viennese contemporary, Freud.

An excerpt from Gould’s study of Hearn illuminates how closely linked his concept of cosmic horror and diagnostic practices were:

“Hearn was no “product of his environment… The great, the distinctive, the dominating force which controlled and created Hearn’s literary makings, his morbid vision, was not “environment” as the critics and scientists mean by the term. These have not yet learned that Art and Life hang upon the perfection and peculiarities of the senses of the artist and of the one who lives, and that intellect and especially aesthetics are almost wholly the product of vision. Conversely, the morbidities and individualisms of Art and Life often depend pre-eminently upon the morbidities of vision.”

Hearn and the “new pathology of genius”

Gould saw Hearn as exemplifying “a new pathology of genius …coming into view which shows the morbidizing of art and literature through disease, chiefly of the sense-organs of the artist and literary work-man, but also by unnatural living, selfishness, sin, and the rest.” Gould presents Hearn’s personality and writings (in which Lovecraft also found an anticipation of cosmic horror) as characteristic of this modern morbidity, and claims he influenced Hearn’s decision to relocate permanently to Japan. Hearn had in common with both Gould and Lovecraft a suspicion of and even contempt for modern, urban, cosmopolitan industrial life, and Gould suggests that Hearn’s embrace and adaptation of ancient East Asian folklore and traditions offered a means of moving beyond the paralyzing cosmic horror he experienced, a horror that suggestively haunts his earlier American writings, including the Louisiana-set early novel Chita (see Peter Bernard’s essay “Some Notes on Reading Hearn’s Chita as a Gothic Text.”)

It is important to recognize that, like Lovecraft’s later revaluation, Gould’s concept of cosmic horror is a polemical interpretation of a particular, but supposedly universal, human affect, using a phrase that was already circulating through late 19^th century transatlantic anglophone print culture. The earliest use I’ve found of the phrase “cosmic horror” via Google’s Ngram Viewer occurs as part of a journalistic description of the period leading up to the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883: “We could feel that some cosmic horror was impending long before the catastrophe took place, and I fancy that other sensations of a like nature are in store. We hear from one part of Asia of atmospheric phenomena which disturb numerous and delicate people.”

From this apparently first reference in the Pall Mall Gazette ten years before Gould publishes The Meaning and the Method of Life, and nearly a half-century before Lovecraft re-defines it in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, the term “cosmic horror” was associated with an atmosphere, in the most literal sense, one that “delicate” people were especially responsive to, and one involving a disturbing intimation of threatening immensity.

The Unseen Universe?

The definitions of “cosmic horror” developed by both Gould and Lovecraft are indelibly shaped by late 19^th and early 20^th century debates about the relationship between scientific and religious worldviews in the spreading wake of Darwinian evolutionary theory and the second law of thermodynamics. They are also contrasting polemical forays into these debates, which led to the publication in 1875 of The Unseen Universe: or Physical Speculations on a Future State, which begins by declaring: “Our object, in the present work, is to endeavour to show that the presumed incompatibility of Science and Religion does not exist”.

The Unseen Universe was the work of two scientists who were also pious Presbyterians, Peter Guthrie Tait and Balfour Stewart. They wrote the book as a rejoinder to “contemporary deployments of the doctrine of the conservation of energy in support of materialism, deployments which presented it as a grand overarching principle that brings all phenomena under the uniform reign of physical causality.” Tait and Stewart’s strategy was not to challenge the first and second laws, but rather to endorse them as evidence for a benevolent divine creator. As they put it, ‘the visible universe must, certainly in transformable energy, and probably in matter, come to an end. We cannot escape from this conclusion. But the principle of Continuity upon which all such arguments are based still demanding a continuance of the universe, we are forced to believe that there is something beyond that which is visible.’ Tait and Stewart made no secret of the fact that their motivation for all this speculation was theological, asserting: ‘We assume as absolutely self-evident the existence of a Deity who is the Creator of all things.”

The Unseen Universe remained influential across the later nineteenth century, being particularly popular with Christian theologians, natural philosophers, and scientists. It was also widely adopted by spiritualists, esotericists and mystics as a means of reconciling metaphysics with modern energy science; warmly embraced by Helena Blavatsky, it became a key text for Theosophy. It was also met with a great deal of criticism from scientists and philosophers.

Clifford’s “Cosmic Emotion”

Among its most forceful critics was the British mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford (1845-1879). His 1875 appraisal for the Fortnightly Review emphasized the “machinery of Christian mythology” that drove the book, which he (correctly!) predicted “will be warmly welcomed and widely read by those whose dearly-loved convictions it is designed once more to prop.” In philosophical circles, Clifford remains best known for a paper, spurred by his reading of The Unseen Universe, ‘On the Ethics of Belief’ in which he argues that we have not simply an epistemic but also a moral duty to confine our belief to what is warranted by evidence, an essay that would inspire William James to write his own rejoinder, The Will to Believe (1896).

In 1877, Clifford published a related essay that would give rise to both Gould and Lovecraft’s conceptions of cosmic horror. “The Cosmic Emotion” “outlines the ancient conception of nature as an orderly system… as times have changed so have our ideas … replacing the providential plan of some transcendent deity with a scientifically discoverable system of natural evolution. The divine logos of the ancients, we moderns conceive as evolution.” Clifford explains:

“By a cosmic emotion—the phrase is Mr. Henry Sidgwick’s—I mean an emotion which is felt in regard to the universe or sum of things, viewed as a cosmos or order. There are two kinds of cosmic emotion—one having reference to the Macrocosm or universe surrounding and containing us, the other relating to the Microcosm or universe of our own souls.”

Clifford calls it “the cosmic emotion,” rather than specifying what emotion it is, because “the character of the emotion with which men contemplate the world, the temper in which they stand in the presence of the immensities and the eternities, must depend first of all on what they think the world is.” In other words, whether the cosmic emotion is awe or terror depends on how “the world,” reality, is understood, an understanding that changes drastically with historical and cultural context and the development of scientific knowledge: “Whatever conception, then, we can form of the external cosmos must be regarded as only provisional and not final, as waiting revision when we shall have pushed the bounds of our knowledge further away in time and space.”

“That volcanic shuddering and sickening of the soul”

Gould’s fascination with Clifford’s concept and debt to The Unseen Universe are alike clearly evident throughout The Meaning and the Method of Life, in which he writes the following breathless and adjective-laden description, which so tellingly anticipates the language of many of Lovecraft’s horror-struck narrators:

“Until I reached the vivid knowledge of the foregoing truths these two things were precisely they that inspired me with that utter desolation of despair I have called cosmic horror—that volcanic shuddering and sickening of the soul at the contemplation there without of the awful infinity of the dead, cold and purposeless universe; whilst within, an unknown God, by an unknown instinct, commanded an unknown self to do an unknown duty. I have learned that many another sensitive despairing soul, in the face of the glib creeds and the loneliness of subjectivity, has also and often felt the same clutching spasm of cosmic horror, the very heart of life stifled and stilled with an infinite fear and sense of lostness. But I can now lie and look into the starry depths of space without soul-sickening or spirit-shudder, for knowledge lends comfort even to fate, and the certainty of the vision and love of God in the world about and within me translates the stern command of duty into a sweet and irresistible invitation of the Father to help Him.”

Gould designated this evolutionist deity Biologos, claiming that “He Himself may also be a divine victim of some “struggle for existence.” The thought may make us shudder as if icy-steel were in our soul, but every deep spirit has often felt the sudden sickening cosmic horror and chill as the infinite doubt of stability clutched his palsied heart while peering tremblingly over the crumbling precipice of supposed certainty into the abyss of past and future night.”

“Morbid Metaphysics” vs. “Biologos”

Gould insisted that the revelations of the new sciences, like the horrors of the Civil War, could only be borne and made intelligible by faith in a benevolent natural divinity, one whose governance, much like American democracy, required human effort and participation. His attempt to mingle monotheism with evolutionary biology also involved an attempt to reconcile the turn of the 20^th century’s two most influential theories about the origin of terrestrial life; xeno-panspermia (basically, all earthly life originating from space-borne alien seeds) and abiogenesis ( all earthly life gradually arising from non-living matter, especially organic compounds.) In Gould’s synthesis, “not matter-born but matter-taming, Biologos came to our planet from without, whether, as has been taught, gaining the first foothold by means of a meteor-carried cluster of organic cells, or whether such an elementary organism were nursed and fanned into activity here in the warm ooze of some tropic shore, matters not. Life’s organizing architectonic force is so profoundly unlike any mechanical force that the materialist of our day can only command our sincere pity for his congenital atrophy of perception. “

In Gould’s conception, cosmic horror is a base material that “man’s sense of law” must sublimate by affective alchemy into an elevated “ceaseless awe.” For Gould, the inability to reach such “sublime pleasure” indicates “a morbid metaphysics.” The overcoming of such “morbid metaphysics” and transcendence of cosmic horror, requires recognizing and accepting the invitation of Biologos, and working with this purposive intelligence to further transform the alien stuff of mere matter. This medical theology led Gould to advocate for eugenic policies: “Future sociology and government must undertake a certain ordering and regulation of the reproductive function. God is waiting to turn the task over to man.”

From the entry on “Siamese Twins” in Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine

This “task” is underlined by Gould’s preface to Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (1896), whose comprehensive catalogue of medical abnormalities and monstrosities is meant to allow readers to “catch forbidden sight of the secret work-room of Nature, and drag out into the light the evidences of her clumsiness, and proofs of her lapses of skill,–evidences and proofs, moreover, that tell us much of the methods and means used by the vital artisan of Life,–the loom, and even the silent weaver at work upon the mysterious garment of corporeality.”

Gould’s cataloguing of medical anomalies was a decisive influence on his conception of Biologos as a constrained deity, working with recalcitrant materials, requiring the cooperation of His human creations to complete the “vitalization of dead matter and mechanical nature,” a view he used his considerable influence as a medical writer, editor and lexicographer to promulgate.

Gould’s “Biologos” was taken up by other writers through to the 1920s (for example, it features prominently in Theodore Dreiser’s 1915 novel The Genius) and became one among many popular attempts to synthesize Darwin and Christianity in the era of the Scopes Monkey Trial, anticipating many versions of “intelligent design” which persist today.

Cosmic Horror: Lovecraft’s Transvaluation

Probably the most direct and best documented literary source of Lovecraft’s conception of cosmic horror is Blackwood’s “The Willows,” which Lovecraft described as the “foremost” of Blackwood’s fictions for the “impression of lasting poignancy” it evokes.

“The Willows” details “a singular emotion” closely related to, but distinct from, natural sublimity, in which “delight of the wild beauty” mingles with “a curious feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm” that “lay deeper far than the emotions of awe or wonder,” due to the narrator’s “realization of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained power of the elements.” The primary difference between this and Gould’s description of cosmic horror is that Blackwood presents a simultaneous commingling of horror and awe, rather than the resolution of the former into the latter.

One of Sam Ford’s stunning illustrations for a contemporary graphic adaptation of “The Willows”

Lovecraft consistently follows Blackwood in presenting cosmic horror as a “sense of awe” “touched somewhere by vague terror,” and thereby implicitly rejects the “sublime turn” which is the conceptual crux of Gould’s theologically freighted concept.

For Gould, cosmic horror is a pathology and an obstacle, one that must be overcome by faith in the natural divinity Gould calls Biologos. For Lovecraft, it is instead an ambition and an invitation to the speculative exploration of the consequences of a vast, complex and indifferent universe. Lovecraft applies this transfigured conception to works of literature and art that convey the abyssal contrast between a belief in human exceptionalism grounded in the persistent, palliative notion that we are made “in the image” of a benevolent creator, and the reality that we are but one species among tens of thousands, struggling for survival on one planet among millions, in a universe whose virtually infinite reaches are beyond our paltry epistemic grasp, and from which we will one day pass, leaving no more than a tiny ripple in the oceanic expanses of space and time.

For further exploration of contemporaneous influences on Lovecraft’s conception of cosmic horror, read my essay “Lovecraft, Lucretius, and Leonard’s Locomotive-God”:

Lovecraft, Lucretius, and Leonard’s Locomotive-God: Further Thoughts on Cosmic Horror

Tagged Algernon Blackwood, Biologos, charlotte perkins gilman, cosmic horror, Ezra Pound, George M. Gould, h.p. lovecraft, horror fiction, James Joyce, Lafcadio Hearn, Natural Theology, Naturalism, Paul di Fillipo, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Ligotti, weird fiction, William Kingdon Clifford

Apr 17 2024

Essays, Uncategorized

The Devil and Edgar Poe: Poe’s Romantic Satanism and its Influence on Contemporary Religious Satanism, or, Getting Intimate with Poe As Prophylaxis Against Losing A Limb on the Left Hand Path

By Sean Moreland, PhD

This is the text of a conference paper I delivered as part of the inaugural Society for the Study of the American Gothic (SSAG) conference in Salem, Ma. in March 2024, as part of a panel focused on Poe and Lovecraft.

It represents the conjunction of my interest in the literary and cultural contexts of various forms of modern religious Satanism, Romantic literary Satanism, the history of “Satanic Panic” narratives, and, of course, Edgar Poe’s writings and cultural legacy in general.

In part, the paper stemmed from my interest in how the (chiefly British, German and later French) writers associated with early nineteenth-century Romantic Satanism were transmitted into the peculiarly American emergence of explicitly Satanic discourse and soi-disant Satanic organizations in the 20th century, and my realization that Poe is a crucial, but unrecognized, conduit for this transmission.

While I’ll eventually return to and develop it more fully (and it will likely end up breaking into a couple of longer pieces, as many of my conference papers tend to do; one will focus in more detail on the concept of, to echo the title of M. David Litwa’s fascinating recent study, the Gnostic concept of The Evil Creator in Poe’s work, Romantic Satanism, and American Transcendentalism more broadly; another will focus on the transformative reception of Poe’s work by Paschal Beverly Randolph and later esotericists) I thought I’d share the original conference version here, short and sketchy as it is. I haven’t included endnote citations in this version of the text but have supplied links to many of the referenced texts.

Edgar A. Poe – unsung “Lord of the Left Hand Path”?

“I lost a limb / on the left hand path / and I never, ever, ever / got it back”

Cold Cave, “A Little Death to Laugh”

Introduction: Poe and Satanic Discourse

This paper situates Poe’s writing in the nineteenth-century discourse of Romantic Satanism while illuminating its pervasive, but critically under-recognized, influence on various forms of modern religious Satanism. In Jesper A. Petersen’s words, “the nature of modern Satanism is delineated through a distinction between discourse on the satanic and satanic discourse,” “the difference between cultural stereotypes and self-ascribed satanic identities.”

In terms of the “discourse on the satanic,” Poe’s writings and literary persona were yoked to popular conceptions of the demonic, a process accelerated by his literary executor and first biographer, American writer, editor, and one-time Baptist minister, Rufus W. Griswold, whose characterizations were amplified in turn by later writers, including Baudelaire in France and Swinburne in England, who saw in Poe’s persona their own ideals of the “poete Maudite,” hurling daemonic maledictions at a tyrannical divinity and perverse universe. My primary interest here is rather Poe’s relationship with “satanic discourse,” the “positive self”-identification shared by various forms of modern Satanism. For, while Poe did not explicitly identify as a Satanist, his writings have shaped the forms of religious self-identity of those who, since the late 19^th century, have so identified.

The Crimson Ribbon: Esoteric and Rationalist Satanism

Modern Satanists exist on a spectrum. Imagine it as a crimson ribbon, hung between two horns on a goat’s skull, mounted above a gaudy altar. The first horn is “esoteric”–those who follow what is often referred to, using terminology introduced by the co-founder of Theosophy H. P. Blavatsky, as the “Left Hand Path” (originally her translation of the Sanskrit tantric term vamachara). The second is “rational” —those whose adversarial attitude toward supernatural, theistic religion is informed by a physicalist, atheistic worldview.

For example, the “rationalist” Satanism of the Church of Satan, which holds Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible (1969) as a definitive text, falls closer to the second horn. Yet LaVey’s teachings foreground a form of magical practice based on the ritualistic amplification of one’s “Will,” a concept deriving directly from the magical philosophy of the early 20^th century occultist Aleister Crowley, and indirectly (as we shall see) from Poe’s writings. Even closer to the “rational” horn is the Satanic Temple, or the unaffiliated but ideologically similar Global Order of Satan. Both groups emphasize secularism, religious pluralism, individual autonomy and reproductive rights, and the psychological and social importance of ritual rather than magical practice. In contrast, The Temple of Set, whose founder Michael Aquino split off from the Church of Satan in 1975, falls much closer to the first horn, advocating the use of “Black Magic” to ultimately attain power over reality and personal immortality.

Poe’s work runs the full length of this crimson ribbon. On one hand, it is saturated in esoteric ideas, as Barton Levi St. Armand long ago emphasized: “Poe’s metaphysic derives …from those …unorthodox and even heretical doctrines…current at the beginnings of Christianity itself and then suppressed or driven underground by the actions of… dogmatic Church councils.” Serving as a vehicle for these doctrines, it has influenced the course of Western esotericism since the mid-19^th century. On the other, Poe’s work is profoundly shaped by Epicurean philosophy, suffused by a poetics of perishability, and frequently satirizes what Lucretius called religio, which I take to mean those forms of religion that reinforce hegemonic state and social power and prescriptive morality through promises of personal immortality and divine reward or punishment.

Poe’s Romantic Satanism: Farcical Fausts

Understanding Poe’s place in the contemporary Satanic milieu requires understanding how contrastive Gnostic and Epicurean influences shape his version of Romantic Satanism, influences evident in his writings as of the early 1830s, when Poe develops two narrative structures that reflect them. The first and most obvious is the farcical Faustian tale, which Poe deploys first in 1831 with early drafts of “The Bargain Lost,” published after extensive revision as “Bon-Bon” in 1835, and last with “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” in 1841. The second features a male, first person, unreliable narrator who is obsessed with the death and apparent resurrection of a beloved woman. Poe initially develops this structure with “Berenice” but it recurs throughout many of his later poems and tales, from “Morella” and “Ligeia” to “The Raven.”

“Bon-Bon’s” Devil is explicitly linked to Epicurean philosophy – the Devil insists “I am Epicurus!” – while caricaturing what Peter Schock calls the “daemonic sublimity” of Milton’s Satan. It is the tale’s eponymous gourmand-philosopher that seems to embody the egotistical sublime associated with this figure; it is “impossible to behold the rotundity of his stomach without a sense of magnificence nearly bordering on the sublime,” “in its immensity a fitting habitation for his immortal soul.” In contrast, the tale’s devil is marked by his contemplative air and “a pair of green spectacles,” giving the impression “of an ecclesiastic.” Self-identifying as “the most profound theologian,” this devil suggests he is the source and enforcer of “orthodox” theology and the institutions that enforce it, echoing the Marcionite Gnostic perspective alluded to in “Berenice”’s invocation of Tertullian.

The tale also links the Devil less to Milton’s Satan than to Milton himself, through his monist materialism, physical blindness and theological insight, anticipating the view of Milton as an “Arian” subverter of orthodox Christian doctrine Poe makes explicit in a combative 1845 review of Griswold’s edition of Milton’s prose works (one of many public disputes that fueled Griswold’s later demonizing characterizations of Poe.)

“Bon-Bon”’s devil is close kin to one of the caricatures Poe intended to frame and narrate his proposed collection, Tales of the Folio Club: one “De Rerum Naturâ, Esqr., who wore a very singular pair of green spectacles,” identical to those of “Bon-Bon”’s devil, again, underlining Poe’s Epicurean agenda. Poe approached the New York publishers Harper and Brothers with a prospectus for this planned collection in 1836, receiving a rejection letter in June of that year that claimed, in part, that American readers “have a decided and strong preference for works, (especially fictions) in which a single and connected story occupies the whole volume, or number of volumes.”

Poe’s pique at this rejection was likely intensified by the advertisements for the many titles Harper did publish that year; among the most prominent was the English natural philosopher and theologian John Mason Good’s Book of Nature, a series of lectures claiming consilience between a Trinitarian protestant understanding of the Bible and natural philosophy. Harper recognized that the long-term saleability of Good’s Book was due to this claimed consilience; the catalogue listings for Good’s Book cites a New-England Christian Herald review, trumpeting it as “a safe book for any person to read. There is no skepticism in it.” Harper’s successful marketing led to this “safe book’s” sustained and widespread dissemination in the United States into the 1870s, especially in the wake of the less orthodox natural theology of the Bridgewater Treatises in the late 1830s and Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in the 1840s (for more on this, see my article “Entro(Poe)tics: Darkness, Decay and the Heat Death of the Universe.”)

Pym subverts Book of Nature’s claim that the natural world is rife with evidence of a benevolent, omnipotent creator through its eponymous naïve narrator, who constantly misreads a world littered with evidence, instead, of a vengeful, temperamental and deceptive author; the comical Epicurean Devil of the “Folio” tales is replaced by a neo-Gnostic nightmare world that serves as, at once, a “single and connected story” to meet the publisher’s demands, and a mockery of the “single and connected story” that is the specious consilience between Christian doctrine and the study of nature presented by one of Harper’s most profitable titles. Poe ultimately returns to such a theologically subversive “single and connected” story with his cosmic poetic romance, Eureka.

Poe’s 1840 collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, further shows the evolution of his Romantic Satanism. Consider “The Devil in the Belfry” (1839), in which the Devil becomes one of Poe’s first apparitions of entropy, a companion to the fissure running through the contemporaneous “House of Usher” and a precursor to the later “Masque of the Red Death.” The punctilious citizens of the remote town of Vondervotteimittiss (wonder-what-time-it-is) are primarily preoccupied with clocks and cabbage until the arrival of a devilish fiddler who invades the belltower and rings thirteen o’clock. Here, the titular devil introduces disorder to the town’s tightly ordered system, but in doing so, admits the possibility of change and creativity.

George Barrie’s 1894 illustration for “The Devil in the Belfry.”

More than his earlier Faustian farces, this tale shows the influence of the German writer-philosophers, August and Friedrich Schlegel, in whose earlier writings Satan figures the freedom, infinity and chaos admitted by the systematically unsystematic exercise of irony. Friedrich Schlegel called irony “the clear consciousness […[ of an infinitely full chaos.” As James Clow puts it, “Schlegel does not really articulate a position … but instead saturates his writing with a self-reflexivity that both performs and explains the philosophical uses of irony.” Poe’s work is rife with Schlegel’s brand of self-reflexive irony, which had earlier influenced the Romantic Satanism of Percy Shelley, whose essay “On the Devil, and Devils” calls Satan “the vulnerable belly of the crocodile” of Christian doctrine, a rebuke of John Mason Good’s Biblical and natural theological views. Shelley’s essay was not published until 1880, making it unknown to Poe. Yet there are striking parallels between the Romantic Satanisms of Shelley and Poe, although Poe ultimately takes Schlegel’s self-reflexive irony much further than his English predecessor in ways that weave his work into the literary foundations of the contemporary Satanic milieu.

“Ligeia,” “Morella” and Poe’s Esoteric Reception

Two other Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque build on the narrative structure Poe initiated with “Berenice,” demonstrating how Poe’s Schlegelian irony led to his work’s embrace as a precursor to what, after Blavatsky, becomes called the “Left Hand Path” of modern esotericism. “Ligeia” and “Morella” are sister-tales of apparent metempsychosis, circulating around an unreliable narrator’s perception that his dead wife’s esoteric studies and tremendous will enable her rebirth into, respectively, the body of his second wife and that of his daughter. These tales shaped the concept of magical will used by later esotericists to distinguish between “right hand” and “left hand” practices, beginning with their adaptation by the African-American occultist Paschal Beverly Randolph, largely responsible for introducing “sex magic” practices to late 19^th century audiences.

1874 photograph of Randolph, an admirer of Poe whose influence on Theosophy and related forms of modern Western esotericism is fascinating and critically under-recognized.

As Randolph’s biographer John Patrick Deveney explains, “The influence of Poe’s writings on Randolph is quite extensive.” A “constant refrain” of Randolph’s magical philosophy is that “men fail and die through feebleness of will.’” Randolph attributes this idea in his seminal text, Ansairetic Mystery, to Joseph Glanville. The origin of this statement is not Glanville, but Poe’s epigraph to “Ligeia” attributed to him, which bears little relation to Glanville’s theological views. What it does strongly resemble is a stanza from Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Die Worte des Glaubens.” In John Herman Merivale’s 1844 translation:

And God is – a holy Will that abides,

Though the human will may falter;

High over both Space and Time it rides,

The high Thought that will never alter.

Johann Fichte included this stanza at the conclusion of his essay “On the Ground of our Faith in a Divine Government of the World” as exemplary of his own view, fuelling the Pantheismusstreit alluded to in “Morella” as the “wild pantheism of Fichte.” That Poe deploys Fichtean terms in such unsettling ways in these tales, written during the era of the Young America movement and the popularization of “Manifest Destiny,” when Fichte’s nationalist mysticism (which would later infuse Nazi occultism and other forms of radical religious nationalism) was percolating through antebellum American culture surely deserves further consideration, but is beyond the scope of this essay. At base, the Fichtean allusions in both tales emphasize that the human will can, through “intentness,” in effect become divine and abide eternally, facilitating Fichte’s reception as a philosopher of the Left Hand path for later esotericists, from MacGregor Mathers and Crowley to more recent proponents including Aquino and Stephen Flowers.

While originating in Blavatsky’s interpretation of contrastive tantric practices, the terms left- and right-hand path have evolved via later commentators to distinguish those who seek mystical union with the divine by a total surrender of individual self from those who seek to attain knowledge, power, or personal immortality through an act of self-apotheosis. It is exactly such an act that the narrators of “Ligeia” and “Morella” claim to witness in the (however momentary and incomplete) conquest of death performed by their sinister wives.

Conclusion: Eureka, A(Poe)theosis and the Invention of “The Left Hand Path”

These tales are far from the only writings by Poe to influence the worldview of later esotericists; Eureka has had an even greater influence in this regard. In 1893, the Theosophical Society’s official periodical, Lucifer (Vol. 12, March-August) included the brief article “Edgar Allan Poe and Occultism,” claiming that Poe, “By the independent action of his powerful intellect, arrived at conclusions with regard to ultimate philosophy which will be familiar to all students of the Wisdom-Religion.” It reproduces the passage from Eureka culminating in Man “will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah.”

Peter Gilmore, current High Priest of the Church of Satan, describes LaVeyan Satanism as not a form of “atheism,” but of “I-theism.” It’s a pun that Poe, as a (witting, willing or otherwise) “Lord of the Left Hand path” and literary architect of modern Satanism, made possible. His identification of divinity with humanity and ambiguous synthesis of Gnostic and Epicurean materials seeded the ground from which both modern rational and esoteric Satanism would spring. From the neo-Gnostic literary Satanism of The Revolt of the Angels, the 1914 Anatole France novel which serves as a core text for The Satanic Temple, to “satanic woman” Maria de Naglowska’s Randolph-inspired surrealist sexual ritualism, to Anton LaVey’s use of Satan as an adversarial floating signifier, Poe’s work has become foundational to an incredible proliferation of Satanic discourse over the last 150 years.

Tagged aleister crowley, american gothic, books, church of satan, edgar allan poe, epicurean philosophy, esotericism, gnosticism, gothic fiction, hermeticism, Horror, literature, paschal beverly randolph, religious satanism, satan, satanism, the satanic temple

May 26 2018

Interviews, Uncategorized

PSTD AUTHOR INTERVIEW: MIKE ALLEN

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Read the reprint of Mike Allen’s story, “Tardigrade,” and poem “Dearly Beloved”, accompanying this interview.

Hello Mike, and thanks for agreeing to answer a few questions as part of our PstD author feature. To start off, can you tell our readers a little about who you are, what you do, what you’ve written, what you’re writing, what you’ve edited, what you’re editing?

What counts as a little? I can try for a little of each.

Let’s see. By day I work as a newspaper reporter. (Yes, newspapers still exist! And do excellent, necessary work.) In my spare time I write, edit and publish science fiction, fantasy and horror. I’m almost 50 years old. I grew up in a couple of out of the way places and still live in a (slightly larger) out of the way place, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia. I married my best friend, Anita, a little over 26 years ago.

I had interests in many different kinds of art as a kid — drawing, music, poetry, fiction, acting — and not much else, which put me at odds at times with my farmhand-turned-college professor-turned-computer programmer father as I got older, right up until I landed the newspaper job.

But since I was small, my greatest aesthetic interest has been the literature of the fantastic: reading it, writing it and eventually even publishing it. Like everyone else in the biz, I’m always grabbing at the next highest rung on the ladder, but I feel incredibly lucky to have pulled off the stunts I’ve managed so far.

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I sold my first story in 1992 to a long-forgotten pay-in-copy zine. In the first two decades of my sci-fi career, I plunged really deep into speculative poetry. There are three big fat (for collections of poetry) books that hold the bulk of those adventures (though not all of them!), containing about 60 poems each: Strange Wisdoms of the Dead (2006), The Journey to Kailash (2008) and Hungry Constellations (2014). Hungry Constellations deserves a little extra explanation: Dominik Parisien edited that one, selecting what he thought were the strongest pieces from Strange Wisdoms and Journey to Kailash, then adding a section of new stuff.

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All along, I wrote more short stories, but I produced them less frequently than the poems and sold them even less frequently, so it took a while for them to build into a body of work. I had my first breakthrough of a sort in 2005, when a wacky novelette I co-wrote with Ian Watson, “Dee-Dee and the Dumpy Dancers,” appeared in Interzone, and a bigger one three years later when my horror story “The Button Bin” became a Nebula finalist. Still, when my stories appeared they never tended to attract much attention, so when my debut collection, Unseaming, came out, and it ended up being a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and selling several thousand copies, no one was more surprised than me! My followup collection, The Spider Tapestries: Seven Strange Stories (weird sci-fi and fantasy rather than horror) didn’t make as much noise.

I’ve had one novel published, The Black Fire Concerto (Haunted Stars, 2013). It’s a post-apocalyptic dark fantasy with music, magic, flying horses made of wood and hordes of ravenous undead, and I’m personally quite proud of it, but few people know it exists. I have another dark fantasy novel that’s currently seeking a home, cross fingers. A completed first draft of a sequel to Black Fire Concerto rests on a back burner. I’m in the foothills of another novel set in the present day that I think of as Lovecraftian noir. I’m also assembling a horror story collection that’s a follow-up to Unseaming, working title Aftermath of an Industrial Accident.

Though I’ve made inroads as a fiction writer, I think more people still know me as a poet or as an editor. (A fact that can make me gnash my teeth sometimes, heh.) I never dreamed, as a kid, of being an editor, how that came about would double the length of this already long answer.

My editing career has three major threads. There’s the anthologies, the highest profile of which is the Clockwork Phoenix series, intended as a home for difficult to classify stories with sci-fi, fantasy and/or horror elements. The first three volumes were originally published by Norilana Books, but I have all the rights to those now, and I edited and published the fourth and fifth volumes myself. Several stories from those books have been Nebula, Shirley Jackson and WSFA Small Press Award finalists and the most recent volume, Clockwork Phoenix 5, was a World Fantasy Award finalist last year. 61l90Oo-gjL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_

Then there’s the magazines. The obvious one to mention here is Mythic Delirium, which I started in 1998 as a biannual all-poetry journal. Eventually I switched from print-only to digital-only and started including short stories. This year, we published the 50^thissue of Mythic Delirium, which also happened to be the 20^thanniversary issue, and with that I put the zine on hiatus.

The third thread is books. I’ve dabbled in editing and publishing books by other authors for years — the first one was The Lexicographer’s Love Song, a poetry collection by Ian Watson, put out by DNA Publications in 2001. Things got a bit more serious when Anita and I decided to release Bone Swans, a collection of five novellas from C. S. E. Cooney, through our Mythic Delirium Books imprint, and even more serious when Bone Swans won the World Fantasy Award in 2016. (We were there at the ceremony, and so was Claire Cooney, the announcement that she had won was a wonderful surprise.) The current project on deck is Latchkey, a novel by Nicole Kornher-Stace that’s sequel to her YA debut Archivist Wasp. Officially that launches July 10, 2018. There’s a couple more in the works I’m not ready to go public with yet.

Whether they are historical or contemporary, who are some of the writers whose work has been most influential on, or important to, your own, and what have you taken from their writing?

I think it all boils down to Poe and Tolkien, the first is probably kind of obvious, the second I imagine less so for any readers out there that might know me only through my creative work.

Those two writers set me on the path. A well-meaning third grade teacher read “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven” to our class for Halloween, and while the other kids just giggled it away I was traumatized, with night terrors that lasted for years. Yet instead of staying away from all things horror, I became consumed with morbid curiosity, constantly coming back to this type of story-telling that held so much power over me, leading me to devour stuff by H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Peter Straub and Clive Barker.

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Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” inspired “night terrors that lasted for years.” (Harry Clarke’s 1919 illustration.)

With Barker, my favorite writer when I was in my teens, I experienced a paradigm change. I became a gleeful participant in the land of imaginary horrors, rather than a frightened victim. I ended up consuming so much horror that I essentially inoculated myself from the night terrors.

I would bet the idea that I’m best known for horror stories would be a big shock to 10-year-old me. Around 4^thgrade or so my dad made me read The Lord of the Rings, because he thought it was the greatest novel ever written and because he was sure I would like it. On that second part, absolutely, he was right. Maybe the first one, too? But anyway, I developed this hunger for all things Tolkien. We lived at the time in Wise, Virginia, a coal town high in the Appalachians. There was no bookstore. There were a couple of other kids who liked fantasy, but didn’t share my obsessive need for it, or at least not my precise interests — as I recall, one buddy was a huge Larry Niven fan.

There was no fandom community in Wise. My parents enjoyed sci-fi and fantasy but were not particularly knowledgeable about what was out there. So I was on my own figuring out how to find other books for that fix.

The library in Wise became the center of my world. I got my mom to mail order a book of essays on Tolkien, and I’d track down the books mentioned there. My parents gave me a book that was essentially lists of recommended reading for teenagers, and I ignored everything except the chapter on science fiction and fantasy in the very back. Those two sources led me to C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Stephen R. Donaldson, Madeleine L’Engle, Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Susan Cooper, T.S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, Lovecraft, Roger Zelazny, Anne MacCaffrey, Samuel R. Delany, Harlan Ellison, Lloyd Alexander, John Christopher, Michael Moorcock, and led me to do things like read Le Morte d’Arthur.

I imagine 10-year-old me would have expected 45-year-old me to be writing epic fantasy instead of body horror. As an adult, though, the writers who have been real revelations to me, who’ve stirred primal surges of imagination — Thomas Ligotti, Brian McNaughton, Laird Barron, Livia Llewellyn — have all tended to lean toward horror. I started at some point to find epic fantasy tiresome. I blame Robert Jordan.

Generally speaking, in my own writing, I try to emulate what inspires me. When I was writing The Black Fire Concerto for Haunted Stars, I made a deliberate choice to aim for the kind of wild, gonzo, big-scale surreal events found in Moorcock’s Eternal Champion books. Rod Belcher, a.k.a. dark fantasy novelist R.S. Belcher, who also lives here in Roanoke, read Black Fire Concerto and correctly deduced that there’s a huge slab of Zelazny slathered in there too. 51UT0Rh9qxL

I’ll slip direct homages in too. My short story “Her Acres of Pastoral Playground” from the Cthulhu’s Reign anthology contains a huge shout out to Thomas Ligotti’s “The Cocoons,” though when Tom read it himself, he didn’t notice. (I couldn’t resist pointing it out to him.)

Right out of the gates, then, you were drawn to the “literature of the fantastic,” and both your writing and editing has circulated through this broad field. Yet, as you suggest, to the probable surprise of your young epic-fantasy-fanatical self, much of your prose fiction could be, and often has been, described somewhat more narrowly as “horror.” The label is especially often applied to your 2014 collection Unseaming, which deservedly earned rave reviews in venues including Rue Morgue Magazine, where it was favourably compared to Clive Barker’s short fiction. In his introduction to Unseaming, Laird Barron locates your work at “the forefront of a ‘New New Wave'” of horror.

It was awful nice of Laird to write that!

What importance does the term “horror” have for you? Do you find this to be a congenial way to describe some, or all of your writing? What are some of the (dis)advantages of being perceived, or self-representing, as a horror writer?

I love horror. Left to my own devices, my first choice for entertainment will usually be a a collection of horror stories or a horror film. (You wouldn’t necessarily glean that from the stories I gravitate toward as an editor, which tend towards the ornate and surreal. It’s a quirk even I don’t completely understand. Though my favorite films of all time aren’t horror films: Dr. Strangelove, 2001, Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Wild Bunch.)

I suppose horror permeates a lot of my writing, even when I don’t intend it deliberately. I’m drawn to the downbeat, to impossible choices, irreparable damage and mortifying fates. Those moves are more conventional in horror, though sf and fantasy stories, especially short stories, definitely sport their share. (Some of the short stories I encountered as a kid that really stuck in my craw, like “Descending” by Thomas M. Disch or “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts,” by Shirley Jackson, feel like horror stories even if they don’t read like them in the conventional sense.)

I’m not shy about calling myself a horror writer, because people grasp what that is, and I believe, though you don’t find horror sections in bookstores anymore, it’s become a much more acceptable thing to trumpet in this pop-culture saturated 21^stcentury. I spent more than a decade trying to explain to people what a “science fiction poet” is — compared to that, saying “I write horror” goes down pretty smooth.

As you note above, your 2016 story collection, The Spider Tapestries: Seven Strange Stories instead collects fiction oriented more toward sci-fi and fantasy. Perhaps as a result, it doesn’t have the same tonal and thematic concentration that marks Unseaming. In her introduction to the collection, Nicole Kornher-Stace portrays this as the “throwing down of a gauntlet to anyone who so much as thinks of pigeonholing the versatile body of work of which Mike Allen is capable.” Was that a gesture you were consciously making? What effect do you think it had on the book’s reception, or your perception by readers who knew your name mainly through Unseaming?

The lesson I learned with The Spider Tapestries is that readers who buy horror want more horror. I’m not a complete fool, though: I never expected a slender volume of intensely surreal science fantasy works to keep pace with Unseaming, where the weirdness all falls within horror parameters. (I’d be a liar, though, if I claimed I wasn’t hoping for it!)

What Nicole wrote (again, super-kind words) about me throwing down a gauntlet was true in the creation of the individual stories, not as much in the assembly of the book. For example, the ending of my novelette “Sleepless, Burning Life,” in which (spoiler alert?) I run through all the possible consequences of Jyshiu’s next, story-concluding choice, then don’t tell the reader what she did, was 100% deliberate author malfeasance. In “Twa Sisters” I set out to see how far I could push treating science fiction prose like concrete poetry. (In that sense it’s an homage to Harlan Ellison’s “The Region Between,” at least in execution if not in subject matter.)

The base raison d’etre for the book might seem pretty dull: I felt I needed an additional reward option for the Clockwork Phoenix 5 Kickstarter campaign, and it occurred to me these stories left out of Unseaming might work well together.

An aside: I’d been playing with and shopping around various versions of Unseaming for years. Anita, who has for many years organized the contents of our zine issues and anthologies so that they have a thematic flow, also organized Unseaming. Laird once suggested to me that I should be willing to toss in stories from other genres (see his own sf story “Ears Prick Up” in his collection Swift to Chase) but Anita felt the book should hew consistently toward horror, and I must admit I’m grateful for her instincts.

But with any luck, readers will continue to discover The Spider Tapestries and be surprised by the things I spring on them.

Kornher-Stace’s calling your body of work “versatile” is, if anything, an understatement. Having read a broad swath of your published writing at this point, I’m awed by the range of voices, modes, forms that comprise your corpus. There are a couple of things, however, that seem to me quintessentially “Mike Allenesque” characteristics, and I’d like to ask your thoughts on these.

The first is a fascinated, and fascinating, emphasis on visceral metamorphoses, one that sometimes causes your work to swing close toward what I would describe as “body horror” and the grotesque. Amal el-Mohtar’s introduction to Hungry Constellations phrases this in a particularly vivid way when she writes that Mike Allen “is a man who delights in breaking bodies: butchering, splitting, splaying, dismembering, then seeding landscapes with viscera until they too become bodies—bodies invaded, bodies studied, bodies contaminated. This is a man who carves words into and out of bodies, be they skin or sapphire, corpses or constellations. But somehow Allen skirts gore and clinical detachment both: there is a precision and an economy to his horror that’s reminiscent of clockwork, architecture, astronomy.”

There is something in her characterization of a precision that is more aesthetic than clinical, a grotesquerie that is more architectural than, to paraphrase Stephen King, “going for the gross out,” that cuts to the heart of your work, I think.

What do you think of this characterization? Why do you think you “delight in breaking bodies” in these ways?

I’ll admit, I was taken aback at first by Amal’s description, but after some contemplation I had to concede it was a fair cop. It’s there in my earliest published work, back in the 1990s.

My best guess: it’s an accumulation of factors. My father taught biology at the University of Guam and later at Clinch Valley College in Wise, and I remember, on visiting his offices and classrooms, being fascinated by the large plastic anatomy models — you could open them and remove the internal organs, the pieces of the brain, the eyes, you could open the heart up and look inside it. Also all the strange creatures from many phyla floating in formaldehyde, and the even weirder invertebrates described in textbooks. I never did get to see the biology department’s cadaver, but I knew it was there inside its coffin-shaped tank. Somehow, though, none of these things ever scared me the way Poe or Lovecraft did.

And yet, I would have these astonishing nightmares, incredibly vivid, where streets would be lined with veins and intestines and people would suffer gory fates worthy of the grossest splatter films — which I had never watched! As a kid, when something too scary came on the television, I’d flee the room. Those dreams, I’m certain, guide my aesthetic as an adult.

I mentioned Barker sparking my own transformation. I think The Books of Blood connected parts of my mind that weren’t consciously working together, the part fascinated with the wilds of biology and the part terrified of but unable to look away from the body under the sheet (as King so eloquently described the love of horror in Night Shift.) Movies like Return of the Living Dead, Evil Dead 2 and Reanimator served the same purpose in a much cruder way. And of course there was Carpenter’s The Thing.

Those sources have a lot of literal partitioning and repurposing of flesh. Once you venture into poetry, though, where the metamorphoses can be simultaneously literal and metaphorical, things really get fun. From there, I guess that’s how I get to stories like “Monster,” where you have a serial killer who’s also a math equation.

The second, and closely related “Mike Allenesque” characteristic that threads through most of your work, even at its darkest, its most violent, and grotesque, is a certain celebratory quality, a rapt reveling, an almost rhapsodic delight in the linguistic expression of entity and being, no matter how agonized, entropic, or abject. I wonder if this delight is related to what Thomas Ligotti has characterized as the “fun” underlying your writing. In his words, “ not ‘good’ fun, and certainly not ‘good clean’ fun,” but “laughter in the dark—unnerving, serious laughter.”

What, for you, is “fun” about your work? What is serious? What’s the difference?

This is really challenging to answer — but thank you for asking!

All of it has to be fun to some degree, or why do it?

At my littlest, way back in the haze of the first things I remember, my favorite toys were letters of the alphabet. I think that continues in a love I have for wordplay. I often end up pruning back that tendency in the finished product so it doesn’t distract from the narrative, though I can’t resist leaving alliteration and internal rhymes here and there.

The notion that “demented” and “entertaining” can be synonyms arose in my teen years. There were all those 1980s horror movies that were both scary and funny. Those were also the years, much to the chagrin of my parents, that I discovered my love of heavy metal. For some, these teen passions fade, but for me, this particular one never has. The music could trigger these crazy fugues of imagery that spouted from a similar vein (so to speak) as those super-intense nightmares I had when I was younger. My story “Let There Be Darkness” is basically a transcription of one of those fugues, inspired by Slayer’s “South of Heaven.”

“Let There Be Darkness” is inspired by Slayer’s “South of Heaven.”

The story in Unseaming that is pure fun-for-fun’s-sake is “An Invitation via E-mail,” which has occasionally been dinged for being shallow and mean-spirited compared to the other stories. So be it, it’s short and fun to read aloud.

Beyond “demented,” there’s “disturbing.” My favorite novels when I was young tended to be books like The Lord of the Rings and later The Chronicles of Amber, that swept me up in the grandeur of their inventions. The short stories that stuck with me the longest, though, were the ones that disturbed me, like “Pickman’s Model” or “Descending” or “I Have No Mouth, but I Must Scream.” So when I am writing, I have this real Imp of the Perverse impulse to aim at recreating those experiences for whomever ends up being my reader. I can even experience a kind of “Eureka!” glee when I sense that I’m on track toward that goal. I think Tom was able to peer with laser precision through the words and perceive the Imp at work.

All the above makes it sound like none of this is serious for me, but there are things I’m deadly serious about. My anecdotal sense of the world we live in is that we humans lie to ourselves all the time about how good we supposedly are, that we’ve constructed a society that at best pays mere lip service to what’s good and at worst actively punishes the selfless while rewarding the selfish. These notions, and the anger they inspire, also inform my writing, though not in a way that’s intended to convey a prescriptive message.

While we are back on the subject of Ligotti, you’ve mentioned your admiration for, and an homage to, his work above. Can you elaborate about your reception of his work? What aspects of it have influenced your writing, and how? How did Ligotti come to read and review your collection Unseaming?

I’m not 100% certain whether the first thing I read by Tom was “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story” in David Hartwell’s Foundations of Fear anthology or whether it was Grimscribe: His Life and Works. I recall finding Grimscribe in a bookstore (it had a blurb comparing him to Barker, an instant hook for me), then soon after special ordering Songs of a Dead Dreamer.

A Clive Barker blurb atop a portrait of Megatherion introduced Ligotti’s oneiric entropy to some…

His stories have a dreamlike quality that hit me where it hurts so good. By the time I encountered Ligotti’s works, I was a huge fan of all things with a Lovecraftian echo, and I appreciated how he shifted cosmic horror into psychological and metaphysical realms. Grimscribe is full of spectacularly creepy stories, like “Nethescurial,” which features an ending that’s both terrifying and darkly hilarious. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, my poem “No One” sincerely flatters that story.

The late, lamented David G. Hartwell’s seminal collection introduced it to many others….

I think my world view might be at heart just as dark as his, but whereas his is articulately thought out, mine is more of a gut reaction, or a reaction involving guts, perhaps?

The short answer to why he wrote me a blurb: I screwed up my courage and asked him. Longer context: from 1999ish to 2005, I was a volunteer editor with DNA Publications after they moved from Massachusetts to Floyd, Virginia. Publisher Warren Lapine made my poetry zine, Mythic Delirium, part of the DNA stable, which meant it became a sister magazine to Weird Tales, which at the time was regularly publishing new Ligotti tales. (Including one of my absolute favorites, “Purity.”) Generally speaking, at DNA I learned that getting “name” authors to participate in things really involved pulling one’s grownup pants on and asking, because they’re not necessarily going to say no. (Though if they do, don’t argue, take no for an answer.) Specifically, I first reached out to Tom to see if he’d contribute to a project, and though he declined, I shared my poems with him and he had nice things to say. I was grateful to find the door still open as Unseaming came together.

Back in 2014, while PstD was still a paper journal and Dominik Parisien was our poetry editor, your poem “Dearly Beloved” was the featured poem in our 5^thvolume. I’m curious, first, about why you enlisted Dominik to curate and edit the selection in Hungry Constellations. In her introduction to the collection, Amal el-Mohtar characterizes him as more of a collaborator than editor – is that a fair assessment? What was that process like?

Dom had made the mistake of telling me how much he admired my poetry, and demonstrating some familiarity with it beyond just stumbling across a poem or two on a website hither and yon. A dangerous thing to do!

Like The Spider Tapestries, Hungry Constellations has mundane origins. When I ran the Mythic Delirium Kickstarter in 2013, I offered as one of the rewards an omnibus collecting all of my poems. When it came time to put that together I had second thoughts. We writers love all our babies to some degree, but some of my published poems I’m just not super-excited about including in a book intended as a showcase.

I selected and ordered all the poems in my previous big collections, Strange Wisdoms of the Dead and The Journey to Kailash. It occurred to me that making this next book a “new and selected poems”-type volume would add esthetic value, but that would require enlisting someone else’s editorial vision. Though his super-successful editing collaborations with Navah Wolfe were still in the future, Dom’s interests in and knowledge of poetry and weird fiction generally and in my work in particular suggested to me he’d be a good choice, and bless him, he was willing to do it. (Worth noting, also, Dom had previously done editorial work for the Ann VanderMeer incarnation of Weird Tales, where “An Invitation via E-mail” appeared.)

I guess you’ll have to judge whether this sounds like collaboration. Essentially, I presented my entire twenty-odd-year accumulation of poetic work to him and asked him to decide what formed a coherent book. (Piece of cake, right?) I’m thrilled with the job he did. There are poems that I would have included if left to my own devices that he didn’t, and vice versa. Even at the very end, when I decided to make a couple additions to the “New and Uncollected Poems” section, I cleared them with Dom first and asked for his guidance as to where to put them. A fascinating final bit came when Amal was reading the book for her introduction and she and Dom discussed his choices, with me carbon copied on the messages. Amal recognized that Hungry Constellations was very much Dom’s creation, with me having provided the clay.

Hungry Constellations also fills what I perceived as a void: it’s my only poetry collection available in e-book form.

In the PstD 5 introduction to “Dearly Beloved,” you cite “the photographic montages of Italian artist Allesandro Bavari” as the inspiration for the universe that poem shared with your Locus-recommended stories “Twa Sisters” and Still-Life with Skull,” both of which were subsequently reprinted in The Spider Tapestries. Can you tell us about the genesis and development of the world these fictions share? Is it a world to which you return, or will return, in more recent work?

My friend Patty Templeton came across Bavari’s work on an art blog she followed and shared it with me. I’ve never met or corresponded with Bavari so I doubt he knows what a debt I owe him, but his twisted photo collages were like slides from my most intense nightmares. He’s made short films, too, that are just as wild.

Nicole Kornher-Stace had issued me a challenge to write a short story the way I wrote poetry. She had use of language in mind, but I decided to bend those rules and take a stab at a story that imagined the surreal Boschian landscapes in Bavari’s images as real places, a technique I had used in a series of poems about 20^thcentury artists called “Disturbing Muses.” That story became “Twa Sisters.” The story uses some concrete poetry techniques, too, which made it really hard to find a publisher, heh. (Bless you, Not One of Us!) I took a second stab at working in that bizarre world without the visual prose tricks, which became “Still Life With Skull.”

The series by Bavari that inspired me most bears the title “Sodom and Gomorrah.” Despite the elements of horror in some of those works, there’s also an anarchic pansexual delight that I fully incorporated into these stories, where sex, gender and physiognomy can be switched like jackets, so the notion that someone would be judged by their sexual orientation or appearance has become alien as the void. On the downside, I suppose, I also imagine this world as a place where all the constant, invasive surveillance we fret about here in the U.S. via NSA collusion with Google, Facebook, etc. is something that most everyone simply accepts as being as inevitable as death and taxes.

I’ve got a novelette sitting on the back burner, “The Threefold Feather,” that will probably be my final venture into this world. The first draft is finished. Someday, I’ll get back to it…

In the same introduction you describe Bavari’s work as “visual speculative fiction masquerading as fine art.” I love the characterization; can you say a little more about what you think constitutes visual speculative art? What is it about Bavari’s images that inspired this characterization? Who are some other artists whose work you’d align with the same category?

It’s part of what attracted me so much to his work: to me, regarding the photos in his “Sodom and Gomorrah” series seem very much like peering into a parallel word, where the rules of existence must be quite different from ours, and yet it’s easy to imagine that there are rules of existence, that these aren’t just abstract doodles.

Even as a kid I was drawn to art that had this feel. I frequently checked out a book on Salvador Dali from the Wise library for that reason. I’ve never based any of my own writings on his work, though — maybe it feels like too obvious a thing to do?

The works of Remedios Varo absolutely have that feel for me — somebody I may try writing a “Disturbing Muses” piece about her. I also had that feel attending the Wassily Kandinksy exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2009, which eventually begat the poem “Kandinsky’s Galaxy.” Through my day job as an arts columnist I from time to time encountered works by contemporary artists that also, to my mind, have this feel, such as painter Bill Rutherfoord or textile artist Beverly Semmes, whose photographs were the inspiration for the antagonist in my short story “Longsleeves.”

Also on the topic of inter-influence between visual and literary speculative art, your wife Anita, whose influence on your writing you often acknowledge, is an accomplished visual artist. Can you (and perhaps Anita herself) tell us more about the relationship between her art and yours? Some of the ways they feed into, and off of, one another?

I just discussed this with Anita a little bit. She can write, but prefers to draw. I can draw, but prefer to write. We definite can work together in a symbiotic way when the need requires. Most important of all, we get each other.

Anita is definitely an artist whose work can have that “view into another world” feel. Her one and only solo show to date, “Beyond the Borders,” held in 2015 at a gallery here in Roanoke, was a gathering of fanciful creatures and monsters, some small as your fist, others so big and heavy it took four people to carry them from the truck to the gallery. Her own background in biology, specifically horticulture, played into it. (You can see some of the creatures from that show on the covers of Mythic Delirium 1.3 and 2.3.)

And, much like writing and editing, the visual arts require lots of icky self-promotion and the willingness to keep wading forward through avalanches of rejection, and Anita’s not super-thrilled at the prospect of either, so she’s never pushed her art to the degree I’ve pushed my writing. In her own words, Anita gets weirded out by the prospect of the limelight and prefers the shadows. Even so, she’s pulled off some really cool things, like that solo show, and I’m hugely proud of her for it.

She has a painting called “The Forest Lord,” of a mythical deer with antlers like clusters of tree branches crowning its head, that really resonates with me on a level I can’t explain. A character inspired by that image appears in The Black Fire Concerto and then reappears in somewhat different form in “Longsleeves.” They’re not the exact same character; those fictional universes aren’t connected, at least not yet, but clearly they’re linked on some other level. “Longsleeves” is almost like a funhouse mirror inversion of Black Fire Concerto, and the reappearance of the Antlered Man is a big part of what makes that so.

As I formulated the first questions for this interview, I was a little shocked to learn that your zine, Mythic Delirium, was going on hiatus after having been a vital touchstone in the world of indie weird and fantasy writing for the course of its 20 year career. Can you tell us more about the origins and history of the zine, and, especially, why you’ve decided to shelve it right now?

First, thank you for the kind words!

I explained both the history and the decision in some detail in the editorial for the final issue, it’s tempting to cut-and-paste, but that would double the length of this interview. I’ll attempt the Cliff’s Notes version.

When I decided to start Mythic Delirium, I’d already done two projects as an editor, the anthology New Dominions: Fantasy Stories by Virginia Writers (1995) and the e-zine Event Horizon (1997-98), which nowadays is mainly remembered as a footnote to Ellen Datlow’s e-zine of the same name. I was interested in continuing my editing ventures but I wanted to do it in a way that I could afford in terms of both money and time, and I didn’t want to answer to anyone but myself. My idea for how to do this was to put out a biannual poetry zine, and those were the mundane origins of Mythic Delirium. I mentioned earlier that once I was with DNA, Warren Lapine offered to take over the publishing end, which is how Mythic Delirium became a sister zine of Weird Tales. So far as I know, Mythic Delirium was the only genre poetry zine ever to be in a position like that — it wasn’t distributed on newsstands, but it was advertised in magazines that were, and included in subscription packages. It helped the zine build up a large enough base that when we parted from DNA in 2005 (and Warren generously let us keep our subscribers), we were able to keep going on our own for a pretty long time.

Fast forward to post-2013, when we reinvented Mythic Delirium as a webzine that included fiction as well as poetry. I am as proud of this chapter of the zine’s life as I am of everything that came before. However, the zine made very little money on its own — the bulk of the support it got was essentially a side effect of the Clockwork Phoenix Kickstarter campaigns. My sense is that the field appreciated Mythic Delirium, but it was a passive appreciation; there were no flurries of social media excitement when new issues came out, and reviewers would for the most part ignore it. I was putting a lot of time into editing and formatting, and creating all those different e-book formats drained away time I could use for my own writing; there were nowhere near enough subscription purchases to justify paying someone else to do that labor. I had to coldly consider ratios of work invested vs. reward, and I concluded that, barring some miracle, I would end the zine in Spring 2018, giving it a classy farewell instead of just shutting off the hose. I at least got enough support to make that possible.

If I remember right, I reached that decision in 2016, and even before then it had loomed as a possibility.

Funny thing about me: I’m an agnostic, but I believe, perhaps irrationally, in guidance offered by serendipity. There were times, earlier in Mythic Delirium’s history, when I considered shutting it down, but something always happened that convinced me the time wasn’t right. This time it worked the opposite way: things that might have made me reconsider resoundingly did not happen. There were other things that happened, though–I’ll keep those details private–that made me happy I didn’t have much longer to go.

That knowledge also made me work even harder to make the final run of issues special. So I have no regrets.

We’re reprinting your short story, “Tardigrade,” as part of the feature. Can you provide us with a little context for the story – its inspiration, when and how you wrote it, what it is about the story you continue to find most effective or interesting, its prior publication history?

I started “Tardigrade” as a lark back in late 2013. At first, it was just a vignette meant to scare a friend of mine who I thought might squirm while reading about bad things happening to teeth, and who has a phobia of slugs. (The original title was “We Make Holes in Teeth,” the Cavity Creeps chant from the old Crest commercial.) That friend is pretty unflappable, and to this day I don’t know if they found that vignette the least bit scary, as I didn’t hear back after I sent it.

I love visual experiments in text, and in its first form the story was just descriptions of creepy Internet videos and the commands to activate them, though the notion that the things depicted were connected wasn’t as clear as I would have liked it to have been. The story want on the back burner for several months while I drafted The Ghoulmaker’s Aria (the sequel to The Black Fire Concerto) and when I came back to it I decided that for it to really work, we needed to see the person watching the videos. At that point it started to morph into “Tardigrade.” A couple months later I received an unexpected invitation from Jason V. Brock to contribute to his anthology A Darke Phantastique, if I could turn something around within a week (!!!) — I finished up “Tardigrade,” Jason loved it, and before the end of the year it was out in print, one of the few times I’ve had something snap together that fast.

Where else can our readers find your work (both online and in print) and, for those who are just beginning to explore it, where would you suggest they start?

If I might indulge in a radio show-style deep cut: if you’re interested in a varied sampling of my poetry, you can go to descentintolight.com and check out this entry, which links to a series of posts I did for National Poetry Month in 2011 in which I reprinted 13 of the poems collected in The Journey to Kailash, and discussed in detail how and why I wrote them. I also did audio readings of each poem, which you can listen to if you enable Adobe Flash.

If you want more free samples, a number of my stories have been reprinted online or adapted into podcasts. Apex Magazine reprinted both my Nebula-nominated story “The Button Bin” and its novella-length sequel “The Quiltmaker.” Wilson Fowlie’s reading of “The Button Bin” at Pseudopod has been praised as one of the site’s best podcasts, period. StarShipSofa has a reading I recorded of “Her Acres of Pastoral Playground” that incorporates sound effects. Tales to Terrify has a great reading by C. S. E. Cooney of “The Red Empress,” the first chapter in The Black Fire Concerto. Setsu Uzume made a delightful recording at Podcastle of my new-ish story “The Cruelest Team Will Win.”

And there’s plenty more out there. Most of the books that I’ve mentioned remain in print and available through online retailers. The Mythic Delirium Books website has links to most of the ones actively available, and my author home page has links to a few more.

Thanks, Mike, for sharing these generous responses, and this wealth of resources, with our readers!

Tagged Allesandro Bavari, Amal el-Mohtar, anita allen, Ann VanderMeer, body horror, Clive Barker, clockwork phoenix, demented, disturbing, Dominik Parisien, edgar allan poe, Grimscribe, h. p. lovecraft, harlan ellison, horror fiction, horror films, j.r.r. tolkien, Jason v. brock, John carpenter, Mike Allen, mythic delerium, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Peter Straub, Remedios Varo, speculative fiction, speculative poetry, stephen king, Thomas Ligotti, unseaming, Ursula K. LeGuin, weird fiction

Mar 09 2017

Uncategorized

PSTD BOOK REVIEW: REVENGE OF THE VAMPIR KING

by Lydia Peever

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Those who devour vampire fiction will be familiar with Nancy Kilpatrick. With hundreds of credits to her name, and having complied The Goth Bible, she has become irrevocably fused with the genre. Considering her contributions, that is a wonderful thing.

Her latest foray into endless night is an epic series, projected at over a half dozen books, entitled ‘Thrones of Blood.’ Revenge of the Vampir King is the first volume in this series, released by Crossroad Press in ebook format on February 1, 2017, with the paperback to follow. Judging by the elastic length of the electronic version, this will be a thick volume at nearly 300 pages, giving lovers of meaty series that drip blood from every page one to sink their teeth into. Within the first chapter, however, it will have sunk its teeth into you, for better or worse.

Kilpatrick has decades of expertise on vampires; books about them could be considered her legacy. Scounds of short stories spatter her bibliography. She has curated anthologies of sanguine sagas as editor of Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead, and the follow-up Evolve: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead. Her collections, like Vampyric Variations and the appropriately titled The Vampire Stories of Nancy Kilpatrick, and a number of novels, both under her name and her pseudonym Amarantha Knight, capture the immortal imagination–Dracul, Bloodlover, and Child of the Night–to name a few.

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With the cyclical popularity of long and involved series resurgent lately, it seems like perfect timing for a writer so at home with these nocturnal fascinations. There are other fascinations to be had in her writing, too. Whip cracks of erotica, flirting with exploitative porn and hard-line kink, may make some readers flinch… or beg for mercy. Those with a bookshelf full of non-fiction kink or erotic horror with a stomach for sexual violence may relish the experience.

Those who come to the horror genre seeking more than one kind of release may very well find it here. On top of that, the exploits of vampir King Moarte and his reluctant captor-cum-bride Valada go from a master and slave dynamic to a travelling and plotting duo, as the story morphs between fantasy fiction and espionage tale, slippery with deceit and betrayal.

Revenge of the Vampir King may seem to have something for everyone and appear vastly inclusive at first glance; however, upon inspection, you can see how the audience may shrink. Regency vampires, sword and sorcery, plus the highly sexualized nature of these beasts may appeal to a only a few clans in the horde of vampire fans, since there are so many incarnations of the blood-drinkers to be drawn to. If you have an affinity for modern speech and balk at the fantasy genre’s penchant for flowery and dramatic dialogue, then you may fall out of the net here. The harder division line comes with the fusion of violence and sexuality, as noted earlier, and some may not be able to see past the submissive nature or the brutal treatment of some characters.

Where the words slave and master will thrill some readers, they could drive others away.

All in all, it is brave piece of fiction for readers seeking a deep plunge into sex, swords and sanguine sensuality.

Lydia Peever is a horror author and journalist from Ontario, Canada. She is a big fan of horror music, books and film–so anywhere there is blood, you will probably find her lurking somewhere in the corner.

Her short stories have appeared in Postscripts To Darkness, Dark Moon Digest, For When The Veil Drops and her small collection, Pray Lied Eve and its sequel Pray Lied Eve 2. The follow up to her first novel Nightface has also been written.

In her spare time, she helps update the new releases section of the Horror Writers Association website, photographs zombie walks or bloody punk rock bands, and records a few podcasts.

You can read her earlier in-depth PstD interview with Nancy Kilpatrick here.

Postscripts to Darkness

psssst…..dear darkness….are you there?

Category Archives: Uncategorized

“The dread contemplation of infinity”: Some Thoughts on George M. Gould and Cosmic Horror Before Lovecraft

The Devil and Edgar Poe: Poe’s Romantic Satanism and its Influence on Contemporary Religious Satanism, or, Getting Intimate with Poe As Prophylaxis Against Losing A Limb on the Left Hand Path

PSTD AUTHOR INTERVIEW: MIKE ALLEN

PSTD BOOK REVIEW: REVENGE OF THE VAMPIR KING