Читать книгу Weird Tales #334 - Darrell Schweitzer - Страница 5

THE EYRIE

Who Killed Horror? The Murder on the Orient Express Solution

Here we were all set to write an editorial about something else, when, due to the vagaries of the international postal system, we only now (late September) received a copy of the April issue of that admirable British science fiction and fantasy magazines, Interzone, which contains a column by one of our favorite commentators, Gary Westfahl, with the arresting title of “Who Didn’t Kill Horror?” Well, we had to read that right away, and as a result pushed our other editorial idea forward an issue or two.

Who killed Horror? Those of us old enough (or historically cognizant enough) to remember the 1961 Hugo Awards know that there actually was a publication called Who Killed Science Fiction? which won a Hugo for Best Fanzine that year. Yet Science Fiction isn’t dead, is it? Westfahl doesn’t think so. Nor does the editor of Interzone, obviously, but that is a discussion for another time and place. Horror has been reported dead many times. “Who Killed Horror?” panels have been mainstays at conventions for at least a decade by now, ever since…they found the body? Or did they? To the point, Westfahl concludes:

“…in confronting what happened to horror, we arrive at a conclusion rarely observed in the literature of detective fiction: the detective eliminates all the obvious suspects and announces to the interested parties, “Something much more complicated than a simple murder is going on here, so we must launch a ­thoroughgoing investigation of the various factors that might have contributed to the victim’s death.”

In sum, determining who—if anybody—killed horror does not demand the services of police officers or detectives to find a perpetrator; instead it requires a doctor of forensic medicine who is prepared to ­conduct an extensive autopsy and diligently search for the true cause or causes of death. On the basis of my cursory ­examinations, such a figure in the field of horror has not yet emerged. (p. 51)

But at the same time, the unstated subtext of Westfahl’s article is the Murder on the Orient Express solution. Sorry if this is a spoiler, but we think that the novel—and film—are now so famous that most people know the ending: Agatha Christie, in the course of systematically breaking the “rules” of detective fiction one by one, finally went over the top and did a novel in which everybody participated in the murder, all the suspects, several hangers-on, and probably a few people nobody bothered to notice. Westfahl doesn’t succeed in eliminating any of the usual suspects, pointing out that, when horror was making lots of money, it was only natural that more writers, including less talented ones, would flock to the field, and that publishers were not about to say, “Well this isn’t very good, so, for the sake of the integrity of the genre, we’ll publish something less profitable.” Maybe for a time readers would tolerate the results. Then they didn’t. But other fields have undergone this sort of boom/flood-of-crud/bust cycle, including, most obviously, science ­fiction, which was at the bottom of a collapse when Who Killed Science Fiction? came out. It is very helpful for Westfahl to question the accepted wisdom on this matter. We’d like to ask a few more questions:

Is the victim really dead? Here’s an anecdote. Back in the 1980s, when one of us (Darrell) began to sell stories to magazines like Night Cry and The Horror Show, we were given a bit of career advice by a very respected editor of the time. “Re-invent yourself,” he said. “Disown everything you have done up till now. Cut all connection with science fiction, fantasy, fandom, conventions, and fanzines and become a new person, a Horror Writer, whose career will be much more profitable. Dress differently. And oh, by the way, grow a moustache.” Well, we ­didn’t. For one thing, we were reluctant to disown everything we’d written up to that time, maybe out of sheer egotism. (We are still not at all embarrassed by The Shattered Goddess or the Tom O’Bedlam stories.) We also don’t like the idea of turning our back on old friends and associates merely for career advantage. Hey, fandom is our tribe. We are a part of it and it is a part of us. There might also be the objection that a moustache would mar such boyish good looks as we allegedly still possessed in those days or become a repository for week-old soup; but the more serious point is that if we had taken that editor’s advice, we might have found ourselves on the proverbial (or metaphorical) bread-line with the rest of the ex-horror writers. Instead, we went on to write The Mask of the Sorcerer and the other Sekenre stories, more Tom O’Bedlam, and quite a bit else which has pleased at least some readers. There might have been short-term career advantage to total re-invention as a horror writer. It worked for Dean Koontz, didn’t it? We might have had a couple good years around 1988, but by the early ’90s, something catastrophic had clearly happened to the horror field. Those black-covered books with the demonic children and the embossed drop of blood visible through the show-through outer cover were disappearing. With them went, frequently, the entire horror section in major bookstores. Publishing houses which used to have major horror lines and full-time horror editors now didn’t. The field imploded, largely collapsing down to the small-press or near vanity-press level, where one could become a “big name” with a print-on-demand novel that sold four hundred copies. The first sign of trouble was something we noted at the time in one of these editorials: the attempt to remove the supernatural elements from horror fiction and repackage it as “Dark Suspense.” Ramsey Campbell, in the interview we did with him for H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, discusses this candidly. He was told in no uncertain terms that ghostlies didn’t sell and he should remake himself in the image of Thomas Harris, he of The Silence of the Lambs fame. It was an astonishing thing to demand of an author who’d written more first-rate supernatural horror fiction than anybody, ever. Fortunately, the ghostly Mr. Campbell survived, and his career continues apace. Fortunately Weird Tales survived, and is now the equivalent of a still-living denizen of the Jurassic, rather like a shark or a ginko tree, which existed in pretty much the same form when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Many of the ex-horror writers didn’t make it. One year at NECon (Northeast Regional Fantasy Convention, sort of a “summer camp for horror writers”) this was particularly evident when all the freebie books by attending writers were media tie-in novels. That’s where some of them went. Others (like Joe Lansdale) stayed in “dark suspense” and merged into the crime-fiction field (where Lansdale is doing very well, thank you). And a few, like Ramsey Campbell, are still writing what they always did. But it is impossible to deny that, if the field is not dead, it is at a low ebb, comparable to where science fiction was in 1960. We will continue to tap-dance around the question of who killed it. Publishing scuttlebutt has it that one very central, prominent mass-market horror imprint failed so badly, that with classic corporate logic, it was allowed to continue for the next five years with smaller and smaller budgets and print-runs, so accountants could spread the zillion-dollar loss out over several years, rather than take it all at once. When this was over, so was the field, as far as the Big Boys were concerned. That’s one more suspect to the long list, again reminding is of the ending of Murder on the Orient Express. Not only did we not grow that moustache, but also we came away with a feeling of having missed the plane that crashed. There is something to be said for versatility. In the corporate world of bestseller-or-die publishing, this may be faulted as lack of focus, but we are still happy to have the ability to move, with some degree of success, between fantasy, horror, science fiction, and various types of non-fiction when conditions warrant. The last thing we wrote for pay before doing this editorial was an article on Urban Legends for a reference book to be published by Gale Research. We note, for instance, illustrious horror writers of the past, such as Fritz Leiber and Richard Matheson, have been well served by an ability to write more than just horror. Had we been giving that advice to a young writer, circa 1986, we would have said, “Never mind the moustache. Yes, horror looks like it’s getting big, so now is the time to write a horror novel. But don’t get yourself so typed that you haven’t got anything else to fall back on.”

Was the victim ever alive? Westfahl suggests, probably without 100% belief, that maybe “horror is a form of narrative, like westerns, pirate stories, and jungle adventures, that is by its nature becoming outdated, a problem that cannot be solved by superficial transformations to accommodate contemporary sensibilities.” Perhaps, he goes on to say, it is a fad which cannot endure, like hula-hoops or pet rocks. We’re sure that Westfahl is just teasing us with this possibility, because he is a very knowledgeable critic, who is well aware that something identifiable as horror fiction has existed for centuries, and that the duration of hula-hoops and pet rocks is not even a blip on its timeline. But there is a serious question here: Was horror ever viable as a commercial genre? Of course there have been supernatural horror stories published for a very long time. Poe was active in the 1840s and hasn’t been out of print since. Dracula has never been out of print since its first publication in 1897. Weird Tales has published horror fiction (but was never a 100% horror magazine) in all its incarnations over the past eighty years. But such classic horror novels as The Haunting of Hill House (1959) were published as “mainstream” novels. The first attempt to make horror into a genre, in the sense of a category of publishing with its own packaged “look,” its own editors, imprints, and niche in the bookstore may have begun only about 1960 with a couple anthologies from Ace (Macabre and More Macabre) and, more significantly, by a series of Ballantine books, which had Richard Powers covers and a distinct design which told the reader that here was another of “those books.” The line was a modest success. It included a couple of Sarban titles, one H.R. Wakefield, and Fritz Leiber’s Shadows With Eyes (1962). We’re not old enough to remember where these books were placed in stores, but it was probably in the science-fiction section. There was certainly no horror section then, anymore than there had been in 1840 or 1897. Toward the end of the 1960s Lin Carter invented a publishing category. In the wake of the huge success of The Lord of the Rings in paperback, he created the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series. Most of the books were reprints, many dating back into the 19th century (and one, Beckford’s Vathek, to the 18th), but they were Carter’s attempt to build a canon, define a category and an audience, and create a new “kind” of book. Before that, fantasy books were published either as mainstream (e.g. The Once and Future King), as juveniles (the works of Alan Garner) or disguised as science fiction. Carter’s experiment worked. In fact it worked so hugely well that it completely absorbed the contemporary and more limited publishing phenomenon of Sword & Sorcery, which derived its content and imagery, not from Tolkien, but from Robert E. Howard. Why didn’t this work with horror, which tried to do the same thing with post-Exorcist, post-Stephen King supernatural fiction? Clearly it did not. Entirely too great an edifice was built on too small a foundation, and it came crashing down. This is not to suggest a definite solution. Westfahl is right that the matter will take more study and a careful autopsy. But we would add to the roster of everybody-did-it suspects (and we haven’t even begun to talk about the debasement of audience expectations due to the influence of slasher films) publishers, editors, and writers who define horror too narrowly. We saw symptoms of this long ago too. One of the other things one of the editors we knew in the ’80s told us, was that no matter how much he admired our horror fiction, he “couldn’t read” stories set in the historical past, in imaginary lands, or on other planets. He certainly couldn’t regard them as horror, for all we have consistently argued that a story about a man who comes back from the grave and crawls into bed with his wife (“Going to the Mountain,” in Refugees from an Imaginary Country) is still horror, whether set in contemporary New Jersey or in some ancient and fabulous land where gods still walk the Earth. We’ve always felt that Clark Ashton Smith stories are horrifying, whether set in the present day, in medieval Averoigne, pre-historic Hyperborea, or on the planet Mars. This blurs definitions, a corporate publisher’s salesman is going to object. You bet it does. We also think it’s one of the reasons why Weird Tales is still here and the paperback line which so thunderously carried off the core of the horror category in the middle ’90s is not. We have always done our best to broaden the definition of what we will publish, not narrow it. Our friends the horror editors of the ’80s were very insistent that they didn’t want horror fiction outside of a contemporary frame of reference. This seems to have applied to the whole field during the boom years. With such exceptions as Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s historical vampire novels (which are arguably selling as Romance, rather than horror), the rule seem to have always been that category horror could not be set prior to Victorian times. We can only ask: how many post-King books about lower-middle-class families in supernatural peril does anybody want to read? Maybe what happened is that repetition set in, caused by over-narrow definitions and expectations on the part of both producers and consumers of horror, and everybody just got bored. Maybe the “field” was too narrow to ever have been successful. It was a chimera. Nobody killed it because it was never alive. Maybe we’ll just have to go back to how things were from the beginnings of literature until about 1980, when horror and supernatural books and stories were published aplenty, but there was no “category” at all. At least for a while. After all this is horror we’re talking about, where things can’t be trusted to stay dead, even things that have never, strictly speaking, been alive.

The Most Popular Story in issue 331, we may have to give up on as a lost cause. Voting has been very light. We do, however, have enough in hand to declare Robert E. Waters’s first published story, “The Assassin’s Retirement Party” the winner for issue 332. Second place goes to “Shatter” by Kelly McCullough, and third to “The Archpriest’s Potion” by Keith Taylor.

We continue to get letters, though never enough of them, including the following from Christopher Dunn, who writes: Dear Gibbering Degenerates, or is it Degenerate Gibberers? Delighted to hear of Great Cthulhu’s 75th, & paper party hat. As it is written (according to the new, true, & authentic demysticized translation): Nor is it to be thought, that man is either the oldest or the last of the earth’s party animals, or that the common dolt and life of the party stumbles on alone. The Old Ones partied, the Old Ones party, and the Old Ones shall party. Not in the discos we know [Yes, Alhazred mentions disco.…] but between them they whirl, stomp, and pirouette in steps undecipherable and to us unseemly. Yog-Sothoth knows the gait; Yog-Sothoth is the gait…

Or as Alhzared summed it up:

That is some hangover which must eternal lie. After strange revels He may wish he could die.

Being entirely unable to respond to that one—there’s a limit even to eldritch blasphemy—we shamble hastily on to the following epistle from Steve Allseys: With great interest I read your latest Eyrie article about the true nature of Lovecraft’s fictional universe and the inadequate way Derleth attempted to reproduce it. I believe, however, that there are still some mistaken notions about the Mythos that linger on even now. These may be the result of drawing assumptions from HPL’s biography and then superimposing them upon the Mythos. You remark upon this context by saying that in HPL’s story, “there is no moral order to the universe, no God or ‘spirit’ in any sense…” A few lines down, is the statement that “Lovecraft was describing, unflinchingly, the universe revealed by science.” (Page 6, issue 332.) Really? Is this Arthur C. Clarke, then, we are talking about? When we think back to Lovecraft’s longest “series” about his clearly delineated alter-ego Randolph Carter, I can think of many instances that demonstrate the existence of all kinds of supernatural manifestations in his tales. Do you really believe that creatures such as Cthulhu exist in a materialistic, scientific universe? Lovecraft was simply replacing traditional theological concepts with his own brand of inverted horror theology. In the case of Randolph Carter, whose primary motivation most of the time was to achieve ever-heightened, lucid ecstacies in his presumably supernatural dream-life, we find in the opening of The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath that he “prayed long and earnestly to the hidden gods of dream…” Not exactly the sentiments of an atheist in our modern understanding of the word. Atheists do not “pray.” Further, on the next page, we find that in the Lovecraft universe there really is a “god”: “that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion that blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity”—Azathoth. The fact that the very location of Azathoth defines the center of the universe makes this being the “God” of the Mythos. In the poem, “Azathoth,” we read that from the abominable dancing of Azathoth and the Other Gods “flow the aimless waves whose chance combining gives each frail cosmos its eternal law.” Here, then, is the supernatural being that serves as HPL’s “anti-god,” for nowhere in the cold, stark universe are these muffled, vile drums and thin cracked flutes going. Oh, you could say that I am being too literal, and that these are mere symbols of chaos, and that chaos itself is not a form of order. But just try telling that to Carter when he is preparing his candles for his evening bout of slumber beyond the Gates of Dream. I know of no writer who puts as much faith in the magic of life as Lovecraft.

To which we can say, no we’re not talking about Arthur C. Clarke. He sometimes shows a mystical streak that Lovecraft completely lacks. One needs only to read Lovecraft’s letters or such essays as “The Materialist Today” or “A Confession of Unfaith,” not to mention his autobiographical writings, and Joshi’s H.P. Lovecraft: A Life to get as very clear impression that Lovecraft was one of the most materialistic and un-religious persons who ever lived. Aside from a childish fancy, more play than serious belief, in which he supposedly glimpsed Diana and fauns in the woods around Providence—which he later argued was just as valid as any other mystical experience—Lovecraft had no non-materialist leanings at all.

You are reversing the mistake you accuse us of. You are trying to take material from the stories and apply them to the author’s life.

In the dream-universe of Randolph Carter, yes, there are gods; and prayers have effects; but this is fantasy fiction, and, for Lovecraft, very unsatisfactory fantasy fiction at that. Remember that he regarded The Dream Quest of Unknown Ka­dath as no more than a “practice” novel, not something good enough to type or publish, and was not published until after his death.) The characters may have theologies. Lovecraft himself did not. In his more “realistic” fiction, such as “The Colour Out of Space” and “At the Mountains of Madness,” there is no “spirit” realm at all, only the vastness of the cosmos in which mankind plays no significant rôle.

Of course Lovecraft did not literally believe in the existence of Cthulhu. “The Call of Cthulhu” is fiction—but the Great One does indeed, within the story, exist in a “materialistic” universe. He is a vastly powerful extraterrestrial being, who came to the Earth from the stars, not from the spirit realm. And yes, we do think it is symbolic and significant that the “god” of the Lovecraftian universe is the mindless chaos called Azathoth.