The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Read online

  Dedicated to Nicolas Cheetham, Gio Clairval, and all of the editors who helped us by way of example or advice

  Table of Contents

  Foreweird by Michael Moorcock

  Introduction by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

  “The Other Side” (excerpt), 1908, Alfred Kubin

  “The Screaming Skull,” 1908, F. Marion Crawford

  “The Willows,” 1907, Algernon Blackwood

  “Sredni Vashtar,” 1910, Saki

  “Casting the Runes,” 1911, M.R. James

  “How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles,” 1912, Lord Dunsany

  “The Man in the Bottle,” 1912, Gustav Meyrink

  “The Dissection,” 1913, Georg Heym

  “The Spider,” 1915, Hanns Heinz Ewers

  “The Hungry Stones,” 1916, Rabindranath Tagore

  “The Vegetable Man,” 1917, Luigi Ugolini

  “The People of the Pit,” 1918, A. Merritt

  “The Hell Screen,” 1918, Ryunosuke Akutagawa

  “Unseen—Unfeared,” 1919, Francis Stevens

  “In the Penal Colony,” 1919, Franz Kafka

  “The White Wyrak,” 1921, Stefan Grabinski

  “The Night Wire,” 1926, H.F. Arnold

  “The Dunwich Horror,” 1929, H.P. Lovecraft

  “The Book,” 1930, Margaret Irwin

  “The Mainz Psalter,” 1930, Jean Ray

  “The Shadowy Street,” 1931, Jean Ray

  “Genius Loci,” 1933, Clark Ashton Smith

  “The Town of Cats,” 1935, Hagiwara Sakutar

  “The Tarn,” 1936, Hugh Walpole

  “Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass,” 1937, Bruno Schulz

  “Far Below,” 1939, Robert Barbour Johnson

  “Smoke Ghost,” 1941, Fritz Leiber

  “White Rabbits,” 1941, Leonora Carrington

  “Mimic,” 1942, Donald Wollheim

  “The Crowd,” 1943, Ray Bradbury

  “The Long Sheet,” 1944, William Sansom

  “The Aleph,” 1945, Jorge Luis Borges

  “A Child in the Bush of Ghosts,” 1949, Olympe Bhêly-Quénum

  “The Summer People,” 1950, Shirley Jackson

  “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles,” 1951, Margaret St. Clair

  “The Hungry House,” 1951, Robert Bloch

  “The Complete Gentleman,” 1952, Amos Tutuola

  “‘It’s a Good Life,’” 1953, Jerome Bixby

  “Mister Taylor,” 1952, Augusto Monterroso

  “Axolotl,” 1956, Julio Cortázar

  “A Woman Seldom Found,” 1956, William Sansom

  “The Howling Man,” 1959, Charles Beaumont

  “Same Time, Same Place,” 1963, Mervyn Peake

  “The Other Side of the Mountain,” 1967, Michel Bernanos

  “The Salamander,” 1967, Mercè Rodoreda

  “The Ghoulbird,” 1967, Claude Seignolle

  “The Sea Was Wet As Wet Could Be,” 1967, Gahan Wilson

  “Don’t Look Now,” 1971, Daphne Du Maurier

  “The Hospice,” 1975, Robert Aickman

  “It Only Comes Out at Night,” 1976, Dennis Etchison

  “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Terrible Things to Rats,” 1976, James Tiptree, Jr.

  “The Beak Doctor,” 1977, Eric Basso

  “My Mother,” 1978, Jamaica Kincaid

  “Sandkings,” 1979, George R.R. Martin

  “Window,” 1980, Bob Leman

  “The Brood,” 1980, Ramsey Campbell

  “The Autopsy,” 1980, Michael Shea

  “The Belonging Kind,” 1981, William Gibson/John Shirley

  “Egnaro,” 1981, M. John Harrison

  “The Little Dirty Girl,” 1982, Joanna Russ

  “The New Rays,” 1982, M. John Harrison

  “The Discovery of Telenapota,” 1984, Premendra Mitra

  “Soft,” 1984, F. Paul Wilson

  “Bloodchild,” 1984, Octavia Butler

  “In the Hills, the Cities,” 1984, Clive Barker

  “Tainaron: Mail From Another City,” 1985, Leena Krohn

  “Hogfoot Right and Bird-hands,” 1987, Garry Kilworth

  “Shades,” 1987, Lucius Shepard

  “The Function of Dream Sleep,” 1988, Harlan Ellison

  “Worlds That Flourish,” 1988, Ben Okri

  “The Boy in the Tree,” 1989, Elizabeth Hand

  “Family,” 1989, Joyce Carol Oates

  “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood,” 1990, Poppy Z. Brite

  “The End of the Garden,” 1991, Michal Ajvaz

  “The Dark,” 1991, Karen Joy Fowler

  “Angels in Love,” 1991, Kathe Koja

  “The Ice Man,” 1991, Haruki Murakami

  “Replacements,” 1992, Lisa Tuttle

  “The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio,” 1993, Marc Laidlaw

  “The Country Doctor,” 1993, Steven Utley

  “Last Rites and Resurrections,” 1994, Martin Simpson

  “The Ocean and All Its Devices,” 1994, William Browning Spencer

  “The Delicate,” 1994, Jeffrey Ford

  “The Man in the Black Suit,” 1994, Stephen King

  “The Snow Pavilion,” 1995, Angela Carter

  “The Meat Garden,” 1996, Craig Padawer

  “The Stiff and the Stile,” 1997, Stepan Chapman

  “Yellow and Red,” 1998, Tanith Lee

  “The Specialist’s Hat,” 1998, Kelly Link

  “A Redress for Andromeda,” 2000, Caitlín R. Kiernan

  “The God of Dark Laughter,” 2001, Michael Chabon

  “Details,” 2002, China Miéville

  “The Genius of Assassins,” 2002, Michael Cisco

  “Feeders and Eaters,” 2002, Neil Gaiman

  “The Cage,” 2002, Jeff VanderMeer

  “The Beautiful Gelreesh,” 2003, Jeffrey Ford

  “The Town Manager,” 2003, Thomas Ligotti

  “The Brotherhood of Mutilation,” 2003, Brian Evenson

  “The White Hands,” 2003, Mark Samuels

  “Flat Diane,” 2004, Daniel Abraham

  “Singing My Sister Down,” 2005, Margo Lanagan

  “The People on the Island,” 2005, T.M. Wright

  “The Forest,” 2007, Laird Barron

  “The Hide,” 2007, Liz Williams

  “Dust Enforcer,” 2008, Reza Negarestani

  “The Familiars,” 2009, Micaela Morrissette

  “In the Lion’s Den,” 2009, Steve Duffy

  “Little Lambs,” 2009, Stephen Graham Jones

  “The Portal,” 2010, J. Robert Lennon

  “Saving the Gleeful Horse,” 2010, K.J. Bishop

  Afterweird by China Miéville

  Acknowledgements

  Extended Copyrights

  About the Editors

  Photo

  Foreweird

  Michael Moorcock

  KEEP Austin Weird, it says on a popular bumper sticker for the city where I spend much of my time. That old Anglo-Saxon word for fate or destiny has taken on a lot of meanings. And, should you mention a coincidence to someone, they are likely to respond ‘Weird!’ That kid next door who prefers to read rather than play is weird. How weird is that? Weird has become one of those useful words which stands in for a certain look or rough telepathy – we all know pretty much what is meant. And if we don’t we ask, ‘What kind of weird?’ And the answer, as you’ll find, might be in any one of these stories.

  Science fiction was once described as the only popular fiction defined by what it is not. Perhaps the weird story can be defined in the same way. In pop
ular terms, it came to mean a supernatural story in something of the Gothic tradition and we currently have a plethora of bad Gothic, ‘shudder tales’ topping the charts in the media. There vampires, werewolves and ghouls produce an effect of the kind which made bosoms heave by the thousand in early Victorian times before the genre was relegated to the ranks of the shilling shocker or the tuppeny blood, still popular with the general public, if not polite society. No doubt the same fate awaits the children of Twilight…

  The ‘blood’ at the bottom of the literary pond was the 19th century’s version of the splatter tale in the 20th and 21st. And what is left after other definitions are exhausted is the weird story. The weird story can contain all the quality of a fine Modernist writer like Conrad or Bowen, a great popular novelist like Greene or a master of the numinous like Lansdale, whose finest stories often contain only a slight twist in reality to make them so good. Weird? We’re clearly comfortable with a term covering pretty much anything from absurdism to horror, even occasionally social realism.

  There are no established rules for the weird tale, which is at least part of the attraction if the story an author wants to tell can’t readily be told in an established form. Although it might often contain a supernatural element, or a suggested supernatural element, it does not have to do so. And I think we can now discard the notion that ‘weird’ in fiction only concerns itself with the manifestly supernatural and is written by heterosexual boys without girlfriends. I think the downgrading in critical esteem for the weird story happened when the market found something else it could commodify and then aim at a large specialized market to the extent that a certain type of reader will now attack a story precisely because it doesn’t fulfill the expectations of category. Both the Star Wars and Friday the Thirteenth franchises have much to answer for.

  Generally, the real tensions in literary forms come from that which can be readily commodified and branded and that which cannot. Fritz Leiber, one of the best American stylists I knew, told me that he had talked about this with two Weird Tales contributors, Robert Bloch (of Psycho fame) and Henry Kuttner (primarily a science fiction writer). All had begun writing unrationalized fiction, having much in common with surrealism or absurdism, to discover very quickly that literary magazines wanted an approximation of realism and commercial markets needed to know why, forcing you to cook up some sort of rationalization for the events you described so that you came to see your failure to rationalize as some sort of flaw or laziness in yourself. These days, writing for the supernatural fiction market is one way of meeting commercial interests halfway but, once the ambitious writer has established a reputation, it is common, almost endemic, that they begin dropping the generic elements from their work and hope to take their readership with them without otherwise compromising. Ray Bradbury, published originally in pulps like Weird Tales or Startling Stories, achieved this, as did J.G. Ballard, also first published in a generic fantasy magazine.

  Crossword puzzles don’t necessarily make good fiction. The reader of the Victorian Gothic – of Lewis and Maturin – demanded that most weird events be grounded in a ‘realistic’ explanation – Romantic specters must be the result of villains working explicable, practical clockwork or novel scientific inventions such as candle-powered magic lanterns. The 1930s reader of Weird Tales did not mind the ghost being, as it were, real but there had to be a suggestion of a material motive, say, in the minds of lurkers at the threshold. Gothic revelations of base motives behind fake ghosts and so on eventually became absorbed into the popular ‘thriller’, especially those published in the first decades of the 20th century. The weird increasingly, since the days of Charles Williams to the present, shares much in common with supernatural fiction but it is not merely another name for it.

  What is good about the majority of these stories is precisely that they leave you with many more questions than answers, the mark, in my view, of a superior kind of fiction. As in M.R. James’s classic Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad, it trusts the reader to be the ultimate interpreter. It does, in fact, what most of our best fiction does, irrespective of category. When the great actor Kemble dismissed the ghost in Hamlet and addressed himself not to the conventional white sheet but to an empty chair, he played an infinite jest on playwright and audience which continues to open that scene and others to a thousand interpretations. The audience’s own imagination was tapped. Hamlet’s sanity is thoroughly questioned. Not only do we continue to wonder who it is Hamlet truly loves, if anyone, but we can speculate endlessly about his state of mind. Is he always pretending to be mad? Is the specter a joke played by others on a disturbed, mourning young man or does he conjure specters from his own mind? If so, what can we make of that mind and its disturbed owner’s motives? That is why Hamlet is perhaps the most and best performed and least readily understood of Shakespeare’s plays.

  The surrealists and the existentialists loved the fantastic story, the weird story, because they had been knocked sideways by psychoanalysis and had come to understand how the unconscious told its tales, apparently through eccentric, innocent or unusual images and strange behavior. Is that, we asked, why we fear ‘the unknown’? Because it reveals all the lies and delusions by which life becomes bearable? But modern relativism can’t easily carry the Freudian narrative either, these days. Or perhaps singles out one possibility amongst many – or rather takes it for granted there is one version amongst many. We modern readers must make our way in a complex world by resorting to complicated narratives, unending analysis. It could even be that, as populist rhetoric fills our print and airwaves, we tend to embrace complexity in the face of journalistic simplicities. We learn new or modified modes of story-telling precisely as we changed with the coming of film, TV or, more recently, the net. Many of the givens which helped us appreciate Modernism are today dismissed in favor of a multiplicity of interpretation. We’re uncomfortable, too, with the idealistic optimism of those 20th-century writers who thought they followed Zola (though even the great Sinclair Lewis had to write some fantasy on occasions because sometimes only the weird tale will best suit the experience). This unsettling of the literary waters generally helps to enrich a work and make it freshly challenging, even confrontational, sometimes attacking what it perceives very accurately as misguided social assumptions just as magic realism, inspired by the likes of Borges, refreshed social realism at the point where it had become almost wholly generic and had therefore lost vitality, offering a comfort to the soul rather than confrontation with received ideas. Similarly, differences between generic and ‘literary’ fiction began to break down by the 1960s when the likes of J.G.Ballard began to appear in magazines such as Science Fiction Adventures, where stories like The Drowned World were placed because at the time nothing else in the author allowed him to approach the tragic dreamscapes of his imagination through any other form. Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick and others sold to genre magazines. Mervyn Peake, the absurdist master who rarely made use of the supernatural, was published in Science Fantasy Magazine simply because I happened to know Peake and the magazine’s editor and I acted as intermediary after Peake failed to place the story elsewhere. The story was weird and suis generis. The editor was delighted to run it.

  For me, the appeal of the weird story is precisely that it is designed to disturb. At least if left to itself. Maybe all we can really say about it is that it suits a certain mood in the reader; that it’s subtler and more complex than generic fantasy stories.

  The best writers, as this collection shows, write the best weird stories. So the weird story is Bradbury, Kafka, Lovecraft. It is Borges, Leiber, Angela Carter, Chabon. Clever artistry guides our encounters with the unknown and the numinous. At its best the weird story commands us with a style both original and engaging but not necessarily good in the opinion of its day. My own great hero George Meredith – who wrote a few weird tales and even some pretty good weird poetry (what a shame there wasn’t room here for The Woods of Westermaine) was hailed towards the end of his lifet
ime as the greatest British writer since Shakespeare and today you’d be hard put to find even a second-hand copy of his late masterpiece The Amazing Marriage. Time and the multi-verse are fond of these ironic tricks.

  That said, the weird story certainly endures. Otranto is still in print as are Frankenstein and Melmoth. None is especially memorable for its style but for communicating the novelty with which it struck the writer. Inspiration somehow smacks the reader between the eyes and keeps them reading no matter how gratingly bad the prose might be, even when a story has given birth to a million other stories so that the basic premise and story are familiar to millions more readers. Our opinions of a writer don’t define where they’ll end up in the canon and one decade’s canon can be utterly forgotten by another. Half the writers I once championed as under-noticed or ‘marginalized’ are now regarded as central to any well-read reader’s education. Equally, half the people I knew as friends and admired as writers, who were thought central to any contemporary syllabus, are often not even in print and it is often difficult to understand how or why they went out of fashion and others came in. The public and academia are pretty fickle in picking favorites. What made that weird musical The Wizard of Oz fail to get an Oscar in 1939 but become a perennial favourite to this day while The Rains Came, which did win the Oscar, is scarcely known now at all? Is the ‘weirdness’ that made Citizen Kane bad box-office in its day the same quality which gave the movie its enduring place among the ten greatest American films? Certainly a great many of the stories here were originally published rather obscurely, many of them in pulp magazines, yet have rarely been out of print since.

  When I was young, few of the weird writers I enjoyed were known to the general public, yet now they go into many editions and translations. Even Kafka was somewhat marginalized. When I was young, only a few non-Argentinean Anglophones had read Borges. I had them related to me by a Spanish-speaking Swede while hitch-hiking across Europe. His first story in English was translated by Anthony Boucher (co-founder of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) in 1948 but further stories would not appear in English until 1962, published by Grove Press. Howard was still thoroughly in the margins, published in small editions by obscure presses: now he appears as a Penguin Modern Classic. Few had heard of Lovecraft and fewer still admired him. I am sure that Grin, the great Russian fantasist, will eventually see translation and take his place beside the fine writers collected here. Firbank, the marvelous English absurdist, Richardson, creator of Engelbrecht, the surrealist boxing dwarf, Vian, who gave us the astonishing L’Écume des jours and died watching a bad movie version of his novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, have all yet to become familiar to the general US reader. If you are unfamiliar with them, I suspect your curiosity will be whetted enough for you to find them with the rest of those weird writers kept from this book by length.