Lost Transmissions

by Desirina Boskovich

  But aside from specific references, the underlying assumptions of The King in Yellow form a major aspect of what’s become weird fiction . . . the idea that the universe, beneath its mundane mask, is bizarre, terrifying, and impossible to really see without losing your mind. That’s what’s so poisonous about the play at the center of it all. It reveals things. It simply tells the truth. And those truths, once grasped, cannot be forgotten . . . nor can they be survived.

  As an early forerunner of weird fiction, these four short stories by Chambers have inspired many of our favorite writers of genre, and not just science fiction and fantasy, but also mystery and horror. Chambers’s admirers included Raymond Chandler, Robert Heinlein, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, George R. R. Martin, Alan Moore, and Charles Stross (not to mention Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective producer and script writer; we’ll get to that in a minute).

  Many have wondered—just what is the secret of Carcosa? What mysteries are revealed in the second act of the play that remain so awful to contemplate?

  Whatever’s lurking in the darkness is infinitely worse in our own imaginations, so to attempt a real-life version of the cursed play is very daring indeed. James Blish (1921–1975), however, once attempted to take on the challenge in his story “More Light” (1970). Blish was a very, very good writer, one of the few writers who might pull this off, so we’ll forgive him the imposition. Appropriately enough, the story appeared in print only twice and is somewhat difficult to find.

  “More Light” draws on a lightweight frame story. The narrator, a fiction author, meets with an old friend named Bill Atheling, a reviewer with a “mean streak” whom he’s “never trusted”; “But perhaps for the same reason, I also rather like him.” This opening is a little inside joke of Blish’s, as Bill Atheling was actually his own pseudonym that he used to publish literary criticism. (It also poses some interesting questions, since Atheling—himself—is the one who supplies him with the forbidden script.) Atheling is a mess. He invites the narrator to his house and relates to him the story of how he came to own the script . . . a boyhood correspondence with an aging Lovecraft, who upon his inquiries, sent him the play, which he said that Chambers had once sent to him. For various reasons, decades went by and Atheling never got around to reading the play, until just recently. There’s an obstacle, though. There is something about the play that prevents the reader from finishing it. At some point, and that point varies for each person, the reader simply can’t go on. Piqued by the challenge, the narrator agrees to stay over that night and give it a go.

  The rest of the story is mostly devoted to the play itself, with various breaks as he considers the play and its effects on him, or lack thereof. We read with him. Blish reverse-engineered the play from the brief fragments and glancing hints revealed within Chamber’s story, and the effect is, indeed, extremely creepy. The flow is purposely stilted and disjointed. Piece by piece it reveals a decaying royal family in a place outside of time, locked in an eternal stalemate of tedious incest and unchanging war. Slowly there accrues a calm yet suffocating sense of dread.

  STRANGER: Carcosa does not sit upon the Earth.

  It is, perhaps, not even real; or not so real

  As you and I. Certainly, the Living God does not

  Believe in it. Then why should you?

  Wisely, Blish also spares his reader the closing lines of the play, because the narrator finds that he is not capable of finishing it, either. So the final secret remains shrouded in mystery.

  My own theory is this: The horrible truth revealed in The King in Yellow is indisputable evidence that forces the reader to acknowledge what, on some level, we’ve known all along—that we have always been in Carcosa, the city that takes on the size and shape of a hostile universe; and the fact that the world itself is a garish mask.

  The King in Yellow reached its largest audience yet in 2014, when Nic Pizzolatto drew on its unsettling mythology in the phenomenal first season of True Detective. In this installment, Louisiana detectives Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) investigate the occult murder of a young woman that reveals a much deeper conspiracy. The King in Yellow doesn’t quite hold the key to this conspiracy; it runs in parallel with it. These references to something deep, dark, and ancient inform the threatening, despairing atmosphere of the show’s Louisiana bayou setting. The Carcosa mythology is referenced by both victims and killers. “I closed my eyes and saw the King in Yellow moving through the forest,” says the first victim’s journal. “The King’s children are marked. They became his angels.” Further unexplained references abound: black stars tattooed on a girl’s neck, and a flock of birds forming in the ominous spiral the show imagines as the Yellow Sign.

  Meanwhile, the frequently spouted nihilist philosophy of Detective Cohle (who would be right at home in his own Cthulhu mythos story) provides a glimpse of a mind suffering deeply under the weight of its own indisputable truths: His intimate knowledge of life-changing loss and grief, coupled with his understanding that in the grand scheme of everything, life and death are just something that happens; the universe is indifferent to either. Perhaps that was the truth revealed by The King in Yellow all along.

  In the final scenes of True Detective’s season one finale, few answers are provided, but Cohle comes face-to-face with his own vision of Carcosa and the swirling dark between the stars.

  The Inklings: A Friendship That Changed Fantastic Literature Forever

  Some friendships begin the moment two like minds meet—a connection is made, sparks fly, and a kinship begins. This was not the case for C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) and J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973), who first met as faculty at Oxford University in 1926, and were not particularly impressed by each other. Lewis wrote in his diary of Tolkien: “No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.”

  Fortunately, first impressions were not final. They discovered they had plenty of interests in common, and began getting together for a beer every Monday morning and discussing politics, poetry, theology, and myth. “This is one of the pleasantest spots in the week,” Lewis wrote. They eventually became close friends.

  This friendship became the core of a local clique of contemporary thinkers made up of writers, painters, doctors, and academics. Lewis’s brother Warren, or “Warnie,” became a frequent member, and later, Lewis’s son Christopher. The group eventually grew to nineteen, but four writers remained its core members. Along with Lewis and Tolkien, they were Charles Williams and Owen Barfield. They called themselves the Inklings: a whimsical and slightly self-deprecating pun.

  The Inklings congregated frequently at Lewis’s apartment, as well as at a nearby pub called the Eagle and Child, but was referred to by regulars as “the Bird and Baby.” They smoked, drank beer, and argued about everything under the sun. Critic and writer Michael Dirda noted, “One evening’s conversation, according to Lewis’s brother Warnie, touched on ‘red-brick universities . . . torture, Tertullian, bores, the contractual theory of medieval kingship, and odd place-names.’”

  Most importantly, the Inklings read their manuscripts aloud to the group for comment and critique. “Listening to drafts and offering energetic feedback occupied the better part of every Inklings meeting,” writes Lewis scholar Diana Glyer. “As they met through the 1930s and ’40s, extraordinary things began to happen. They generated enormous creative energy. . . . Together, they helped bring to light some of the greatest literary works of this past century.”

  The Inklings by Marc Burckhardt for the Atlantic. Clockwise from top: Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien.

  These works include, of course, the mighty oeuvres of both J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Their books have sold more than three hundred million copies and been translated into forty-plus languages around the world. Films based on The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings have earned billions of dollars. But beyond that, the work of these two essential fantasists shaped the entire field of fantasy for generations.
“Without the Inklings there would be no Dungeons & Dragons (and the whole universe of online fantasy role-playing it produced), no Harry Potter, no Philip Pullman (in his role as the anti-Lewis),” wrote Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, the authoritative Inklings scholars.

  We can also add to that list Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy, which directly engages the idea of Narnia and the portal fantasy, as well as the SyFy television series that the books inspired.

  Did Tolkien and Lewis influence each other’s work? The writers themselves did not think so. They drew from the same well of interests, influences and inspirations—the foundation of their friendship in the first place—but their work remained very different.

  Tolkien wrote of Lewis, “The unpayable debt that I owe to [Lewis] was not ‘influence’ as it is ordinarily understood but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience.”

  Lewis shared this view. “I don’t think Tolkien influenced me, and I am certain I didn’t influence him,” he wrote. “That is, didn’t influence what he wrote. My continual encouragement, carried to the point of nagging, influenced him very much to write at all with that gravity and at that length.” They shared most of their work with each other and exchanged manuscripts in progress, cheering and supporting each other through the creation of the famous works we love today.

  The iconic Eagle and Child continues to operate today, serving up drinks and pub food along with a hearty helping of history.

  Of course, all four of the core writers in the Inklings—and the group as a whole—influenced and inspired one another in their avid and voracious exploration of a dozen different disciplines. In the Los Angeles Times, fantasy novelist Elizabeth Hand wrote of Williams and Barfield that they were “minor writers who nonetheless had considerable influence on their friends, especially Lewis, a literary magpie who made liberal use of images and ideas from the other Inklings in his work.”

  Though nowhere near as successful as Lewis and Tolkien, Williams and Barfield were also relatively influential in their day. Williams wrote poetry, plays, literary scholarship, and spiritual thrillers. Barfield wrote a well-received children’s fantasy, The Silver Trumpet, as well as significant books on language and linguistics. He later taught in the United States, including at Brandeis, where he became a friend to the American literary figure Saul Bellow, another intriguing ripple in the pond of literary history.

  Zaleski and Zaleski impressively describe the broad and massive reach of the Inklings’ influence: “By the time the last Inkling passed away, on the eve of the 21st century, the group had altered, in large or small measure, the course of imaginative literature (fantasy, allegory, mythopoeic tales), Christian theology and philosophy, comparative mythology, and the scholarly study of the Beowulf author, of Dante, Spenser, Milton, courtly love, fairy tale, and epic.”

  JOHN JENNINGS

  Henry Dumas’s Foundational Afrofuturism

  Imagine that you’re in a lush, green rural space. The sky is full of billowing clouds and the air is sweet. You are listening to the life of the forest and the song of the lake nearby. Suddenly, to your awe and dismay, you witness a giant sailing ship wafting in from that once peaceful sky; its masts strutting like trees into the air.

  The ship’s massive sails block out the sun. What mysteries would such a vessel have in its hold? In this case, if you had the courage to venture below decks, you’d find millions of bones stacked neatly and carefully catalogued. This ship carries all of the bones of the slaves who died in the Middle Passage and finally made it to the shores of America to collect the rest. These bones resonate with the trauma, pain, and diabolical legacy of chattel slavery in our country. It’s a legacy that still haunts our country to this day.

  This narrative is the plot of the short story by Henry Dumas (1934–1968) called “Ark of Bones.” It is just one tale told by this tragically unsung genius.

  Born in Sweet Home, Arkansas, Dumas was a prolific poet and short story writer, political activist, educator, and one of the foundational creators in what would later be called Afrofuturism. Dumas was a powerful contributor to the Black Arts Movement; the sister aesthetic movement to the Black Power Movement.

  Dumas’s writing fused the hope and pain of the southern American black experience with the promise and broken dreams of the urban landscape. He used the metaphorical affordances of the speculative to unpack the tensions of being black in America, the peculiar tragedies beset upon black citizens by systemic oppression, and the sometimes magical joys of simply surviving to tell the tale.

  Dumas’s stories showcased allegorical aspects like a little boy witnessing God and the Devil play a card game for his grandfather’s soul, a mystical tree that houses ancestral spirits, and a magical horn that has dire consequences for particular people who hear it. His poetry vibrated with the voices of the age and was heartbreakingly moving. Each of his carefully crafted short stories were soaked in the sorrow and excitement of the era.

  Dumas taught at Southern Illinois University with the poet Eugene Redmond. The two would become close friends and collaborators. This friendship is what would make Dumas an immortally tragic figure in literature. Dumas was also a close friend of the experimental Afrofuturist jazz musician Sun Ra. Dumas was in Harlem in May of 1968, coming from one of Sun Ra’s rehearsals. On his journey back to his space he unfortunately had an argument with a police officer that ended with his death. He was thirty-three years old. Dumas’s work was posthumously edited and shepherded by his friend Eugene Redmond and the amazing Toni Morrison.

  Morrison cites Dumas as one her influences and has called him an “absolute genius.”

  Unfortunately, his work has yet to reach a larger audience.

  As of now, I can imagine his specter guiding that wondrous and terrible magical ark, picking up the pieces of history to show us when we are truly ready to see.

  The Author of the Narnia Books Worked on a Mega-Creepy Time Travel Story . . . Probably

  C.S. Lewis is the author of The Chronicles of Narnia and iconic characters like the cruel White Witch, the noble lion Aslan, and the pessimistic marshwiggle Puddleglum. Lewis also wrote science fictions for adults: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. Though less popular than the Narnia books, this Space Trilogy still received substantial acclaim.

  When an incomplete manuscript of a time-travel novel surfaced in 1966—three years after Lewis’s death—fans were ecstatic. A story about inter-dimensional time travel, created by one of the most imaginative minds of the twentieth century?! Yes, please. The unfinished story, titled “The Dark Tower,” was published in a 1977 collection by the same name, assembled by Lewis’s literary executor, Walter Hooper.

  Though obviously not as polished a published work, “The Dark Tower” still possesses plenty of raw appeal; it’s an uncanny and compelling read that seizes attention from the very beginning. The story centers on a group of academics performing experiments with a “chronoscope” that its inventor believes allows them to see to other times—whether past or future, they aren’t sure. The world they observe is geographically similar yet also utterly alien, frequently terrifying and grotesque, ruled by a “Stinging Man” with a poisoned horn to slay his sacrificial victims. The professors begin to believe they’re looking not at a future or a past, but an alternate reality.

  During one of these viewing sessions, as the scholars watch—equally entranced and horrified—a mishap occurs and the inventor’s assistant, Scudamour, is actually drawn into that other world, which they’ve taken to calling “the Othertime.” As he navigates this bizarre reality, he learns about a society with far more advanced time-science than our own, a theory of time that flows “eckwards” and “andwards” as well as backward and forward, and features parallel and perpendicular timelines that occasionally touch.

  Then—right as the story is really picking up steam—it ends. Right in the middle of a scene. And even though I knew I was reading an incomplete manuscript, I felt disappointed and fr
ustrated . . . maybe even a little cheated. Like every C. S. Lewis fan, I wanted that story! As Kirkus Reviews commented on the collection, “the groundwork of the plot is laid out with such confidence that one wonders how Lewis could have borne not to finish it.”

  But . . . there’s more. The plot thickens, because the drama surrounding the story may be even more intriguing than the story itself.

  Hooper claimed to have discovered this unfinished manuscript and several others in 1964, when he rescued it from a pile of Lewis’s old papers that Lewis’s brother was about to burn as he tidied up the Lewis estate. All was well until 1978, when Kathryn Lindskoog, a prominent C. S. Lewis scholar, dramatically accused Hooper of fabricating the manuscript for his own personal gain. The explosive accusations ripped C. S. Lewis fandom apart. For years a bitter and acrimonious battle of words raged among Lindskoog, Hooper, and their various supporters. Journalist Jim Washburn wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Given the way the Lewis community has responded to her book, one would think that Lindskoog had been guilty of letting flies into heaven. . . . At times the exchanges seem less like a scholarly debate than a playground brawl.”