The Development of the Weird Tale

by S. T. Joshi

  He was putting everything down on paper in case anything else were to happen to his memory. Next time the shadows swallowed the past he would have something to go on. He wondered who he was. He wondered if he had a wife and family. He wondered who his friends had been; where he had lived; what he had done for a living; what sort of person he had been.

  When a policeman offhandedly remarks, “I have the feeling that all this is much trickier than we realize,” he is uttering a far more profound truth than he knows—for when the secret of Pinder’s ailment, blandly identified at the outset as “total amnesia triggered off by shock,” is finally revealed, on almost the final page of the novel, its tragic implications about the waste of an entire life are almost cataclysmic.

  One of the distinctive features of Who Is Lewis Pinder? is Davies’s skill at casting suspicion on almost everyone—on some of the doctors tending to Pinder; on a mysterious figure, Martin Kilby, who has the disconcerting habit of appearing on the scene at critical moments in the narrative; even on Fenn’s colleague, Inspector Darwin. This is far from the hackneyed mystery writer’s technique of mechanically implicating every character as a potential murderer; for in a Davies plot, the perpetrator of a murder—and this novel contains more than its share of them—is the least interesting aspect of the puzzle. The real mystery, in this novel as in most of Davies’ others, is the inscrutable workings of the human mind, and Davies recognises that there is never any neat and tidy solution to this conundrum.

  L. P. Davies was himself a “man out of nowhere”—a writer who seemed to work without appreciable literary influences, who generated a succession of utterly distinctive novels and tales from the seclusion of his Welsh home, and who seemed content to express his imagination without thirsting for fame or recognition. But in spite of his humility, Davies attracted a wide following, and his score of novels are ripe for reprinting for a new generation.

  B. Twilight Journey (1967)

  One of the great virtues of L. P. Davies’s work is its unclassifiability. When his novels were published in the United States, mostly by Doubleday, they appeared either in that publisher’s series of mystery and detective stories, The Crime Club, or in the “Doubleday Science Fiction” series. In many cases these categorisations were peculiar if not self-contradictory, for many of Davies’s “Crime Club” novels involved apparent excursions into the super­natural, something that would be intolerable in the orthodox detective story.

  Twilight Journey (1967) is a more clearly science fictional work than many of Davies’s other novels; but it too contains elements of fantasy and terror that cause it to break the science fiction mould. It begins brilliantly with a scene that features jarringly incongruous and artificial dialogue that seems to have no relation to its purported setting in an anonymous café in the year 1967. We quickly learn that the scene is in fact occurring in the year 2123, and in the mind of one Richard Worbey, a student who is undergoing a process called senduction—a process whereby information is fed directly into a person’s brain so that any era of the past can (if, of course, the information regarding it is accurate) be experienced for the purposes of education. This remarkable anticipation of the notion of “virtual reality” is only one of the many innovative touches in the novel.

  It quickly transpires by Richard Worbey is none other than Dr. Clayton Solan, the inventor of senduction. Why, then, has he subjected himself to this process—a process that, because he has fed the machine with false information about himself, could lead to death or madness? It is this mystery, and the even more baffling mystery of how to save Dr. Solan without rendering him a lunatic, that is the subject of this compulsively readable novel.

  The bleak, depressing future that Davies depicts in Twilight Journey—a future in which human beings have been turned into zombies for political gain, and in which the ruins of a once-flourishing civilisation serve as the backdrop for the few brave but wretched souls who have resisted brainwashing at the hands of a political elite—is no less terrifying because it is quite literally occurring within the protagonist’s mind. As several characters note, senduction results in a world that is “more real than reality”: because information is fed directly into the brain, the resulting images are perceived by the mind without the weakening effect of our feeble and imprecise senses. As a result, the scenes that take place in Dr. Solan’s mind are far more vivid and compelling than those that purport to take place in the actual “reality” of the year 2123, with the increasingly desperate attempts of doctors and technicians to rid Solan of his self-induced visions. As such, Twilight Journey can take its place with some of the more noteworthy dystopian novels of the twentieth century, from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four to Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon to several of Philip K. Dick’s novels, and perhaps even to the film Brazil.

  L. P. Davies’s focus was always on the potentially bizarre and inscrutable aberrations of the mind and the psyche. In Twilight Journey, a character refers in passing to the “infinite layers of the mind,” while another notes that what Solan is experiencing is “a play performed on the stage of the mind.” It is precisely the fact that so many of our mental and psychological functions remain poorly understood that allowed Davies the imaginative scope to portray the disturbances or perversions of these functions—amnesia, multiple personality, precognitive dreams, and the like—in such a powerful and frighteningly plausible manner. What seems like fantasy or imaginative whimsy today may turn into reality tomorrow; and in Twilight Journey Davies weaves a morality play about the misuse of science for ruthlessly political ends that will remain a balefully plausible scenario of our own present and future.

  C. The Shadow Before (1970)

  The Shadow Before, first published in 1970, may be Davies’s masterwork. Taking its cue from a line from a poem by the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell, “Coming events cast their shadows before,” Davies has written a richly complex tale mingling such elements as dreams, amnesia, fate, and the moral consequences of crime. It is tempting to see in the novel’s protagonist, the struggling pharmacist Lester Dunn, a stand-in for the ex-pharmacist Leslie Davies, whose initials he shares. Is it possible that the other central figures so vividly realised in the tale—the lugubrious locum John Latham; the dynamic travel agent Tom Cochrane; the jovial hardware store owner, Vic Howarth, who becomes increasingly nervous as his friends seem to embark on a life of crime; and the pretty young assistant Petra Wolsey, who nearly stumbles upon her boss’s doings at a late stage—are also drawn from life? We can never know. What we can say with confidence is that Davies has portrayed the life of a shopowner in a small town—whose profit margin “could be measured in pennies”—with the grim verisimilitude of experience. (We can, however, be sure that Davies himself did not suffer the unhappy marriage of his protagonist: his tombstone in the Canary Islands reads “In loving memory of my husband,” and his wife, Winifred, survived him by little more than three months.)

  It would be cruelly unfair to those who have not read this novel to give away any of its striking twists and turns of plot. Suffice it to say that Davies has ingeniously incorporated the dominant element in all his writing—the bizare workings of the mind, whether they take the form of precognitive dreams, baffling amnesia, or still more unusual aberrations—into a complex narrative whose ramifications raise troubling questions about the ease with which seemingly ordinary individuals can be tempted into crime and even murder. When, shortly after undergoing an operation to remove a benign brain tumour, Lester regains consciousness after experiencing an apparent car accident, we feel his increasing agitation as he discovers that not merely a few months or a year, but three full years, have been spliced from his memory. Curiously enough, Lester Dunn himself is perhaps not as fully realised a character as others in the book; but perhaps that is exactly because he is used as a conduit for readers to experience the existential terror of amnesia for themselves. When Dunn, finally coming to realise that years have passed since his operation and, most baffling of all, he ha
s gained fabulous wealth, his reaction—“For long, sickening moments he was poised over bridgeless emptiness”—touches us in the deepest layers of our sense of self. Later, Tom Cochrane tells him, “I have the nasty feeling that your mind has decided to forget because it wanted to forget”—a psychological observation whose truth even he does not fully understand.

  Later, the novel takes on a terror of a different kind—the terror of a dream, enticing in some ways but foreboding in others, inexorably and systematically coming true in reality. Dunn is correct in thinking that this is “a nightmare of another kind”: he desperately wishes to believe that the dream only pointed out a possible future, not a certain one—but what if it didn’t? What if, in other words, we are merely the pawns of some impersonal fate and are destined to act out our dreams like automata—in this case, a dream that leads to crime and murder?

  One of the great virtues of The Shadow Before is its seamless construction. Davies was master of the complexly interlocking plot, and in this case he has fashioned a succession of startling climaxes that leads inevitably to the powerful denouement at the conclusion. If nothing else, the novel is a triumph of literary architecture. Not a chapter, not an episode, not a single word is out of place or extraneous. Like many mystery stories, it is a kind of jigsaw puzzle—or, perhaps more aptly, a set of Chinese boxes, each contained within the other. While largely a story of crime, there are elements of fantasy and science fiction as well—another patented element in Davies’ work, and one that makes his novels stand out from all others in these genres.

  L. P. Davies died more than three decades ago, but his work has attracted a cadre of devotees that will ensure its survival. This reissue of one of his best novels is certain to bring him a new generation of readers—readers who will have the good luck to relish the distinctive brand of existential terror that he made his own.

  Atheism and Anticlericalism in the Films of Guillermo del Toro

  Introduction

  The emergence of atheism, agnosticism, and secularism in the West is by no means a recent phenomenon, even though the so-called New Atheists (Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens) have raised the consciousness of both the religious and the irreligious by the incisiveness and at times polemical fire of their best-selling treatises, published in the early years of this century. But the history of atheism in the West can be traced back to the Greek philosophers of the seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries b.c.e.: they were the first thinkers to our knowledge who abandoned the notion that a god or gods created the universe and that, instead, the world as we know it was created by natural forces.

  The rediscovery of classical learning—especially the writings of the Greek Atomist Democritus and his disciples, Epicurus and Lucretius (the works of the first two exist only in extensive fragments)—in the Renaissance, and the simultaneous advance of scientific (especially astronomical and biological) discovery with the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and others, led to the ultimate dethronement of the Judeo-Christian worldview from intellectual supremacy. By the time Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species (1859), the intelligentsia—if not the general populace—was ready to embrace a worldview that entirely banished God or godlike forces from the universe. As Richard Dawkins has stated, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”[156] This tendency continued in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries with such thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Gore Vidal, Kai Neilsen, and many others.

  Anticlericalism—a belief that a specific church, or perhaps all churches, are forces of evil rather than good, whether it be in the intellectual, cultural, political, or social sphere—is quite a different thing. Many strongly anticlerical thinkers would be horrified at the notion that they are atheists or agnostics. Voltaire, the most celebrated (but far from the most acute) thinker of eighteenth-century France, was strongly anticlerical, as his repeated utterance “Écrasez l’infâme!” (“Crush the infamy!”), applied to the Catholic church, attests: while vigorously condemning the intolerance and corruption of the church, he just as vigorously scorned atheists as intellectually suspect libertines. Voltaire was a pronounced Deist (a believer that a god had created the universe and initiated its complex mechanism, but then sat back and admired his handiwork without any subsequent intervention in human or cosmic affairs), as were many of the Founding Fathers of this nation, notably Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. All would have rejected the imputation of atheism.

  del Toro and Religion

  Guillermo del Toro has frequently admitted to being a “lapsed Catholic.” It is well known that he was raised in a strict Catholic household in Guadalajara, Mexico, chiefly under the influence of his grandmother. In his 2009 interview with Charlie Rose, he stated: “I mercifully lapsed as a Catholic, I say. But as [Luis] Buñuel used to say, ‘I’m an atheist, thank God.’ You know, there is always, once a Catholic, always a Catholic in a way.”[157]

  The intersection of weird and fantastic fiction and atheism is a subject that still needs detailed exploration. Del Toro, thoroughly conversant with the long history of supernatural fiction—as most recently exemplified in his splendid introductory essay “Haunted Castles, Dark Mirrors” to the Penguin Horror series of 2013—is no doubt aware that there is no easy equation of weird fiction with atheism. While a few writers of the weird may have been atheists or agnostics (Poe, Lord Dunsany, and H. P. Lovecraft come to mind), others were emphatically otherwise: del Toro’s longtime favourite Arthur Machen was a devout Anglo-Catholic; Algernon Blackwood was a Buddhist mystic; and the contemporary British writer Ramsey Campbell is a lapsed Catholic like del Toro, but it is not clear he has gone all the way to atheism.

  Del Toro’s closest analogue may indeed be with Lovecraft, an author he has long held in high esteem. Lovecraft was, indeed, an outspoken atheist, once claiming to have shed the tenets of his Baptist upbringing so early as the age of twelve; but most of his discussions of atheism were included in private letters that only began publication in the 1960s. Del Toro is no doubt aware of this body of work, but he has probably been even more influenced by Lovecraft’s fiction, which—when read with care—embody an uncompromising atheism that depicts a humanity “alone in the cosmos” and dwarfed by the immensity of space and time. Del Toro had long wished to adapt Lovecraft’s great Antarctic novel At the Mountains of Madness (1931) as a film. It is precisely Lovecraft’s creation of an invented mythology in many of his best tales that appealed to del Toro, whose rejection of orthodox religion in no way entailed a rejection of a sense of spirituality; indeed, rejection of religion may in fact have enhanced the spirituality that is at the core of his being.

  Cronos (1993), the first film written and directed entirely by del Toro, employs a motif that is of very long standing in the history of weird fiction—the quest for eternal life. In its traditional literary modes—as, for example, in William Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams (1794), Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and, imperishably, Goethe’s Faust (1808–32)—the notion involves a sorcerer or alchemist who seeks the philosopher’s stone, an object that at once grants eternal life and all-encompassing knowledge. Cronos is premised largely on this idea: an alchemist in 1557 created something called the “Cronos device” and lived until 1937, when he died in a building collapse in Mexico. The bulk of the film deals with the rediscovery of the device by an elderly antiques dealer, significantly named Jesús Gris (the gray Jesus), and the attempts by a dying man, de la Guardia, to secure it and rejuvenate himself.

  The film treads lightly on a number of religious and metaphysical issues. Early in the film Gris, looking at the strange metallic device, which resembles a large mechanical insect, and asks, “What are you? A god?” The miraculous powers of the device would certainly lead most human beings—inclined, as del Toro is surely aware, to belief in gods and the supernatural whenever they encounter anything anomalous or incomprehensible—to attribute deific properties t
o the object. Gris is subsequently killed by de la Guardia’s vicious nephew, but the device revives him; however, the result is that Gris becomes a kind of vampire, requiring human blood to continue his undead life. When he refuses to drink his granddaughter Aurora’s blood, he dies a second time.

  Cronos is, in its way, a perverted retelling of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ—exactly the sort of thing that a lapsed Catholic like del Toro would have been led to fashion. In the end it becomes a touching love story between an old man and his granddaughter, who refuses to abandon him even after his death and grotesque revival. There are also a few Lovecraftian touches, notably in the notion that the “rules” for the use of the device are embodied in an ancient book—an adaptation of the “forbidden book” motif that Lovecraft utilised perhaps more extensively than any other author of weird fiction.

  Religion and Fascism

  The Devil’s Backbone (2001) is one of the first of del Toro’s films to fuse terror and political commentary, and religion inevitably enters the mix. Its setting during the earlier stages of the Spanish Civil War is no accident: del Toro is keenly cognisant of the degree to which the outmanned Republicans were inclined toward atheism (as a facet of their communist or socialist politics), whereas the Loyalists under Franco had sought the assistance of the Catholic church to aid their ruthless suppression of political freedom. The film only glancingly equates Catholicism with fascism; more significant is the complex portrayal of Doctor Casares, a “man of science” who scorns superstition and denies the existence of ghosts, even though the ghost of a murdered boy, Santi, frequently appears in the orphanage that serves as the setting of the film.