WEIRD TALES #352
November/December 2008
Vol. 63, No. 5
Magazine copyright © 2008 by Wildside Press, LLC. All individual stories copyright © 2008 by their respective authors. All rights reserved; reproduction prohibited without prior permission. Weird Tales® is a registered trademark owned by Weird Tales, Limited.
PREFACE
Weird Tales was the first storytelling magazine devoted explicitly to the realm of the dark and fantastic. Founded in 1923, Weird Tales provided a literary home for such diverse wielders of the imagination as H.P. Lovecraft (creator of Cthulhu), Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian), Margaret Brundage (artistic godmother of goth fetishism), and Ray Bradbury (author of The Illustrated Man and Something Wicked This Way Comes). Today, O wondrous reader of the 21st century, we continue to seek out that which is most weird and unsettling, for your own edification and alarm.
EDITORIAL STAFF
Editorial & creative director | Stephen H. Segal
Fiction editor | Ann VanderMeer
Contributing editors | Bill Baker, Amanda Gannon, Elizabeth Genco, Kenneth Hite, Darrell Schweitzer
Editor emeritus | George H. Scithers
Editorial assistants | Rae Bryant, Tessa Kum
Assistant to the publisher | Renee Farrah
Publisher | John Gregory Betancourt
CONTENTS
THE BAZAAR | a fantastical clockmaker and a bizarre bookbinder
THE LIBRARY |—monstrous musicals and demonic dictation
NEIL GAIMAN: THE WEIRD TALES INTERVIEW
Lisa Mantchev catches the dream king wowing fans in Seattle, and Bill Baker chats him up about The Graveyard Book and the 20th anniversary of The Sandman.
HOW TO PLAY WITH DOLLS | by Matthew Cheney
In which Jenny finds new things to do with a dollhouse.
FAR & WEE | by Kathe Koja
In which passion unleashed will not so easily be contained.
THE LAST GREAT CLOWN HUNT | by Chris Furst
In which the battlefield should perhaps have been called “Little Big Nose.”
A LAKE OF SPACES | by Tim Pratt
In which a hero deep beneath the waves must risk everything on a gamble.
CATASTROPHE | by Felix Gilman
In which a good attitude is not necessarily the hallmark of an assassin.
THE MATCHING PAIR | by Mark Budman
In which royalty finds it necessary to call a spade a spade.
MS ITO'S BIRD | by Chris Ward
In which the geography teacher would prefer that her home remain private.
WENDIGO | by Michaela Morrissette
In which many remarkable dishes will be pondered, served and eaten.
PURR | by Michael Bishop
In which we learn that “Love me, love my cat” should not be taken lightly.
MY TRUE LOVECRAFT GAVE TO ME | by Eric Lis
In which we keep humming the song while adding up the numbers.
THE MAN WITH THE MYRIAD SCARS | by Ben Thomas
In which the hooks enter the flesh and the spirit faces a conundrum.
LOST IN LOVECRAFT| a literary journey with Kenneth Hiteion
* * *
THE BAZAAR
Arts & Artifacts | by Amanda Gannon
CHASING TIME
The horological contradictions of Eric Freitas.
(www.ericfreitas.com)
All artisan clockmakers have a gift. Not the ability to move through time, or to control it, but to make it visible in a beautiful way. The way Eric Freitas does it, it's not like anything you've ever seen.
In his Michigan workshop, amid brass shavings, diagrams, and machines great and small, Eric Freitas creates his clocks. All whorls and gnarled asymmetry, they're the perfect antithesis of the impartial mechanical soullessness that we've come to expect from our timepieces. The flowing, branchlike shapes cut from weathered metal look as though they've simply grown through some unfathomable process—one that's not quite finished. These are skeleton clocks, their bones not confined behind the antiqued metal and paper faces or hidden behind any cabinet. Rather, the inner workings sprawl out for all to see: brass gears, the shining vertebrae of the finely-connected chains . . . all are rich with the patina of a bygone age, an age that never was. Catalogued here—in the endlessly spinning gears, the steady heartbeat of the pendulum—is a different sort of time altogether.
Part of his goal, Freitas says, was to “create pieces that looked like relics from a fantastic world that never existed.” He has certainly done that: These clocks are equal parts steampunk and unseelie court, artifacts from a place just to the left of our own. The twisted shapes are beautiful, but a little dark, a little dangerous-looking. The chaotic forms are caught in the middle of growth or decay. And yet for all their grungy, devolving and re-evolving shapes, they are clocks, precise, ordered, telling perfect time.
The challenge lies in bringing the artist's wild conceptual drawings into three dimensions. Metal is a demanding material, clockwork a demanding form. Yet Freitas doesn't back away, doesn't bend his designs to the available technology—he pushes the technology to fit the designs. To do this, he must make each piece by hand. Not just the hands and faces, but often, now, every piece of each clock. Every leaf of every pinion, every link in every chain, every screw and gear. All are hand-cut and unique to that clock, each piece as perfectly-matched, integral, and essential as part of a living thing.
When Freitas first began his self-training as a time lord, there were few guides. Clockmaking is a dying art. Yet armed with a couple of books, some secondhand auto-factory machinery, and a driving will, he dove in. When his tools proved inadequate to the task, he created new ones himself and forged on. His first fully-mechanical weight-driven timepiece took over one year to complete. Things go more quickly now, and with each creation the clocks become a bit freer from the limits of what gears and springs and pulleys can do. Each clock presents a different challenge, a different lesson. And with each one, Freitas grows closer to capturing the exact form as he first imagined it in ballpoint pen on sketchbook paper: barely possible, unexpected. Each one brings cold clockwork closer to a vision that is as strange and wild and unpredictable as time itself.
Where this vision will lead him, what new forms will be conceived, born, given a mechanical heartbeat, we cannot know. Only time can tell.
BRAHM'S BOOKWORKS
(www.brahmsbookworks.com)
Students of the occult needn't be frustrated by the scarcity of grimoires grand enough to house their arcane secrets—Brahm Ward's lovely handcrafted tomes will delight even the most particular book-lover. From the fine leather binding to the sculpted metal fittings, each 800-page book is a work of art. Fully custom work is available in addition to the wide selection of standard hardware. The old-world binding system allows the addition or removal of pages as necessary. Customers of the Bookworks can also access its Scriptorum, an online guide to manuscript illumination, with techniques from the very basic to the advanced.
MORBID TENDENCIES
(www.morbidtendencies.com)
It takes a demented mind to do what Acataphasia Grey does: dismembering helpless stuffed animals and reassembling them, Viktor Frankenstein-style, into cuddly little horrors. From two-faced, four-armed bunnies to snuggly bears whose heads have been replaced with colorful, staring cat skulls, these guys just want to be loved. You can choose your commission's morbidity rating, and at five skulls, it gets morbid fast. Heads split open and reveal eyes and fangs inside the braincase, faces peel away to show the tentacles beneath, alien creatures crawl out of other animals' skins. Brave souls who don't want their new little friends to feel lonely can order a new dreadful darling
every month through the Unfortunate Animal of the Month Club. Unfortunate Animals also make uniquely loveable gifts for twisted children and adults alike.
SAGA SHIRTS
(www.sagashirts.com)
The folks at Saga Shirts have made many sacrifices—including an intern—to bring us a stellar selection of motifs ranging from Celtic to Norse to Lovecraftian to modern pagan. Actually, according to some sort of blasphemous unspoken contract with Arkham's Pickman, Hobbes, and de Molay, attorneys at law, they are compelledto distribute the shirts as far and wide as possible. Fortunately, they are exquisite; skulls, ankhs, and biohazard symbols are rendered in exquisitely detailed, epic yet modern knotwork. Art doesn't trump humor, though: behold the “Ctheltic Cthulhu” shirt or the “Visit Scenic Annwn” shirt. Yes, one could argue that it's tasteless—or downright dangerous!—to laugh about Old Ones and the Otherworld, but hey, if we're doomed, we might as well go down in style.
* * *
THE LIBRARY
Book Reviews | by Kenneth Hite and Colin Azariah-Kribbs
AN EVIL GUEST
by Gene Wolfe
(Tor, hardcover, $25.95)
Gene Wolfe elliptically lets the reader know that this is not your standard Cthulhu Mythos novel when much of the action takes place in Kingsport, not in Arkham. It's a little off-kilter, but then the mysterious book that draws our heroine into the wizard's plot isn't the Necronomicon but a would-be Broadway musical called Dating the Volcano God. It's not all fun and games: there's an undead assassin, and a shark god, and an ex-husband. The voice is more R.A. Lafferty than H.P. Lovecraft, and more Free Live Free than Book of the Long Sun. In short, it's a Gene Wolfe novel, which means it defies classification.
The action is relatively straightforward, albeit told in staccato bursts of dialogue in service to a plot that is as rambunctious, complex, and beautifully designed as a Ziegfeld musical number. Actress Cassie Casey is recruited by the P.I.-cum-wizard Gideon Chase to get close to the dangerous zillionaire William Reis, who learned the secrets of alchemy and invisibility from the alien world Woldercan (a Dr. Lao reference—it's not all H.P.L., by any means), where Reis was the U.S. Ambassador some years ago. In exchange, Chase takes her up to the mountaintop and awakens her magnetic potential—she becomes the biggest star in the world. Faust story, love triangle, spy thriller, showbiz novel, and meditation on reality ensue, complete with South Seas islands, tough cops, the President, a werewolf, and . . . oh, yes, Great Cthulhu. The wild scenery blends the 1930s and the 2080s, space-hoppers and Baskin-Robbins tossed in the air with studied carelessness by Wolfe as he goes about his tale.
“It could be worse.” This ongoing theme to the book (summed up in Cassie's colloquy with some unusually talkative night-gaunts) winds up almost comfortable, rather than cosmic. That said, individual set pieces will set your hair on end, and Wolfe has idly dropped at least two philosophical landmines into the mix to keep the reader from getting too settled in. Readers with a pre-existing fund of spare, economical 1940s prose in their ear-canals will, nonetheless, find An Evil Guest oddly soothing even as it unnervingly wheels through its Expressionist storyline. Alternately reminiscent of Robert A. Heinlein's horror pulp thriller The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag and of Fredric Brown's What Mad Universe, with a splash of strange eons and plenty of 42nd Street, the sum is (cosmically?) larger than its sources. But then, it's a Gene Wolfe Cthulhu Mythos novel—what weren't you expecting? —K.H.
DEMON: A MEMOIR
by Tosca Lee
(NavPress, trade paperback, $12.99)
“This wounds me most (what can it less?) that Man, / Man fallen, shall be restored, I never more.” So spoke Satan in Milton's Paradise Regained—you don't have to be a Milton expert to appreciate these same sentiments of supernatural hatred and jealousy in Tosca Lee's chilling Demon: A Memoir.In this intensely philosophical novel, we meet Clay, an editor at a small Boston press who's suffering the after-effects of a recent divorce, and who meets an intense, eccentric stranger named Lucian who says he's a demon and wants Clay to publish his life story. Clay is skeptical at first, but his progressively unsettling conversations with Lucian quickly convince him that there's more to the “man” than meets the eye.
Lee's tale attempts an immense cosmic portrayal of the rebellion of Satan and his angels—even as the dramatic narrative itself remains confined to Lucian's conversations with Clay. The effect is something like a cross between a Miltonic epic and C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters, as the vast expanse of history from the Flood to the Crucifixion rolls out from the titular demon's point of view. Like Milton's Satan, Lucian is tormented by the idea that God is willing to redeem “worthless” humanity while withholding this same redemption from the fallen angels. Jealous rage marks much of the tense interaction between Lucian and Clay—sometimes erupting with horrifying consequences. For his part, Clay is far too fascinated by Lucian for his own good, and we wonder just how long it will take the mortal man to apply the morals of Lucian's autobiography to his own life.
Both fascinating and frightening, Demon: A Memoir starkly depicts the contrast between undying evil and the hope of redemption. The raw intimacy of the story proves refreshingly harrowing, as not only the narrator but the reader, too, experiences the reality of Heaven and Hell, damnation and salvation, more closely than expected. —C.A.K.
* * *
THE WEIRD TALES INTERVIEW: NEIL GAIMAN
Introduction by Lisa Mantchev | Q&A by Bill Baker
He's signing. Books in stacks of eight await his signature, rendered in red-brown ink that flows from a fountain pen. Everyone here in the backstage green room keeps a close eye on Neil Gaiman and a closer eye on his right hand, which sports a splint on the middle finger: a souvenir from a recent trip to China. (The first rule of author signings is that you don't ask the author how he—or his hand—is holding up. The second rule? See rule one.)
In passing, Gaiman wonders aloud why there is a clipart leaf on the title page, when a bat or a tombstone would have been more thematically appropriate to a tome entitled The Graveyard Book. Everyone within hearing commiserates or offers their suggestions (“Perhaps it's meant to be the ivy near the Egyptian Walk?”) but there's no denying that other things might look more like actual ivy, and Gaiman only shakes his head and moves on to the next title page in the next book.
A lot has changed since his first signing at the University of Washington Book Store, where twenty people were in attendance. Tonight's venue holds nine hundred, and by the time the reading starts at seven, the only seating available is in the balcony. Attendance didn't jump fiftyfold overnight, though; there's never been a lightning bolt or thunder clap in Gaiman's career. Instead, a gradual storm has built one raindrop at a time: a cult following for Sandman whose membership jumped with the publication of American Gods and again with the release of the Stardust movie. No doubt the same will happen again when Coraline opens in 2009. Handselling by supportive booksellers has been as vital as word-of-mouth by readers who each came to the Road of Gaiman by a different gateway work, as evidenced by the shifting piles of personal items now moving across the table: old review copies of Good Omens, co-written with the estimable Terry Pratchett; a Mirrormask DVD; a pamphlet of Snow, Glass, Apples; a hardcover copy of the Fragile Things collection.
In the chapel where the reading will take place, the audience is just as diverse: a beauty in full goth attire complete with crinoline and top hat; a young married couple with a toddler; people of various ages and means who arrive singly and in small groups. It's Seattle, so they waited in the rain, in some cases for more than an hour, until the doors opened. It's their chance to see the man many consider the rock star of the speculative fiction genre, the uncrowned king. Yes, he's an award-winning, bestselling, internationally-acclaimed author, but he's still "Neil for short." Amicable, approachable, he's still very much one of us.
Before long, the moment has come: The sconces and chandeliers dim, the applause begins, and a single spot pours w
hite light over Gaiman as he enters Stage Left. A ripple of laughter passes through the room when Gaiman informs the audience they will be seeing special advance footage of Coraline after the intermission, and he would appreciate it if no one would videotape it and put it on YouTube because he knows he can trust them. Upturned faces smile and nod. With a smile that says, Good. I'm glad we understand one another, Gaiman launches into Chapter Four of The Graveyard Book: The Witch's Headstone.
It's a long chapter—the longest in the book, in fact, and the original source material for the novel. Originally published, almost simultaneously, in the anthology Wizards and Gaiman's collection M is for Magic, it is the seed that bore the darkly charming flower of The Graveyard Book. Gaiman swiftly renders Nobody Owens (Bod, for short) and his companions:
Abanazer Bolger had thick spectacles and a permanent expression of mild distaste, as if he had just realized that the milk in his tea had been on the turn, and he could not get the sour taste out of his mouth.
This is exactly the sort of thing Gaiman's audience has come to expect and to love: words that sketch a vivid mental image, colored with his charming inflections. He's a brilliant reader of his own work, pausing for dramatic effect in exactly the right place, pacing sentences just so, and always properly anticipating the laughter of those gathered in the pews.
"I wanted to hear his voice,” fan Elizabeth Coleman says afterward. “It's such an expressive, melodious thing, and brings magic to everything he says, profound or mundane. In the Q&A, he turned even the most simple question . . . into a tale, but he was never long-winded."
It's all a perfectly balanced tightrope act: an author whose stories for children resonate with adults, whose comic book stories win World Fantasy awards, whose novels become movies filled with both CGI special effects and puppetry. And perhaps that tightrope act is simply one turn at the Mouse Circus, where everything is odd and enchanting and darkly mystical. —Or, if not a tightrope, then the blade of a very special knife, the sort carried by Jack in opening scene of The Graveyard Book:
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