Weird Tales, Volume 350

by Norman Spinrad

  The myth of the Incubus, a demon which lies upon sleeping women in order to violate them, may have sprung from the same source. Peer at the mosaic of language and things begin to fall into place. The Old English word for the Incubus was maire, which means “one who oppresses or crushes.” In German, it is mare. And from these we get “night mare,” or simply nightmare. What it all means is: “A perfectly normal sleep thing that scares the screaming holy fuck out of us.”

  I recalled this one recent evening when, after having drifted off to sleep, I awoke, unable to move. Outside my bedroom window were voices. My father, I think, and my wife. Others, too. I could not understand them. And then something malevolent came into the room. And stood at the foot of the bed. And watched.

  This experience was nothing new, not for me and not for mankind. From restless spirits to space-faring entities, from the Incubus to the gray alien, from Romeo and Juliet to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, we can cast our fears in a new guise. We can give it a new name and a new face. Yet ultimately, the haunts of our evening remain the same: a hiccup of sleep and a lack of understanding. Once I understood that, it was an easy enough demon to exorcize. I needed neither holy water nor holy man. No scientists; no laser beams; no necklace of garlic. Just some understanding … and the terror was no more. Sometimes, that's all the exorcism you need.

  THE LIBRARY & BAZAAR

  Book Review | by Scott Connors

  The World, the Flesh, and the Devil

  by Gerald Kersh

  (Ash-Tree Press, $47.50)

  Gerald Kersh was a hugely prolific and popular writer who might well have been to the Britain of the mid-twentieth century what Rudyard Kipling and H.G. Wells were to the late nineteenth. He wrote in 1943: “You may like sordid realism or wild fantasy, sticky romance or spicy sex drama, horror or rosebuds, love or hate, misery or joy — the greatest composer of stories is life itself, and the greatest teller of stories is the man who clings faithfully to life as it is lived.” Kersh wrote in all these genres, faithfully recording life as he saw it — but his vision of humanity and of man's position in the universe was perhaps as bleak as that of H.P. Lovecraft, echoes of whom may be heard in one of Kersh's best known tales, “Men Without Bones.”

  Kersh was a product of the popular journalism of his time, and many of the stories we find in the new collection The World, The Flesh, and The Devil noteworthy for their treatment of contemporary issues. For instance, “One Case in a Million” appears to have been inspired by hangman Albert Pierrepoint, who was reviled after his participation in the controversial execution of murderess Ruth Ellis. Several of the stories here are allegories, but more interesting are the satires, such as the prescient “Comrade Death,” with its chilling prediction of the effects of nuclear warfare. “The Epistle of Simple Simon” is a rather unsubtle swipe at how far blind faith may deviate from what has become known recently as “the reality-based community” — and is reminiscent of a scene in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, though of course Kersh's story predates it. Some of the science-fiction stories have been overtaken by history, as in “Note on Danger B,” which speculates on some possible effects of breaching the sound barrier. But others, like “The Brighton Monster,” use some of the same background to make powerful observations about alienation and cultural relativism.

  The sense of being cast adrift in a meaningless universe is a common and powerful motif in Kersh's work; indeed, it is implied in the very title of his first (suppressed) book, Jews Without Jehovah. This is literally the case in both “The Brighton Monster” and “Neither Man Nor Dog.” The latter story is one of several Kersh wrote about a ferocious Russian named Adze who, as he is depicted in “The Wolf Dies in Silence,” might have given Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian lessons in toughness. Adze is a Hobbesian character living in a state of nature without any of the gentler emotions. “Wolf, Wolf” demonstrates his almost sociopathic practicality and lack of sentiment. “Kannibalsky” is an ironic commentary on how closely the saint and the sinner may coexist in each of us — and how disquieting it might be for the idealist to confront this coexistence. The only time Adze shows any apparent humanity is in “Neither Man Nor Dog,” a confirmation of John Donne's assertion “No man is an island” that manages to deliver a deliciously misanthropic subtext. We might detect a similar cynical view of man's brutish nature in “Corporal Cuckoo,” a tale of an immortal who fails to make the best use of his condition. Ambrose Bierce, one of the best-known cynics of our era, is the protagonist of the Edgar Award-winning tale “The Oxoxoco Bottle,” wherein Kersh manages to express simultaneously a cynicism about human motives and a sense of man's helplessness before blind chance.

  Kersh did write some more or less conventional weird tales. “The Gentleman All in Black” is a fine variation on the theme of the deal with the Devil and “The White-washed Room” an excellent ghost story, while “Miracle of the Winged Rescue” is a fantasy that would have fit in well into John W. Campbell's classic magazine Unknown Worlds. But Kersh's forte was definitely the conte cruel, as exemplified in the horrific “Crooked Bone.” He displays a deft hand in building his narrative towards the final payoff, which is both foreshadowed by the described events yet still manages to come as a shock.

  Kersh was an extremely versatile writer — yet, ironically, that very protean virtuosity made it difficult for his work to survive his death, due to a perception by publishers that it would be difficult to market. He's not the first author whose ouevre has succumbed to the confounding brilliance of its own interstitiality; classic Weird Tales favorite Henry Kuttner, for instance, has posthumously been in much the same boat. But all literary resurrections must begin somewhere — so we can hope that, now that Ash-Tree Press has brought us The World, The Flesh, and The Devil, there may be future volumes to come collecting more “fantastical writings” of Gerald Kersh.

  Comics Review | by Nick Mamatas

  The Drifting Classroom

  Vol. 1 by Kaou Umezu

  (Viz Media, $9.99)

  The manga boom in the U.S. can be difficult to navigate. Not for teens — they're natural aesthetic explorers — but for adult readers, the five or six new shelves of unfamiliar new comic books that have materialized in most chain bookstores over the past few years tend to be intimidating. Where to begin? Try Kazuo Umezu's The Drifting Classroom. The eleven-volume series, originally published in the early 1970s, is the unnerving story of an elementary school that finds itself transported … somewhere else. Young Sho, an immature sixth-grader, yells at his mother one morning and declares that he is never coming home. Inexplicably his wish comes true when an earthquake hits and the outside world falls away. What's left is only the social pressure-cooker of the school, the incompetent-to-sadistic teachers, and hints of what has happened to the rest of the planet.

  The Drifting Classroom is not a subtle series. The two-page splashes of the chasm where the school once stood and of the twisting desert landscape to where it has been transported hit the very edge of what can be expressed by ink on digest-sized pages. To calm the students from panicking, a teacher grabs a child and attacks him with a shard of glass from his own broken spectacles. A few pages later, the kid is revealed as the teacher's own son. The principal comes to after being brained by a burglar; when he staggers in to the main office and declares that the faculty pay packets are missing, the teachers can only laugh at him. And while the upper grades worry about their parents and how to retain their composure for the good of the school, the third-graders tie up their teacher and one of the kids makes a break for it.

  Over the course of eleven books, Sho emerges as a leader of the students (which proves necessary after his teacher goes mad) and much more is learned about the uncanny landscape to which the school is exiled. There are giant insect attacks and female gangs, plagues and serial killers. Most disturbing of all is the attention paid to detail; the kids are never depicted as anything other than kids, with art that would not be out of place in so
me 1970s-era Japanese Dick-and-Jane basal reader. The haircuts and ankle socks alone are to die for — and many of the characters do just that.

  A whole new culture of comic books was suddenly and inexplicably transported to American shopping malls; for those wanting to pick their way through its world, The Drifting Classroom is an excellent place to start.

  Arts & Artifacts | by Amanda Gannon

  Merimask

  www.merimask.etsy.com

  Concealing your face isn't difficult. Doing so while revealing something of the essential character beneath is another matter entirely — and thatis what great masks are all about. That's where Andrea Tognetti of Merimask comes in. Each of her mysterious facepieces is constructed of a single piece of cut, carved, and formed top-grain leather. All are unique, hand-tooled, and painted with meticulous attention to detail; Merimask pieces have been featured at performances by Cirque du Soleil. But while the artistry may be gallery-quality — and, indeed, Tognetti's work has hung in exhibits around the nation — these three-dimensional fantasies are durable and fully intended to be worn. So go ahead, choose a second face: blue wolf, scarlet dragon, Green Man, Anubis. For the truly weird and unique, Tognetti does accept custom commissions …

  INTERVIEW

  Mike Mignola: Hellboy's Dad

  by Elizabeth Genco

  When Mike Mignola was but a wee lad of ten or twelve years old, he read a book that would change everything. From the moment he closed the covers, he knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. The book? Dracula. The inner calling? Monsters.

  Mike got to work, pursuing his newfound goal with passion and fervor. His self-imposed training regimen included many trips to Berkeley’s used bookstores and countless hours devouring the likes of Lovecraft and Smith, Bloch and Howard. (You know, a Weird Tales who’s who.) And folk tales. And classic monster movies. And lots and lots of comics.

  Fast-forward a couple of decades. After years of penciling superhero comics for Marvel and DC, the moment Mike had been waiting for had finally arrived: the chance to do his own thing. He took all his literary, folklore, and pulp-fiction loves and funneled them into his singular new creation: a grizzled, beet-red demon working for the good guys. (Good thing, too, what with that Right Hand Of Doom and all.) Mission accomplished.

  The second Hellboy feature film hits theaters in July.

  So what have you been up to? Is Hellboy 2 finished?

  My work on Hellboy 2 wrapped up a long time ago. I was only really involved in pre-production, and I made one visit to the set. Which wasn't really work!

  What exactly did you do?

  A few months after the first movie was finished, Guillermo [Del Toro, acclaimed director of Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth] and I came up with an original story. I co-plotted; he turned it into the screenplay. I came in for three months on pre-production in LA, and then for a couple of weeks in Budapest.

  Rough concept stuff.

  How did you meet Del Toro in the first place?

  When he heard that the studio wanted to do a Hellboy film, he approached them. Then he and I met and we hit it off instantly. I knew right away that if there was anybody I wanted to see make a Hellboy movie, it was certainly going be this guy.

  The commentaries on the first film are so much fun to listen to. You two hit it off so well.

  It's spooky how much we have in common.

  He also loves his monsters.

  Yeah, it's very funny. I was living in Portland at the time and we met for breakfast, courtesy of Dark Horse, my publisher. Afterwards Guillermo and I immediately went off went to the best used bookstore in America, which is in Portland. [That’d be Powells, of course —ed.] Then we went back to my apartment and we discovered some crazy similarities. I mean, right down to what books I had on my shelf, and where. I put certain authors together and it makes no logical sense, and yet he was going, “Oh, I put this guy next to that guy too!” It was really pretty weird.

  Your stories read like a who's who of mythology, folklore and occultism — you’re really quite well-read on this stuff. I admit to having been pleasantly surprised at some of the rather obscure references in Hellboy.

  It's always been my interest, ever since I read Dracula as a kid. Dracula kind of opened my eyes. I tend to approach it from the folklore and literary sides rather than the big movie monster side. Dracula turned me on to that Victorian era of literature, but also there was a folklore element in that story. It really sent me in two directions: in the literature direction, and the folklore direction.

  So ever since then I've been collecting and reading this stuff. And I always knew that if I ever got to that point in comics where I could do whatever I wanted, I'd draw on that material. In fact, before I did Hellboy, there were a couple of different folktales I'd planned to adapt into comics and both of them ended up turning into Hellboy stories.

  So almost from the very beginning, I recognized that Hellboy was a vehicle to do these stories. Unfortunately, if you do a straight adaptation of an English folktale, nobody's going to give a shit. But if you do it wrapped around a character like this, a lot more people are going to pay attention to it.

  What draws you into in these stories? Why do you love them so much?

  It's the weirdness. Especially with folklore, it's just the weirdness — these strange things that defy all logic. Folklore and fairy tale logic is something that Del Toro and I are always making reference to. Where you think, “That seems right, but I don't know why…“

  If you read a lot of this material, you'll see certain rhythms and patterns. But part of the rhythm and patterns is things like, “two plus two adds up to a pine tree.” How the hell did we get there from here? Things like in a Russian folktale where a cat and a bird warn a guy that this is the time of the year that Baba Yaga will come in the window … and count your silverware.

  A lot of writers will take a story like that and either change that element, or feel compelled to explain that element. But the beauty of that stuff is that there's no possible explanation for it. Certain things “just happen.”

  And to think it all started with Dracula … !

  Yeah! It's a very strange thing, but I remember finishing that book or being in the middle of that book and almost making a conscious decision: “Oh. This is it.” I had discovered my “thing.” And there was never any straying from the path. I can almost say that since reading Dracula, I probably haven't read even a dozen books that don't have monsters in them that weren't required for a class or something.

  Okay, so that's an overstatement. But Dracula certainly did make me realize what world I was interested in.

  And there’s some Lovecraft in there too.

  Weird Tales and the pulp magazines introduced me to this other kind of Big Cosmic Horror thing: Lovecraft and the whole circle of Lovecraft guys. And there was just something magical about it. I discovered people like Lovecraft, and learned that all this stuff was published in some magazine called Weird Tales, and it was like hearing about this whole other world.

  So part of the Lovecraft influence is a real nostalgia for those pulp magazines. But there's also the fact that Lovecraft had this amazing vision of this giant unknowable universe, which is something I've tried to pick up and put in my own stuff. This idea that so much of what we're dealing with is beyond human comprehension.

  How do you mean?

  I hate rules and regulations in supernatural stuff. I hate things like coming up with formulas that say, “If you're bitten by a vampire, after three days you turn into a vampire.” That's not in the old folklore, and in my view, as soon as you put rules on things, it becomes science fiction. Sometimes Lovecraft almost veers into sci-fi, but generally his worlds are so huge that they become unknowable. There's a mystery. I've tried to emulate that unknowable thing.

  Do you remember your first exposure to Lovecraft or the pulps?

  I was buying all this stuff at the used bookstores in Berkley as a kid. I don't recall which specific story I read
first, but I've always been a big anthology nut. So I'm sure I'd picked up some anthology somewhere which had a Lovecraft story, and then probably there was an introduction that referenced Weird Tales, and then suddenly I was buying every anthology I could get my hands on that included stories from Weird Tales.

  There was — oh, maybe a couple-year period where it felt like almost every day I discovered some new (to me) writer who was writing at that time. It probably started with Robert E. Howard because I was really into Conan, and he was in Weird Tales, and then you pick up Weird Tales and you discover Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and all these other guys.

  Do you still have all of your books from that time?

  I have a lot of them, and in many cases, I've tracked down copies where I don't have my originals. In fact, I just went back to Berkeley this past weekend. I hadn't been there in years, but I went back just to look at those used bookstores again and say, “That's where I got my copy of this” and “That's where I got my copy of that.” Because it really was the stuff that changed my life.

  It was very strange. Some of them had disappeared, but they'd come back. Or some of them used to be on one street and I'd find them on another. And of course some of them were radically different. But one bookstore in particular, Moe's, which is on Telegraph Avenue, was exactly the same. I hadn't been there in 15 years, but I went to particular shelves and probably some of the same books were there. Their folklore section was exactly where it used to be. Their rare book section has the books on the exact same shelves. The supernatural section is exactly where it was. It was a little bit like walking back in time.