The Resurrectionist
by Jack O’Connell
(Algonquin Books, $24.95)
Think Jasper Fforde meets Lorenzo’s Oil meets The Neverending Story. In Jack O'Connell's incredible new novel, we meet Sweeney, a druggist whose son, Danny, has been left in a coma with minimal brain activity. Soon, however, Sweeney discovers that his son's condition is bizarrely linked to the comic-book universe of Limbo. Nurses, freaks, and magic converge as the author drives Danny and his father to their strange fate.
Vicious Circle
by Mike Carey
(Grand Central, $24.99)
Mike Carey talked with Weird Tales last year (issue #346) about the debut of his ghost-hunting hero Felix Castor in The Devil You Know. Carey follows Castor back into his life of exorcism in the sequel, Vicious Circle, as the haunted protagonist takes some freelance paranormal work from the local police. One case threatens to be more than he can handle, sending Castor, his possessed friend Rafi, and the succubus Juliet on a quest to stop the reincarnation of a demon.
LOST IN LOVECRAFT
A Guided Tour of the Dark Master's World | by Kenneth Hite
Hanging Out in Dreamland (With a Prior King)
“Why the beings and the sculptures lingered so late in the world, even until the coming of men, none can tell; unless it was because the land of Mnar is very still, and remote from most other lands, both of waking and of dream.” —H.P. Lovecraft, “The Doom That Came to Sarnath”
Finding the “first appearance” of Lovecraft's Dreamlands involves an appropriately murky exploration. For instance, his first three mature tales — “The Tomb,” “Dagon,” and “Polaris” — all involve dream visions that may or may not also be travel narratives. The first mention of “lands of dream” (a notion Lovecraft took from Dunsany, or perhaps from Winsor McKay?) in his fiction is in “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” but the only tale explicitly set in Dreamland is The Dream-Quest of Unknown
Kadath. On the other hand, out of Lovecraft's fifty solo stories, thirty-nine feature or mention dreams, and five more mention nightmares. Of the six remaining, two — “The Cats of Ulthar” and “The Other Gods” — are conventionally considered “Dream- land” stories, though that convention dissolves if you examine it too closely. Just like Serranian, the “pink marble city of the clouds.”
Leng, Kadath, Sarnath, and Lomar are all explicitly set in both Lovecraft's “real world” and in the Dreamland. Even Randolph Carter, the soul-symbol of the Dream Cycle, spends at least half his time in waking world adventures. The boundary between “Dreamland” stories and “Mythos” stories is so thin as to be risible. As thin, indeed, as one suspects Lovecraft considers the boundaries between the mundane world and any of his higher dimensions: the ultraviolet, hyperspace, the Dreamlands, the past of “He,” or the chaos outside Erich Zann's window. Or, to be sure, the boundaries between life and death in “Cool Air” or madness and reality in “Hypnos” or tale and truth in “Quest of Iranon” or man and monster in “Shadow Over Innsmouth” or science and blasphemy in “The Dunwich Horror.” Thinness of boundaries, the lack of walls — of sleep or otherwise — seems to be a huge meta-concern spanning all of Lovecraft's work.
But back to Dreamland. Of fifty tales, by my count, only four have no connection with dreams. Further, Lovecraft drew elements of many of his stories, including “The Statement of Randolph Carter” and “Call of Cthulhu,” from his own dreams. In a sense, Lovecraft's entire cosmos, from “changeless, legend-haunted” Arkham to the vaults of Zin, is a Dreamland.
“They reminded him, too, that not only had no man ever been to Kadath, but no man had ever suspected in what part of space it may lie; whether it be in the dreamlands around our own world, or in those surrounding some unguessed companion of Fomalhaut or Aldebaran. If in our dreamland, it might conceivably be reached ...” —H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
Dreamland, meanwhile, is somewhere else. It is on the other side of the Gates of Deeper Slumber, and through a ghoul-burrow, and just that side of the Tanarian Hills, and through the Enchanted Wood. And that's just in one novel, the Dream-Quest. In “The White Ship,” Basil Elton takes a White Ship across the Southern Sea to what might be Dreamland. King Kuranes of “Celephaïs” merely nods off and “journeys” there, although the specific “there” seems to vary with his age. The Dreamland is both the “inner world” and “around our world,” and there are other “regions of dream” that aren't it at all.
Dreamland has its own Moon and Saturn, at least, and there are other dreamlands entirely “surrounding some unguessed companion of Fomalhaut or Aldebaran.” Parts of it resemble Earth —such as the patch of Cornwall dreamed into existence by Kuranes — and parts of it might even be on Earth, such as Randolph Carter's “sunset city,” which he reaches not by falling asleep but by waking up.
“It was very strange, but as the riders went on they seemed to gallop back through Time ...” —H.P. Lovecraft, “Celephaïs”
Perhaps more of Dreamland than we, or Randolph Carter, suspect lies on the Earth. Ulthar, for example, receives a visit from a young cat-fancier named Menes who (we are led to infer) will grow up to be that Menes who became the first Pharaoh of Egypt, dating the events of “The Cats of Ulthar” to approximately 3100 bc. Sarnath and Ib are explicitly dated to “ten thousand years ago,” and in At the Mountains of Madness, Ib joins such faultlessly terrestrial locations as Atlantis, R'lyeh, Lomar, and Arabia's “nameless city.” At the Mountains of Madness also incidentally further confounds the locations of Kadath and Leng, both occasional features of the Dreamland, by identifying them with the Old Ones' Antarctic conurbation. “The Other Gods” returns Kadath to such Dreamland environs as Hatheg-Kla, Ulthar, and so forth, but then sets them “in the youth of the world.” Dreamland, in other words, is an ancestral memory-plane, or even the ancient world itself, as indeed Lomar (fl. 24,000 B.C.) turns out to be in “Polaris.” In this context, it is perhaps significant that Lovecraft's commonplace-book story-seed for “Celephaïs” reads: “Man journeys into the past — or imaginative realm — leaving bodily shell behind.” And indeed, when Kuranes makes his final trip to Celephaïs, the riders escorting him seem “to gallop back through Time” past “houses and villagers such as Chaucer or men before him might have seen.”
“Then he saw a sort of grey phosphorescence about, and guessed they were coming even to that inner world of subterrene horror of which dim legends tell, and which is litten only by the pale death-fire wherewith reeks the ghoulish air and the primal mists of the pits at Earth’s core.” —H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
But is Kuranes really traveling to the distant past on his final ride? It is, after all, his final ride because his hashish-stupefied “bodily shell” has fallen over an English cliffside somewhere. In short, Kuranes dies and goes to the Dreamlands. Something similar happens to Richard Upton Pickman, who is dragged into a tunnel in his Boston cellar only to emerge as a ghoul in the Dreamlands, a tough enough trick to manage even without adding time-travel to the mix. Barzai the Wise falls “into the sky” above Kadath, into a “damnable pit.” George Wetzel's bravura essay “The Cthulhu Mythos” identifies the Dreamland directly with Hell, or rather with Elysium and Tartarus intermixed. The ghouls, and their vast piles of bones in the Vale of Pnath, usher in this hellish atmosphere. Moreover, the Dreamlands of the Dream-Quest are full of “daemon” entities, “gargoyles,” and other infernal signifiers, lurking in omnipresent pits, abysses, and gulfs. Like Dante's inferno, the way to the Dreamland lies both in the middle of a wood and in the “inner world.” (Better yet, Mt. Ngranek lies within “the primal mists of the earth's core.”) Like Avernus, one descends (770 steps) into Dreamland, although contra Virgil, the descent is not as easy as all that.
“A blessed haze lies upon all this region, wherein is held a little more of the sunlight than other places hold, and a little more of the summer’s humming music of birds and bees; so that men walk through
it as through a faery place, and feel greater joy and wonder than they ever afterward remember.” —H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
Can these three Dreamlands be reconciled? Can the Dreamland be an amorphous parallel dimension, and the ancient past, and the pit of Tartarus all at once? What else might come from dreams and fancies, or the past, or Hell? A sampling of answers: According to the Edwardian anthropologist W.Y. Evans-Wentz, changelings are made while children are asleep. On the Isle of Skye, falling asleep on a fairy mound results in being taken to Fairyland. As the Irish author “A.E.” put it: “Many go to the Tirna-nog in sleep, and some are said to have remained there.” Shakespeare's fairy encounters occur in an Enchanted Wood (zoog-free) during a midsummer night's dream.
So much for dreams. What of the past? The Irish Book of Conquests tells of the primordial Tuatha de Danaan, who retreated inside the hills to become the Daoine Sidh, or fairies, keeping their ancient world alive there. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, among others, took this to mean that the “little people” were ancient survivals of a “Mongolian” race of pre-Britons. And Hell? Again, Evans-Wentz reports beliefs across the Celtic world identifying the fairies with the spirits of the dead. The sluagh of the Highlands are the evil dead; Finvarra's troops in Ireland are likewise sinister sorts. Lady Wilde reports an Irish legend that the fairies are fallen angels. And of course Hell, Faërie, and Lovecraft's Dreamland are all underground realms.
Like Lovecraft's ghouls, fairies snatch trespassers and feed them a transforming food that keeps them in Fairyland forever. The merchants of Dylath-Leen, and the slavers from the Moon, and the nightgaunts, all likewise kidnap passersby in fine fairy style. The fate of Iranon in his eponymous quest resembles that of King Herla, who aged to dust upon return from Faërie. Like “Tir-na-nog,” the fairies. Land of Youth, Ooth-Nargai holds “only perpetual youth.” Sona-Nyl, where “there is neither time nor space,” sounds like the eternal twilight realm of infinite meadows and forests tucked inside a fairy mound. The peculiar behavior of time and space in the Dreamland likewise tracks the tales of a night's dancing that lasts seven years, or of fairy rides across all England in a night. Dreamland and Fairyland overlap thoroughly, albeit mysteriously. Lovecraft read Machen and A.E., and the Anglo-Irish Lord Dunsany was of course familiar with the renaissance in Irish fairy lore that was occurring all around him. Exactly how the sidhe became the ghouls, or the redcaps the gugs, we may never know. But it seems as clear as the River Skai that whether by design, inspiration, or Dunsany, Lovecraft had discovered Fairyland, and dreamed himself its creator.
THE CRYPTIC
by Darrell Schweitzer
People: It's What's For Dinner
Does the name Sawney Bean mean anything to you? If so, it surely conjures up images of the darkest depths of human depravity and degeneracy, next to which Lovecraft's “decayed” New England Whateleys and Marshes are paragons of civic probity, although the Martense family in “The Lurking Fear” is a bit closer to the mark: inbred, dwarfish, half-human cannibals dwelling in caves and tunnels underneath an ancient mansion in the Catskills.
Indeed, cannibalism is the crux of the matter, because Sawney Bean (or Beane) and his extended family were the most famous cannibals in the history of Scotland. This is not to suggest that people eating people is a particularly common phenomenon in the north of Britain, and we will refrain from prying questions about what precisely is in that wonderful haggis they serve there, but Sawney Bean is something else again.
“The following account, though as well attested as any historical fact can be, is almost as incredible, for the monstrous and unparalleled barbarities that it relates,” begins the “standard” version of the story, which tells how, some centuries ago, one Sawney Bean, the “idle” and generally ne'er-do-well son of a Scottish laborer, removed himself from respectable society in the company of a lady similarly inclined, and took up residence in caves in Galloway, where the happy couple was fruitful, multiplied astonishingly, and supported themselves entirely by highway robbery and cannibalism. So successful were they at this that they continued undetected for twenty-five years, as numerous travelers disappeared, several innocent innkeepers were hanged on suspicion of murder, and no one encountered the Bean family and did other than “stay for dinner,” even as the prolific clan increased incestuously unto a third generation. At last, a man and a wife, riding on the same horse on the way home from a fair, were attacked by the cannibals. The woman was dragged off the horse, butchered, her blood drunk “with great gusto” and her entrails were ripped in front of her husband's eyes. He fought bravely “with sword and pistol,” knowing his fate would be the same, until a party of thirty more people returning from the same fair suddenly arrived on the scene. For the first time, someone had encountered the Bean clan and survived. Soon the king of Scotland himself, with four hundred armed retainers scoured the countryside, discovered the Beans. cave complex with its vast stores of smoked and picked human remains, and after a stout fight, all the cannibals were hauled off to Glasgow for edifyingly gory executions without any need for a trial. Not one of them repented, all screaming hideous curses to the end.
Such families of murderous rural cannibals have become a horror archetype, a staple of the field. Among the novels on the subject are The Flesh Eaters by L.A. Morse (1979) and Guy N. Smith's The Cannibals (1986). Jack Ketchum's first book, The Off Season (1980) transplants the story to the Maine coast. Among film adaptations or films somewhat inspired by the story are Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977, remade in 2006), Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain (2003), Hillside Cannibals (2006), Hotel Caledonia (2008), which sets the story in the present day, and — although a less literal adaptation — The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, remade in 2006).
So “well attested” and documented is the tale of the Bean clan that it turns up in any number of “true crime” books, including Jay Nash's Encyclopedia of Crime and Almanac of World Crime, C.E. Maine's The World’s Strangest Crimes, and William Roughhead's Rogues Walk Here.
There is only one problem: not a word of this story is true.
I owe this insight to my friend and colleague Lee Weinstein, editor and writer and scholar par excellence. When I repeated the basic Bean story to him and insisted, “It's very well documented,” he said, “Oh really? Show me.”
Lee is a librarian by profession and an outstanding researcher who was once engaged by the editors of Shocked and Amazed to document the existence of “La Petomaine,” an eccentric French performance artist whose, ahem, “talent” cannot be described delicately. (Look it up. That's why God made the Internet.) He also worked for a National Enquirer writer, carefully documenting each reported instance of human physiological oddities: cyclopses, “mermaids,” two-headed babies, that sort of thing. Lee was the one who introduced me to Philadelphia's brilliantly weird Mutter Museum, with its world-class collection of bizarre medical specimens. Sawney Bean seemed right up his alley.
I have to confess that Lee did more of the research than I did, but I take credit for goading him on, and what we found out is quite instructive in showing how such stories assemble themselves and how you can take them apart again.
We began with the obvious question: Which king of Scotland? Various accounts cite a King James, sometimes James the First, but here we are already in difficulties, because this could mean either James the First of Scotland who ruled only part of the country between 1406 and 1437 (and did not control Galloway, where the Bean caves are “still to be seen” to this day; so he would not have been able to take an army there) or perhaps James the Sixth of Scotland who became James the First of England in 1603. In which case we're talking about Shakespeare's patron, for whom the Bard wrote Macbeth.
Okay — we've already got a spread of about 160 years here.
The next question was this: Why didn't Shakespeare or one of his contemporaries mention Sawney Bean? We followed this up with: Why isn't the “documentation” even better? The life of James VI a.k.a. Jame
s I, the first Stuart king of Great Britain, is exceptionally well chronicled. You would think that if he had participated in something as shocking as an armed raid on a clan of cannibals, and had personally presided over all those dismemberments and burnings afterwards, which were carried out in fully public view in Glasgow (Edinburgh by some accounts), this would have, in effect, made the evening news. People would talk about it. Writers would mention it. It would become proverbial. There would be lurid ballads written, and maybe an even more lurid play on the order of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, the 16th century equivalent of a slasher flick.
But there is silence. Almost.
We found a very old “Historie of Scotland” by Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie (circa 1532-1578) which reports strange portents marking the death of James the Second (1460) including a “blazing star,” the birth of a hermaphrodite, and, incidentally, “a certaine theefe” who lurked in “a den in Angus called Fenisden,” where he and his family robbed and ate passers-by, until finally caught, whereupon all the family was burnt at the stake. One daughter was spared, she being only a year old at the time, but by the time she was twelve she displayed similar appetites and met the same fate.
The story is repeated in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577). This is the same Holinshed that Shakespeare used as a source for several of his plays.
This looked like paydirt, but it was not definitive. The Lindsay/Holinshed version does not mention Sawney Bean by name, nor does it contain the heroic husband and the disemboweled lady on her way home from the fair. Holinshed was not noted for extreme accuracy, which is one reason why many Shakespeare history plays only slightly resemble the actual reality of the events they depict. There is also, clearly, an oral tradition at work here. Note that the daughter who was spared only to reveal her evil nature has been dropped from later versions.
Weird Tales, Volume 350 Page 15