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[lionsdenbooks]

hi there

I started this blog over summer break and got immediately terminated by automatic filters for no reason. A bit discouraging having made all of three posts, but after two months, I'm back!

I'll probably have to post sparingly from here on out; work and school are going to take up a lot of my time. I am glad I have this blog back, though (hell of a url), and I'll try to put something out every week or so. Thanks for understanding!

[lionsdenbooks]

i have mixed opinions on turn of the screw

The Turn of the Screw is an 1898 Gothic horror novella written by lauded American-British novelist Henry James. It concerns a governess who becomes caretaker to two children, Miles and Flora, and grows convinced they are being haunted by the spirits of former staff, Peter Quint and his lover Miss Jessel. It got a loose adaptation in 2020 in the form of the series The Haunting of Bly Manor, which I've heard was reasonably good.

Screw begins with the frame of a narrator gathering around a fire with friends to hear this story, presented as the account of the late governess, a "manuscript in old faded ink and in the most beautiful hand." The tale is talked up as dreadful and terrifying, which doesn't prevent one guest from asking, "And what did the former governess die of? Of so much respectability?" The severity of this cut only becomes clear after suffering through a hundred-odd pages of "her" writing, but I assure you it's deep.

Like in The Castle of Otranto, another seminal work of gothic horror fiction, James seems here to have adopted an intentionally antiquated/distinguished style of narration to give the work an air of age. (Mysteries of Udolpho is explicitly referenced in the story.) As soon as the governess' tale begins, the style immediately gains the ability to induce headaches at twenty feet verbosity and sentence length.

But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connection with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several times rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect; to watch from my open window the faint summer dawn, to look at such stretches of the rest of the house as I could catch, and to listen, while in the fading dusk the first birds began to twitter, for the possible recurrence of a sound or two, less natural and not without but within, that I had fancied I heard.

This work made it clear to me that James lacked familiarity with periods in both senses.

Sentences like that are not isolated incidents, unfortunately. In them, James will often deploy needlessly baroque language.

We met, after I had brought home little Miles, more intimately than ever on the ground of my stupefaction, my general emotion: so monstrous was I then ready to pronounce it that such a child as had now been revealed to me should be under an interdict.

Look, it's not that I'm unable to read this; it's that, over the course of an entire novella, it feels like contortions on the part of the writer to try and force a certain style, which was annoying.

To James' credit, the novel demonstrates a certain level of pacing and tension. The first apparition, the likeness of a man the governess later learns is called Peter Quint, she first sees atop the estate's battlements, then staring at her through a window. This is a clear escalation (in proximity)—in fact, as the second appearance is happening, the governess comments on his "nearness...that represented a forward stride in our intercourse." After he disappears, she goes outside and investigates, and the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, is terrified by the sight of her in turn through the window, causing the chapter to end with the governess musing ominously, "But there's only one [thing] I should take space to mention. I wondered why she should be scared." This is strong horror writing. The governess' fear is vividly described; an intriguing paranormal mystery is set up—she later points out to Grose that she had no way of knowing what Quint looked like, or even that he existed, but the apparition had his likeness—and there is a clear escalation in stakes in the ghost coming closer. So far, so good.

Where the book frustrates me is that, in my estimation, the book largely loses its momentum after these appearances. There are more apparition-scenes, which are uniformly written well, but in between these bouts of interest, the book devotes an inordinate amount of its space to describing the most mundane possible interactions between the governess and Miles and Flora, both of whom are excruciating in their bland sweetness (for most of the book, anyway). This is an issue because the central conflict of the story is ostensibly the governess trying to prevent them from being corrupted by the ghosts of Quint and Jessel. Miles demonstrates a sort of canny intelligence that threatens to be interesting, but it comes late in the story and presents to me more as precociousness than sinister possession. In any case, neither of the children seems to "progress" in their "condition" the way the apparitions progress in their appearances, so the threat of their being taken over by the ghosts is largely theoretical.

The one exception to this criticism is the final scene, which was actually quite engaging to read. In it, the governess is alone with Miles, and her paranoia over Quint and Jessel reaches a fever pitch. Miles is more confrontational than he has been the rest of the book, and so his cleverness has actual teeth, as it were. "For of course if we're alone together now it's you that are alone most," he remarks to the governess. In the scene's climax, Quint appears at the window, Miles fails to see it, the governess realizes he is no longer controlled, and then Miles' heart stops and he dies. The scene would have had more impact had it felt more actively set up by the rest of the book, but as is it's a good climax, and as the first two seasons of Twin Peaks have taught us, a great deal of poor writing can be excused by a fantastic ending. Screw doesn't escape its own laborious middle, but that doesn't entirely prevent it from ending on a high note.

The book did not successfully make me care about the children, possessed or otherwise. Instead, the parts that will stick with me the most are certainly the scenes in which the spirits appear to the governess; they have a certain snapshot intensity that I found very engaging. There's one in particular that occurs at night upon a stair lit by candlelight—a CLASSIC Gothic setup—and that I simply marked in my annotations as Antigonish. It begins gravely, "I remember that the book I had in my hand was Fielding's Amelia; also that I was wholly awake." The governess walks down the hall, her candle is blown out, and she comes face-to-face with Quint upon the stair.

It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such an hour we still at least would have spoken...I can't express what followed it save by saying that the silence itself—which was indeed in a manner an attestation of my strength—became the element into which I saw the figure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn, as I might have seen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of an order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch could have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the darkness in which the next bend was lost.

I should mention one aspect of this novel that is legitimately interesting, which is its ambiguity. Though Miles, Flora, and Mrs. Grose are familiar with Quint and Jessel prior to their deaths, the apparitions go unseen throughout the story except by the governess. It is entirely possible to read it, then, as a tale written by a madwoman who terrorized two children with her hallucinations, and in my opinion that is much more compelling. Read this way, where the governess is the ultimate threat to the children rather than abstract ghosts, the climax is much more dramatic; in "saving" Miles from an imaginary threat, she frightens the poor boy to death. It also ameliorates the pacing issues of the book with respect to the children, for if they are not actually "possessed" nothing is actually progressing except the governess' mental condition; nothing is getting worse except her derangement.

All in all, I don't regret my time with A Turn of the Screw, even though I find it much weaker than Dracula, Frankenstein, and the like as far as the genre goes. (Being read back to back with Haunting of Hill House, now my favorite Gothic horror novel of all time, certainly didn't do it any favors either.) If you're into the genre, it's worth a read, but your mileage may vary.

Edit: In the time between this post being queued and published, I read The Jolly Corner (1908) and made the terrible realization that this prolix sludge is, unfortunately, his regular writing style. On balance, I think Screw has a more compelling concept overall and a few very strong scenes, which benefits it a lot, but I don't know if I'll be suffering through much more of his work in future.

[lionsdenbooks]

flavorful writing; Nature & setting description (w/ examples from weird fiction)

When describing a setting in your world/story, there are two ways to go about it. You can faithfully describe it as though you had taken a picture or painted a painting:

A green lamp sits on a broad mahogany desk. It lights up a stack of papers sitting in the center. The papers are all from notebooks. Each holds a different style of childish scrawl. There are red pens sitting to the right and left of the papers, precisely in line with them. There is a pastel yellow ashtray at the far left corner of the desk with some refuse in it.

This description is serviceable in that it lets us know what the desk looks like and what is on it, but stylistically it is pretty flat—"there are pens," "there are papers," "there is a lamp," etc. In contrast, the other broad way you can describe it is more cinematic/stylistic, with extra attention paid to currently progressing action and the focus of the story:

The desk is lit by a banker's lamp, the green sort that might have been stolen from an old Gothic library. Its beam falls gently over an immaculately arranged stack of notebook papers, each bearing a name in a different childish scrawl: Kate. George. Constance. Nervous and ungraded, they sit in the center. Red pens array themselves like a surgeon's tools to either side. Far in the corner, safely out of the papers' way, sits a pastel yellow ashtray, the deep crimson of cigarette butts smoldering in its center.

I find the second description to be stronger because, despite the information communicated not being different, there's a lot more meaning given to all the elements of the setting than in the first description. The red pens don't just sit there, they array themselves like a surgeon's tools, telling us not only their immaculate placement but also implying something to us about the task for which they will be used and the manner in which that task will be carried out.

My point is not that I'm a stylistic genius; it's that so much of writing is fundamentally about finding ways to tell people more in fewer words. If you employ the first description, you're communicating so much less information about the current situation and the character to whom these objects belong—so much less that you may feel the need to elaborate explicitly about his fastidiousness, his infamous harshness in grading, and maybe even his habit of chain-smoking. People are smart, imaginative creatures. They can make inferences; they can pick up hints; and most likely, that will interest them more than being force-fed repetitive, boring sets of adjectives.*

To see how this plays out in an actual literary genre, let's look at descriptions of Nature in some stories I've been reading recently. From Ambrose Bierce's An Inhabitant of Carcosa (1886):

On every side of me stretched a bleak and desolate expanse of plain, covered with a tall overgrowth of sere grass, which rustled and whistled in the autumn wind with heaven knows what mysterious and disquieting suggestion. Protruded at long intervals above it, stood strangely shaped and somber-colored rocks, which seemed to have an understanding with one another and to exchange looks of uncomfortable significance, as if they had reared their heads to watch the issue of some foreseen event. A few blasted trees here and there appeared as leaders in this malevolent conspiracy of silent expectation.

And from Algernon Blackwood's Ancient Sorceries (1908):

There was a certain queer sense of bewitchment in it all. The music seemed to him oddly unartificial. It made him think of trees swept by the wind, of night breezes singing among wires and chimney-stacks, or in the rigging of invisible ships; or—and the simile leaped up in his thoughts with a sudden sharpness of suggestion—a chorus of animals, of wild creatures, somewhere in desolate places of the world, crying and singing as animals will, to the moon.

And, breaking genre a bit, even from Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962):**

They both looked to the carnival where dusk colored the canvas billows. Shadows ran coolly out to engulf them...Soon night would own the midway, where shadows rode the Ferris wheel up to cloud the stars.

In all these excerpts, elements of Nature are personified—they have agency. Night-breezes sing, shadows run coolly, rocks exchange looks of uncomfortable significance. The effect is to make the world of the text feel more responsive and transport the reader more fully. Especially in horror, making the world itself feel dangerous and alive does wonders for your tone. It's like the red pens in the example; the personification does more work for the author by setting a mood, implying more information about the situation, and making the world feel more genuine. Clearly, there's stuff going on (maybe scary stuff? probably scary stuff) that's not connected to the main characters or the main plot. The setting they're in doesn't feel like a painted background.

Led by my thoughts, my eyes turned downward to the powdery road surface which had held such hideous testimonies. The last few days had been dry, and tracks of all sorts cluttered the rutted, irregular highway despite the unfrequented nature of the district. With a vague curiosity I began to trace the outline of some of the heterogeneous impressions, trying meanwhile to curb the flights of macabre fancy which the place and its memories suggested. There was something menacing and uncomfortable in the funereal stillness, in the muffled, subtle trickle of distant brooks, and in the crowding green peaks and black-wooded precipices that choked the narrow horizon.

I think this is some of the strongest Nature description that H.P. Lovecraft does in The Whisperer in Darkness (1930), but in my experience he tends to be weaker about it than the other writers I have excerpted. In general throughout Whisperer, he is much more concerned with people's feelings about the elements of Nature with which they are interacting rather than it performing any actions itself. Occasionally, he will break from his tendency of flat description in "deep woods of the highest peaks," "ice and rock pinnacles," etc. and dare to use a compelling descriptor, as in "deep, steep-sided gorges that even the wolves shunned" or "things seen or heard where the primal forest pressed close upon their dooryards," but his default seems to be flatter.

Especially when you're writing a piece that has the level of reliance on tone that horror does, it is in your best interest to use more compelling descriptions. Using more interesting verbs, employing personification, and varying your sentence lengths can go a long way toward making your writing feel alive and allowing you to imply more and say less. Your hair will grow back. You'll get a six-pack. Your readers will thank you for it.

—

* As with everything else in writing, this rule is context-dependent. Of course you shouldn't abandon plain, straightforward description; my suggestion is to think carefully about when and why you employ it, and to move away from it as a default. The White People (1904) by Arthur Machen is a great counterexample from this genre; most of the story is the written account of a girl and so intentionally uses simplistic imagery/descriptions—not as a mere matter of course, but with the specific effect of making her authorial voice more distinct.

** Bradbury is most notorious for having written Fahrenheit 451, but I think his weird fiction is actually spectacular. Something Wicked and From the Dust Returned (2001)—which is basically a novelization of The Addams Family—are god-tier Halloween books.

[lionsdenbooks]

on algernon blackwood and his influence on cosmic horror

Algernon Blackwood was an English writer who became known for his works of "weird fiction" around the turn of the 20th century. Although he can't hold a candle to the likes of Poe etc. in posthumous fame, he was extremely influential in the development of the horror genre and especially cosmic horror, and in fact, Lovecraft and his literary circle have explicitly cited him as an inspiration.

Actually, Blackwood serves as a sort of who's who of deviant religion (deviant, a word which here means "it's Northern Europe, dumbass; anything that isn't explicitly and devoutly Christian") in the early 20th century. He was raised in a household of what S.T. Joshi has described as "oppressive religiosity," and the rest of his life was colored by a reaction against that. He was greatly influenced by Buddhist texts; he ran with the Society for Psychical Research; he formally joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1900 (and, judging by the name, sacrificed some children there too); and of course he joined the Theosophical Society—though I don't believe he had the opportunity to meet Miss Blavatsky herself before her passing in 1891. He always seemed to be searching for some deeper, more significant spiritual understanding. This reflects in his work, which constantly plays with spiritual ideas like reincarnation, other planes, and spiritual truths (sometimes even that Man Was Not Meant to Know).

J.R.R. Tolkien once mentioned that he got the name "Crack of Doom" from one of Blackwood's unnamed stories. If so (it may also be that it comes from Macbeth), it would be fitting, because both share the same deep contrition over industrialization and reverence of Nature. It is impossible to read a Blackwood story without noticing his awe of the power and mystery of the natural world, and in his two most prominent tales, The Willows and The Wendigo—which both feature protagonists supernaturally besieged in the wilderness—it sits front and center. Listen to this excerpt from Wendigo:

Deep silence fell about the little camp, planted there so audaciously in the jaws of the wilderness. The lake gleamed like a sheet of black glass beneath the stars. The cold air pricked. In the draughts of night that poured their silent tide from the depths of the forest, with messages from distant ridges and from lakes just beginning to freeze, there lay already the faint, bleak odours of coming winter.

Not only is Blackwood investing Nature with fearsome power ("the jaws of the wilderness"), he gives it a certain sentience with "messages." Consider the way the Danube is described in Willows:

From its tiny bubbling entry into the world among the pinewood gardens of Donaueschingen [a German town in the Black Forest], until this moment when it began to play the great river-game of losing itself among the deserted swamps, unobserved, unrestrained, it had seemed to us like following the growth of some living creature. Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being, through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a Great Personage.

Blackwood uses this technique constantly. In that except, his characters explicitly personify the river; it is said to have "violent desires," "conscious[ness]," and a "deep soul." Nature is ancient, it is powerful, it has a sort of intelligence, and it is what lurks behind the oh-so-thin veil of civilization in which we cloak ourselves.* The man consistently hits it out of the park with his Nature-settings, making his stories set there feel more weighty and immersive, and luckily, he seems to play to his strengths.

Another common theme of Blackwood's is disturbed mental states, especially brought on by the powers of Nature or of one of his spiritual bugaboos. In the fantastic Insanity of Mr. Jones, the eponymous Jones believes himself to be exacting vengeance on behalf of his previous reincarnation; The Man Who Found Out features someone briefly driven mad by Ancient Truths Man Was Not Meant to Know; and if you had told me Hozier's lyrics "Oh but she loves / like sleep to the freezing" were part of an adaptation of the tale The Glamour of the Snow, I would probably believe you. Listen to how everyman Hibbert is described in this latter one:

Now this battle for his soul must have issue. And he knew that the spell of Nature was greater for him than all other spells in the world combined—greater than love, revelry, or pleasure, greater even than study. He had always been afraid to let himself go. His pagan soul dreaded her terrific powers of witchery even while he worshipped.

In this quote, not just a part of Nature is personified; as a concept, it is characterized as a sort of powerful temptress, tugging at the primal heartstrings of Man. Though both he and the witless Arthur Vezin of Ancient Sorceries end up escaping from their respective Nature-witches, it is clear that for Blackwood, the concept of Nature is bound up in paganism, esoteric spiritual truth, and vast, intelligent danger that can drive a man mad. In this way, I consider him one of the stronger weird fiction writers of the twentieth century; grounding his horrors in Nature plays on all of our preconceived feelings about it to deliver more impact than spinning them out of whole cloth. What's scarier than a strange man in the willows? The willows that have eaten him, of course.

Not to say old Algae doesn't have his share of issues. The spiritualist movements with which he was involved, especially the Theosophical society, were famously racist; the Theosophists in particular put Aryans at the top of their esoteric racial classification scheme. As far as his work is concerned, the fact that he, a white man, is best-known for a story called Wendigo in which the only Native character has zero lines and is offhandedly described as "a member of a dying race" is a critique that makes itself, but it is also a critique of the culture around him for granting him this appropriative success. And even as far as his actual technique is concerned, there is a certain predictability to it that can be exhausting to read. In the middle of Ancient Sorceries, when the fiftieth member of the French village was coyly described as "catlike," I finally lost it and scrawled in the margins, "MAYBE THEY'RE SECRETLY CATS ALGAE IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?? WILL YOU STOP HINTING IF I SAY IT??"

Still, though. After reading a modest selection of his short fiction, and grappling with his shortcomings, I remain disappointed that it is Lovecraft whom history has decided to remember as the king of the Weird Tale. (Need I remind you what he named his cat? The bar is in hell.) Blackwood has at least as much claim to the throne, if not more, and in my opinion, he is simply a better writer. I find his word choice to be more evocative and his settings more vivid—and if I'm being honest, I'm just plain tired of Lovecraft at this point. If you like how he writes, but you want to branch out, I salute you, and Blackwood is a great place to start.

* Sometimes I wonder to what extent this tense, adversarial relationship with Nature is the product of empire. We make monsters of what our society marginalizes and exploits, so in a way, it is only natural that for a beneficiary of the largest colonial project the world has ever known, the Earth itself is out for revenge.

[lionsdenbooks]

the castle of otranto: the beginning of gothic horror

what is it?

The Castle of Otranto is widely thought to be the first proper Gothic horror novel. It was written by Horace Walpole (not That Walpole—his son, actually) in 1764. It tells the story of the castle and its inhabitants: the temperamental and abusive Manfred, his kindly wife Hippolita, their virtuous daughter Mildred, and their sickly son Conrad, who opens the book by dying mysteriously on his wedding day.

Walpole initially claimed in a foreword that the manuscript was printed in Naples in 1529 and speculated that the story might be as old as the Crusades. He later admitted that he had written it, but he had tried to mimic stylistic elements of medieval literature to make it more convincing. I don't know enough about medieval lit to know if he succeeded, but there's certainly a stateliness to the writing that gives it an older feel than other books written in this era. A subtler but significant Gothic touch.

observations:

In general, this book is structurally awkward. It has a strong opening, with the mystery of Conrad's death and the terror of Isabella fleeing from Manfred, but stumbles in the middle, with the Gothic elements being noticeably sidelined in favor of...royals arguing quite a lot. It ends with what amounts to a deus ex machina, but at least a fun one with the Grim Reaper, so that's nice

Otranto really pulls out all the Gothic stops early. It's got bleeding statues, living portraits, haunted castle (just one though), moonlit nights, secret passageways, you name it

Love is treated in this book as a simple switch—Theodore falls instantly, desperately, and permanently in love with Matilda, so much so that the book ends with this line: "...[Theodore] was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could for ever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul." This might be consciously in the medieval literary tradition of courtly love, love for love's sake, which generally had to end in tragedy because there was no real societal future for it?

The words "simpleton" and "blockhead" are used a lot in this book. I'm not sure what to do with this information

The stark difference in social understanding makes for a stilted horror piece. In the first chapter, Isabella flees from Manfred when he tries to force himself on her; escaping from your would-be father-in-law attempting to rape you is terrifying, but isn't the bigger horror here really the idea of divorce? The narrative certainly seems to think so, or it at least spends more time condemning Manfred's attempt to separate from Hippolita. This turns your emotional reaction from sympathetic horror for the protagonist to vague confusion and disgust with the perspective of the story in general.

final thoughts:

Otranto is honestly more historically interesting than it is enjoyable. Though written in a highly dramatic way, and with eye-catching Gothic staples throughout, to modern audiences that have seen a lifetime of spooky castles and bleeding statues, their mere presence doesn't mean much. I'd totally recommend this book to anyone who particularly enjoys Gothic horror and wants to know more about its history as a genre, but it'll be an awkward read.

phrase of the book:

"...Well! he is killed in just a critical minute—I accuse nobody. A helmet falls from the moon—so, my Lord, your father says; but Lopez and all the servants say that this young spark is a magician, and stole it from Alfonso's tomb—"

"Have done with this rhapsody of impertinence," said Matilda.