Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” is arguably the scariest story ever written. It is certainly the weirdest. First published in 1907, “The Willows” begins in familiar territory as it tells the tale of two adventurers canoeing down the Danube. Our protagonists are warned against a vaguely evil spot by superstitious locals. Naturally, they ignore this advice and soon find themselves stranded on a diminishing sandy island, its banks crumbling amid ever-rising floodwaters, the only shelter a copse of uncannily animate willow trees. A terrifying presence soon makes itself felt — and here Blackwood’s story shifts from hoary Gothic clichés to something unaccountably new.
Before Blackwood, horror stories most often centered on entities that are eerie because of their proximity to us. The revenant, the vampire, the doll-sprung-to-life and so on all reflect human ugliness back at us, as if from a warped and grimy mirror. “The Willows,” by contrast, looks elsewhere, outward. The beings that beset the adventurers are emphatically alien: unknowable, indescribable, unnamable.
For all its singularity, “The Willows,” like all pieces of genius, has become exemplary. Having reworked old conventions into something startlingly new, Blackwood now stands at the head of a particular stream of horror writing often called simply “the Weird.” The name suggests the magazine Weird Tales, preferred venue for the genre’s foremost practitioner, H.P. Lovecraft. A devotee of “The Willows,” Lovecraft praised Blackwood for his ability to conjure “the idea of an unreal world constantly pressing upon ours.” He could have been describing his own stories or those of his many imitators.
Creepy encounters with creatures far removed from familiar evolutionary pathways, vertiginous dives into the deep abysses of past time and possible futures, mad-making glimpses into realities where the rock-solid certainty of Euclidean geometry no longer holds sway — the Weird’s territory is, by definition, bigger than anything we can imagine. Yet, measured by the scarce attention it has received from academics, literary critics and general readers, the Weird can appear insignificant, especially relative to the sweeping, cosmic visions it offers.
It is the aim of Kate Marshall’s excellent new book, “Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century,” to rectify this neglect. For Marshall, an English professor at the University of Notre Dame, the Weird, in its many manifestations, stands at the center of contemporary literary culture — so long as we know where and how to see it. As Marshall notes, a defining trait of much recent fiction is “the desire for nonhuman narration,” which is to say some sense of the forces that exceed our understanding but still shape our lives. It follows that the Weird, like the grasping tentacles many of its authors so obsessively describe, has slithered up from hidden depths and coiled itself around unsuspecting books, authors and readers. The Weird is the genre that ate the world.
This is the sort of claim that might itself feel like a paranoid vision to the sort of reader who mainly consumes fiction featuring people with two eyes, conventional configurations of limbs and houses that are the same size on the inside as they would seem to be from without. But Marshall expertly demonstrates how the Weird has come to crop up in unexpected places. More a force, style or set of concerns than a boxed-off genre, the Weird, for Marshall, tends to invade and insinuate. Having escaped the pulpy backwaters of genre fiction, the Weird now spills into the groundwater nourishing all literature. It even makes itself felt in otherwise solidly realistic works, as if some evil genius grafted monstrous tendrils onto the stolid stock of realist literary fiction. It takes a mixed approach to genre, splicing — sometimes subtly — the fantastic or cosmic into realist form.
For example, Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping” — a story of two sisters navigating bereavement and abandonment — could be described as “haunting,” given its gauzy, ethereal prose. But no one would normally characterize it as a horror novel, much less a Weird one: There is hardly a chthonic creature or Cyclopean ruin in sight. Nevertheless, Marshall teases out the work’s uncanny kinship to Blackwood and Lovecraft, a connection especially evident when Robinson’s “narrator takes on an alien perspective, voicing knowledge tonally marked as external to her experience.”
Marshall is expert at tracking the work of the Weird as it warps and distends otherwise straightforward “mainstream” writing like Robinson’s. When the narrator of Teju Cole’s “Open City” “desperately seek[s] a cosmic vantage,” when one of Don DeLillo’s characters “aspires to be a rock,” when Richard Powers, in “The Overstory,” imagines “vast letters constructed from decaying trees viewable only from space,” the novels, otherwise safely anchored in the consensual hallucination we call reality, drift into stranger, more alien territory, like the travelers in Blackwood’s “Willows.”
Why the Weird? Why now? At the start of “Novels by Aliens,” Marshall considers Amitav Ghosh’s despairing account of the contemporary novel in the time of climate change. For Ghosh, the novel, our best means of plumbing psychic interiority and mapping out social space, simply cannot measure up to the impersonal, extra-human forces cooking the globe. Marriage, war, memory, cities and existential despair fall neatly into the novel’s domain, but the extinction of species, the suffocating circulation of greenhouse gases, the violent extraction of fossil fuels and rare-earth minerals — such things exceed the novel’s grasp. For Ghosh, Marshall argues, the novel can witness those planet-sweeping developments only through the peephole of human perception. It necessarily stands at a remove from the true enormity of the global crisis.
The problem with Ghosh’s argument, Marshall points out, is that it presumes the novel is a form smaller and more staid than it really is. Ghosh calls for a fiction of the future that will reach beyond the confines of the human point of view. Marshall maintains that such literature is already here in our “novels by aliens,” works that adapt the Weird innovations of genre fiction to our increasingly strange and unreal times.
When the narrator of “The Willows” catches an unclear, impossible glimpse of the alien beings surrounding him, he exclaims, “I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed.” Marshall has shown that we could say the same of the contemporary “realist” novel: “The standard of reality had changed.” Such novels have become necessarily Weirder to meet the challenge of weirder times. Or, as Mark E. Smith, the lead singer of the Fall — a band steeped in Lovecraftian lore — once put it in a slyly allusive line: “You don’t have to be Weird to be weird.”
Novels by Aliens
Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century
By Kate Marshall
University of Chicago Press. 215 pp. $26, paperback
Other Weird fiction stories and novels to read now
For Weird fiction novices, where to start? H.P. Lovecraft’s work probably best exemplifies the genre, but it is by no means the first or last word. Probably the single best introduction to the genre is Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology “The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories.” The book does a nice job surveying the canon, new and old. It contains writing that inspired or anticipated Lovecraft as well as work by contemporary practitioners — among them, China Miéville, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Laird Barron, Brian Evenson and Jeff VanderMeer himself. Those brave enough to venture further into Weird territory might consider:
- “The Town Manager” and “Our Temporary Supervisor,” by Thomas Ligotti, collected in “Teatro Grottesco”: The single best living writer of the Weird is Thomas Ligotti, whose work owes as much to Lovecraft as to the uncategorizable, absurdist fantasies of early-20th-century writers such as Bruno Schulz and Franz Kafka. As with Kafka, Ligotti’s great obsessions are soul-sucking jobs, faceless bureaucracies, maddening paperwork and dehumanizing offices. Except in the case of stories like the two recommended here, the jobs are literally soul-sucking.
- “The Hospice,” by Robert Aickman, collected in “Cold Hand in Mind”: While Ligotti deals in the dread of office drudgery, Aickman — who produced a series of works he called simply “strange stories” — focuses on the horrors of tourism and travel. “The Hospice” features a lost, bedraggled traveler who gets exactly what he wants: a hotel with food and a bed. Except the sumptuous feast served by the unrelenting staff never seems to stop — and the other guests are chained to the dining table.
- “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” by Joan Lindsay: Peter Weir’s film adaptation of Lindsay’s novel is perhaps better known than its source material. The story of schoolgirls gone missing on a field trip, Weir’s vague, creepy, menacing film is a remarkably faithful adaptation of Lindsay’s extraordinary work. Sun-dappled but brimming with dread, both versions suggest that the schoolgirls inadvertently slipped into some nonhuman realm.
- “Solenoid,” by Mircea Cartarescu: If Ligotti is the Kafka of Weird fiction, then the Romanian writer Cartarescu is its Proust. Cartarescu’s recently translated novel “Solenoid” is obsessed with memory and reverie. Set in Bucharest, it finds the unnamed narrator ruminating on his past, much of which involves that most Proustian of activities: reading in a childhood bedroom. But strangeness abounds. The buildings and facades of Bucharest conceal labyrinths and odd machinery; a local factory serves as a gateway to an alien (or perhaps microscopic) dimension, one bristling with many-limbed monstrosities; a cult stalks the city; and the narrator digs foreign objects from his body (the result of some half-remembered childhood surgery or experiment?).
- “The Passion According to G.H.,” by Clarice Lispector: Where the classic ghost story makes our hair stand on end, the Weird sets out to drive us mad. The closest that Lispector’s novel comes to Lovecraftian tentacular terror is a cockroach, which is crushed in the opening pages. But what happens next is pure Weird. Fixated on the dead bug, the narrator finds her mind slowly unfurling as it moves from cockroach to cosmos.