Black Gate

I don’t often write here about bad books. Partly that’s because I don’t usually care to give them publicity. Partly it’s because I don’t usually care to think further about an unrewarding reading experience. Mostly, though, it’s because to me a bad book is typically an uninteresting book. And what I really want to write about, when I write about a book, is what makes it interesting. Still, there are always exceptions. And of course it’s always worth challenging one’s ideas of what ‘bad’ means. So this time out I want to talk about some books by a writer who was, in her time, notorious for literary badness.

Marie Corelli, born in 1855 as Marie Mackay, published her first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, in 1886. It launched her career as a best-selling and critically despised author. She went on to write two dozen novels, a number of short stories, and several volumes of nonfiction. Her popularity only began to dwindle at about the time of the First World War; she died in 1924. Reviewers had never warmed to her work, and her obituary in the London Times stated that “even the most lenient critic cannot regard Miss Corelli’s work as of much literary importance.” For several decades she fell into obscurity, but lately a new wave of critics and biographers have been taking another look at her accomplishments.

Certainly Corelli’s an interesting figure. A fair amount of her work has elements of fantasy or of what would come to be called science fiction. In her day, she outsold Doyle, Wells, and Kipling, and was loved by readers of all walks of life, up to and including Queen Victoria. She never married; she seems to have been born out of wedlock to a journalist and writer named Charles Mackay, and took the name ‘Corelli’ for herself as part of an early attempt to establish a career as a pianist. For 40 years she lived with another woman, Bertha Vyver. Different biographers draw different conclusions: here’s one article arguing they were lovers, here’s another stating they weren’t. Both pieces get at another subject of interest — Corelli’s influence on later writers. The latter article argues that Corelli’s 1887 novel Thelma, which I haven’t read, was a significant influence on Tolkien’s Gollum. The first argues that her 1889 Ardath was an influence on Dunsany.

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Writing about fantasy fiction seems sooner or later to involve writing about myth. The two aren’t the same, but have a connection difficult to articulate. Similarities and contrasts both feel obvious and yet are hard to nail down. Perhaps it’s fair to say both fantasy and myth challenge consensus reality. But that they differ in the relation they have to truth, or to what is to be taken as truth.

Minister Faust is the pen name of Edmontonian Malcolm Azania. Faust is a novelist, as well as a journalist, radio host, activist, and former teacher. He’s written four novels; I want to write here a bit about his 2011 book The Alchemists of Kush. As I read it, it’s about a myth, both an exposition of that myth and an exploration of how the myth might be used in the contemporary world. How people can be affected by a story, and how a community can be created by the stories it tells itself. Mostly, though, I think the book’s about one person, and how he’s transformed — alchemised — by the story he finds.

Technically, the novel’s made up of three different books: ‘The Book of Now,’ ‘The Book of Then,’ and ‘The Book of the Golden Falcon.’ ‘The Book of the Golden Falcon,’ presented as a kind of appendix at the back of the novel, is divided into ten chapters and written in dense — mythic — langage which retells the story of Horus, Osiris, Anubis, and Set. Most of the novel consists of alternating chapters of ‘The Book of Then,’ which retells that story in a more novelistic (or, at least, less fable-like) style, and ‘The Book of Now,’ set in contemporary Edmonton, Alberta. ‘The Book of Now,’ by far the longest of the three books, tells the story of Rap, an Edmonton teen of Somali and Sudanese parentage, as he meets a society of adults who follow the moral and ethical lessons of ‘The Book of the Golden Falcon.’ Rap joins them and helps them to create a ‘golden fortress,’ a kind of organization of local youth, specifically Black youth. But as a community, the fortress faces a number of obstacles and enemies, just as Rap himself has to work out his own relationship to the community as it develops, and find his own path to maturity.

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One of the joys you get to have as a reader is the discovery of a new writer, or a new old writer, with a back catalogue of work out there waiting for you. A little while ago, my girlfriend Grace and I were at a book fair when Grace came across a children’s novel called The Land the Ravens Found. First published in 1955, the copy she’d found was a fourth edition, from 1966, suggesting there’d been some demand for the book over the years. It was a story of Viking times and the founding of a settlement in Iceland, written by a woman named Naomi Mitchison. Neither of us had heard of her, but after reading the book, Grace was impressed enough to recommend it to me; after reading it myself, and learning a bit about Mitchison online, I thought it’d be worth writing a little here on both book and author.

The short novel tells the story of Aud the Deep-Minded, a historical figure who was the head of a Viking household in Caithness, and who led her household to Iceland late in the ninth century. The book begins in Caithness, with a scene from the perspective of Aud’s grandson, Anlaf, but the point-of-view shifts easily throughout the book, giving a kind of communal portrait of Aud and her family and her family’s thralls, describing their relationships and daily lives. The drama seems almost secondary to the precise, detailed depictions of ninth-century life, but oddly the book becomes all the more involving because of it, as life moves on, through marriages and deaths and quarrels which oddly remain in the background, yet still shape everything that goes on.

Mitchison was born Naomi Haldane in 1897. She died in 1999, at the age of 101, after what seems to have been one hell of a life. It’s not just that she wrote over ninety books in her life, from science fiction to autobiography. She was an anti-fascist who helped get left-wing refugees out of Nazi Austria, an activist for women’s rights and open access to birth control, a polyamorist, and, after a period living in Africa in the 1960s, an honorary mother (‘Mmarona’) and advisor to a Botswanan leader.

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The term ‘dying earth’ comes from a series of stories by Jack Vance, but Vance was following in the footsteps of Clark Ashton Smith, whose Zothique stories introduced the concept: a setting at the end of time, during the twilight of civilisation on earth — when magic and science had become fused and indistinguishable, when the ruins of previous cultures choked the land, when we and our children and our children’s children are not even memories. Among other writers to tackle similar settings are Michael Moorcock, in his Dancers at the End of Time series, and Gene Wolfe in his classic Book of the New Sun. Wikipedia suggests a few more examples, such as C.J. Cherryh’s Sunfall. Dying-earth stories are typically autumnal, often ironic or cynical, stories about things running down in the senility of the world; often written in a self-consciously baroque style. And, I find, often very powerful works. I want to write a bit here about one of the odder works of an inherently odd subgenre: M. John Harrison’s Viriconium sequence.

There are four Viriconium books, three novels and a collection of linked short stories: The Pastel City, published in 1971; A Storm of Wings, from 1980; In Viriconium, from 1982; and 1985’s Viriconium Nights. One can technically read the books in any order, as few plot strands directly connect them. They’re bound by setting, theme, and imagery, and to that extent perhaps are best read in order of publication, so that one follows the growth of Harrison’s conception of the books and of his technical facility. At any rate, the internal chronology of the series is intentionally difficult. Omnibus editions treat the short stories of Viriconium Nights in different ways, sometimes putting them together in one place as they would have first appeared, sometimes scattering them before, between, and after the three novels. Harrison has apparently said that the stories can appear in any order, so long as the short story “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium” comes at the end.

The four books are very different works, as one might expect from pieces written over 15 years. The style varies radically. So does the tone; the writing, ironic from the start, produces increasingly complex effects. Thematically, key concerns persist, about art and heroism and ritual. And reality; and the way in which fantasies attempt to mimic reality, and the ways in which bad fantasies — or bad fiction — deviates from emotional truth. So these are books that use the form of fantasy fiction to critique, or question, fantasy. Depending on what set of definitions you care to use, you could call this a modernist or postmodernist approach. The more important question is this: does the work succeed as written art?

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Women in Horror Month is over now, and after some consideration, I’ve decided to write a bit about a book I didn’t discuss during the month proper, and why it was I didn’t write about it. Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca is often mentioned as a classic horror novel and an important part of the Gothic tradition. I certainly can see it as a Gothic. But I wouldn’t describe it as horror, not exactly. I’d like to try to consider it here, and see if I can figure out just what it is.

To start with, I can say that Rebecca, published in 1938, was du Maurier’s fifth novel. It became a massive popular success, though critical reception was more mixed. Du Maurier adapted the book for the stage two years later, the same year Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation — Hitchcock’s first movie for an American studio — reached screens. Du Maurier herself was thoroughly part of the English literary world; parodied by P.G. Wodehouse, daughter of a famous actor, cousin to the boys who inspired Peter Pan.

The book itself is told in retrospective, as a recollection of the unnamed first-person narrator, who as a young woman in her early twenties falls in love with an older man, Maxim de Winter, marries him, and becomes mistress of his great house called Manderley. But the new Mrs. de Winter finds herself competing against the memories of her husband’s first wife, the eponymous Rebecca. Manderley’s housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, idolised the dead woman. As the book moves along, we come to find out more about Rebecca and slowly come to understand not only the truth of her relationship with Maxim, but who Rebecca de Winter really was.

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Women in Horror Month continues, and bearing that in mind I’d like to say a few words about Tanith Lee and the Secret Books of Paradys. Lee’s a prolific writer, and I haven’t read much else of her work — only the novel Heart-Beast besides the four volumes of the Paradys sequence — but after reading only the first Paradys collection, I started buying her work when I found it. Even a relatively small sample of her prose created a remarkable impression.

In some ways, as one reads through the whole series, it’s difficult to know how to take the books. They’re horrific, but also at times absurdly parodic or comic; which is to say grotesque. They’re oneiric, in that not only do supernatural events happen, but characters often act or change without obvious reason, and the fictive city of Paradys itself seems to accrue layers of meaning and complexity like a recurring landscape in a lucid dream. Above all, the books are weird with the weirdness of nightmare; though written with incredible technical skill, it’s difficult to articulate a single overall theme to the books, though multiple meanings suggest themselves.

Paradys is a city in northern France, originally a Roman settlement based around the exoploitation of soon-played-out silver mines. It developed over time into a major city, with a cathedral and taverns and damned poets and all the appurtenances of decadent gothic romance. The various stories of Paradys take place in different eras of the city’s life, told from different perspectives, using different styles. They’re linked by certain patterns of imagery — notably the ambiguous symbol of the moon — and a concentration on colour: each book, or long story, has a certain colour which defines it, and all colour-references within that story will refer either to white, black, or that specific hue. I can only imagine how difficult that technique is, but it’s incredibly effective at building distinct and distinctive atmospheres.

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When I took a look at Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House the other week, I did not know that February was in fact Women in Horror Recognition Month. The establishment of WiHM, as it’s abbreviated, began in 2010 as “a month-long celebration that would promote and assist underrepresented female artists while educating the public about current and past discrimination.” In 2011, WiHM was backed by the Viscera Organization, a non-profit assisting female genre filmmakers. If you want to know more, here’s the web site for the event, from which I took the foregoing quote, and the Facebook page; here’s a link to the Viscera Organization, with info on the annual film festivals they hold in Los Angeles and Boston. As for me, as a result of learning all this, I stumbled on a couple of lists of works by female horror writers. And on one of those lists, I noticed a book I’d had on my shelf for ages: The Demon Lover, by Dion Fortune.

Fortune is an interesting figure. Born in Wales in or about 1890 (sources vary) as Violet Mary Firth, in her twenties she grew interested in psychotherapy and occultism — possibly a function of visions she claimed to have had since the age of four, which she came to believe were memories of a past life in ancient Atlantis; or of a nervous breakdown she suffered at age twenty, which she believed was the result of a magical attack against her. She became a Theosophist in 1914, and in 1919, while studying magic under a man named Doctor Theodore Moriarty, she took the name ‘Dion Fortune’ and joined the Order of the Golden Dawn. She founded her own magical society in 1922, the Community (later Fraternity, now Society) of the Inner Light, which aimed at bringing Chistian teachings into occultism. In 1926, she published a book of short stories based on her magic experiences: The Secrets of Dr. Taverner. The Demon Lover, her first novel, followed in 1927, with more novels coming in the years after that. She wrote several non-fiction books about occultism — I’ve read The Mystical Qabalah — although it has been argued that her novels ended up being more important for later occultists, especially Gardenerian Wiccans.

Fortune’s work certainly seems to have influenced Marion Zimmer Bradley and Diana Paxson, both as literature and as spiritual inspiration. Alan Moore has spoken highly of Fortune’s magical writing, and more equivocally ranked her with Sax Rohmer as an imaginative writer. For the sake of this piece, it may be worth noting that I’m temperamentally agnostic — I make no claim to wisdom — but naturally skeptical. I want to write about The Demon Lover because I thought it was an interesting book. Not flawless; but interesting. It’s not necessary to know, much less share, Fortune’s history and beliefs in order to enjoy the novel. But Fortune’s biography does suggest some interesting ways to look at what she wrote, and consider the relation between horror (and fantasy) and what is commonly perceived to be real.

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I’ve been reading Peter Ackroyd’s writing for almost twenty years now, and I’m frankly beginning to fall behind. It’s hard to keep up with the man: he’s produced poetry, fiction, biographies, creative nonfiction, and, most recently, narrative history. One of his nonfiction books, Albion, was subtitled ‘the English Imagination,’ and was an essay or set of essays investigating exactly that; in fact, much of Ackroyd’s work can be seen as an investigation of, or a struggle with, the nature of English literary, historical, and imaginative traditions — especially as manifested in the history of London. And so his current project (or one of them) is an ambitious six-book history of England. Two have been published so far; as I say, I’m behind, and have only just completed the first, Foundation, examining the past of England from prehistory to the end of the Wars of the Roses.

I think it’s worth looking at here not only because it’s a good and fascinating book, but because the ways in which it stands out are perhaps especially relevant to fantasy fiction. Of course, medieval English history has had a significant influence on English fantasy writing. And certainly the style of the book is gripping and narrative. Specifically, you can see that this is a novelist writing popular history, and at times there’s an imaginative feel of the sweep of time, oddly like the history writing of a Harold Lamb — there’s an ability not only to find themes and ideas in the process of history, but to concretise or distill those themes into a specific moment. As a result, the depiction of history becomes an imaginative act, suggesting the habits of thought of past eras, in a way that I think may be especially relevant to fantasy writers and readers.

It is worth noting, though, that Ackroyd here is consciously an Englishman writing to an English audience about England. As a Canadian, I felt at times as though I was eavesdropping on a conversation, or at least a speech within a conversation. That’s not a bad thing — at no point was the book inaccessible — but it does emphasise the self-reflective nature of the enterprise. As I say, Ackroyd’s been fascinated by Englishness for much of his literary career; this book, and this series, is a logical outgrowth of that. In practical terms, it means that the book consciously chooses to look at English history within a strictly English context, with other parts of Britain or Europe mentioned only so far as they’re relevant to English history.

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Different people have different explanations for why horror fiction exists, and why it’s worthwhile. It’s always seemed to me that, whatever else it does, good horror writing expresses some kind of fear or terror that is both deep and common. Insofar as the fear’s deep, the horror story touches a profound well of emotion, as good fiction usually does; insofar as it’s common the story links readers together and reminds us that we share the same dreads. So at its best, horror fiction is empathic and profound.

And something else: it can articulate fear in a new way. Mary Shelley tapped into new fears of her time about scientists and Faustian Romantics. H.P. Lovecraft wrote stories articulating fears arising from a new scientific worldview, in which humanity was not only displaced from the centre of creation, but proved to be an accident or irrelevance in a fundamentally inhuman universe. At least as far back as the first wave of Gothic novelists in the late eighteenth century, writers were finding an imaginative form for writing about the fears of women (in particular) in an extremely patriarchal society; the usual plot involved an innocent female protagonist, a sinister edifice or castle, and a demonic male figure, lord of the estate, who gets the heroine in his clutches. It’s been said that the typical Gothic is a love story between a woman and a house.

Gothics are still being written, though not quite in the eighteenth century mold. The best of them have changed, incorporating new fears, reflecting new times. So one of the greatest of twentieth century horror stories, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, is both a bravura reprise of the Gothic tradition and also a radical updating of the form. It finds new dimensions to the fears it raises and summons. Gender has a relevance to those fears, but not I think in the way of the old Gothics. There is a dreadful universality to the disquiet Jackson evokes. The book revises its tradition, but also mixes old fears with new. So let’s take a look at it, and see how it all works, and what we have to be scared of.

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