98. Followed by } anonyma, pseudepigrapha, & apocrypha.

March, 1953, The Hall of Fantasy, a weekly radio series broadcast “an original tale of fantasy by Richard Thorne entitled,” “The Masks of Ashor.” The story begins when Marsha’s Uncle Harold sends two gold masks. Marsha’s husband, Bert, says that the masks are “…beautiful, except grotesque at the same time”; his wife adds, “well they look human, and yet….” In spite of their uncertainty about the masks, they decide to hang them up on either side of the mirror that hangs above the fireplace in their living room.

Accompanying the masks is a letter from Uncle Harold. The masks are from Istanbul, they’re gold yet the seller sold them for very little—was eager to be rid of them—and, “there’s some kind of story connected with them, I don’t know what it is….” When Uncle Harold finds out, he rushes to save his niece and her husband from  the true owner of the masks, Ashor—but too late.

Last year—in March, as a matter of fact, I received a pair of masks in the mail. I have no Uncle Harold, but an Aunt Eileen. One of the masks is pictured above.

During my Color Plates book tour, I was handed a play, properly, a masque, by an actress leaving what I presumed was an audition taking place in the space above the bar where I read. I transcribed some of the “Black Masque” here, in the hope someone would claim authorship. No one has. Though I am not the author, I tend to think of it as mine.

My copy of Transactions of the Flesh arrived a little ahead of Christmas. I’ve only just started to poke at it, but see it includes “Indescribable,” an excerpt from M.O.N.’s ObliviOnanisM, a “profanely mystical work of hyperpurple theory-porn”—a description provided by ObliviOnanisM’s publisher, gnOme. The connection I made between gnOme and the masque handed me in New York City is gnOme’s aesthetic toward anonymity and an authentic kind of falsehood, the sort of truth that lives in, as gnOme has it, “pseudepigrapha” and “apocrypha.”

I believe the “Black Masque” is more than just a script; it’s a transcript, and when performed, a liturgy.

Does Anonymous make contact with gnOme, or does gnOme contact Anonymous?

97. The Problem of Boredom } & friendship.

In a short end-of-the-year “best” piece for the Boston Globe, Don Share wrote about The Problem of Boredom in Paradise, the Paul Hannigan selected I edited. This project was completed with the help of Caroline Banks, Hannigan’s widow. I won’t go into details here, but she helped in numerous ways, most especially by her patient faith. I first contacted her nearly a decade ago, and years went by with little progress made. “Touching” is the wrong word—maybe “important”?—most important to me was the time she defended my editorship from another press—this, before I had any sure idea to whom I was going to submit a selected, if ever I finished.

Whether or not the book is the best book of poetry in 2013, Share’s praise will hopefully bring people to Paul’s poetry, and that’s what I want above all else.

If you shop Amazon for Emily Berry’s Dear Boy—another title Share recommends—Amazon will tell you that “customers who viewed this item also viewed” many other titles Share recommended, including Boredom, A Dark Dreambox of Another King: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton, Collected Poetry by Bill Knott, Milk & Filth by Carmen Giménez Smith, etc. Also, I just discovered, Boredom all of a sudden has a review on its Amazon page, published days after the Globe article. A 2014 review for a book published in Feb. of ’13.

There's a line from the review I find intriguing: “I don't know how he must sound to younger poets now—probably too brittle and sarcastic.” This faintly echoes what Share wrote about me, “Time has been unkind to [Hannigan]; he died in 2000, almost forgotten. But his work was discovered by [a] young [poet] who [has] lovingly prepared a new selection....”

What’s all this about young poets?

The advantage I have over those poets who knew Paul is that I do not know him as they do. Some of his peers are quick to “remind” me that he was a pain in the ass, which may be why they couldn’t bring his work back into print.

Friendship is complicated; the following are four stanzas from Paul’s poem “My Friends”:

Some of them
Are my friends
Smiling as if they
Were cutting a wedding
Cake or buying a
New car.

You can tell
From the picture
They all speak English
And lies.

I see them in dreams;
Sometimes they are all
Falling over the rail
Of a great ocean liner
As I photograph them.
And sometimes they are

Slithering over the foot-
Board of the bed in which
I am unexpectedly dying.

All the while I edited Boredom, I wondered how I will react when some twenty-something calls me up out of the blue to talk about the brilliant poet they discovered who isn’t me but a pal of mine.

96. Sub-editions } & other mysterious appearances.

From the cult of Ex Occidente, Transactions of the Flesh, an anthology after the writings of Joris-Karl Huysmans edited by D.P. Watt and Peter Holman: the book is made, in two incarnations, a “lettered deluxe subedition” and the “numbered regular edition.” The cost is irrelevant. Copies can be obtained from Zagava Books.

I’ll write a word more about the book once my copy arrives. My story, “Smoke (Ash Sun, Raspberry Sky)” is another episode in the life of Theophile, who I first wrote about in the story “Her Magnetic Field,” published in Cinnabar’s Gnosis. “Smoke” is set ahead of Theophile’s confrontation with the “Stone That Thinks,” features an alternate Milla Jovovich, and Siduri, the barkeep who urges Gilgamesh to enjoy life, rather than punish himself with grief for Enkidu.

Dan Ghetu, publisher of Ex Occidente books, recently announced that he’s liquidating his (small) remaining stock; it is possible to purchase one of two remaining copies of Cinnabar’s Gnosis for $80. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait till I complete and then find a publisher for the complete Theophile tales, an event I anticipate occurring never.

# # #

My mixed feelings swell for 1913 Press and their efforts to raise funds for a print run of 1913: A Journal of Forms 6. A while back, they half-heartedly ran a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds—unsurprisingly, they failed to meet their goal. A similar fundraising campaign is now running through Indiegogo; as of today, they’ve raised $2,171 of the $25,000 they asked for. At least with Indiegogo they get whatever they raise.

When “editrice” Sandra Doller asked me for a poem for the journal I was delighted, and I am delighted—look at the t.o.c. for issue 6 (published, at last, as a PDF): there’s Rae Armantrout, Rachel May, Deborah Poe, Thalia Field, etc. But I’m disappointed too, that the press couldn’t fund a print incarnation: 1913’s great charm is in print, their books and their journal loves the page. I’d be less disappointed if there seemed to be more enthusiasm from the press themselves—infrequent email notices notwithstanding, there’s not enough brouhaha to hope that a financial goal as big as $25,000 will ever be met.

Do visit the issue. The PDF is satisfying—and suggests that if the funds are raised, issue 6 would be every bit as pleasing as its predecessors. My poem—one part of a triptych (I hope one day will be published whole)—is on page 52.

# # #

This Sunday, at 3pm, at Ada Books in Providence, R.I., the chapbook Compound Eye will be released. It’s a selection of poems written during the R.I.S.D. Museum “Locally Made” show in September. A number of area poets were invited to sit behind typewriters and write poems on demand. To explain: folks would approach a poet, supply the poet with inspiration—a word, a theme, a picture—and the poet would write a poem.

With carbons, copies were made, then collected by Kate Shapria, who, with the help of Maria Anderson, Janaya Kizzie, and Kat Murphy, assembled them into Compound Eye. I know little about the end-result, and only vaguely recall the poems I wrote. Fellow poets are Mary-Kim Arnold, Lindsday Beebe, Indigo Bethea, Cherry Pickman, and Amish Trivedi.

Some of us will read our poems. I read at 3:20. Kate says, “it'll be pretty easy-breezy—some milling around, some exclaiming over the books, punctuated by reading out loud.” Chapbooks cost $5, except for “everyone who participated, or who managed to hang onto their event program”—then it’s free.

# # #

[Photo: a Valentine Portable Typewriter by Olivetti, in the R.I.S.D. Museum collection]

95. Elisa Gabbert writes } “What I miss about childhood is…”

Friday, my eldest and I will visit Boston to look at colored glass and ice and to listen to Elisa Gabbert read from The Self Unstable. Prose poems; of them, Black Ocean sez, “combines elements of memoir, philosophy, and aphorism.” Which doesn’t make them sound at all different from billions of poems. The difference is Elisa—from what I’ve read, the pieces in The Self Unstable are like lines of her poems and thoughts from her blog, with some interesting deviations in-between. (An in-between, for instance: “I saw a figure from a distance and thought it was me. I drink from the opposite side of a glass.” Make that the opening line of your horror story.)

The book’s design is as eye-catching as all Black Ocean titles are. You can read quite a lot from the book online—do a simple search Gabbert+The+Self+Unstable.

Will I seem to mock Elisa, by bringing my six year-old daughter to hear poems about ageing? My daughter, staring up at an end-result? Perhaps my own great age will dull the edge of my daughter's smile.

94. Horror fiction notes (7/7) } the unsatisfactory conclusion.

…however, the best story in the fifth annual edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror is Elizabeth Massie’s “Stephen.”

(I first read Jack Womack’s “Out of Sight, Out ofMind” before “hoarding” behavior was widely known, so the setting, a hoarder’s house, fascinated. That the hoarder’s obsession was triggered by Fibber McGee’s closet (the fact that no one seemed to remember Fibber’s closet) also interested me—I grew up listening to recordings of old radio broadcasts, including Fibber McGee & Molly, and had a sense of how bizarre it is for a culture to leave behind something that was once a great common ground. “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” isn’t just about the fear of losing one’s own past; it’s also about preservation, and the point at which preservation becomes obsessive and destructive.

Rereading it now, I’m less bowled over, and the discovery at the end—what makes “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” horror—seems simply inevitable.)

Would someone send me a list of stories about (or that feature) decapitated heads kept alive (magic or science. Also, skulls)? Off the top of my capitated head is The Arabian Nights (Sage Duban’s head kept alive on a platter coated with a magic powder), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, F.Marion Crawford’s “The Screaming Skull,” Ramsey Campbell’s “Heading Home,” and (maybe) “The Skull of Charlotte Corday.” No films, T.V., or radio broadcasts, please. Donovan’s Brain? Sure, I’m willing to open the door to brains kept alive in jars.

“Stephen” is the only story by Elizabeth Massie I remember, though I’m sure I’ve read others—I had a story in Exotic Gothic 2 and so did she, with “Los Penitentes,” so I read that, “Pinkie” was reprinted in Best New Horror 17 so I probably read that, and maybe “What Happened When Mosby Paulson Had Her Painting Reproduced on the Cover of the Phone Book,” too. Anyway.

I don’t want to say much about  “Stephen.” It is a decapitated head story, but it treats that trope seriously, and uses it as an illustration of the other horror that truly runs the story. Though at sixteen I didn’t understand the sexual issues in Massie’s story—I understood enough to be troubled by them.

Coincidentally, I wrote a decapitated head story called “Stephen Plec.” Plec is a Polish word for sex; I associate the name Stephen with repression and guilt. Plec is a garbage collector who, out on his route, finds a head in a box, becomes intimate with it, gets rid of it in a frenzy of self-loathing, but ends up desperately searching for it in the municipal dump where he works.  I wondered if my Stephen was in any way inspired by Massie’s, but I  dug up the original drafts of “Stephen Plec,” and all were carefully dated “1989.”

93. Horror fiction notes (6/7) } a call & Mark Samuels.

Earlier this summer, before I reread David B. Silva’s “The Calling,” I dreamed I was at a roundtable with Silva and a group of other horror authors. In my waking life, I never met him, nor had any interest in his work. His The Horror Show ended its run before I was really aware of the horror small press—I never read an issue. We sat at the table—this dream Silva and me—and enjoyed a pleasant conversation.

Today, in preparation for writing this post, I learned that Silva died earlier this year, in March.

According to Locus magazine’s obituary for David B. Silva, he won a Bram Stoker Award in 1990 for “The Calling.” The Stoker is hardly a reliable measure of greatness, but “The Calling” is undeniably powerful. The horror is cancer and Silva’s portrayal of a son caring for his mother as she dies is harrowing. The end is silly—a risk Silva took—and obviously many readers felt otherwise.

In 1991, Ellen Datlow wrote, “Until a couple years ago, David B. Silva… was primarily known for his editorship of The Horror Show. This prestigious magazine’s last issue came out this past spring, giving Silva more time to write.” The Locus obituary begins, “Silva is best known for editing influential magazine The Horror Show, which ran from 1982-1991 .”

# # #

My summer reading was not devoted exclusively to the 1991 edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. I at last read the Chomu Press re-print of Mark Samuels’ The Man Who Collected Machen and, from Tartarus, The White Hands. I preferred The White Hands, which cohered a little better, but both are well-constructed collections.

The horror across all the stories is hopelessness. Story after story revealed any hope to be false. This is perhaps most obviously epitomized by “The Black Mould,” a story about a terrified life form that destroys what it encounters—and it encounters all.

A recurring “black mould” in these collections is infection. It sometimes acts as a doppelganger—ultimately replacing its victim with a sort-of copy—read “Vrolyk” but also “THYXXOLQU” and even “Glickman the Bibliophile,” in which a book lover is transformed into a reverse image of himself through the mechanisms of Nemesis Press. These stories are also about the decay of language and the power of that decay. Another black mould is the corporation—an easy target, but brilliantly portrayed in “The Impasse,” a story that perfectly describes the easy way a person can surrender themselves to something idiotic and monstrous: “Despite being utterly confused by the sheer waste of effort and time his work seemed to involve, he resolved that, as his employers were paying him so well, he should think to fulfill his obligations.” And for that pay, he is damned. 

The horror of hopelessness is the horror of Dante’s Hell. Everyone Dante meets in Hell thinks there’s a chance they can somehow improve their situation—even Satan keeps flapping his wings in order to fly away free, but all he accomplishes with his wings is to harden the ice that keeps him where he is. No one in Hell really understands the inscription on the gate: abandon all hope ye who enter here. So it is for the inhabitants of Samuels’ fictions.

In spite of the coda—which isn’t exactly disappointing, and, if I consider it in the right light, is a better end than the ellipsis that precedes it—“The Search for Kruptos” may be the best story of the lot. In it, all of Samuels’ fascinations are on display. A narrator who believes that books are important, but who is wrong, a text that infects, and hopelessness, with a European, World War II backdrop. Samuels seems to concur; in an interview conducted by Matt Cardin, he is asked where a new reader of his fiction might begin and replied:

I expect that “The White Hands” (in the restored version contained in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #15) or “The Search for Kruptos” would prove good starting points. If a reader enjoys those two tales I’d suggest that they try The Face of Twilight, which is my short novel published this year by PS Publishing. I think this is probably the most interesting work that I have thus far produced.

I did enjoy both, so I'll try The Face of Twilight, and let the infection progress.

92. Horror fiction notes (5/7) } the monster is the male gaze.

Talk of gender equality in horror fiction publishing, especially when conducted online, is too often reactionary rather than productive, anecdotal, and prone to inspire disgusting behavior. One author, male, whose work I thrice rejected from New Genre, threatened to expose me as a sexist editor in an email he sent me. Obviously unfamiliar with my editorial work as a whole, he said that if he pointed out to his online community how few women I publish, “I guarantee you there'd be an online reaction.” He then added, “Doesn't feel good to be accused of sexism, does it?”

What didn’t feel good was his use of a discussion about gender equality,  intended to improve circumstances for women, as a weapon. I have no idea if he did or didn’t attempt to blacklist me, but I did confront him about his email in person at a convention, and he simply withered. All the vitriolic rhetoric gone once face-to-face. He’s not looked me in the eye since.

# # #

Nikki Kiriki Hoffman’s “A Touch of the Old Lilith” is the second excellent Hoffman story to appear in the fourth Year’s Best—more on the story itself in a moment. Ellen Datlow selected it from Women of Darkness II, an anthology of new horror stories by women. Datlow wrote in her survey of horror fiction published in 1990 that Women of Darkness II is a “Pretty undistinguished reprise of #1….”

Of the first Women of Darkness, Datlow wrote,

The idea of an all-women horror anthology developed from the (correct) perception that the horror field in general and anthologies in particular were dominated by male writers. Kathryn Ptacek’s Women of Darkness (1988) was conceived to remedy this. Its publication in itself brought needed attention to the perceived “problem” [to be clear, the quotes are Datlow’s], and in that, the book was successful.

Datlow then wrote more generally about anthologizing women horror writers:

I object to the single-gender anthology as a remedy. If more women edit horror anthologies, more women might be included. Of course, quality should always come first. I personally prefer to blur lines of gender and genre rather than bringing more attention to them and labeling them. There is an excellent essay by Jeanette M. Hopper in The Blood Review on women writing about stereotypically women’s subjects. The argument, with which I agree, is that if women want to be read by the other half of the population, they need to write male characters who aren’t stereotypical and two-dimensional, and they need to appeal to concerns of both men and women. These same truths hold for men and women; I’m dead sick of stories about battered women and children, just as I’m sick of stories by men that brutalize women for the eroticism of it.

A single-gender (or single-race, or single-sexual orientation, etc.) anthology isn’t only an argument; it is that, but it’s also an artistic opportunity, like any themed anthology, be it erotic horror, or Poe-inspired stories, or mummy stories, etc. The theme sets limits. Those limits exclude some authors and call to others.

Ideally, the authors invited to contribute to an all-women authored anthology would consider what it means that they are the theme, and work from there, rather than work from the premise that “woman” or “women’s subjects “ is somehow the theme.

# # #

“A Touch of the Old Lilith” falls soundly into the category of stories high-school Adam did not appreciate. That the antagonist is the polite young male photographer who has taken a fancy to Clea, and not Clea herself, or any of the Meander women whose fingers are snake-like, and whose boyfriends and husbands frequently end up dead under mysterious circumstances, was lost on me. The monsters in Clea’s life are men who carelessly or deliberately remake women to suit their desires. Toward the end of the story, Clea very nearly understands this:

I felt a flick of anger, like a little bruise inside. Did he think because he liked the way I looked that he had created me?
 Hadn’t he? Didn’t we choose this steel gray coat—“the color of your eyes”—together? Hadn’t he bought me this green velvet dress at a second-hand shop, and didn’t I drag these tights out of an old suitcase because he asked me to?

Too late for Clea—she loses herself. (Though, thanks to the efforts of her grandmother—the only honest woman in her life—there is hope she is not totally lost.)

That the monster—Jeffry is his name—is a photographer, suggests Hoffman is writing about the male gaze. How the male gaze deforms women. Hoffman’s tale is so subtle, it’s easy to miss that horror. Or perhaps I’m so inured to what makes Jeffry a monster it’s easy for me to miss. After all, how easy is it for the monster to recognize himself as such?