The weird eco-fiction of Machen’s contemporary Algernon Black-wood, outdoorsman and Buddhist mystic, is the focus of chapter 4, ‘Horrible Enchantments’. I approach tragically under-discussed Black-wood’s tales of backwoods horror, including ‘The Willows’ (1907), ‘The Wendigo’ (1910) and ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ (1912) using the ecocriticism and new materialism of Michael Marder and Jane Bennett. I pair these biophilosophical explorations of matter and life with theories of disgust, abjection and the aesthetics of horror, most notably those of China Miéville. The very difficulties inherent in conveying the unthinkable natural world are harnessed by Blackwood’s stories to cultivate a sense of cosmic awe, an ecological sublimity inseparable from a form of aestheticised disgust. Rather than confirming an essential alterity between humanity and nature – the dualistic, hierarchical configuration that characterises the conventional sublime and undergirds either a correlationist account of human consciousness or an understanding of nature as inert, mechanistic matter – Blackwood’s weird nature- stories entangle the human and the non-human in a rhizomatic mesh of non-human actants and vegetal horrors.
Chapter 5, ‘Disgusting Powers’, focuses on another author influential in the genre but marginalised in scholarship: William Hope Hodgson, known for his tales of nautical horror and supernatural mystery. Like Blackwood’s weird nature stories, Hodgson’s tales present nature simultaneously as an unclean, disgusting force from a terrible Outside – embodied in figures of monstrous lichen and abominable pig-monsters – and as infectious, polluting human flesh and minds. My examination of Hodgson – a mysophobe interested in physical culture – extends the new materialist approach adopted in the previous chapter, specifically drawing on theories of trans-corporeality advanced by feminist scholar Stacy Alaimo and on the agential realism of physicist and philosopher Karen Barad. I argue that Hodgson’s protagonists, even as they desperately strive to purify themselves through everything from carbolic acid to elaborate occult-scientific apparatus, inevitably become enmeshed in what Barad would call a form of ‘intra-action’ – an entanglement of material agencies which undermines accounts the subject-object dichotomy that speculative realists also find troublesome.33 I consider three of Hodgson’s texts: his (in)famously disgusting short story ‘The Voice in the Night’ (1907), his cosmic romance and novella The House on the Borderland (1908) and his occult detective story ‘The Hog’ (posthumously published in 1947). In addition to new materialist theories of bodies and nature, I utilise Korsmeyer’s concept of the sublate and Susan Miller’s theory of ‘horror’ as a particular form of disgust fixated on human powerlessness to show how Hodgson’s characters, for all their pretensions of heroic derring-do, are not human agents as we usually conceive them but beings of trans-corporeal flesh entrapped in a vision of reality-as-cesspool.
The final chapter of the monograph, ‘Daemonology of Unplumbed Space’, considers the weird fiction of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, perhaps the best known author of weird fiction in history. My analysis focuses on the short stories ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (1923) and ‘The Colour Out of Space’ (1927), and the novella The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936). Like his predecessors, Lovecraft is concerned both with engendering affective responses in his readers and with forms of metaphysical speculation; in many ways, his work assimilates the influences of the four authors discussed in previous chapters, in terms of plot and imagery and in relation to the ideas underlying his stories. With Poe he shares a fascination with the decomposing corpse; with Machen, an interest in combining teratology, ancestrality and deep time; with Blackwood, a quest for seeking the universe’s outermost rim, the cosmic outside; with Hodgson, a phobic dread of the sea and of otherworldly contamination. In Lovecraft’s fiction the universe itself is a malignant force – a force I describe in relation to Arthur Schopenhauer’s ontology, which identifies the world-in-itself with an all-encompassing, non-sentient ‘will-to-live’. Key to Lovecraft’s works, I contend, is the revelation that even the most seemingly dependable human conceptions, such as those of selfhood and self-knowledge, are unreliable: his weird stories are rife with protagonists who, with spasms of revulsion, apprehend not only the emptiness of their human values but the reality of their own alienage, of the strangeness and repulsiveness of the universe, and of a continuity between human beings and that nauseating cosmos. The only solace from this endless horror lies in a dissipation of the self, a loss of ego kin to madness which I relate to Schopenhauer’s formulation of the sublime and to the nullification of the will in the moment of its apprehension.
The story this book tells is not always a linear one – there is no clear roadmap of the Great Outdoors. What emerges from my analysis is not a single, consistent picture of the unthinkable world-in-itself but a series of shifting visions, coalescing miasma-like to provide strange and sometimes unsettling glimpses of the reality we inhabit but imperfectly comprehend. My goal here is to contribute to a growing critical understanding of weird fiction as serious literature engaged in exploring meaningful questions about the nature of reality and our access to it, and to bring to the study of the weird new perspectives emphasising the cognitive and aesthetic power of disgust.
Macabre metaphysics
EDGAR ALLAN POE’S first short published story, ‘Metzengerstein: A Tale in Imitation of the German’ (1832), is explicitly concerned with metaphysics. Its central conceit of metempsychosis – an idea that Poe would return to in works like ‘Morella’ (1835) and ‘Ligeia’ (1838) – concerns the transmigration of the soul, and manifests in the form of a grotesque horse with the soul of a man, a liminal figure somewhere between life and death, human and animal. The horse becomes the obsession of Frederick, the Baron Metzengerstein, a likely arsonist who burned down the stables of his neighbours, the Berlifitzing family, with whom his own family had long feuded. The horse, branded with the letters ‘W.V.B.’, is implied to be possessed by the spirit of William von Berlifitzing, who died trying to save one of the horses. Poe emphasises the steed’s repulsiveness: it possesses ‘gigantic and disgusting teeth’ and ‘distended lips’, and its rider, Frederick, contracts from the beast ‘a hideous and unnatural fervour’ described as a ‘morbid melancholy’.1 From the outset Frederick is fascinated by the creature: upon first seeing its representation in a tapestry, ‘his eyes [become] unwittingly riveted’ to the ‘unnaturally coloured’ thing, and his lip twitches with a ‘fiendish expression… without his consciousness’, his gaze returning inexorably to the image ‘mechanically’ (p. 160). Here Poe simultaneously erodes the individual agency of the baron while hinting that the horse may be the product of his unconscious mind, adding another layer of paradox to the already contradictory beast. The baron’s infection by the monstrous horse, itself an abominable amalgam transgressing both physical and metaphysical boundaries, serves to blend the hideous steed and its rider together,