Much has been made of Lovecraft's cosmicism and rightly so. It is this aspect of his writing that set his work apart from that of the other Weird Tales writers of his generation and spawned countless pastiches, critical essays, polemics, stuffies and tchotchkes.
An aspect of his writing that gets less attention is his tales of a very puritanical witch-haunted New England. The doomed protagonists of his tales often find Margaret Murray'sThe Witch-Cult in Western Europe among the more eldritch tomes on the bookshelves they consult. Lovecraft himself offers us the witch Keziah Mason and her familiar Brown Jenkin in "The Dreams in the Witch House".
"He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King’s men in the dark, olden days of the Province." 1
The oft scorned figure of Cotton Mather stalks by the gallows hill and the graveyards holding the ancestors of still more doomed narrators.
"Beside the road at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak and windswept, and I saw that it was a burying-ground where black gravestones stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse. The printless road was very lonely, and sometimes I thought I heard a distant horrible creaking as of a gibbet in the wind. They had hanged four kinsmen of mine for witchcraft in 1692, but I did not know just where." 2
"You call the Salem witchcraft a delusion, but I’ll wage my four-times-great-grandmother could have told you things. They hanged her on Gallows Hill, with Cotton Mather looking sanctimoniously on. Mather, damn him, was afraid somebody might succeed in kicking free of this accursed cage of monotony—I wish someone had laid a spell on him or sucked his blood in the night!
“I can shew you a house he lived in, and I can shew you another one he was afraid to enter in spite of all his fine bold talk. He knew things he didn’t dare put into that stupid Magnalia or that puerile Wonders of the Invisible World." 3
It is the modern version of this haunted New England that Caitlin R. Kiernan offers us in "So Runs the World Away" It is the story of the Dead Girl, her rival Gable, the boy Bobby, all of whom who live along the bank and in the waters of the Seekonk River. It is also the story of the strange house on Benefit Street, where the abnormally long-lived Miss Josephine holds forth on great disasters she has seen to her friends. A "rough circle of men and women that always makes the Dead Girl think of ravens gathered around carrion, blackbirds about a raccoon's corpse, jostling each other for the best bits" 4 It is also in the basement of the house on Benefit street that Madam Terpsichore instructs the younger ghouls in the correct away to dismember a corpse.
The Dead Girl and her companions move between both groups tolerated if not welcome. It is in the basement that the Dead Girl always seeking details of her past, quizzes the ghoul Barney about a strange vision of death she has had.
'I think I eat them," Dead Girl says. "But there are blackbirds then, a whole flock of blackbirds, and all I can hear are their wings. Their wings bruise the sky.' 5
But Barney refuses to tell her for fear of the reaction of the Baliff, a menacing figure who seems to exert a great deal of control over the group surrounding the Dead Girl. Later the Dead Girl takes a friend on a pilgrimage to Lovecraft's grave; a trip Kiernan must herself have made a number of times when she lived in Providence, Rhode Island.
To avoid spoilers, I will end my description of the story here.
Having followed Kiernan's blog for years, I know she brings what seems like an encyclopedic knowledge of among other topics, Lovecraft's work, deep time, folklore, science, science fiction and horror to her tales. This knowledge includes film and music, as well as the written word. Like Lovecraft, she seems to visit a number of the sites she writes about as part of her research. And like Lovecraft, she often positions the fantastic elements of her stories within a network of real locations and events, quotations, newspapers clipping, and scientific facts.
She also writes beautifully and evocatively.
"People have carved things," she says and strikes the lighter again, holds the flickering blueorange flame so that Adrian can see all the pocket-knife graffiti worked into the smooth, pale bark of the tree. The unpronounceable names of dark, fictitious gods and entire passages from Lovecraft, razor steel for ink to tattoo these occult wounds and lonely messages to a dead man, and she runs an index finger across a scar in the shape of a tentacle-headed fish." 6
I enjoyed the story; some may find ending is a bit ambiguous. I follow Kiernan's blog, and I seem to remember her mentioning that an editor of an anthology she was participating in complained that the conclusion of a story was ambiguous and rather than clarify it, she withdrew the story. I love that. I hate weird tales that offer too much explanation or even worse a prosaic explanation. I am mad for example, or in the case of William Hope Hodgson's worst Carnacki stories, criminals staged the entire haunting.
In their introduction to The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, Ann and Jeff Vandermeer quote Lovecraft on the weird tale.
"Instead, it represents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane – a ‘certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread’ or ‘malign and particular suspension or defeat of … fixed laws of Nature’ – through fiction that comes from the more unsettling, shadowy side of the fantastical tradition."
The Vandeermer's also state
"Because The Weird is as much a sensation as it is a mode of writing, the most keenly attuned amongst us will say ‘I know it when I see it,’ by which they mean ‘I know it when I feel""
They go on to say
"In either instance, subtle or bold, The Weird acknowledges that our search for understanding about worlds beyond our own cannot always be found in science or religion and thus becomes an alternative path for exploration of the numinous."
For me, this is similar (not in content but impact) to the sense of wonder in science fiction. It is a point in which some aspect of the story transports my reading self out of the narrative into the realm of sensation or imaginative experience. And it is very much a matter of knowing it when I see it or rather experience it. The events within a weird tale are things of mood and atmosphere rather than something that can be categorized. They are very much experiences of the what (real or not). What happened, what did I feel, what did I see, rather than how or why did something happened.
I read this in the PS Publishing collection of Kiernan's stories To Charles Fort
With Love. It was followed by a discussion of the inspiration for the story and it's place within her body of work. I typed it while listening to the album Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigates Witch Cults Of The Radio Age, because I could.
Caitlin R. Kiernan's Online Journal is here,
Footnotes
1 HPL, "The Dreams in the Witch House. "
2 HPL, "The Festival"
3 HPL, "Pickman's Model"
4-6 Kiernan, "So Runs the World Away"
