It’s that time of the year in the West, with shorter days and gloomier weather, when our imaginations might be darker as we pass from summer harvest to the start of winter. It seems an appropriate season to continue with this short series. In Part 1, I put forth some philosophy behind the ecological weird–drawing broadly from Brad Tabas’s study in Miranda, Dark Places: Ecology, Place, and the Metaphysics of Horror Fiction, where he pointed out:
Horror writer and theorist Thomas Ligotti has suggested that human awareness of the alien nature of objects, the sensation that “the objects around them were one thing and that they were another,” led to the birth of horror.
The alien nature of objects can relate to any object, though this series focuses on natural objects, noting ecology as a system of natural objects that we are connected with deeply but which also strongly represents the mysterious other in the context of imaginative and deep fiction. Weird fiction can be a neat lens through which to observe the natural world, with that “gaze above.”
While the first part of the series served as an introduction, Part 2 examines earlier works in the field. Because the final part of the series will deal with the Anthropocene, this section covers a lot of ground, from the early 20th century to around 1970. See my notes at the end of the article for more on the rationale behind this time-frame. Though the amount of earlier weird literature is large, I’ll try to hit some of the works that strongly remark on the natural world. By no means, however, is this section anything but a sample. For more information about the history of this fiction, see “The Weird: An Introduction” at Weird Fiction Review.
The following is a sample of earlier stories that dive into the ecological weird, giving us a sense of wild unease. Of nightmares and dreams. Of disquiet. Maybe a sense of awe or fear or respect for nature in all its power, beauty, and horror.
Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows (1907)
I cuddled up one night in bed, the Pacific wind and rain howling outside–the perfect setting–with my small bedside lamp and warm brown blanket, and read this novella in one setting. In The Willows, two men are on a canoe trip down the Danube, and, at one of the islands in what is now the Dunajské luhy Protected Landscape Area, in Slovakia, they stop to camp. What follows is a preternatural sequence of events that defies logic and hastens through with little explanation.
While whatever is happening around the men exists on the border of the explainable and the non-explainable (whispers, strange light figures escaping from the willows into the heavens at night, and so on), a palpable fear that the two seasoned river canoers experience is very real, and, being rational people, they wonder if they are hallucinating or so scared that their imaginations are running wild. The main character tells himself that if he states out loud his fears to his companion, simply described as “the Swede,” that the fears will then manifest as real.
The two find the corpse of a peasant, and they wonder if it is a sacrifice to the island, and further fright sets in. It is of their utmost concern that they get off this island and back to the river, but they are also trapped because of flooding. As the nature around them takes on its own will, as if it has a conscience, their unrest deepens.
This short story relies on landscape, the willows themselves becoming preternatural or perhaps supernatural. Environment is key, but it really represents the unknown, perhaps a statement on humans versus nature. In Chicago Now, Melissa Baron states:
[The author] personifies nature like no other, turning the Danube into a living, thinking being. The willows, too, are given this lifelike personage: “Then we lay panting and laughing after our exertions on the hot yellow sand…and an immense army of dancing, shouting willow bushes, closing in from all sides, shining with spray and clapping their thousand little hands as though to applaud the success of our efforts.”
Despite the obvious focus on the natural world, according to the article (requires payment) “Walking with the Goat-God: Gothic Ecology in Algernon Blackwood’s Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories,” by Michelle Poland:
In order to understand Earth’s increasingly unpredictable climate, we must accept natural chaos and anthropogenic disturbance as a key component of our ecological and social future…this article further suggests that chaos ecology also has its roots in the Gothic.
Note that the graphic novel The Willows is published in October 2017.
William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” (1907)
In this story, which I read last summer, a sense of mystery fell around me, feeling almost physical–like the omnipresent weight of the granite-colored Vancouver sky we see in days of rain on end. As with a couple other stories mentioned here, the characters are traveling on a boat, a common trope that serves as a way to enter another realm. The vehicle is transient, the road is abstract (water), and the journey uncertain, leading to the supernatural. George, the narrator, and his friend Will, are traveling somewhere in the North Pacific, their exact location unknown. It’s night-time, and a voice from the sea begins talking to them, the voice identifying itself as only an old man. His claim for approach is that he is hungry and “so is she.”
“She” turns out to be the man’s fiancée. They had escaped a sinking ship called the Albatross by making a raft and sailing to a nearby lagoon, where they saw a sunken ship covered with a fungus-like growth. This growth is unstoppable. I found it interesting that similar themes have taken place in fiction: Stephen King’s “Grey Matter,” John Brosnan’s “The Fungus,” Brian Lumley’s “Fruiting Bodies,” and Jeff VanderMeer’s stories, of which the Los Angeles Times said:
It turns out that so-called fungal fiction — speculative fiction involving intelligent and sometimes even godlike fungic creatures — is a category that borders on being its own subgenre. Fungal creatures play central roles in previous VanderMeer books…In biological taxonomy, fungi make up a massive kingdom of species replete with unknowns. Out of millions of fungal species, only about 5% have been classified; these mysterious organisms, with their spore-based reproduction and parasitic life cycles, are little understood but known to feast off the dead and spread invisibly through the air — making them ripe targets for fantasy.
“A Voice in the Night” has a surreal and potent ending, which I will not spoil here. According to an article in O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies, in autumn 2013, “We Who Had Been Human, Became—?: Some Dark Ecological Thoughts on William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night,” by Anthony Camara [PDF]:
Outlining the dark ecological implications of Hodgson’s maritime short story, “The Voice in the Night,” which first appeared in the November 1907 Blue Book Magazine, this essay argues that the grotesque becoming-fungus of human beings recounted in the tale challenges conventional theological and biological accounts of creation. By depicting the mesh of ecological relations as a crucible for the emergence of new life forms, Hodgson’s story wrests productive power away from both divine agency and classical Darwinian evolution. It is the hideous intimacy of ecological nuptials that generates a horrifyingly novel hybrid specimen of life, an unnamable thing that defies naturalistic classification. The story therefore posits the sheer unnaturalness of ecological relations, which evince the chaotic creativity of the universe.
Luigi Ugolini’s “The Vegetable Man” (1917)
For those who are into lost places, this story might intrigue you. A fan of The Lost Horizon–or overall of the idea of Shangri-La–The Lost City of Z, and the television show “Lost,” I find all of these stories rich with tension and wildness. They create such longing and suspense and fashion new myths for places that might be lost, but might not ever have been. But we want to believe that such places once existed, or do exist, for this belief gives us hope that the mystical and beautiful is possible. That maybe our ancestors even took part in helping to create such a place. And to construct such fantastical places means the ability to co-inhabit with the wild, in harmony, despite dangers and inconvenience. Italian author Luigi Ugolini was born in 1891, and grew up when interest in the wild South American jungles was high among explorers and when audiences were hungry for science fiction stories. Along with that, too, was the desire to understand science, and thus finding more about the properties of nature existing in not just known natural places but unknown ones.
The story is about a man named Benito Olivares whose work leads him into the Amazon jungle, where he comes across a plant that defies the norm. The plant resembles a man and pricks him with a thorn, after which Benito becomes ill, which leads to a transformation. Weird Fiction Review states about the author:
Ugolini was a hunter, an ornithologist, and a naturalist, and this comes across clearly in his vivid descriptions of the jungles—which might have little to do with the Amazon, but certainly have much to do with nature—and fantasy, weird writing, is if nothing else about taking the world around us and rewriting it as our fears, desires, and melancholy dictate.
The review goes on to quote two passages from the story, which I think bring to light the botanical writing, rich with ecological prose, if not rife with tones of sexuality and religion:
. . . I penetrated the virgin forests, discovering the remote sources of some of our magnificent rivers, measuring myself against death in that poisonous climate, risking the horrible bites of the deadly snakes that live in the mysterious jungle shadows. I wrung countless secrets out of that vegetable environment that knows no bounds, that rises to the highest glory of free and lush flora, seeming almost to declare its domination over the fertile land, as if jealously guarding its most beautiful and hidden mysteries, wanting to revenge itself on any intruder.
And later, he describes a simple vine thus:
But a silent and insidious weapon rules the mute combat of the vegetable kingdom: the liana. It is the octopus of the forest, the paralyzing tentacle, the noose that cuts off the circulation of the sap and produces vegetable suffocation and gangrene.
According to A Short Story Guide about Nature and the Environment:
The narrator recounts a story told him by a green man. He had a degree in Natural Sciences and explored the Amazon and Mato Grosso. He found many wonders, including a new plant beyond classification – tall as a person, with thick and fleshy leaves, reddish branches, and long white hair.
Michel de Ghelderode’s “A Twilight” (1941)
This story has the theme of deluge, and ironically I read it during a Vancouver rainstorm that battered the sky with as much strangeness as what is written in this story. This story has so much ecological and brilliant wordplay that it made me feel like I was on some other realm while reading it. There’s something primal, yet also apocalyptic. The Weird Fiction Review has the story online, and near the beginning we’re immediately dangled above a monstrous pit:
Our world wouldn’t explode in a glorious detonation; it was becoming a ball of mud, peeling, rotting, hydropic, destroyed by water, a miserable humanity returning to its primordial marshlands where elementary life fermented, filthy living debris, deaf and blind…Such were my thoughts, creeping like long worms, until the moment when my consciousness was sucked down into a muddy sleep.
The narrator is a guy on his couch looking out at a ruined city through a curtain of “fissured rain”. He then decides to explore the city, looking for people…for life. He cannot help but note the sky and how luminous yet catastrophic the light is, some kind of “monstrous error of nature” and a twilight that is a “luminous orgasm” at a crisis. The only life he sees are cattle silently charging toward the “gates of sunset.” Bars and churches are empty. No signs of lamplight shine from residences. The first life he thinks he sees is really a fallen statue of Jesus Christ. In time, he observes the decrepit nature of a church, and even though it stands like a shadow of its former glory, it has been so eroded, the narrator thinks that even an archeologist wouldn’t touch it for fear it might collapse. This statement on organized religion isn’t lost on the reader. As he enters the church, he realizes that either it has sunk into the ground or the church has risen above its walls. I was reminded a lot of the tower/tunnel in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, for the church is a tower, but the narrator feels like he is descending as he walks through it. He enters a labyrinth of corridors wherein “threatening, phosphorescent statues” seem to light the way but ambush him. The following passage reveals a trope for apocalyptic weird fiction:
The mud of the city was no longer a threat, but didn’t the flagstones of this religious charnel house themselves constitute a trap that was no less dreadful? Ah! If I were to sink down into the muck from which these enormous cryptogamous pillars had grown!…Who then would stretch out a hand to save me? There was no one in this church, and I repeated in a loud voice and without awakening any echo, “Is there nobody here?” [Ibid]
Charnel grounds are places where the putrefaction of usually human bodies happens naturally, decomposing on the ground rather than in a burial container. Though perhaps an organic way of dying without ritual, charnel grounds are tied to Indo-Tibetan traditions. In fiction, the trope can also symbolize a gone world, such as in an apocalyptic setting, where there is no time to bury anyone. It may also exemplify, in ecologically oriented fiction overall, a world whose wilderness has disappeared. Enter a haunted world where memory and regret mourn what was. In “A Twilight,” around the decomposing bodies in the church, the narrator views a purple flame, and later he thinks God has thrown him a rope, which he grabs. At that time:
The dislocated church remade itself geometrically, under the orders of an invisible architect that was nothing but light. Candles lit up like stars. The mortuary slabs once more steadied themselves. And with the advent of priests resembling bronzed birds, and who sought to exorcise the darkness with their gestures, I felt a fierce gratitude toward the magical Consciousness that prevented the world from perishing on this day of deluge.
The dead come alive and walk forward like shades and sing. The narrator flees the church, only to see herds of cattle encircling the church. The whole story is trippy and symbolic.
Shirley Jackson: The Summer People (1950)
I’m including this short story (Jackson also wrote the memorable story “The Lottery” and the novel The Haunting of Hill House) because the premise is city people taking a trip to a country cottage. They need to get away from their normal urban home. This sentiment is common; I think we all get it. Leaving the city and journeying to the country offers reprieve. In James A. Schaefer’s book of environmental essays, The Two Houses of Okios, a book I published at Moon Willow Press in 2015, the author states:
How does nature seep into our minds? In the late 19th century, psychologist William James proposed that elements in the natural environment are easily engaging: “strange things, moving things, wild animals, bright things, pretty things”–a tangle of intrigue. Relaxed and absorbed by nature, our brain is restored and ready to take on new, demanding tasks.1,3
And, according to theory, the more intricate the environment, the greater the effect. In Sheffield, England, another research team revealed the experiences of more than 300 park-goers enriched by nature’s complexity. Their ability to think increased with more varieties of plants, birds, and habitats.3 (The harried worlds of shopping and TV, in contrast, seem to provide no such restorative effects.) This is the irony of greenery: Clarity of mind from the clutter of nature.
In “The Summer People,” the Allisons retreat to their summer cottage in New York State–the cottage is on a lake, and it has no electricity, heat, or indoor plumbing. Unlike in previous summers, now the Allisons are retired, so this summer they decide to stay past Labor Day. But this year, things go wrong. A dead car. A delivery of kerosene that doesn’t happen. A letter from a son that sounds off. And an incoming storm. While these things could just be coincidental happenings, on ominous tone prevails. Because nobody ever stays past Labor Day, even though Mr. Allison tells his wife, “We might as well enjoy the country as long as possible.” You could read this story as social satire or horror. Though not deeply ecological in nature, there is a strong sense that being closer to nature is soothing, and does one ever want to return to anything else? The following passage comes from the story:
It was not possible to remain troubled long in the face of the day; the country had never seemed more inviting, and the lake moved quietly below them, among the trees, with the almost incredible softness of a summer picture. Mrs. Allison sighed deeply, in the pleasure of possessing for themselves that sight of the lake, with the distant green hills beyond, the gentleness of the small wind through the trees.
With all that seems baleful about staying at the lake, away from the hot city, the story ends with the couple experiencing a loud storm outside. And other noises. And they wait. The entire story is based upon suspicion, away from the familiar confines of home. I think this may be another statement on the uncanny nature of nature.
Michael Bernanos: The Other Side of the Mountain (1967, France)
The novella starts normally enough, with a hungover 18-year-old guy agreeing to join a ship crew. A storm and lack of food and water results in some pretty horrible conditions, including cannibalism and death among the other crew mates. The teen becomes friends with the cook, also a long-time sailor, and they survive only to reach a different realm of some kind. The stars are different, and the land they reach is red and hellish. They think that reaching the big mountain in the distance, and seeing what’s on the other side, is their only salvation. Yet, pure horror happens on their trek, including carnal plants, bowing trees, a river that opens up to sink them, small villages and other areas where things and people have “vitrified,” and so on. The basis of the story seems to be a poetic telling of nature in the very raw. Seen through the lens of Earth people, the new land defies much logic but simply has different species and laws of physics. The novel is not gloomy insofar as the friendship between the cook and the teenager; courage and loyalty leads them together up the mountain, even if their fate is not life. I find the raw and weird in nature worth investigating through the page-flipping and suspenseful poetics of fiction. I like what It All Began: The Story Imperial wrote:
This story runs on so many levels, it will probably strike every reader in a completely different way. Man versus nature. A devolution into madness. The hallucinatory last gasp for life of two dying men. It even has the fairy elements of entering the world of the Fae and finding you are trapped there once you unwittingly eat their food. If it weren’t for the poetic nature of the writing, which leaves the reader with a deeper sense of meaning within every word, these simple plot devices might suffice, but ultimately they do not. If you want to partake of your own endless journey, read this fantastic story and you will find yourself thinking about it for years to come – constantly twisting your thoughts around to find fresh meanings in each lovely and memorable image.
Summary
These stories delve into the ecological weird, whether it’s haunted willows and a strange river, the open sea and fungi, botany and a green vegetable man, apocalyptic rain and charnel grounds, a cottage retreat on a lake, or an eerie realm with genuflecting trees and predatory flowers. These examples of earlier weird fiction tap into ecology to raise our awareness–and the hair on our arms–of the wild power of the world around us. The stories are diverse, rooted in subjects ranging from Gothic chaos ecology to the defiance of naturalistic classification to the questioning of religious and cultural rituals to surrealism–themes that are rooted in the ecological weird.
References and Notes
[1] Taylor, A. F., F. E. Kuo, and W. C. Sullivan. 2001. Coping with add: The surprising connection to green play settings. Environment and Behavior 33:54-77.
[2] Faber Taylor, A., and F. E. Kuo. 2009. Children with attention deficits concentrate better after walk in the park. Journal of Attention Disorders 12:402-409.
[3] Fuller, R. A., K. N. Irvine, P. Devine-Wright, P. H. Warren, and K. J. Gaston. 2007. Psychological benefits of greenspace increase with biodiversity. Biology Letters 3:390-394.
Notes: Part 3 will focus on contemporary weird fiction authors, the time-frame coinciding with modern acceptance of global warming–at least in this series. While new weird fiction, according to Wikipedia, began in the 1990s, this series focuses on the ecological weird, so we’ll start a little earlier in the sense of weird fiction that may advocate, even subtly, for nature. Human-caused global warming became accepted in the 1970s within the scientific community. And authors such as Arthur Herzog and Ursula K. Le Guin were among the pioneers of writers dealing with Anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The 1970s is also when the term eco-fiction came about. The literary world began to recognize natural history while connecting humanity with ecology. Eco-criticism was born as well. And John Stadler’s Eco-fiction anthology was published, bringing academic ideas into the mainstream, with the anthology’s short story authors including Ray Bradbury, John Steinbeck, Edgar Allen Poe, A.E. Coppard, James Agee, Robert M. Coates, Daphne du Maurier, Robley Wilson Jr., E.B. White, J.F. Powers, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sarah Orne Jewett, Frank Herbert, H.H. Munro, J.G. Ballard, Steven Scharder, Isaac Asimov, and William Saroyan.
The featured image is licensed for use and (c) Can Stock Photo / AlfaOlga
