Weird Horror #7: Weird Horror, #7

WEIRD HORROR MAGAZINE

AUTUMN 2023

ISSUE 7

EDITED BY

MICHAEL KELLY

WEIRD HORROR 7

Autumn 2023

PUBLISHER

Undertow Publications

EDITOR/LAYOUT

Michael Kelly

PROOFREADER

Carolyn Macdonell

OPINION

Simon Strantzas

COMMENTARY

Orrin Grey

BOOKS

Lysette Stevenson

COVER ART

James Hutton

COVER DESIGN

Vince Haig

INTERIOR ART

Neil Ballantyne

Weirdhorrormagazine.com

CONTENTS

On Horror

Simon Strantzas

Grey’s Grotesqueries

Orrin Grey

Devil’s Acre

Stuart Arthur

A Perfect Day for Babelfish

Josh Pearce

The Mission House Guests

Lynn Hutchinson Lee

Cretins

Thomas Ha

Mother’s Milk

Annika Barranti Klein

The Prince of Oakland

M.M. Olivas

A Geography of Innocence

M. Rickert

The Buddha Bone

Thersa Matsuura

The Painted Boy

Spencer Nitkey

Sotto Voce

Kay Chronister

In One Ear and Out the Other

Kristiana Willsey

The Macabre Reader

Lysette Stevenson

Contributors

ON HORROR

SIMON STRANTZAS

PRIMORDIAL SOUP

When discussing a subject, it helps to have a common nomenclature so everyone knows what everyone else means. Language is a contract, after all, and communication only works when there’s agreement. But language is also changing and evolving, and that fluid nature makes forming a common nomenclature tricky.

Take for example Weird Fiction. This term has been floating around — primarily in specific pockets of the Horror community — for almost 20 years, and we have yet to nail down a definitive definition for what it is. Everyone has their own take, some holding opinions more passionately than others, and it makes discussion about its workings difficult. Even in this short column an issue has already reared its troublesome head: do I mean Horror, that marketing category that encompasses a narrowly defined range of subject matter and effects? Or do I mean Horror, that style of fiction with dark element where some malignant force aims to affect the world at a macro and/or micro level? And what about Weird Fiction? Do I mean that chimera that has existed nearly as long as fiction has been written, or do I mean that recent phenomenon that describes the post-millennial intermingling of genres? Nobody is sure, and since nobody is sure, nobody can agree. We lack a common nomenclature.

Don’t worry: I’m not proposing one here. To paraphrase an old XKCD strip, when there are fourteen terms for a thing, following the instinct to simplify it all by creating a new all-encompassing term will only result in there now being fifteen terms for a thing. Instead, I want to talk about why these words have come into being, and what it might mean.

Back to Weird fiction. I’ve previously laid out my controversial stance that Weird fiction (in the term’s relatively recent usage) is simply another description for Horror fiction, but one that doesn’t carry its implicit baggage. And one that best describes the leading edge of Horror — that interstitial place where the genre meets other speculative genres. Horror, Fantasy, Science Fiction, all share some overlapping borders between which they commingle, and that commingling enhances Horror. Inevitably, some of the effects of this enhanced Horror trickle down and inform the full breadth of the genre. Today’s changes become tomorrow’s status quo. I still believe this is the case, but I also suspect I may suffer from the same myopia that many other fans of genre fiction are burdened with. Namely, as a horror writer I’m seeing this interstitial fiction through Horror’s lens.

What does that mean? Let me frame it: Science Fiction is a genre that has been in existence almost as long as Horror (and also better accepted culturally). There is the canonical idea of a Science Fiction story, and a lot of work in the genre that explores it, but there is also a leading edge of Science Fiction that has been called Slipstream. It’s here in this place that Science Fiction mingles with Horror and Fantasy to blur the lines between the genres. It’s an interstitial place where the genres mix and Science Fiction is enhanced. Some of the ideas in this enhanced Science Fiction will eventually trickle down into the genre as a whole. Slipstream is seeing this interstitial fiction through Science Fiction’s lens.

Or, to put it a third way, why not consider Fantasy? Much of it still written in the shadow of Tolkien, Fantasy nevertheless has its own leading edge, where it meets Horror and Science Fiction to produce enhanced work not quite like anything else. Some people might refer to it as Fabulism, and it takes the best of its sister genres and produces something unlike what’s produced by the bulk of Fantasy writers. Unlike it, but destined to eventually become it. Fabulism is simply seeing interstitial fiction through the lens of Fantasy.

So, despite our best effort, we end up with a new term: Interstitial Fiction. You may ask if that isn’t exactly what I promised we’d avoid, and the answer is yes, I did promise that. But I’d argue this isn’t a case of the proverbial blind men and the elephant, where multiple groups see aspects of the same thing. Instead, I believe this is a case of parallel evolution or, perhaps, convergent evolution, where each corner of the speculative fiction triangle has a segment that has been moving toward a multi-stream way of storytelling, and all have converged in this one similar place, making their leading edges mostly indistinguishable from one another. Or, to put it another way, it’s not that I’m crowning these stories Interstitial Fiction, and expect everything we once knew as Slipstream, or Fabulism, or Weird (or Literate Horror, or New Weird, and so on) to be called that instead. I don’t expect us to see YEAR’S BEST INTERSTITIAL FICTION on any bookstore shelves anytime soon. Instead, what I’m saying is interstitial fiction is a descriptor of this style of writing. It’s an adjective. And I think does a better job than the litany of sub-genres we’ve already tried to create to capture it because, let’s face it, this sort of fiction can’t be captured. And that’s kind of the point.

The way fiction advances is through a continuum — each generation of authors successively building on all who have come before. Live long enough and you’ll see the complex works of your present transform into the simplistic works of your past. In order for Horror to keep moving forward, it needs to change, and that vanguard will continue to be something new and different from what’s come before. It has to be, otherwise the genre has no other direction in which to go but towards death, a snake swallowing its own tail until nothing remains. The days of silos are done, perhaps forever — the walls collapsing in art, music, and literature — and where the future lies is in the interstices of art. In the amorphous mixture of speculation from which the different genres pull the pieces most interesting and applicable to their ideologies and spin them out or, perhaps more likely, hone them into something more clearly defined. Interstitial fiction, in that sense, operates like a primordial soup for speculative fiction — whether in a genre or outside of them all — and regardless of the lens through which we look at it, we are in many ways talking about the same thing: the place from which everything is born. No matter what we call it.

GREY’S GROTESQUERIES

ORRIN GREY

JACK KIRBY: KING OF MONSTERS

When I was young, I had a box of random comic books that had been left behind by my older brothers, none of whom were particularly into comics, so the titles were an arbitrary scattering indeed. Among these were a handful of issues from the 1970s reprinting Stan Lee and Jack Kirby monster comics originally from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, boasting irresistible titles like Where Monsters Dwell and Creatures on the Loose.

These were my first exposure to the monster comics illustrated by Jack Kirby and, as a kid, I didn’t appreciate them as much as I do now — which is not to say that I didn’t read them almost literally to pieces, because I certainly did.

For those who don’t know Jack Kirby, he is one of the most respected comic book artists of all time, and the creator or co-creator of … well, the majority of the most famous superheroes around. Iron Man, Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men. You name it, Kirby probably had a hand in it.

Even among those who are familiar with Kirby as the father of much of the modern crop of superhero comics, however, his earlier monster work is often less well known, in spite of the fact that some of them have attained recent prominence in altered forms. Groot, for example, who has now become such a staple of Marvel’s marketing that you can find him hawking pistachios at your local grocery store, began as one of these four-color invaders. The Groot who initially appeared in Tales to Astonish #13 back in 1960 didn’t look much like the one we know today, and he was much more verbose than his cinematic counterpart.

Despite my initial reluctance, Kirby’s monster comics eventually became not only my favorites from among that titan’s prolific oeuvre, but some of my favorite comic books of all time. Oh sure, they will never be as culturally significant as characters like the Fantastic Four or Captain America, but they demonstrate Kirby’s particular genius admirably, and I love a good monster, after all.

While Kirby enjoys a considerable reputation among comic book artists, he has a style that can seem decidedly clunky to modern readers. Certainly, I went through a period, when I was first getting into comic books myself, when I didn’t understand the appeal of it. That chunky, blocky design sensibility serves Kirby well when creating monsters, and no other monsters in or out of the comics look quite like his.

You can see it in some of the monstrous superheroes that he created, such as the Thing, the Hulk, or DC’s Etrigan. But you can see it even more in the monsters that didn’t get ported over into mainstream success, critters with names like Moomba, Spragg, and Orrgo — the latter being possibly my favorite of all of Kirby’s many weird designs.

Actually reading all of these stories can often be an exercise in repetition. Many of the creatures Kirby brought to life share similar diegetic origins — either alien invaders or creations of human hubris. They frequently speak of themselves in grandiose terms and in the third person, and they are almost always outwitted by the protagonist of the story, who is just some random human in a tweed blazer. And thanks to the stipulations of the Comics Code Authority, they often wear ridiculous purple shorts.

Of course, the stories are not what we’re really here for. Which is not to say that there isn’t genuine pleasure to be had in reading them — and quite a lot of it, at times. It’s just that the real draw of these old Jack Kirby monster comics is there in the words I just used to describe them. We’re here for Jack Kirby’s inimitable art. More than that, we’re here for the monsters.

It’s honestly a pity that the sci-fi and horror movies that dominated the drive-ins of the ‘50s and ‘60s didn’t draw more of their inspiration from his designs. Can you imagine a wealth of stop-motion Kirby kaiju stomping across drive-in screens?

One of the only exceptions to this comes from the little-seen 1962 John Agar flick Hand of Death, which sees Agar metamorphose into a monster (designed by Bob Mark) that seems to have been inspired by the appearance of the Thing from the Fantastic Four, who made their debut just eight months earlier. Agar’s monstrous form in Hand of Death even goes so far as to don the same hat-and-trench coat combo that the Thing wears to disguise his appearance when he goes out in public. Unfortunately, aside from the unique monster makeup, there is little enough else to distinguish this 1962 potboiler.

Prior to concocting this crop of comic book creatures for Marvel, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon had previously worked on a string of pre-Code horror comics for DC under titles like Black Magic and Strange World of Your Dreams. These early horror comics featured plenty of striking imagery — including a storyline that was probably lifted pretty much wholesale for the 1996 Full Moon horror comedy Head of the Family — and plenty of monsters, but there was nothing in them quite like the sci-fi creatures Kirby concocted for Marvel in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

These days, many other nerds like me who grew up with these monsters — whether in their original incarnations or in the 1970s reprints that I got into — are writing and drawing comics at Marvel and elsewhere, and these classic monsters have made new appearances. Back in 2017, Marvel launched a Monsters Unleashed event, written primarily by Cullen Bunn, that brought many of these creatures back to the fore, while also introducing new giant monsters, and a heroic friend for them named Kid Kaiju.

To accompany the event there were the expected marketing tie-ins. A standalone Monsters Unleashed expansion for the VS System card game was, well, unleashed. Perhaps more thematically, Marvel trotted out a trio of Goosebumps-style tie-in books for young readers starring some of these classic monsters. R. L. Stine himself