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Page 85 BOOK REVIEWS Tartarus Press Strange Tales, ed. Rosalie Parker (North Yorkshire: Tartarus, 2003) & Wormwood: Literature of the Fantastic, Supernatural & Decadent, 1­6, 2003­2006 Dara Downey the horror genre is extremely limber, extremely adaptable, extremely useful; the author or filmmaker can use it as a crowbar to lever open locked doors or a small, slim pick to tease the tumblers into giving. The genre can thus be used to open almost any lock on the fears which lie behind the door […]. (Stephen King, Danse Macabre (1982), 163) When King is at his best, he can be remarkably adept at cutting to the core of the genre of which he is the self­proclaimed “King”. Nevertheless, however astute such isolated observations as the above comment might be, it is always possible to find another, equally astute observation, that both contradicts what he is saying and undermines whatever favourable impression of his analytical skills we may have. Elsewhere in Danse Macabre, for example, King states confidently that Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw, with its elegant drawing­room prose and its tightly woven psychological logic, has had very little influence on the American masscult” of mainstream horror (Danse Macabre, 66). What this suggests is that the flexibility which he sees as the defining characteristic of horror has (for him at any rate) a breaking point, a suggestion well in line with his near­hysterical insistence that aesthetic values and intellectual rigour are antithetical to the aims and effects of the genre. It is precisely this sort of inverted snobbery that Tartarus Press are striving to overthrow. Their journal, Wormwood, includes articles on Algernon Blackwood and Oliver Onions in the same context as studies of Ray Bradbury and Joyce Carol Oates. It also includes authors more accurately categorised as “decadent”, but who, through this juxtaposition, are revealed as indispensable to an understanding of horror in general. In a somewhat different manner, Tartarus’ collection of new short stories, Strange Tales, is a timely reminder that “elegant drawing­room prose” and “tightly woven psychological logic” are perfect vehicles for the peculiar amorphousness of twenty­first century fear, ranging as it does from nameless dread to physical revulsion, and encompassing everything in between ­ much like the volume itself. Both Wormwood and Strange Tales make perfectly clear what King ­ despite, or perhaps because of his currently status within horror fiction ­ seems to have forgotten. When Gothic and horror narratives are most successful, it is due primarily to their power to unsettle their readers profoundly, whatever their content, approach or style. Wormwood and Strange Tales, as I shall argue, reinstate one of the most central aspects of “traditional”, Radcliffean Gothic ­ the realisation that, in order to give shape and voice to the fears of the present, we must plunder and rework the images and terrors of the past. In this way, Tartarus Press’ oeuvre seems both more modern and more radical than most of King’s writing (and certainly more so than much of his recent work), unafraid as Tartarus is of finding horror in unlikely places. The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 2 Page 86 Far from being confined to simply trawling the back catalogue of August Derleth and William Hope Hodgson, in search of something other than blood, guts and psycho­murderer types, Wormwood, subtitled Literature of the Fantastic, Supernatural & Decadent, is admirably capacious. Reviewing and critiquing thrillers and mysteries alongside works that fit neatly under the heading of “fantastic and supernatural” fiction, this biannual journal shows up as arbitrary and even damaging the strict enforcement of such categorisations; and indirectly hints that, by refusing and undermining them, a better understanding can be gained of fiction in general. This is achieved primarily through three forms of articles ­ literary biographies of little­known writers; scholarly articles on specific texts or authors; and reprints of obscure stories and other writings. In my opinion, it is in the area of literary biography that Wormwood most fully succeeds. Wormwood 5, from Autumn 2005, for example, features a fascinating article on the life and work of Victor Benjamin Neuberg, who is described by Richard Neff as follows: At the age of sixteen he joined the family firm, which imported canes, fibres and rattans, but it quickly became apparent that a conventional life was not for him. He felt the call to be a poet and dabbled with agnosticism and vegetarianism until he settled on the paganism and ritual magic of Aleister Crowley. (33) The assured and fluid quality of the writing here, along with careful research and the insightful but by no means reverential reading of Neuberg’s own writings with which the article concludes, far from being isolated to this particular article, characterise Wormwood as a whole. Notable examples include Jeff Gardiner’s plangent piece on forgotten fantasist Francis Stevens, who influenced H.P. Lovecraft, among others (No. 2, Spring 2004); and Brian R. Banks’ massively detailed and philosophically complex ‘Trajectory of a Comet: Poland’s Arch­Decadent, Stansilaw Przybyszewski’ (No. 6, Spring 2006). My personal favourite is Adam Daly’s essay on Lionel Erskine Britton, whose 1984­esque Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth (1930) comes across as pleasantly surreal and radical, the kind of angry science fiction that doesn’t seem to get written any more. All three articles are poignant reminders of how easily an author, however famous during his or her own lifetime, can slip into the murky waters of the great unread (Mr. King take note). At the same time, and for this reason, they constitute a call to arms for academics, and in particular those who see the very purpose of studying supernatural, Gothic and horror fiction to be to expand and even dismantle the concept of a canon. If this is the case, then surely it is to authors such as those featured in Wormwood that we should be turning in order to get beyond the notion of the genre as monolithic ­ indeed, as an unproblematically coherent genre at all. The quality, however, is not always so high, primarily due to the fact that (surprisingly for a journal so very dedicated to the recreation of the milieux in which authors lived) many of the articles offering readings of texts rather than of writers are characterised by a somewhat unexamined, not to mention outmoded, acceptance of psychoanalysis as an ideal tool for “demystifying” supernatural fiction. In particular, Stephen Sennitt’s article ‘Phantom Doubles: A Freudian Reading of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Hoffman’s “The Sandman”’ (No. 5, Autunm 2005) is at once naïve and commonplace, as well as being exemplary of the kind of laziness that characterises so many commentators on horror and the fantastic. Apart from any other possible objections to such a reading, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 2 Page 87 Freud himself has already read ‘The Sandman’ in this manner in his essay ‘The “Uncanny”’, and to do so again only serves to repeat the tendency of critics, uncomfortable with the implications of horror and Gothic fiction, to confine these tales firmly within the individual psyche, thereby denying whatever potentially subversive comments they might make about society, culture and hegemonic power. Along the same lines, only much better, is Jeff Gardiner’s ‘Some Dark Ancestral Sense: Awe in the Work of Algernon Blackwood’ (No. 5, Autunm 2005), which has some interesting things to say about the supernatural origins of fear. Similar concerns underlie Jyri­Pekka Luoma’s ‘Phantasmagoria & Psyche in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde,’ (No. 2, Spring 2004) which displays considerable critical daring and subtlety, an impressive feat in the face of well­worn material. The highlight of the whole journal, however (for me at any rate) is the inclusion in Wormwood 5 of Robert Aikman’s previously unpublished short tale ‘The Fully Conducted Story’. Recounting the narrator/protagonist’s strange experience at a stately home while on holiday in Tuscany, the story begins as he leaves his ailing wife alone at their hotel. It is only at the very close of the tale itself we discover that she in fact dies soon after they have left Italy. This chilling little aside suggests a comparison with Ray Bradbury’s sublime ‘The Next in Line’ (a tale Joel Lane praises repeatedly in his two­part article on Bradbury, which appears in Wormwood 5 & 6). While it may not quite live up to such a comparison, Aikman’s offering is certainly a satisfyingly creepy little tale unmarred by cheap explanations or gaudy special effects. What raises it to the level of greatness, however, is Glen Cavaliero’s stunning reading of the story which follows. Somewhat chary of Aikman’s quality as a writer, Cavaliero nonetheless praises where praise is due, and asserts astutely: the truly frightening thing about Aikman’s best work is that it posits the conclusion that the uncanny intrusions are in fact irruptions, evidences of where we are at, and of what we are producing. His “ghosts” are self­generating elements in a material world that we regard as stable and unchanging. They are demons of matter. (8) Not only does this neatly sidestep the ho­hum conventionality of a cheap Freudian reading, it does so while still focusing on the inner workings of the protagonist’s mind. Cavaliero carries off the tricky feat of problematising the superficially self­effacing first­person narrator, who initially appears to be Aikman himself, but who, in Cavaliero’s hands, becomes a slippery customer whose narrative strategies and callous attitude towards his wife collude in a complex act of dissembling and omission.

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