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X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries
FEAR (essay)
Originally published in The Nekromantikon, 1950.
Any analysis of fear is bound to wind up on the same scrap heap with similar analyses of love, humor and the divorce rate.
I shall not so much analyze fear as an emotion, but discuss certain aspects of fear that gave rise in the older generation to the myths, superstitions and beliefs of supernatural device and existence. In this modern generation, this amounts to a “thrill desire” for the weird, the macabre, the instinctively terrifying.
The weird had its naissance in fear, in a primordial fear of the unknown, the gibbering, nameless revulsion for the dark and the terrors it seemed to hold.
It was in the earliest experience of Man that storms arose, thunder rolled, lightning hurled jagged tongues of fire upon the earth, and the woods and fields burst into flames thereat. Whence came the storms and the devouring flames? Puny man, who could not withstand flame, conceived that animate, invisible beings caused the storms. They were beings who commanded the terrible flames, who reveled in them moreover, and by means of them fed upon the earth.
Postulate, then, that in the darkling consciousness of early man was concei
ved the importance of flame to his gods and demons, and the thought of appeasing them through the use of fire in ritual and sacrifice.
Generations later, the vague, formless fears of Man, the invisible gods, goddesses and demons, became animated in forms that religious logic deemed most probable. At first, beneficent gods seemed no less terrible than their demon co-habitors of the supernatural realm. A god who performed good works was as much to be feared as one who performed evil. For the principle attribute of a god seems to have been a transcendent humanity, a surpassing of the human faculties of jealousy, hatred and revenge. One chose among the gods, and those chosen were appeased and ingratiated until they could be depended upon to protect the devotee from the other maleficent gods.
The weird literature of the past century (I say century advisedly, for prior to that weird literature was not a literature at all but a fabric of simple beliefs) has done more perhaps to create a tangible form of the supernatural than the previous thousand generations of terror-stricken gibbering and calculated inculcation of fear.
Modern literature has given the supernatural a definite anatomy—even a personality—which was lacking before. It has defined and formulated the vampire into a gestalt (a word beloved of the psychologists!) which occurs almost identically in every mind upon encounter with the concept. There is no longer any doubt as to the form and substance of a were-wolf; the undead are as common as your neighbors; the least demon of Gehenna has been yanked shrieking into print and there interrogated, browbeaten, put upon, ridiculed, subjected to monstrous indignities, until not even Hell has a secret worth keeping.
With all of this light cast upon a subject, wherein lies fear as a fundament for the popularity of weird literature? The pundits and nigromancers of the critical world long ago classified man’s reading habits under a single disdainful and categorical head: “escape.”
Who in the world chooses to escape into a realm of fear? Can any manner of living be so bad as that?
The truth is that you and I do not read to escape our world. The man who first said we do uttered the remark with all the banal jesting of a facetious aphorism. The catchword, “escape literature,” hounds every member of the human species from the time he or she learns his ABC’s. It is high time we got out from under, don’t you think?
People do not read to escape their world. Far from it. They read to add to it. Life is rich with experience, but no life is long enough or diverse enough to cram into it all the experience there is. Experience is the instinctive desire of every human being, and if he cannot contact it personally, then he desires it vicariously. It is, simply, the urge for “what next?”—the desire to be up and doing.
Love, hate, gladness, sorrow, fear…these are our richest emotions. We have all experienced them individually. How do others experience them? Curiosity compels us to find the answer.
Through reading, we experience other situations that fall quite without our own experience, and by seeing the situation through the eyes of another, we experience his reactions, our own being thereby stimulated, and the two are superimposed with a heterodyning effect that unifies the whole experience into a strong emotional impression.
Let us away, therefore, with this folderol of “escape literature” and “adult fairy tales” and other such stigma gratuitously bestowed by the adherents of “realism” as depicted in the love story, the adventure story, the war story, et al, and sundry. In telling us that good fiction is a mirror held up to life, these abhorrents of what they call our “distorted view” fail to take into cognizance that indeed fiction is a mirror held up to life, and like any good mirror, shows the subject backwards!
The appeal of the weird, if anything, owes itself to the fact that it reaches more deeply into the dim corridors of the mind, strikes root in the fertile soil of the thalamus, the seat of emotions and that hall of the brain whence come our dreams and nightmares. There it flourishes in the satisfaction of a natural appetite for wonder.
Any discussion of fear would not be complete without a treatment of its practical facets. Fear is as basic an aspect of the human organism as hunger. Consciously or subconsciously, each of us feeds his own fears. If we did not, fear would die out, and as a consequence, so would the race.
Imagine the recklessness of a man or woman totally lacking fear! The lack of fear is the lack of judgment. Fear is the rein that will not permit our enthusiasms to run away with us, it is the governor of our desires and our emotions.
There cannot be a person entirely devoid of fear. What taught you moderation in eating? Fear of a tummy ache! What taught you to look both ways before crossing a street? Fear of being run down! What taught you to show proper decorum in public? Fear of ridicule!
The guises of fear are many, and you cannot do without any. Fear is your stimulant and your retardant. Fear makes you leap ahead because of what lies behind. Fear makes you pull up sharply because of what lies in front. You cannot escape it. You cannot even escape into it! You can only accept it and live with it, train it or cajole it into working for you instead of against you.
If we confess to have a taste for weird literature out of nameless fear, then we must also confess to avoiding it out of that same fear, if we do avoid it. The one cultivates the fear; the other avoids it. The one takes zestful pleasure in safely arousing the emotion of fear; the other resents being reminded of a psychic muscle he is ashamed to own up to.
If fear must have its rein, better natural fear, stimulated by the unknowable and the unguessable, than a sickly fear that feeds on life’s banal problems to the destruction of individuality.
WHY VAMPIRES CAN’T REFLECT (letter)
In your December issue, in Baird Searles’ “Films,” Mr. Searles takes exception to a vampires being reflected in a pool of water! (Italics his.)
Now, there is no logical reason why a vampire can not reflect in a pool of water! (Italics mine.)
A mirror will not reflect a vampire—why? Well, it goes like this: Silver was paid to Judas for the betrayal of Christ. To compensate the spirit of the metal for the evil use it had suffered, it was given the special power to repel evil. Therefore, when an evil vampire stands before a silvered mirror, the metal repels the evil and refuses to afford the creature a reflection.
There you have the whole thing in a nutshell. A vampire could even be viewed with the aluminized reflecting surface of a telescope mirror, but not with one coated with silver.
The above stands also as the reason why a silver bullet is used to kill werewolves and other such were-creatures—again the power of silver to put down evil.
With best regards, good work.
—Manly Banister
Portland, Or.
SATAN’S BONDAGE: A WEREWOLF WESTERN
Originally published in Weird Tales, September 1942.
The desert seemed molten when seen through the windshield of the green coupé. That was because of the angle the rays of the afternoon sun made with the glass, and Kenneth Mulvaney was driving directly into the glare.
The car labored up an incline, pacing a whirling dust-devil on the climb. Incandescent boulders shimmered along the rough, rutted way. Desiccated cacti showed dusty green against the ochre and yellow of desert background. On the horizon, blue hills wavered in Mulvaney’s vision, dim and indistinct. He mopped the sweat from his forehead for the dozenth time, clinging with one hand to the wretchedly twisting wheel.
“God, what a road!”
The engine punctuated his exclamation with a sharp cough, gave a straining, wheeze and died.
A glance at the instrument panel discovered the red of the thermometer had squeezed as far to the right as it could possibly go. Boiling water plunked tunefully in the radiator. He switched off the ignition with a motion of abrupt disgust.
Nothing for it now but to sit out here on this damned desert until the engine cooled—if it ever would u
nder this blazing sun. Now that the machine was no longer moving, the heat damped in upon him with reeking fingers. The sun was a burning lance that thrust through the top of the car and into his skull.
Enough of that was enough, he decided. He crawled from behind the wheel into the dust and pulverized grit of the roadway.
“A hell of a road,” he remarked and eyed the twisting length of it along the way he had come. Dust-devils galloped playfully—writhing brown towers with roots in the baking earth and crests smudging the blue-tinted brass of the sky.
There was water in the luggage compartment. A good drink would lower Lizzie’s fever. Dust spurted from under his shoe-soles as he trudged forward with the five-gallon gasoline cann in his grip.
He lifted the hood, took caps off water-tin and radiator, and stood back as a cloud of steam first spurted, then drifted into the astringent heat of the air. When the cloud had thinned somewhat, he tilted the can and permitted the precious water to gurgle throbbingly into the overheated intestines of the radiator.
“Need help, Mister?”
Mulvaney hadn’t heard the girl approach. He nearly dropped the water-tin from surprise.
“You gave me a start,” he said, controlling himself. He focused the glance of his gray eyes upon her face.
She wasn’t smiling—but it seemed that she was. The set of her face was made for laughter. Her eyes were blue. Her hair was golden blond; her complexion well-tanned. She was dressed in some sort of boots and breeches arrangement, designed for hiking. Dust covered her slim figure from the toes of the awkward boots to the grayed bandanna that held her vagrant curls in place.
“I wear it to keep the sun from doing unmentionable things to my hair,” she explained. The corners of her full mouth twitched. “Not to speak of boiling my brain in its own water!”
He set the water-tin carefully at his feet.
“Where’d you come from? I’d no idea there was a soul within miles!”
A shadow crossed her face.
“So there isn’t,” she said strangely. Then, “I was hiking along just over the rise.” She gestured. “I heard your car thumping up the hill. I was all set to thumb a ride when it stopped. So I came back to see what’s up.”
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 2
