by Matt Cardin
Opinions differ on how Aiken’s story is to be received. Some have seen it in an essentially Freudian light, interpreting the story as a retreat from the dirty maturity of adulthood into a dream world of pure white snow, and Aiken did indeed claim to be inspired by Sigmund Freud. Others have assessed the story in more abstract terms, with Paul’s behavior seen as an act of creation, making Paul into what is essentially an artistic figure attempting to bring form and meaning into a structureless world. Still others have seen Paul’s withdrawing from humanity as marking the onset of a mental illness, perhaps schizophrenia, and in this they reference Aiken’s life, in which his respected father killed Aiken’s mother and committed suicide, leaving young Conrad (age eleven) to discover their bodies. Because it is so open, presenting details without providing facile explanations, the story remains idiosyncratically powerful, horrible by implication.
“Silent Snow, Secret Snow” was recognized early for being appreciable as part of the canon of terror and horror literature. Herbert A. Wise and Phyllis Fraser chose to include it in their classic 1944 Modern Library anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. The story was also adapted as a segment for a 1971 episode of Rod Serling’s horror-themed television series Night Gallery, with narration provided by Orson Welles.
Richard Bleiler
See also: Dreams and Nightmares; “Mr. Arcularis”; Psychological Horror.
Further Reading
Gossman, Ann. 1964. “‘Silent Snow, Secret Snow’: The Child as Artist.” Studies in Short Fiction 1, vol. 2 (Winter): 123–128.
Spivey, Ted R. 1997. “Fictional Descent into Hell.” In Time’s Stop in Savannah: Conrad Aiken’s Inner Journey, 91–105. Macon, GA.: Mercer University Press.
Stevenson, Simon. 2004. “The Anorthoscopic Short Story.” Oxford Literary Review 26: 63–78.
SIMMONS, DAN (1948–)
Dan Simmons is an American writer who has published award-winning novels in genres as diverse as mainstream literary fiction, science fiction, dark fantasy, historical fiction (featuring such characters as Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, George Custer, Vlad Tepes, Mark Twain, Sherlock Holmes, and the crew of the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus), hard-boiled crime fiction, and psychological suspense and horror. His work is often informed or influenced by classical poets such as Dante, T. S. Eliot, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Proust, Chaucer, and Homer.
Simmons was born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1948. His family moved around the Midwest when he was a child. One of their stops, Brimfield, Illinois, became the fictional Elm Haven of his novels Summer of Night (1991) and A Winter Haunting (2002). He received a BA in English from Wabash College, along with a Phi Beta Kappa award for creativity in writing and art. During his time at Wabash, he and his roommate published an underground paper called The Satyr. He earned a master’s in Education from Washington University in St. Louis, where his thesis was on television’s effects on cognition and IQ.
In 1969, while working as a teacher’s aide at a school for the blind, he lived in an attic apartment in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, where he witnessed the gang battles and race riots that later appeared in his apocalyptic vampire novel Carrion Comfort (1989). For the next eighteen years, he taught in Missouri, New York, and Colorado, and ended his career in education teaching gifted and talented children. During his years teaching sixth grade, he told an epic story half an hour per day for six months to his students. It featured the first incarnation of the character that would later become the Shrike in his Hyperion Cantos series of science fiction novels, but he lost the manuscript during a move.
His first short story sales were to Galaxy and Galileo, but both magazines folded before his contributions appeared. The American science fiction author Harlan Ellison critiqued Simmons’s story “The River Styx Runs Upstream” at the Writer’s Conference in the Rockies in the summer of 1981. Ellison encouraged Simmons, who was on the verge of quitting writing, to submit his story to Twilight Zone magazine’s short fiction contest for beginning writers, where it tied for first place, won the Rod Serling Memorial Award, and was published in February 1982, on the day Simmons’s daughter was born.
During the summer of 1982, he wrote the horror novel Song of Kali, about an American writer who travels to Calcutta and gets caught up in a horrific cult that worships the eponymous Hindu goddess. It took three years to find a publisher because of the darkness of the story and its failure to follow genre formula. Tor published the book in 1985, and it became the first-ever first novel to win the World Fantasy Award for best novel, although Simmons himself has said that he does not consider it a fantasy. After the success of Kali, he retired from teaching to write full time.
In interviews and essays, Simmons has explained that he vowed to himself that if he had any success in writing, he would not be bound to one form—that he would write whatever moved him, and never allow an editor or publisher to dictate what he worked on. He acted on the assumption that if one publisher was uninterested in a given work, he would be able to find another publisher for it. This proved to be the case, but it has also meant that he is often forced to find different publishers for projects that deviate from prior expectations, as with his Joe Kurtz noir crime novels. This has had the effect of dividing his audience, and he has acknowledged that, for example, only a very small percentage of the people who read his horror novels also read his science fiction works.
In 1989, Simmons released three books, Phases of Gravity, Carrion Comfort, and Hyperion. He tackled the two long science fiction novels—Fall of Hyperion came out in 1990—because the advance allowed him to make a down payment on a house.
Simmons is known for his extensive research and attention to detail and has traveled as far as Romania and Thailand for research. He brought to life the Darwin Awards (the Internet meme that mocks supposedly true stories of people being killed in foolish accidents) in Darwin’s Blade (2000), about an insurance investigator who looks into wrecks caused by vehicular stupidity; and he fictionalized the creation (and near-destruction) of Mount Rushmore in Black Hills (2010). One of his stated rules when using historical figures—even those who are fictional—is to have them refrain from doing anything that contradicts the known facts of their lives; however, the unknown interstices and gaps in their biographies are fair game.
Simmons’s contributions to horror literature include vampires—of the bloodsucking and psychic varieties—ghosts, a godlike killing machine called the Shrike, malicious deities, ancient evils, and soul-devouring monsters. His version of space travel involves being crushed to death and painfully resurrected at the destination.
The author of nearly thirty books and roughly the same number of short stories and novellas, Simmons is the recipient of several Bram Stoker Awards, nearly a dozen Locus Awards, an International Horror Guild Award, a Hugo, a British Fantasy Award, a British Science Fiction Award, and two World Fantasy Awards, and he has been nominated for many others, including the Nebula and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
While many of his books have been optioned for film and television over the years, none have been produced yet, although Simmons did write two teleplays for the Monsters television series in 1990. His script of his 1992 novel Children of the Night was almost the first to be filmed, but the project collapsed. Plans to film his original film treatment “The End of Gravity” aboard the International Space Station did not come to fruition. Darwin’s Blade was green-lit for an ABC series that never launched. Screenwriters have been stymied by the multiple viewpoints and scope of the Hyperion Cantos. Director Guillermo del Toro acquired the rights to Simmons’s novel Drood (2009), about dark goings-on during the final years of Charles Dickens’s life as told by Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins, but del Toro put the project on the back-burner when he was hired to direct The Hobbit (which ended up being directed by Peter Jackson instead). In 2016 AMC announced plans to turn Simmons’s historical novel The Terror (2007), which fictionalizes the disastrous arctic journ
ey of Captain Sir John Franklin in the 1840s, into a horror series to air in 2017.
In 1995 Wabash College awarded Simmons an honorary doctorate for his contributions in education and writing. In 2013 he received the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award.
Bev Vincent
See also: Bram Stoker Award; Carrion Comfort; International Horror Guild Award; Song of Kali; World Fantasy Award.
Further Reading
Clasen, Mathias. 2011. “Primal Fear: A Darwinian Perspective on Dan Simmons’ Song of Kali.” Horror Studies 2, no. 1 (May): 89–104.
“Dan Simmons: A Man for All Genres.” 2002. Locus 49, no. 4 (October): 6–7, 59, 61.
Shindler, Dorman T. 2000. “Dan Simmons: Between Two Worlds.” Publishers Weekly (November 6): 65–66. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/33845-dan-simmons-between-two-worlds.html.
Shindler, Dorman T. 2001. “Dan Simmons.” The Writer 114, no. 2: 30–33.
SMITH, CLARK ASHTON (1893–1961)
Clark Ashton Smith was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction who is often grouped with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard in discussions of the most significant writers who contributed regularly to Weird Tales in the 1930s. He was also an accomplished poet and sculptor whose dark and powerful imagination gave birth to an extraordinary body of creative work.
Smith was born in Long Valley, California, and spent most of his life living in a cabin built by his parent near the town of Auburn. He did not attend high school, and he completed his education himself, with his parents’ assistance. An inveterate reader blessed with an exceptional memory, he read and digested Webster’s Dictionary and the Encyclopedia Britannica. He began writing exotic adventure fiction at an early age and published a number of stories in his teens.
“Ubbo-Sathla”: Decadent Prose-Poetry Meets the Cthulhu Mythos
Clark Ashton Smith’s short story “Ubbo-Sathla” was first published in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales and reprinted in the collection Out of Space and Time (1942). Like Smith’s “The Return of the Sorcerer,” it is a Lovecraftian story with an affiliation to the so-called Cthulhu Mythos, and deliberately links the substance of that Mythos to Smith’s own developing mythical history of the lost continent of Hyperborea, adding a text by the Hyperborean sorcerer Eibon to the register of the Lovecraftian “forbidden books” and helping to broaden the mythical background, to the advantage of later writers recruited to the subgeneric cause.
The story begins with a quote from the Book of Eibon indentifying Ubbo-Sathla as a protoplasmic mass ancestral to all terrestrial life, which is fated also to be the end-product of that life’s decay. The protagonist Paul Tregardis, a modern occultist, finds a magic lens in a curio shop, which unites him with the personality of the Hyperborean sorcerer who once used and employed it, and allows him to share the sorcerer’s visionary quest to retreat through his past incarnations all the way to Ubbo-Sathla—which turns out, unsurprisingly, to be vast, horrific, and loathsome.
“Ubbo-Sathla” is terse and economical by the somewhat prolix standards of the subgenre, albeit loaded with exotic terminology. Once the initial purchase is made and Tregardis is alone with his crystal, the concluding visionary sequence of “Ubbo-Sathla” becomes close in style and spirit to Smith’s Decadent prose-poetry: an effective injection from which the subgenre has always benefited.
Brian Stableford
Smith’s literary vocation reached its first important landmark when he made the acquaintance of the “Bohemian” poet George Sterling, who was heavily influenced by Charles Baudelaire and other French Decadent writers; Smith became an enthusiastic translator of such material. His first poetry collection, The Star Treader and Other Poems (1912), won some critical acclaim, but he had difficulty following it up; his health was frequently poor and his production slow. A second landmark was reached when he became part of a circle of literary correspondents that included H. P. Lovecraft, who waxed enthusiastic about Smith’s exceedingly exotic narrative poem “The Hashish Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil,” in his third collection, Ebony and Crystal (1922).
When Smith was forced to attempt to make money from his pen in order to care for his aged parents, it was Lovecraft’s lead that he followed, although he did so with a stylistic and thematic extravagance that was unique to him. The stories he produced during his one brief phase of hectic productivity, between 1929 and 1934, constitute one of the most remarkable oeuvres in imaginative literature. His highly ornamented prose was directed to the purpose of building phantasmagoric dream-worlds stranger than any that had ever been described before. It was not enough for his fantastic narratives to escape the mundane world; Smith wanted to outdo in imaginative reach all the established mythologies of past and present. These tales were first collected in the Arkham House collections Out of Space and Time (1942), Lost Worlds (1944), Genius Loci and Other Tales (1948), The Abominations of Yondo (1960) and Tales of Science and Sorcery (1964), but they have since been sampled in many other collections and anthologies.
Smith had some difficulty finding an appropriate milieu for his fiction. The imaginary French province of Averoigne allowed scope for pastiches of French fantasy, but not for the products of his wilder imaginings. The lost continent of Hyperborea suited him better, employed in heavily ironic “grotesques” that combined elements of horror and sharp wit evident in the savagely sarcastic “The Testament of Athammaus” (1932) and “The Seven Geases” (1934), in which a prideful magistrate is condemned to descend through a series of hell-like realms to “the ultimate source of all miscreation and abomination.” “Ubbo-Sathla” (1933) accommodated Hyperborea to the Lovecraftian schema that became known as the Cthulhu Mythos, as did the magnificently bizarre “The Coming of the White Worm” (1941).
The most dramatically appropriate of Smith’s imaginary worlds was far-future Zothique, “the world’s last continent,” in which science and civilization are extinct, and everything that happens is a mere prelude to final annihilation. Some stories set there are as ironic as the Hyperborean grotesques, but the best are possessed of an unparalleled dramatic momentum that carries them through a mass of bizarre detail to devastating conclusions, juxtaposing the necrophiliac eroticism of “The Witchcraft of Ulua” (1934) and “The Death of Ilalotha” (1937) with the savage cruelty of “Xeethra” (1934), “The Dark Eidolon” (1935), and “Necromancy in Naat” (1936).
These features are not evidence of depravity on the author’s part, but represent a determined effort to confront the most nightmarish products of the imagination and render them intellectually manageable. Even so, they resulted in numerous tales being censored by their original editors; where original texts could still be found they were restored in a series of booklets published by the Necronomicon Press.
Smith’s mother died in 1935 and his father in 1937. Having already slowed down considerably, Smith then gave up writing fiction almost completely, although he continued to write poetry. At the age of 61 he married a widow with children, Carolyn Jones Dman, and lived with them in Pacific Grove, but his health was poor and he eventually died of a stroke at the age of 68.
Brian Stableford
See also: Arkham House; Baudelaire, Charles; Cthulhu Mythos; Howard, Robert E.; Lovecraft, H. P.; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales.
Further Reading
The Eldritch Dark: The Sanctum of Clark Ashton Smith. Accessed August 15, 2016. http://www.eldritchdark.com.
Joshi, S. T. 2013. “A Triumvirate of Fantastic Poets: Ambrose Bierce, George Sterling, and Clark Ashton Smith.” Extrapolation 54, no. 2: 147–161.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Sidney-Fryer, Donald. [1963] 1997. The Sorcerer Departs. West Hills, CA: Tsathoggua Press.
Stableford, Brian. [1995] 2006. “Outside the Human Aquarium: The Fantastic Imagination of Clark Ashton Smith.” In The Freedom of Fantastic Things: Selected C
riticism on Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Scott Connors, 148–167. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Wolfe, Charles K. 1973. “Introduction.” In Planets and Dimensions: Collected Essays of Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Charles K. Wolfe, ix–xii. Baltimore: Mirage Press.
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
Something Wicked This Way Comes is a modern Gothic novel by Ray Bradbury that was published in 1962. It represents the culmination of the dark carnival theme that Bradbury had explored in a number of earlier works, notably his short story “Black Ferris” (1948) and the frame story that wraps the contents of his collection The Illustrated Man (1951), which themselves had been influenced by The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935), a short novel by Charles G. Finney that Bradbury had reprinted in the anthology Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories (1956). The novel is also set in the same Midwestern milieu as the mostly nonfantastic stories that Bradbury assembled for his novel Dandelion Wine (1957)
The novel’s two main characters, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, are best friends living in Green Town, Illinois. Will was born one minute before midnight on October 30, and Jim one minute after on October 31, Halloween, a distinction that seems relevant to Will’s more cautious behavior and Jim’s attraction to life’s dark side. On October 24 in their thirteenth year a traveling carnival, Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, sets up magically overnight in their town, much later than such seasonal entertainments usually operate. When the boys patronize the fair they discover things seriously amiss: the carnival has a house of mirrors that appears to trap people with images of what their lives might have been, and a carousel that can accelerate or reduce aging depending on the direction in which it spins. Will’s father Charles, the only adult who believes in what the boys claim to have seen, is of the opinion that the carnival’s crew are “autumn people” (Bradbury 1998, 193), steeped in death and the grave, who “live off the poison of the sins we do each other, and the ferment of our most terrible regrets” (204). Both Charles and Jim are tempted by the “empty promises” the carnival offers—Charles with the promise of youth that he is now beyond, and Jim with the promise of maturity that he has yet to grow into—before the three find a way to resist its allure and neutralize its threat.
