EDITORIAL ADDENDA, by Darrell Schweitzer
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
edited by John Clute and John Grant
St. Martin’s Press, 1997
1049 pp. $75.00
We can recommend this massive volume almost without reservations. It is a companion to the similarly enormous tome, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and it will—we predict—sweep all the awards next year. It will also prove to be a definitive reference work for decades to come, and turn out to be even more influential than the science fiction volume.
At first glance, the entries seem to cover the usual: authors, magazines, films, themes, motifs, etc. But the reader notices an great deal of jargon, most of it in small capital letters, which means that each such term has an entry of its own. Thus we are referenced and cross-referenced and cross-cross-referenced to such entries as TAPROOT TEXT, POLDER, WAINSCOTT, LANDSCAPES, MYTH OF ORIGIN, GODDESS, THINNING, THRESHOLD, ACCURSED WANDERER, FOR EST, GNOSTIC FANTASY, SLEEPER UNDER THE HILL, and so on for some distance.
Ultimately it not only makes sense, but proves extremely illuminating. What’s going on here is something very ambitious indeed: an attempt to create an entire critical vocabulary for discussing fantasy literature.
You might ask why this is necessary. Fantasy, after all, is older than everything else. It is older than the written word. (See, in this book, TAPROOT TEXTS, FOLKLORE, and several more.) But fantasy as a genre is a relatively recent development (see GENRE FANTASY) created by Del Rey Books in the mid-1970s under decidedly sub-literary circumstances. And while there are any number of author studies (of Tolkien, Dunsany, Cabell, etc.) around, these often occur within the context of mainstream literature and are written by mainstream critics whose realist or post-realist biases may not leave them quite compatible with the subject matter. It is surprising, but true, that fantasy does not have the same rich body of critical literature that science fiction does. There is very little which addresses topics within the context of a (now inescapable) fantasy genre, which has its own archetypes, tropes, and cross-references.
For example, a great many fantasies deal with the loss of magic. The dragons and wizards go away at the end. The adventure may be glorious, but by the time it’s over we have a sense that this is the last time. Possibly a whole new age or cycle of history begins, as it does at the end of The Lord of the Rings. This can be a powerful metaphor for maturity, old age, the assumption of responsibilities, or other irrevocable change. It is not something found in just one book or one author, but recurrent throughout the genre. Clute and Grant call it THINNING. We need that term and a whole lot of others like it, which are unique to the discussion of fantasy. Such markers will trace the influence of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy for years to come.
The actual entries on individual writers, which range in time from Homer and Lucius Annaeus Seneca to Thomas Ligotti and Ellen Kushner (or, for that matter, Darrell Schweitzer), tend to be expertly done, with few exceptions. Only the Lovecraft entry (by David Langford and Colin Wilson) is seriously skewed, and even manages to cram several factual errors into a single sentence, as when we are told that “The Shadow Out of Time” was the Old Gent’s “last finished work, written about the time he learned he had cancer.” (Wrong on all counts: The story was written in 1934. Lovecraft did not become ill, see a doctor, or begin to express intimations of immediate mortality in his private letters—our most intimate, and often only, source—until well into 1936; besides which, “The Haunter of the Dark” was written later than “The Shadow Out of Time.”)
Any review of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy at this point has to be preliminary. The only way to honestly report on such a volume is use it for several years and then review it, which isn’t very practical. It is too massive to be read from end to end. Those cross-references are like little wormholes which weave in and out of the text, depositing us, sometimes, in surprising places, like a whole long section on Tarzan movies, which is better than you’ll find in most film books. We can browse endlessly. We can turn to our own areas of expertise (Lovecraft, Dunsany, the Weird Tales writers, Mervyn Wall) and find, on the whole, that the facts are sound, the analysis intelligent, and that the scope of the work as a whole is by several orders of magnitude more ambitious than anything previously attempted.
The Best of Weird Tales: 1923
edited by Marvin Kaye and John Gregory Betancourt.
Bleak House (an imprint of Wildside Press), 1997
129 pp. $12.00
It would cost you thousands of dollars to obtain the contents of this book elsewhere. All other considerations aside, The Best of Weird Tales: 1923, is a real bargain. It is the first of a projected series, each volume selecting the best from a given year of “The Unique Magazine.” Since 1923 issues of Weird Tales can easily cost you five hundred collars apiece (more for the first few), if you can find them at all, here you have, for a modest price and with good production values, the truly unobtainable.
Think of it as a core sample, drilled from the lowest sedimentary stratum of pulp horror fantasy. As such, it is of enormous paleontological interest, even if we have to admit that a good deal of what came up was mud.
It’s a deep, dark secret, hidden behind those astronomical prices for the fabulously scarce early issues, that Weird Tales did not make an auspicious start. Had the magazine only survived a year or two, it would have been no more than a curiosity, a failed first effort, for the most part poorly written, badly laid out, and wretchedly illustrated. Fortunately, the quality improved rapidly in just a few years, so that we may safely predict that the 1925 or 1926 volumes in this series will begin to show pure gold.
There’s no doubt that editors Kaye and Betancourt have indeed picked the best of 1923. All of the stories are at least readable. They’re fun, in a crude way, but only serve to remind us why the Weird Tales greats, Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry Whitehead, Robert E. Howard, and the rest seemed so electrifyingly wonderful at the time. Here’s what the competition was like. (Not surprisingly, Lovecraft’s “Dagon,” reprinted here to represent the October 1923 issue, is conspicuously the best of the lot.)
The other stories are of varying interest. “An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension” by Farnsworth Wright (the very man who, as editor of Weird Tales, would bring about the magazine’s amazing transformation a couple years later) is a pioneering, clumsy attempt at the sort of “funny alien” science fiction Stanley G. Weinbaum was to make popular in the mid-’30s. “The Two Men Who Murdered Each Other” stretches the long arm of coincidence outrageously, but has moments of effective description. “Beyond the Door” (one of the very few early Weird Tales stories Lovecraft liked) has a genuinely creepy atmosphere. “Lucifer,” by John. D. Swain, manages a cruel, surprising twist. Most of the others are anecdotes of madness, revenge, and rudimentary hauntings, by writers who did not subsequently become famous.
But this was the beginning. Here you can see how a great tradition started.
Mosig At Last: A Psychologist Looks at H.P. Lovecraft
by Yozan Dirk W. Mosig
Necronomicon Press, 1997
128 pp. $7.95
At the recent Cthulhu Mythos convention, Necronomicon, held in Providence, Rhode Island, at the very base of Lovecraft’s old neighorhood of College Hill (along the steep streets of which your editor conducted a somewhat breathless walking tour), there were two guests of honor. One was Brian Lumley, which is obvious and fitting.
The other was Yozan Dirk W. Mosig, who may not be a household name, but who is, in his own way, equally important. For the occasion, this volume essays was published.
It’s astonishing to discover how little Mosig actually wrote. The bibliography lists a total fifteen articles about Lovecraft, all published between 1973 and 1980. The present volume contains nine of them, plus what appear to be four short original pieces.
Despite this, Donald Burleson, Peter Cannon, S.T. Joshi, and Robert M. Price all attest in their tributes at the back of the book that Mosig is a seminal figure (“the Northrup Frye of Lovecraft