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Category Archives: Uncertainties

The Past Is a Different Country

Conduced by John Kenny, September 2024

Carly Holmes is a writer and editor who lives on the west coast of Wales. She is the author of the novels The Scrapbook (Pathian 2014), which was shortlisted for the International Rubery Book Award, and Crow Face, Doll Face (Honno Welsh Women’s Press 2023). Her short story collection Figurehead (2018) was published by Tartarus Press. She has had numerous stories published in journals and anthologies, and has been selected for The Best Horror of the Year three times.

John Kenny: Before we dive into Uncertainties VII, tell us a little about yourself. Where did your love of the uncanny and supernatural come from?

Carly Holmes: I was an anxious, timid child who organised my days around obsessive rituals and magical thinking to ensure that my family would stay safe. I carried so much guilt constantly and was always worried that I’d get into trouble for something, that I’d be found out and then rejected. I think being attracted to dark fiction and the uncanny—both writing it and reading it—are quite natural steps for an anxious child to take as they progress towards adulthood. The uncanny tends to focus on the domestic world and that shift from security to insecurity when what was once safe suddenly becomes unsafe in a way that’s almost too subtle to be able to appreciate. The same goes for the supernatural. We have an understanding of the way things should be based on logic and rationality, and what we’re taught in school. A supernatural occurrence or experience turns everything on its head and pitches us into a world that is made alien. All of our familiar markers for negotiating our way through life are suddenly called into question. I spent so much of my childhood in a state of uncertainty and fear, and everything about the uncanny as a genre speaks to me.

JK: I suppose you could say that dark fiction and the uncanny helped you to negotiate those childhood fears and make some sense of them. Certainly, there’s a struggle to make sense of things in “A Suit of Darkest Blue” by Steven J. Dines, for me one of the standout stories in Uncertainties VII.

CH: When I invited Steve to contribute a story I was very excited to read what he’d come up with. And, of course, he didn’t disappoint. I think, of all the people I know who write in the horror genre, his stories are most similar in spirit and tone to my own; or certainly to the stories I want to write, those that exist in my head before I’ve committed them to paper, when they’re still perfect, pure things. That longing, that aching melancholy, the horror of grief—that’s what I’m drawn to as a reader, and what I aim to convey as a writer.

JK: I’m quite the fan of Dines’ work myself, particularly the stories I’ve read in Black Static. It’s interesting what you say about the stories as you conceive them compared to what appears on paper. Which of your own stories do you think have come closest to that perfect purity in your head?

CH: I don’t know if any of them have, really! The gulf between what I thought my stories might be before I started writing them and what they then became is vast, every time. I’m not saying I’m not proud of some of the things I’ve written, particularly the novels, but I’m not sure I’ve ever written anything that matched what I initially thought it could have been. Of my short stories, maybe “Three for a Girl”, the novelette in Figurehead, came closest. I never plan anything I write, be it short-form or long-form prose. I tend to respond to a fragment of something overheard or half seen and run with it, which means I’m not following a written guide at all and only have the vaguest idea how the narrative will progress. Recently a friend commented on social media that she kept hearing women singing in the walls of her house and after investigating she discovered a hive of wild bees. That beautiful, other-worldly image sparked the idea for a story, and it was going to be the most perfect story I’d ever written. I’m about 1,000 words in and it’s already moving into less perfect territory! I don’t know if it will ever be published but if I finish it then I hope that I will at least be proud of it.

JK: I think most artists feel the same way about the finished piece, be it fiction, art, music, whatever. Although it does feel to me that Craig Rosenberg’s Uncertainties VII story “The Good Old Days” is as near perfection as can be. I wonder how the sense of nostalgia in that story worked for you. It’s tied to a very specific place and period.

CH: “The Good Old Days” is fantastic, isn’t it! Though it’s set in suburban Australia and partially in the mid-1970s, so a place I’ve never been to and a period before I was born (just), the sense of nostalgia for childhood is pretty universal. The childhood sections of King’s IT, set in the 1950s, conjure that same atmosphere most of us who are Generation X or older will remember: bombing around on your bike with your friends, making dens, disappearing for hours without adult supervision . . . Craig handled that superbly, with a wistful nostalgia and a scattering of references to popular culture. You might not have tasted those particular sweets that Robbie and Jon had when they were kids, but you remember the joy of going to the sweet shop and getting your paper bag of pick n mix with your pocket money.

JK: That’s very true. In my case, I recognised and remember with fondness almost all the films, TV programmes, toys, etc. mentioned in the story. One thing I noticed in Uncertainties VII is the equal balance of male and female writers represented in the anthology, with one non-binary author. Was this by design when you were inviting contributions or a happy accident?

CH: Yes, it was by design. I wanted both sexes to be equally represented. I already had a list of male and female writers whose work I admire and who I knew I’d approach, and that was pretty balanced. I would have liked there to be a greater diversity of ethnic voices as well but some of the authors I emailed with the initial invitation to submit didn’t respond, which is a shame.

JK: Tell us a little more about your own work. Your latest novel was published last year by Honno Welsh Women’s Press. And you’ve had a number of short stories chosen for Year’s Best anthologies.

CH: Sadly, there’s a lot less to tell than I’d like! My first novel The Scrapbook was published ten years ago and I got frozen in the aftermath and became a Miss Havisham character who just couldn’t let it go. I hadn’t been prepared at all for the way a book you’d loved and worked so hard over would drop into the collective pool of all the books written and churned out every month, and sink like a stone after a brief fanfare, causing barely a ripple. That’s just the way of it for small indie publishers, I know that now. But I didn’t really know it then, and I couldn’t move on for a long time to try to write something novel-length again. I’d always written short stories and loved the genre so I returned to them and was lucky enough to have a collection, Figurehead, picked up by Tartarus Press. Then Crow Face, Doll Face, my second novel, was published by Honno Press last October, and I’d had years to forget how smartly the publishing world moves on after the initial post-pub promo buzz, so I’ve had to deal with that all over again! Hopefully I won’t leave it another decade before I write another novel though.

As to the short stories, I just don’t have the time or energy to write much of anything these days as my job is stressful and the workload is overwhelming, so for the last two or three years I’ve only written stories for commission—maybe two or three a year. “Dodger”, a story I wrote last year for Darkness Beckons, Flame Tree Press’s ABC of Horror series of anthologies, was selected for reprint in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year anthology, out at the end of this year, which is wonderful.

JK: I look forward to reading that. Datlow’s Year’s Bests are superb. Looking at all of the stories in Uncertainties VII, I think the strangest one has to be “Mama Fungus” by Sarah Read. The surreal quality of the viewpoint character’s interactions with the “men” manages to convey a real sense of uncertainty. Are you familiar with any of Read’s other work?

CH: I first came across Sarah’s work when we appeared together in Black Shuck Books’s Pareidolia anthology, back in 2019. Her excellent story “Into the Wood” really stayed with me. I picked up her collection Out of Water and absolutely loved it. There’s a strangeness to her writing—a surreal quality, as you say—that really appeals to me. And her prose is exquisite, both poetic and visceral. I have her latest collection, Root Rot, on my TBR pile!

JK: There’s an interesting experiment with time in Georgina Bruce’s “An Innocent Beast” that leaves you guessing at the end. And another favourite of mine is “Subject Matter” by Philippa Holloway, about the lengths to which an artist’s model has to go to fulfil her contract.

CH: I think both “An Innocent Beast” and “Subject Matter” are perfect distillations of the anthology’s theme: uncertainty. The reader, through that intense and intimate second-person narrative, is as out of their depth and insecure as the narrator in “Subject Matter”, trying to work out what’s going on and how things will end. Though a totally different story in theme and gear, “An Innocent Beast” deals in uncertainty just as deftly, giving the reader pieces of the story from different viewpoints and then ultimately ending where it started . . . Or does it?

JK: I wonder if working with such a wide range of writers for this anthology has in any way influenced or inspired you with your own short fiction? Are there any more stories in the pipeline?

CH: It’s always inspiring to read fantastic stories, especially ones that take you by surprise. I love how we all interpret a theme or topic differently and filter our response to it through our own experiences or perspective. Looking across the range of stories in this edition of Uncertainties they’re all so different, and all of them inspiring to me.

I don’t have any stories in the pipeline right now, but do have a deadline for a commissioned piece for an anthology next year. In the meantime, it would be lovely to start (and hopefully finish!) another novel over the next year or so. I have a vague idea for it but nothing more developed than that.

JK: If I were to notice a theme emerging in many of the stories in Uncertainties VII, it would be that of characters trying to escape their past and inevitably coming face-to-face with it. Is this something you noticed yourself or is it a common theme in tales of the uncanny and supernatural?

CH: The shadow theme I noticed when the stories started rolling in was that of nature turning on humans. The natural world not behaving as humans expect it to, and becoming unnatural . . . The wonderful “Ends Abruptly” by Tim Major is a perfect example of this, narrated by a man walking with his family through a sculpture park (which surely has to be the most human-centric outdoor pursuit ever! Manicuring nature and adding unnatural man-made structures to the beauty that is naturally present in order to “improve” it for the human experience), and it’s also there in “An Innocent Beast” by Georgina Bruce, “Mama Fungus” by Sarah Read, “The Winding of the Willows” by Steve Toase, and “The Son” by Bethany W. Pope, to name a few.

JK: The quality of the stories you’ve chosen for Uncertainties VII demonstrates a genre that is in excellent health. But do you think there are enough outlets for stories of this nature? I’m hearing of several small presses shutting down.

CH: I’m not a writer who is firmly rooted in the horror/uncanny genre; I’m more on the fringes of it, as I don’t think I’ve ever intentionally set out to write a horror story. So I don’t have as much awareness as other writers of the general state of small presses in the genre, particularly in the US. I do read things on social media which bear out what you’re saying, and I also know that the situation in Wales is pretty dire generally for short story writers as we’ve lost a number of journals due to lack of funding over the last couple of years. In the horror genre, as in every genre of writing, the number of writers who want to be published far outweighs the number of outlets available. Without supporting these outlets by taking out subscriptions to journals or buying books, the situation will only get worse.

JK: Is Uncertainties VII your first edited anthology? Is this something you’d like to do again in the future?

CH: I work for a publisher and before that I was a freelance editor, so I’ve edited a lot of books: single-authored story collections, novels, memoir, and anthologies, but Uncertainties VII is the first anthology I’ve edited in the horror/uncanny genre. It’s been a lot of fun but also very stressful, mainly because I work essentially full-time hours in my job and have very little free time to spare. I’m a neurotic perfectionist and was determined to give this book and these writers quality attention. I’m very proud of the end result and very excited to see it in print but I need a nap and a large gin now!

Buy a copy of Uncertainties VII.

In an Uncertain Mode

In an Uncertain Mode

Conducted by Brian J. Showers

For most of our books we conduct short interviews just prior to the title’s release. In the case of an anthology, the interview is with the editor. However, for Uncertainties 6, I wanted to do something slightly different. Hoping for just a bit more insight into the genre we love, I posed a single question:

 What draws you to write tales in the weird/uncanny mode?

Here are the responses . . .

Ruth Barber (“Unfinished Business”)

My stories are a form of therapy, a vehicle for processing negative emotions such as grief, sadness, disappointment, and unfairness. The black humour comes from the random and surreal circumstances in which misery is often meted out.

I had an unhappy childhood where the expression of emotion was discouraged. I began writing from a young age: my stories and poems became an acceptable outlet for my feelings. As fiction my feelings could be safely expressed in a way that avoided any need for responsibility, accountability, or indeed resolution.

I work as a criminal lawyer and write in my spare time. Growing up in an atmosphere of unfair condemnation I feel a degree of empathy with people facing criminal charges and my ability to emotionally disassociate allows me to deal with many unpleasant and traumatic cases. I am, of course, professionally bound to keep the details of my cases confidential however I collect discrete shards of experiences and weave them together to create fantasy tales.

My tales are therefore formed from feelings and moments—the creak of a second hand sofa in a café, the shine on a cheap suit, the smell of fear in the courtroom. My tales examine the secret ticks and vices we adopt to make life bearable and the delusions we create to avoid confronting our demons.

I am the person who knows before you call, the person who can extrapolate your mood from the frequency of your WhatsApp logins, and who predicts the future from the lyrics in the next song on the radio. I know the real reason you just spoke to that person and when you are lying. But I will never tell.

Most importantly dear reader know that I write for myself and not for you. Through my tales you gain the privilege of a glimpse inside my head. Be wary as to whether it is truly a place you want to visit.

James Everington (“The Switch”)

The honest answer to this is probably “because I can’t write anything else”. I’ve a relatively broad taste when it comes to reading, but my attempts to write realistic slices of life, comedic fantasy, or—god help me—poetry have always fallen flat. And I think of it as a plus, for a writer, to eventually realise the narrow circumference of your talent and concentrate your efforts there. And it’s not as if I’m missing out: writing about the strange, the ghostly, the nebulous is my realism, reflecting life as I feel it. The hidden yet nagging sense of something unexplainable or jarring or out of sync with reality. And it’s my poetry, too: a chance to play with language and form and style in the pursuit of capturing in words something fleeting yet indelible. All of which is a highfalutin way of saying that, for me, reading and writing uncanny tales scratches an itch that other genres can’t.

Alison Moore (“Where Are They Now?”)

Some years ago, I wrote a horror novelette under a pseudonym for the Eden Book Society series published by Dead Ink Books. Writing a horror story was a natural and satisfying way for me to process the almost unreal experience of donating a kidney. Analysing that process—the relationship between the experience and the story—for a subsequent article clarified my understanding of how and why the uncanny, in which the familiar and the strange coexist, was uniquely suited to this narrative about transplantation and its very literal breaching of boundaries. The kidney donor in my novelette has a persistent sense that none of this is real, and the surreal quality of the experience is reflected in imagery encompassing stories and dreams and horror films. She feels herself gradually disappearing, from her name to her receding gums. “I swear to God,” says a visitor, “there’ll be nothing left of you soon.” There’s a sense of inevitability: when she’s given some paperwork to sign, giving her permission for the procedure to go ahead, she finds she’s already signed it. Her abdomen is marked with a thick black arrow pointing towards the kidney they’re going to take. “If this mark comes off,” the doctor says, “it will be drawn on again.” I took these and other details in the story directly from the diary I was keeping, but what was innocent in reality gains a sinister quality within the fictional narrative, so that the everyday seems to be giving way to something stranger. The procedure went according to plan and the real-life story was a good-news item on local TV, but the horror story, the version that acknowledges and channels the weirdness of it all, captures what it felt like and as a result feels more true.

Naben Ruthnum (“The Bracken Box”)

I’ve been trying to write weird fiction since I started writing. I certainly think there are other kinds of fiction worth reading and writing, but I can’t deny that the weird ones are special for me, that the great and good ones create an artistic effect that is beyond craft or technique, coming close to what I think is most worthwhile in art. That’s why I so rarely put one out there; I think that this piece in Uncertainties is my only successful piece of weird short fiction.

Aickman talked about the shared qualities between poetry and the strange story, which is true in so many ways. I find writing weird fiction to be as difficult as I find writing poetry, and I continue to keep attempting both. I’m starting to succeed, fitfully, with the weird tale, but with every new attempt to flesh an idea or an impression, there come moments when I feel as unarmed and amateur as I did when I first started writing anything. This is a mode that exposes; while strange stories can be suggestive, can lead without going, if there’s nothing to them, we all can tell that there are no ghosts to be found.

Anne-Sylvie Salzman (“Houses of Flesh”)

I was seven when I tried to read my first “adult” book, The Secret of Sarek (L’Île aux trente cercueils), by Maurice Leblanc; I say “try”, because I stopped after a few pages of sombre omens and mutilated corpses (I tackled it a few years later and loved it, of course). But it left its mark—and more than that. The decayed bodies went on rotting in the recesses of my brain and gave birth to most splendid flowers—as would the painter Odilon Redon. At some point, this conflated with a keen love of nature inherited from my parents (naturalists/entomologists/botanists), older brother (ornithologist), and uncle (entomologist). And it is by poring over some accidents of nature—especially in Scotland, and starting with the drumming of the snipe—that I was eventually driven to write uncanny tales, after having trying my hand at a more urban sort of unquietness.

Eric Stener Carlson (“I See Minza”)

That’s a bit of a strange question. I mean, I get it. “Uncanny” is supposed to mean something just slightly off, something that doesn’t feel real.

But that presupposes that there’s one stream of “reality” (composed of common sense, and fair rules of the game, and generally-accepted behaviour), and then there’s another—almost inexistent—stream of “unreality” (where people act inexplicably, where rules don’t apply, where behaviour is cruel, barbaric and fantastic).

Here’s one example of our attempt to push the uncanny into a quiet, little corner. Recently, I watched a TV show from the UK on ancient belief systems (like druids and the early Christian church). The commentator, trying to explain the social context of the Black Death, said something like, “You see, back then, people believed in something called the ‘devil’, and they thought it surrounded them all the time.”

Really? You don’t believe the devil surrounds us on all sides, trying to tempt us to destruction? I do. I believe in an ever-loving, benevolent God, so I also believe in the polar opposite. I’m not saying the devil is a flesh-and-blood creature (in fact, we may be our own devils), but that doesn’t make him any less real. I’ve investigated war crimes in Argentina and the former Yugoslavia, so I know that for a fact.

Although we’d like to think otherwise, “strange” things are woven into the very fabric of our lives. Once, on an abandoned railway platform in Poland at about 3 a.m., a 300-lb former wrestler appeared out of the darkness, and challenged me to punch him in the stomach as hard as I could (I declined). And in college, there was a “glitch” in my answering machine that made it call up a friend and leave my “Please leave your message at the beep” message. She thought maybe it was a plea for help (it wasn’t, at least not from me).

Why do I write weird tales? It’s my attempt to outline our dappled existence, where what we call the “extraordinary” and the “ordinary”, “natural” and “supernatural”, “real” and “uncanny”, all swirl together on a typical Monday morning. What’s “weird” about that is how often we fail to recognize it.

Méabh de Brún (“Consumed as in Obsessed”)

I love ghosts. I love ghosts and goblins and things that go bump in the night. I love gothic hauntings in old creaking manors and the folkloric horror of things within the woods. Sometimes people ask me, but do you really believe? Inconsequential. Irrelevant. I am having a ball. But there’s a subtle difference between spooky and strange, and it’s the strange that truly unnerves and fascinates. Those weird uncanny stories that are not so easily explained by a restless, roaming spirit or an old folk-tale. Senseless events without rules, reason or motive that leave you lonely in the half-dark asking, but why? but why? These kinds of stories may not cause a burst of terror in the moment, but they worm beneath the skin. They unsettle. They unnerve. It’s always the inexplicable that leaves you lying awake at night, turning it over your mind like a tongue probing a rotting tooth. I press the weird against the mundane to highlight the horror of the everyday, and to write about the things that are truly scary. The banal and boring evil of a housing crisis. The creeping dread of losing a beloved friend. I would stride up the steps of the haunted manor with a skip in my step and a song in my heart. No ghoul could compare with living through late stage capitalism. Simone Weil once said, “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.” By writing in the uncanny, I can add a splash of colour to the grey. A jewel-tone spread of strange and sourceless mould across clean concrete. When I need to get to grips with real fear, it’s the uncanny that gives me the weird gloves to do so. Yes, things are still bad, but now they’re interesting. And after all, in the face of inexplicable horror one should always continue to aim for that glorious goal of having a ball.

Stephen J. Clark (“Interference”)

Writing for me involves being receptive to my imagination and unconscious mind. Once an idea, memory or image emerges then the process of creative play begins, and I interpret and delve into the images and ideas to see where they will take me.

To an extent the story has a life of its own. If I set out with a personal experience or memory or dream in mind, I often discover something unexpected: some long-forgotten detail or surprising insight. It’s this potential for revelation that inspires me. I find that revelation is inextricably linked to my experience of language, which involves encountering arresting metaphors or lucid phrases as part of the process and pleasure of writing.

I think of language as a fabric partly composed of unconscious threads, of personal memories yet also ancient images and ideas, so my writing is a way of engaging with those hidden seams between intimacy and myth. For me, writing from the imagination involves attempting to describe what often resists expression, to utter what would otherwise remain lost, concealed or forbidden, to reach into those zones of uncertainty and possibility. For the fabric can become a map, charting journeys into the domains of the grotesque and the Marvellous. Exploring this personal mythology of poetic images and resonances is a method of catharsis too: of attempting to lay ghosts to rest or to name demons.

For me, writing is a kind of waking dream, using my imagination to form a dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious. Whether discovered by chance or through deliberate exploration, I’m fascinated by the experience of encountering alluring and disturbing images and ideas, and my art and stories are the residual evidence of those encounters.

A. K. Benedict (“The Sands”)

Explaining why I write the uncanny would require more words, time, and money for therapy than I currently have, but it is something to do with seeing strangeness in a world that most people think of as “normal”. It’s about being slantwise. Catching the sniff of ghosts in dust motes, fixing restless spirits in ink, bones in words. The uncanny makes more sense than most because we know less than nothing, about anything, and there is joy in acknowledging the twisting of shadows

David Tibet (“Dreams As Red Barn”)

When I was young in Malaysia
I loved the Hebrew Bible
And the New Testament
And the Biblical Apocryphal Writings
Especially Coptic texts
And Apocryphas led me to M. R. James
And his The Apocryphal New Testament
And then I fell in LOVE with his GHOST STORIES
I also loved Enid Blyton
And her NODDY books
And She Wrote in one of them
Amen Amen Amen:
It isn’t very good
In The Dark Dark Wood
In the middle of the night
When there isn’t any light . . .
It isn’t very good
In The Dark Dark Wood . . .
And ever since READING those HALLUCINATORY WORDS . . .
I have searched for The Dark Dark Wood
And found her many times
Amen Amen Amen

David Tibet, Hastings, 4 VII 2023

Buy a copy of Uncertainties 6.

“That Didn’t Scare Me”: Thoughts on Horror Fiction

16

 

“Horror is not a genre like the mystery or science fiction or the western
. . . Horror is an emotion.” – Douglas E. Winter

 

“That didn’t scare me.” This level of criticism grates my sensibilities. That didn’t scare me. It’s the sort of comment you overhear when leaving the cinema or that you might witness among a torrent of social-media posts, not generally known for their insight or elucidation in the first place. It’s not even the brevity of this comment that bothers me, but rather that this grunt seems to convey a shallow understanding of horror: “That didn’t scare me.”

As a life-long connoisseur of horror, I seldom experience genuine “fear” while reading (or viewing)—that adrenaline-fuelled dread termed “art-horror” by Noel Carroll in The Philosophy of Horror. It does happen to me on occasion though, this sense of frisson: I remember the worrying, childhood anxiety of the doomsday clock in John Bellairs’s The House with a Clock in Its Walls, that horrible cosmic grandeur I experienced the first time I turned the pages of William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland, or the overbearing sense of inexorable supernatural fate in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

But if invoking this feeling of fear is such a rare experience—a sort of holy grail of reader reaction—then you might rightly wonder why I carry on exploring this particular section of the library? Am I not effectively one among the crowd, professing with a sneer, that didn’t scare me? It’s a reasonable question. Put another way: If horror doesn’t get you scared, then what are you getting?

In his introduction to the anthology Prime Evil (1988), editor Douglas E. Winter makes an observation, often repeated, what he calls “an important bit of heresy”: “Horror is not a genre like the mystery or science fiction or the western . . . Horror is an emotion.” This is a good place to start: horror is an emotion, and so the success or failure of horror literature is predicated on eliciting an emotional sensation in the reader. Similar to how a joke might be deemed a success or failure depending on the laughs. But there’s got to be more to it than that.

Consider a grand piano, onyx black, appropriately festooned with cobwebs and candelabra bedecked with dripping red candles. Imagine being allowed to play only one note, probably down the far left end of the instrument where the theme from Jaws is usually played. Now imagine that the sole way to enhance the effectiveness of this note is to hammer that one key harder and harder. For many, this is horror. Hammering that single key. Lots of people love that one pounding note too, and feel cheated if they don’t get that adrenaline rush; that didn’t scare me. Sure, that single note might be novel for a moment, sometimes even effective in a particular context, as the musician changes speed or intensity. But you’ll forgive me if I tend to feel overwhelmingly bored with this sort of concert.

Uncertainties 4, painting by B. Catling

“Horror is an emotion,” Douglas E. Winter tells us. I would respectfully like to amend that assertion. Horror is a range of emotions. And each of these moods, if they are to be successful, must be cultivated differently. We know that good horror is rarely just a single note. There are far more keys on that piano—and they’re all elegantly tuned. To borrow the subtitle of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, the genre is eine Symphonie des Grauens—a symphony of horrors.

There seems to have been a proliferation of horror-related literary descriptors in the early- to mid-twentieth century (or at least an increasingly formalised awareness of them): cosmic, weird, numinous, uncanny, strange, among others. I believe these words are of merit, not because they define sub-genres, but because they reflect attempts to describe particular nuances of affect (emotional responses) to be found in the “ghost story”—the dominant mode of horror in the late nineteenth century, itself rooted in the gothic tradition. Despite the common trope of the wailing bedsheet, the ghost story has always been quite diverse and adaptable. As is occasionally observed, the “ghosts” in the works of M. R. James are often not ghosts at all, but demons and other such denizens; while the stories of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Henry James practically beg for the qualifier “psychological” so as to set them apart from the less imaginative chain-rattling fare. And yet, even though Algernon Blackwood himself called “The Willows” a ghost story, that attribution would seem a wholly inadequate description for the troubling sentiments that masterful tale evokes. Who can blame Lovecraft for writing an entire treatise pondering the aesthetics of the weird or Robert Aickman for labouring the strange?

This attempt to describe dominant effects found in horror storytelling continues apace; sometimes these descriptions are celebrated, other times they’re inelegantly stated, occasionally there’s some sort of backlash. Current nomenclature includes “quiet horror” or “elevated horror”, “horror adjacent”, “new horror”, and the ostensibly respectable “thriller”. But surely horror means horror. It doesn’t need your fancy terms. Perhaps the worry is that defining a “sub-genre” will limit creativity, possibly that it’s just a marketing ploy, or, worse still, a declaration of vogueishness, a demonstration of an otherwise unspoken desire to be au courant. Or maybe outsiders discovering good horror ruin the mystique of the insular and supposedly marginalised horror geek who has been reading Thomas Ligotti this whole time anyway.

As someone who thinks often about the mechanics of horror storytelling, it makes sense to me that we recognise and try to describe the wide-ranging nuances of emotional sensations available to writers of horror. I believe understanding this diversity makes horror literature a stronger, richer, and more enjoyable pursuit.

Over the years I’ve written down some words that I’ve come to associate with the various emotional resonances found in horror literature. Take a moment to read through them. Think about stories you’ve read that evoke these sensations to varying degrees of success, and how these ideas differ from one another:

Strange
Weird
Dread
Uncanny
Eerie
Wonder
Awe
Decadence
Terror
Occult
Despair
Numinous
Epiphany
Nihilistic
Cosmic
Psychical
Mysterious
Gothic
Melancholy
Unreal
Surreal
Disquietude
Morbid
Oneiric
Mystical
Supernatural
Sublime
Grotesque
Unease
Paranoia
Revulsion

I have not attempted to arrange these words in any sort of order. I’m not sure I would know how. Nor would I feel confident to state that this list is complete; no doubt you can think of more. Call these words what you’d like—sub-genres, modes, atmospheres, moods, sensibilities—but they all describe, directly or indirectly, discreet emotional sensations that a skilled writer can elicit from a reader. It also stands to reason that this variety of effects requires a broad range of appreciative sensibilities—though I understand that not everyone will respond equally to each of these words. Still, there are plenty of emotional sensations available to the skilled writer, the adrenaline rush of fear being only one of them. And this sensation alone is insufficient to judge the vast scope of horror. So much for “That didn’t scare me”.

Numerous essayists over the centuries have attempted to define some of these modes, to delineate their core attributes and limits. Anne Radcliffe made an early attempt at that classic bifurcation, differentiating terror and horror: “the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them”; to these twin poles, Stephen King added revulsion (the “gross-out”, he called it). Edmund Burke gives us the sublime, when “the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it”; while Freud sets out a reasonable starting point for the uncanny (“that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar”).

Though the weird is often associated with Lovecraft’s examination of supernatural horror in literature, I like Mark Fisher’s more recent philosophical definition in The Weird and the Eerie: “that which does not belong”; and of the eerie: the “failure of absence” or the “failure of presence”. (Fisher also helpfully tells us that the weird and the eerie need not necessarily be aligned with fear either, thank you very much.) The well-known rules for the ghost story proper were set out by M. R. James; so too does Edith Wharton give insight in her preface to Ghosts: “What the ghost really needs is continuity and silence”—although she also notes, “the more one thinks the question over, the more one perceives the impossibility of defining supernatural events”.

It’s true that many have tried to put words to these nuanced facets of horror. Certainly, some overlap or work in tandem, while others command entirely recognisable sub-genres on their own. We can look to Arthur Machen for the mystical (“Omnia exeunt in mysterium”), to Aickman for the strange (“it must open a door where no one had previously noticed a door to exist”), or to Joyce Carol Oates for the grotesque (“a blunt physicality that no amount of epistemological exegesis can exorcise”). There are whole books written on the subject by Dorothy Scarborough, Montague Summers, Peter Penzoldt, Devendra P. Varma, Julia Briggs, Jack Sullivan, Glen Cavaliero, S. T. Joshi—you may not always agree with their conclusions (isn’t that half the fun anyway?), but all are attempting to give names to the various effects a “horror” story can elicit.

Which brings us to the present volume, the fifth in a series of unsettling tales. Believe it or not, Uncertainties is a themed anthology. The remit was nothing so superficial as vampires or zombies or folk horror or Cthulhu (only in dustbowl Oklahoma this time), but rather to exhibit horror’s myriad nuances, to open up strange vistas of unsettling possibilities and other-worldly ideas, to commune with intrusions from the outside and those disquieting gestations from within. “Ghost stories,” as Elizabeth Bowen observed, “are not easy to write—least easy now, for they involve more than they did.” But these twelve writers take up the challenge, each in their own way, with expert awareness of the genre’s limitless possibilities.

Algernon Blackwood put it well in “The Willows”, a story that’s caused me many sleepless nights in terrible awe of the unknown: “ ‘There are things about us, I’m sure, that make for disorder, disintegration, destruction, our destruction,’ he said once, while the fire blazed between us. ‘We’ve strayed out of a safe line somewhere.’ ”

So you can call these stories whatever you’d like: weird, strange, eerie, uncanny . . . I call them Uncertainties.

Brian J. Showers
Rathmines, Dublin
24 February 2021

 

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Brian J. Showers is originally from Madison, Wisconsin. He has written short stories, articles, and reviews for magazines such as Rue Morgue, Ghosts & Scholars, and Supernatural Tales. His short story collection, The Bleeding Horse, won the Children of the Night Award in 2008. He is also the author of Literary Walking Tours of Gothic Dublin (2006), the co-editor of Reflections in a Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu (2011), and the editor of The Green Book. Showers also edited the first two volumes of Uncertainties, and co-edited with Jim Rockhill, the Ghost Story Award-winning anthology Dreams of Shadow and Smoke. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.

Previous volumes of Uncertainties are also available:

Uncertainties Volume 4, edited by Timothy J. Jarvis

Uncertainties Volume 3, edited by Lynda E. Rucker

Uncertainties Volume 2, edited by Brian J. Showers

Uncertainties Volume 1, edited by Brian J. Showers