Weird Tales, Volume 350 Read online

  WEIRD TALES #350

  July/August 2008

  Vol. 63, No. 3

  Magazine copyright © 2008 by Wildside Press, LLC. All individual stories copyright © 2008 by their respective authors. All rights reserved; reproduction prohibited without prior permission. Weird Tales ® is a registered trademark owned by Weird Tales, Limited.

  PREFACE

  Weird Tales was the first storytelling magazine devoted explicitly to the realm of the dark and fantastic. Founded in 1923, Weird Tales provided a literary home for such diverse wielders of the imagination as H.P. Lovecraft (creator of Cthulhu), Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian), Margaret Brundage (artistic godmother of goth fetishism), and Ray Bradbury (author of The Illustrated Man and Something Wicked This Way Comes). Today, O wondrous reader of the 21st century, we continue to seek out that which is most weird and unsettling, for your own edification and alarm.

  EDITORIAL STAFF

  Editorial & creative director | Stephen H. Segal

  Fiction editor | Ann VanderMeer

  Contributing editors | Scott Connors, Elizabeth Genco, Darrell Schweitzer

  Editor emeritus | George H. Scithers

  Editorial assistants | Nivair H. Gabriel, Tessa Kum

  Assistant to the publisher | Renee Farrah

  Publisher | John Gregory Betancourt

  CONTENTS

  Fiction

  All In | by Peter Atwood

  Now this is truly organized gambling.

  How I Got Here | by Ramsey Shehadeh

  Between Heaven and Hell lie the streets of D.C.

  Belair Plaza | by Adam Corbin Fusco

  There is no such thing as a cursed shopping center.

  An Invitation Via Email | by Mike Allen

  Getting tenure must be a real pain in the ass.

  Mainevermontnewhampshiremass | by Nick Mamatas

  And then the horror convention got a little epic.

  The Stone-Hearted Queen | by Kelly Barnhill

  She shared her father's magic — but enough of it?

  Ganaranok | by Rory Steves

  A Shakesperean love story, plus antennae.

  The Difficulties of Evolution | by Karen Heuler

  Can't wait to grow up and escape Mom's claws.

  Right You Are If You Say You Are | by Norman Spinrad

  The princess was hot. Hotter than the dragonfire.

  Features

  Mike Mignola: Hellboy's Dad

  The creator of Hellboy chats with Elizabeth Genco about Dracula, Lovecraft, and making weird comics.

  Summer Reading Weirducopia

  An array of bizarre new books — plus an exclusive excerpt from the hot new steam-fantasy novel The Court of the Air!

  Poetry

  Fame | by F.J. Bergmann

  Departments

  The Eyrie | evolutions, transformations, metamorphoses

  Weirdism | music of the dark, terror of the night

  The Library & Bazaar | weird books and fantastical masks

  Lost In Lovecraft | a literary journey with Kenneth Hite

  The Cryptic | fantastic commentary by Darrell Schweitzer

  Feedback | readers respond to “The 85 Weirdest”

  THE EYRIE

  On Metamorphoses

  by Ann VanderMeer

  I've been thinking a lot about change lately. Especially since it's an election year, and each candidate professes to be bringing change. That's all I'm hearing. “Something's gotta change.” “I am the candidate of change.” “We can't keep going along as we have been or death and destruction will soon be raining down upon us.” Well, maybe that last one is a bit extreme. But you get the point.

  Change is inevitable. We can't escape it no matter what we do. And although some of us embrace change, we shouldn't embark on it solely for the purpose of change.

  I work with this concept every day. In my other life as a consultant, I walk into businesses of all types and point out where change is needed. Most of them balk at it. They fight me and tell me all the reasons why they can't change. But the reason I'm there is because their status quo has proven unsustainable. I've been called in to effect a change so their companies can run more efficiently and yes, more profitably. I'm the one they bring in when the pain of not changing is greater than the change. I guess you can call me an agent of change; just don't nominate me for elected office. I have way too many skeletons in the closet.

  I saw a movie last year that illustrates this whole issue of change very well. Kinky Boots is based on a true story about a man who inherits his father's very traditional shoe factory in North England. The business is failing; no one seems to want the same old same old shoes anymore. After a trip to London, Charlie Price has a chance encounter with a drag queen and comes up with the wacky idea to make boots for this under-served part of society. Needless to say, this change is met with great resistance both from the employees of the factory and Charlie's girlfriend. But Charlie takes a chance. He goes for it and eventually gets support from those around him. He is able to turn the factory around and we have a happy ending.

  We all generally want to be comfortable; our tendency is to want things to remain as they are. But sometimes that just isn't possible. I've found it's important to help people ease into the scarier transitions, so they have time to see how a given change can be a good thing. Well, that's a great concept in the business world — but how does it fit with fiction?

  The stories in this issue are all about change. In Kelly Barnhill's “The Stone-Hearted Queen,” a young girl is transformed into a stone. Ramsey Shehadeh shows us how a mobster handles a corporeal make-over upon traveling into purgatory in “How I Got Here.” Norman Spinrad explores in “Right You Are If You Say You Are” how much power one person can have when he can become anything he wants purely by thinking it. Check out Adam Corbin Fusco's “Bel-air Plaza,” where a strip mall tries to change but can't escape its own true nature. In “The Difficulties of Evolution,” Karen Heuler shows us a mother who resists the inevitable. Nick Mamatas proves you can't go home again in “Mainevermontnewhampshiremass.” Peter Atwood deals with physical change and the extent to which we're willing to go in “All In.” And who can resist a story about star-crossed centipede lovers such as “Ganaranok's Lament” by Rory Steves?

  Weird Tales has never been known to maintain the status quo. The fiction in WT is supposed to make you uncomfortable, right? It's supposed to challenge you and make you think. And not by shoving it in your face or ramming it down your throat. Oh, no. That's not the Weird Tales way. A weird tale does more than that. It gets under your skin and it becomes part of you. And you become part of it.

  So take a ride with us. We're curious to see who you become at the end of the journey.

  LETTERS

  Thrilled To Have Been Thrilled

  Your latest issue seems sincerely given over to fearful chillers and, I think, deserves commendations for giving readers the full show. Lately, tales of fright have seemed somewhat out of style, overshadowed by macabre tales of horror, but I like to see a good panic every now and then … [like] the October 1927 issue that Robert Bloch said scared him “out of a year of growth.” Well, this recent issue put me plenty uptight and had me looking behind me.

  As to the magazine's new look, I had been feeling quite satisfied with its traditional appearance and didn't at first like the new [cover] design, but as things have progressed, I think the avant-garde look is quite in keeping with the contents — and is also more sensational than well-fortified tradition. Perhaps we'll be seeing more spectres than ghouls in the magazine, and that is quite all right with me. I assume you'll really be making the reader sit up and take notice! . John Thiel

  WEIRDISM
r />   Under a Black Sun

  Culture | by Geoffrey H. Goodwin

  Dark music and dark literature share something like the thrill of hearing a dry twig crackle in the woods when you're alone and standing still. They're about following headtrips to brinks of emotion and fatigue. As such, to ask why weird kids, and the weird kids who've grown up to become weird adults, go to a musical event like the BlackSun Festival is to ask why readers enjoy the nightmare logic of the best weird tales.

  Fifteen miles outside of New Haven, Connecticut, on the fourteenth of March, giant highway signs alerted travelers they were entering a fog area. Those not scared off by that horror-movie cliché come to life eventually found themselves strolling into New Haven's leading concert venue, Toad's Place, where a scene equal parts Donnie Darko and Pan’s Labyrinth was in full bloom. Five hundred congregants were dressed in funereal ball gowns, occasional white frills, gas masks, goggles, unnaturally-colored dreads, and lots of pierced-heart tattoos — it was as if all of SuicideGirls.com had sprung to three-dimensional life from the computer screen, accidentally covered in a few pieces of clothing. Considering the festival's cyberpunk provenance, that impression wasn't far from the truth.

  Named for the virtual nightclub in Neal Stephenson's 1992 dark science-fiction classic Snow Crash — which directly inspired today's Web 2.0 world of avatars, widgets, and friendlists — BlackSun originated in Amsterdam as a short-lived nightclub event where an American DJ, Jonathan Kephart, spun the music. That incarnation didn't last long, but Kephart really liked the logo for which he'd paid $200; so, upon returning to the U. S., he repurposed the name for a festival that would feature some of the most atmospheric new gothic-type performers of the infant millennium. He looked for a location that would be on a rail line within reach of both Boston and New York, and found New Haven, a city small enough that attendees could walk from venue to venue. Even more importantly, New Haven had the moody character he wanted. Cue the fog.

  Running down the roster of performers and exhibitors at this year's BlackSun Festival, it's hard to find one who doesn’t have a connection to the world of weird fantasy and science fiction. There's Projekt Records founder Sam Rosenthal, a dark-music pioneer for the past 25 years, whose new solo project is called As Lonely As Dave Bowman in reference to the character in 2001. There's Bloodwire, a boy-girl duo whose gentle melo-dies belie their name, and whose songwriter Shawn Brice is an avowed H.P. Lovecraft fan. There's electronic balladeer Tom Shear, a.k.a. Assemblage 23, whose repertoire features apocalyptic imagery aplenty and whose favorite author is Chuck Pahlaniuk.

  And then there's Ego Likeness, a Baltimore duo comprising the sylphy voice of Donna Lynch and the musical antics of guitarist Steven Archer. Their lyrics are steeped in dark and gloomy imagery and explore alienation, decadence, and dark rituals. Some of their songs slither and smolder, while others veer into jangling triphop. It's no wonder they cite Poe, Gaiman, and Barker as some of their favorite writers; between Lynch's haunting vocals and Archer's hypnotic riffs, the two made their seven p.m. showtime feel like the dead of the night.

  Offstage, Lynch and Archer tap into the dark-fantasy culture in other media. The independent horror publisher Raw Dog Screaming released Lynch's poetry collection Ladies and Other Vicious Creatures with illustrations by Archer, and her novel Isabel Burning will come out in August. Lynch describes the new book as “a love story. Ancient malevolent entities living in quarries, unethical bio-spiritual experiments, twisted relationships, viscera, and ghosts — you know, the usual.” Meanwhile, Archer brings a fine-art, gallery-quality approach to surrealistic fantasy art, creating and selling original mixed-media paintings of tortured souls and alien cephalopods. (See editor's note, below.)

  Two weeks after BlackSun, Ego Likeness crossed the lines of disparate media to put in a weekend's work selling books, paintings, and music at the Horrorfind convention at the University of Maryland, where Lynch's luminescent platinum tresses and Archer's bouncy purple dreadlocks seemed as comfortable in a roomful of zombie-movie fans as they had in a club full of dancing goths. “It's really all the same thing,” muses Lynch, “just different mediums. That isn't to say that all horror is 'gothy' nor all goth music frightening — but in both subcultures, there's a willingness by the creator and the consumer to venture into darker, unusual places.”

  Editor's note: As we prepped this issue of Weird Tales, Steven Archer (above) showed us a bold new project he'd just started : a year-long series of 365 original, dailyartworks inspired mostly by H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. We've never seen Lovecraftian art quite like this before — so we're bringing it to you! Visit WeirdTalesMagazine.com every single day from now through Memorial Day 2009 and you'll have the chance not only to see the debut of this incredible new horror art, but also to purchase the originals!

  Whispers of the Old Hag

  Nonfiction | by Eric San Juan

  The thing was made of light and shadow; skeletal, pale, with ribs like talons and deep eager eyes. I did not know the time. Didn't care to know, really. Midnight; 4 a.m.; whatever. How could I care when it stood there, just outside my bedroom door, framed in moonlight and a clinging mist; a malevolent thing, angry and waiting? The time didn't matter. All that mattered was that I was being watched.

  I longed to scream, but the sound would not come. A hoarse croak. A gasp of breath. Nothing more. I was silent; immobile; paralyzed.

  It's impossible to recall how old I was when it first happened. Twelve. Maybe fourteen. The experience was terrifying, a mix of dread and horror and of being utterly overcome by something alien. The experience was no dream. It was real and true. And it would happen again.

  Once, an unseen presence woke me in the night and sat on my chest. I could not see it, but I could feel it perched upon me. As it sat there pressing the air from my lungs, the walls filled with whispers. Most of them were incomprehensible, but at times snatches of words tormented me: accusations, laughter, distant discussion tantalizingly close to being understood. I strained to call to them, to tell them I was trapped, to beg to be released from this unseen prison, but again my voice was frozen.

  On another occasion, I could see the presence. A curtain was spread across my doorway, pulled slightly open, and as I awoke from a soft afternoon sleep I saw it, a black shadow pacing back and forth just outside the room. “Who's there?” I called, but no sound came. Again my voice was frozen. Again I could not move. Again the whispers came. Just beyond the curtain they chattered, always on the very edge of understanding.

  The visits continued sporadically over the years. A woman I knew, a self-styled fortuneteller, the sort who thinks she knows the secrets of the universe, told me something was happening. That I was breaking through some wall. Some barrier. That maybe, just maybe, it was dangerous.

  She wasn't far off the mark. As it turned out, I was treading in territory that had tormented man for all recorded history. I was swimming in the blackest waters of night; grasping at nightmares made real. Yet it was not the journey into otherworldly hells she suggested.

  I was suffering from sleep paralysis: a bizarre fluke of consciousness that occurs while on the borderlands of sleep, thrusting the victim into a place between dreaming and waking. A very scary place.

  When one enters REM sleep, something called “REM atonia” kicks in, a state during which the body's muscles do not move. You are, in essence, paralyzed. This is perfectly normal. It happens to every sleeper. In the case of sleep paralysis, however, the mind awakens, becomes aware and conscious — mostly — even while the body still sleeps. And then come the hallucinations.

  The feeling of a presence, almost always malevolent, is common. The feeling of being watched, sometimes of a crushing pressure, is also typical. There is always dread. Always fear. Sometimes unbridled panic. And sometimes voices, barely understandable but tantalizingly recognizable. I've heard people chatting in the next room or just outside my window, familiar voices and alien voices, the voices of loved ones and the voices of str
angers. Yet none of them were real.

  “Not real” — but for all the terror they brought me, they might as well have been. The foothills between waking and sleep are a harsh place, a landscape of half-seen truths and elusive lies. Tarry too long, dwell upon the seeming realism of the frightening episodes too obsessively — believe too much of what you see — and you could find yourself swallowed up by your own mind. This was the danger from which I ran.

  I'd left fears of demons behind with childhood. Poltergeists, hauntings, ghosts; sure, the images could provide a chill, but the same could be said for anyone with a vivid imagination. This doesn't mean we really believe in such things. We don't. As a society, we've moved beyond taking such fears seriously. But hang on — because humanity has a new terror of the night. A new presence that comes in the evening and whisks away the unsuspecting. Demons of the modern age. They come from space, drifting out of the sky bathed in cold lights, bringing their emotionless and distant violations with them.

  The gray alien — the now-familiar visage of the silent, petite, triangle-faced, giant-eyed extraterrestrial — that’s today's demonic visitor. Frighteningly inhuman; rendering people helpless; changing the way some live their lives. Alien abduction is a terror many of us believe in. Could sleep paralysis explain these experiences? All the calling cards are there. Waking in the night, unable to move. The feeling of a presence in the room. Losing control of your body. Even a sense that time isn't quite flowing right. Like pieces of some twisted puzzle, it all fits. So if these experiences are simply the result of sleep paralysis, are people investing themselves in the belief that they have been taken by aliens when the real explanation is something much less sinister?

  It wouldn't be the first time sleep paralysis has done exactly that. The belief that this experience is something more than a biological quirk in the body's sleep mechanism has been around as long as man has feared the night. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare makes mention of “the Old Hag.” The Old Hag is a demon of the night right out of foggy old myths, describing an entity — whether a witch, demon, or spirit does not matter — that sits on its victim, rendering them unable to move and making it difficult to breath. Sound familiar?