Joshua Reynolds's Blog, page 23

Death Comes to Dark Oaks

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Alucard is not his name. You must stop him before it is too late. Stop him before death comes to Dark Oaks.

– Madame Zimba

Alucard is not his name. Nor, in fact, is he the son of Dracula, as the title might have you believe. Rather, Lon Chaney Jr. is playing the Count himself in the 1943 Universal picture, Son of Dracula. Efficiently directed by Robert Siodmak, this follow-on from the 1936 film, Dracula’s Daughter, finds the vampire up to his old tricks in Louisiana.

Odd title aside, Son of Dracula lacks both the dark poetry of Daughter of Dracula as well as the mannered menace of Dracula. There is no music of the night here – only a sort of brute clamouring. Fitting, perhaps, given Siodmak’s history as a director of thrillers.

Chaney’s Alucard is no cruel conqueror or tormented soul. Rather, he is a medieval thug – a beast wrapped in finery – killing without regard, confident in his own invincibility. He is a hungry, fierce thing, arrogant and destructive – a barbarian come a-knocking at the gates.

Alucard is characterised by this daemonic ferocity. His first words of dialogue are a command, snarled at a frightened servant. He bites off his words, spitting them like bullets at whomever is unlucky enough to attract his attentions. Taking, with every utterance.

Even his final words are a command – if a futile one. He growls, snarls and purrs – but never simply speaks. It is as if all that is human in him has been burnt out by centuries of undeath – he has become both more and less than a man, and in doing so has lost everything that made him human.

There is none of Lugosi’s dark delight, or Holden’s resigned tragedy, to Chaney’s Alucard. Instead, he is a thing of impulse and urge. He has no grand scheme, no greater desire. Survival is his driving force. A desperate hunger – not the need of an addict, but that of a wild thing. A hunger fit to drain his new territory dry, even as he did the old ones.

He might as well be a tiger, striped in sin.

When he is finally brought to bay, he reacts like any beast would – first fighting, then fleeing when death becomes a certainty. His end is undignified, his final moments spent crawling in the mud. But as the sun rises, it is as if something of the man Alucard had been has surfaced from the charnel pit of his soul.

The beast dies, and the man lives, if only for a few moments. Chaney’s face shows it all…fury turns to incomprehension, incomprehension to panic.

Panic to resignation.

And then, at the last, a brief instant of peace, as the hunter Death brings his quarry to bay at last.

They have what I want, what I need, what I must have. Do you suppose that I would allow any mortal to stand in my way?

– Count Dracula

Who is the Royal Occultist?

Back in 2010, I came up with a character who would prove more popular than I could have ever expected – the Royal Occultist.

Standing between Great Britain and its occult enemies, be they foreign, domestic, human or demonic, the Royal Occultist is the nation’s first and last line of defence against the supernatural. If there are satyrs running amok in Somerset or werewolves in Wolverhampton, the Royal Occultist will be there to see them off.

Formed during the reign of Elizabeth I, the post of the Royal Occultist was created for and first held by the diligent amateur, Dr. John Dee, in recognition for an unrecorded service to the Crown. The title has passed through a succession of hands since.

The list is a long one, weaving in and out of the margins of British history and including such luminaries as the 1st Earl of Holderness and Thomas Carnacki. There have been many Royal Occultists, and there will be many more, thanks to the strong British sense of tradition, bloody-minded necessity and the ridiculously short life expectancy for those who assume the post.

In the wake of the Great War, the title and offices have fallen to Charles St. Cyprian. Accompanied by his apprentice Ebe Gallowglass, he faces threats occult, otherworldly, infernal and divine even as the wider world lurches once more on the path to war.

Charles St. Cyprian and his plucky-yet-murderous apprentice, Ebe Gallowglass, made their first appearance in the holiday-themed short story “Krampusnacht”. They have since appeared in more than fifty short stories as well as several novels.

I suppose the stories could be called ‘urban fantasy’, or even ‘historical fantasy’, what with them taking place in the London of PG Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. That’d be the 1920s to you or me. The ‘Inter-War Period’ as historians call it.

While the characters were first created for and then utterly excised from a book, they found new life in a series proposal for a small press publisher. Four stories a year starring the intrepid duo were to have appeared in one of several flagship magazines. Unfortunately, only one story appeared before the magazines folded. Luckily, by that time, I’d managed to sell a number of the stories to other markets in quick succession. So quickly, in fact, that it still boggles my mind a bit.

Of all the characters I’ve created, and stories I’ve written over the past decade plus, I’m proudest of these. I’ve written more stories featuring St. Cyprian and Gallowglass than I ever intended, and their continued popularity with my readers is both gratifying and humbling. I’ve enjoyed writing every single story, and I look forward to writing many more, as I continue to expand the series.

On that note, a few years ago I hit on the idea of exploring the Royal Occultist universe with regular write-ups about certain elements of the setting, including information on previous Royal Occultists, as well as reoccurring characters like Philip Wendy-Smythe or villains like the sinister Dr. Ptolemy, and even descriptions of artefacts like the Monas Glyph and Gallowglass’ ever-present Webley-Fosbery revolver.

I’d like to do that again, so I’ve decided to make the Royal Occultist universe a semi-regular feature on this blog. To that end, you can click the ‘royal occultist’ tag to see everything on this site. If you’d like to check out some of the Royal Occultist stories for free, head over to my Curious Fictions page. And for more general updates, be sure to check the Royal Occultist Facebook page.

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On Certain Prodigies

A miscellany of various dead men and devils, from my commonplace books.

William of Newburgh‘s Historia rerum Anglicarum is a godsend for a certain sort of writer. Among other fascinating snippets of English history, it includes such accounts as:

The Green Children of East Anglia. A pair of green-skinned children found during the local harvest. Claimed to be from ‘St. Martin’s Land’, wherever that might be. Alternate dimension? Parallel earth?

The Buckinghamshire Vampire. A wandering corpse that required burning and absolution before it lay still.

The Berwick Vampire. A similar occurrence, near the River Tweed. The monster supposedly brought a plague with it.

The Hundeprest (‘Hound-Priest’). A former chaplain who renounced God and indulged in all manner of vileness until his demise…whereupon he returned from the grave to cause even more trouble. An MR James story waiting to happen.

Moving away from William of Newburgh, we have a more recent look at the long-abandoned village of Wharram Percy. A medieval Yorkshire village with a severe vampire problem. Or maybe zombies? Either way, lots of story potential.

And finally, a historical note of a different sort:

All the proprietors pay a prescription in lieu of tithes, except the owner of one estate, who has a total exemption, derived from a circumstance which happened about 200 years ago, almost too ridiculous to be rehearsed or credited. The ancient possessor is said to have slain a noxious cockatrice which the vulgar call a crack-a-christ at this day, as they rehearse the simple fable. There is some record [said to be dated 7th of James I], which the owner of the estate holds to testify his exemption, perhaps in a language or letter not to be understood by the villagers; and which he is too tenacious to suffer to be read by curious visitors.

–History of the County of Cumberland (1794)

Cockatrices are an underrepresented monster in modern genre fiction, I feel. At some point, I’d like to rectify that.

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Restless Seas Rise

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The restless seas rise, find boundaries, are contained. Now, in their warm depths, the miracle of life begins. 

– Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

Universal’s 1954 film, Creature from the Black Lagoon, is considered by many to be the swan-song of the Universal Monsters. Debuting almost a decade after the final outings of Dracula, the Wolfman and the Frankenstein’s Monster, as well as  perennial second-stringers the Mummy and the Invisible Man, the creature is both a final attempt to recapture the glory days of Universal Horror, as well as a change in direction.

Gone are the superstitious villagers, the Balkans-by-way-of-California sound stages and the almost fairy-tale like supernatural elements; in their place, scientists-as-men-of-action, unexplored regions of the Earth and a gritty cosmicism  that is almost Lovecraftian in its implications.

While the eponymous creature isn’t a supernatural menace to be dispatched by sword, stake or fire, it is no less horrifying for that. It exists in spite of established dogma, testing the sanity and certainty of its scientific quarry even as it seeks to maul, drown or throttle them.  It is a thing which cannot be, to quote the aforementioned Lovecraft.

There is a sense of age to the beast, a miasma of centuries that even Dracula cannot match. The creature–the ‘gill-man’–is the (seeming) end-point of an ancient species, the last atavistic nightmare, trapped in its watery Pandora’s Box until it is disturbed by the men and one woman who quickly become its prey.  A fossil brings the latter on the hunt for the answer to an impossible riddle, and the discovery of a living example of said fossil only adds to the mystery. Thus, the gill-man is at once rooted in scientific solidity and cosmic horror.

Heretofore, monsters were aberrations, something from Outside slipping In. Sour blips in reality that, once banished, could be forgotten (until they returned, natch). But what the gill-man represented cannot be forgotten by those who encountered it.

It exposed the lie of an orderly cosmos, and revealed nature for the atavistic Echidna that it truly was. The gill-man and its cinematic descendants were not shamblers from the Outside, but rather Insiders and aggressive competitors for Man’s mastery of his domain.

Like many of Universal’s later films, including 1956’s The Mole People and1957’s The Deadly Mantis, it’s that unspoken implication–that the creature’s existence lends credence to there being some place ‘off the map’, that those regions labelled ‘Here Be Monsters’ are not simply a mapmaker’s fancy but an actual warning – that generates much of the horror.

In the end, the audience is left to wonder whether the creature is merely a degenerate survivor (which is bad enough) or a herald of greater horrors.

After all, who’s to say what lurks beneath the dark surface of the Black Lagoon?

We didn’t come here to fight with monsters. We’re not equipped for it.

– David Reed

Reign Over the Earth

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We may be witnesses to a Biblical prophecy come true – ‘And there shall be destruction and darkness come upon creation, and the beasts shall reign over the earth.’

– Dr. Harold Medford

In 1954, the spectre of nuclear annihilation haunted the minds of cinema-goers. Many of the films of the period are pervaded by an existential unease, and none more so than Gordon Douglas’ seminal ‘big bug’ feature, Them! 

One of the first nuclear monster films, Them! spoke directly to the anxieties of the time. Radiation + innocuous wildlife = national threat. A new folk horror, arising from a distinctly modern set of fears. But instead of something from outside imposing itself on reality, the monster is of man’s own making – and worse, unintentional.

The film has always been one of my favourites. Like Godzilla, released the same year, the ants are kept out of sight for a good portion of the film. They’re a barely glimpsed force, seen out of the corner of the eye or heard. The sound is the worst of it – the shrill prickle of noise, an insect hum, echoing across the lonely desert landscape. A signal that all is not well, and a warning to the curious.

Too, the blunt, factual way the story unfolds makes for greater unease. In places, it could almost be an episode of Dragnet, as the diverse characters seek to unravel the mystery. When they at last discover the true nature of the threat facing them, things spin rapidly into overdrive.

The ants are brute children of Progress, much like Frankenstein’s creation. Unlike Karloff’s monster, however, the ants are not simply at odds with the world – they threaten to reshape it. To make it a place where they, and not mankind, have sole dominion. Heedless of all laws or potency, they flourish in the empty places, and spread where they will, all without man’s knowledge. The assumption of insignificance lends them a hideous strength.

While the film has many of the hallmarks of a disaster film, there’s a darker implication, a hint that there’s been a cosmic reshuffling – man is no longer in control. The ants are not simply symbolic of nuclear disaster, but of the loss of certainty that accompanied the splitting of the atom.

The universe is not as we thought it was, and we will pay for that assumption. The little things, the things unnoticed, are almost our downfall. Only happenstance and diligence prevents a greater tragedy.

There is an almost Lovecraftian cosmicism to the story. Humanity is rendered insignificant by a force seemingly beyond comprehension, their bastions of authority made all but impotent. The ants are utterly alien, and the traditional defences of innocence and ignorance are useless against them. They walk where they will, shadow-shapes stalking a monochrome desert.

Worse, as they spread, the world is irrevocably changed in their wake. When a stake is thrust through Dracula’s heart, normalcy returns. But even after their inevitable immolation, the ants leave the world in disorder. The atomic genie has been let out of the bottle, and nothing will ever be the same. If ants can become giants, can spiders? Can men? What new horrors stir, in the shadow of atomic fire?

What rough beast, its hour come around at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

When Man entered the atomic age, he opened a door into a new world. What we’ll eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.

– Dr. Harold Medford

A Wolf in Salem

Howard Pyle is one of my favourite artists. There’s a palpable energy to his work which starts the gears to turning in my head – there’s a story in every brush stroke. I first encountered his work as a kid, which probably helps explain the ever-present frisson it generates in me, but I tend to revisit it when I need a bit of inspiration.

Of his work, the one I return to most often is ‘A Wolf Had Not Been Seen at Salem for Thirty Years’ (1909). I find it endlessly fascinating, for reasons I can’t adequately articulate, especially around this time of year. There’s a pathos to it, and an element of the macabre. It’s by turns sinister and engaging.

Pyle’s depiction of the wolf is simultaneously monstrous and pitiable, and you can spin a web of implications from the title of the piece alone. There’s a story there, trying to catch your attention.

Now, given Pyle’s body of work, this is likely an illustration for a story – though I’m not aware of what that story might be, or where it can be found.

That said, I don’t particularly need Pyle’s story. I can come up with my own. And I probably will, at some point.

[image error]A Wolf Had Not Been Seen at Salem for Thirty Years, Howard Pyle (1909)

Book of Dead Names

I have beside me, as I type this, a stack of commonplace books. Well, Moleskins, but it’s all zibaldone, right? Compilations of ideas, notes for stories (mostly unwritten, if we’re being honest), sketches, names, song and poetry fragments, directions, maps and whatever else I thought I needed to scribble down at a given moment. I scribble a lot. And when I say a lot, I mean an inordinate amount. 

I scribble when I’m on the bus, on the train, at breakfast, before I go to bed. Other people take pictures, I scribble. It’s automatic writing, only there are no ghosts. Or if there are, they haven’t said boo to me.

Sometimes it’s just word-salad, other times its cross-indexed and neatly organized, as I gnaw at an idea from several different directions. Most of my commonplace books are like this.

A few are not. Some are downright odd.

Of the weirder commonplace books, there’s one has nothing but overexposed pictures I scavenged from the bins beside automatic photo machines, back when I worked at a photo processing center. Yes, I asked permission. Yes, that’s weird. No, I don’t know why. Regardless, I’ve got a notebook full of blurred faces and melted landscapes.

Another is my little black book of names. Names have power. You conjure the character with the name. Names define a character and give you an impression of who they are and what they’re about. A couple of syllables can do more to build an image in the reader’s mind than any number of pages of back-story.

A few years ago, or maybe more than a few now, I went to a certain church yard of some passing local infamy.  It was an old place, and forgotten, crouching off a dirt road that you’d miss unless you knew it was there, situated way back up where the woods gave way to the swamp.

Kudzu was eating the clapboard shell of the church, and what the kudzu didn’t want, the moss gladly took. The congregation had moved on or died off, leaving their snakes behind to repopulate the surrounding woods in peace. It just sat, year after year, forgotten and forgetting.

But the graves were still there. Less than a hundred, and most of them under water, or sunk deep. It was an old burying ground, with wooden markers as well as stone ones. But I could still make out the names well enough, and I set to copying all of them down. By the time the sun started to set, I had all of them that could be had.

The burying ground is gone now. It sank down into the swamp, year by year, and whatever was left of it got washed away for good in the big flood of 2015. But I’ve still got all those names, all copied down in my black book. I might well be the only one who does.

I use them, but only when I need them. There’s power in names, and those names especially, and the right name can sell a story or hook a reader. When I require the services of a special name, a name that needs to be just right, I go to my book. Some names I use more than others, and they form an inadvertent thread through my stories—fictional family lines, scattered across worlds. They’ve got a life, those names in my book.

Sometimes, rarely, I add to the book. When a friend dies. When I meet someone interesting. When I spy a name I just have to have. In my black book they go, more characters waiting to be conjured.

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Darling of Hell

These sinful rites and these her sister’s songs Abhorred Erichtho, fiercest of the race, spurned for their piety, and yet viler art practised in novel form. To her no home beneath a sheltering roof her direful head thus to lay down were crime: deserted tombs her dwelling-place, from which, darling of hell, she dragged the dead. Nor life nor gods forbad but that she knew the secret homes of Styx and learned to hear the whispered voice of ghosts at dread mysterious meetings.

– Lucan, The Pharsalia

Another entry from my commonplace book, this time from Lucan’s Pharsalia (‘The Civil War’), from Book VI, ‘The Flight Near Dyrrhachium. Scaeva’s Exploits. The Witch of Thessalia.’

The eponymous witch, Erichtho, eats corpses, sacrifices babies and forces the dead to speak. The ritual for the latter, in particular, is quite a nasty scene, well worth reading if you’re a fan of cosmic horror.

Interestingly, Thessaly was infamous as a haunt of witches, and such stories have persisted since the Roman period. The Thessalian witches were known for their ability to ‘draw down the moon’, an ability as evocative as it is ill-defined.

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The Other Side of Death

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There’s blood on it again.

– Countess Marya Zaleska

Five years after Universal’s Dracula (1931), and five minutes after Dracula’s on-screen demise, Dracula’s Daughter (1936) arrived to continue her father’s sanguinary spree. But unlike her malevolent sire, Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden) is no self-satisfied monster. Rather, she is an addict, bound by compulsions she cannot control.

Ostensibly based on a deleted chapter from Bram Stoker’s novel, the film bears little resemblance to its source material, or even to the film it is a sequel of. Holden’s Zaleska is distinct from Lugosi’s Dracula – a creature of resigned solemnity rather than arrogant savagery. Dracula wears his damnation like armour. For Zaleska, it is a mourning shroud.

It’s a darker film than its predecessor in many ways. Dracula is a fairy-tale villain, all bombast and power. But Zaleska is something more sinister – and sympathetic.

She is a melancholy figure, filled with a palpable self-loathing that marks her every action, even as she denies her culpability. She is not wicked, not evil; it is Dracula who is evil. Zaleska is but his puppet – a slave to the darkling addiction he has foisted on her. Or so she tells herself.

Though Dracula is reduced to ashes in the film’s opening, he nonetheless still blights Zaleska’s life. Time and again, she pits her will against the demon that drives her. Time and again, she fails, until finally, at the last, she resigns herself to the horror of her own existence – returning to the needle for one last dose. And then another, and another, until the thought of quitting becomes impossible to contemplate.

Zaleska’s addiction is at the heart of the film. Not just addiction to blood, but addiction to despair – to surrender. It is easy to give in to the darkness, to play the music of the night, and stalk…and slay…again and again and again. Easier by far to give in than to resist. Resistance hurts. Resistance costs. Perhaps more than she is prepared to give.

Her struggles are tinged with the hopelessness of one who cannot control themselves – and worse, cannot imagine doing so. As these obstacles prove insurmountable, her despair sharpens, and melancholy turns to malice.

In the end, every choice Countess Marya Zaleska only drives her further into the shadow of Dracula. And having at last lost all hope, she seeks to wrest it from others in their turn, by destroying that which she can never possess.

Like father, like daughter.

She was beautiful when she died, a hundred years ago.

– Professor Van Helsing

Night Battlers

A miscellany of various infernal infants, night battlers and good walkers from my zibaldone.

Cambion. ‘A crooked child’. The offspring of an incubus or a succubus, and a human being – or possibly the child of demons, using the human as a surrogate. Also a term that might refer to a changeling, depending on how you rate de Plancy.

Dhampir. The child of a human and a vampire. Like our friend above, a popular archetypal protagonist of urban fantasy fiction, as dhampirs are said to be able to see invisible vampires and practice sorcery, making them effective vampire hunters.

Krsnik. Speaking of vampire hunters, the Slavic krsnik, is an interesting one. Their soul leaves their body, assuming the shape of a white animal, in order to fight evil. Which is a pretty interesting ability.

Zduhac. Dragon man. Fighter of demons and controller of the weather. Or possibly a crop-thief. Or all of the above. Slightly confusing, but interesting. Why are they called a dragon man? Who knows. Sounds cool, though.

Benandanti. The Good Walkers. Good witches, or possibly werewolves, or something else entirely. Spirit travellers and lucid dreamers. Definitely pick up Carlo Ginzburg’s book, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, which is fascinating, if somewhat dry, reading on the subject. Also read Benito Cereno’s Hector Plasm comics, which are awesome. 

Any one of these entries might provide impetus for a short story or several. Probably why I wrote them all down. I should probably get on that, at some point.

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