The Italian Job: rereading Ann Radcliffe's 'The Italian'

Last week’s Gothic Reading Group centred one of Sheffield Gothic’s favourite topic of conversation: Ann Radcliffe. In particular, her last novel The Italian (Okay, yes, it’s technically not her last novel. But let’s not get into Gaston de Blondeville right now, alright?). Our usual starter question- ‘But is it Gothic?’ – hardly seemed relevant, so instead we began by asking ‘Did we all like this novel?’ The answer was unanimously yes. But why?

The Italian was the first Radcliffe novel I ever read... I was just a little fledging Gothicist in the second year of my undergraduate. I’d taken the Gothic module on something of a whim; the subject talk had made it sound both fun and fascinating, and when I realised Northanger Abbey was on the reading list it sealed the deal. Just kidding. I took it because I was 19, literally living and breathing Jane Austen and the tutor had a jacket with patches on the elbows. It was a simpler time. Unsurprisingly, what I knew of the Gothic at that time amounted mostly to what I’d heard from Catherine Morland. I was excited to read this Mrs Radcliffe for the first time, to see what was quite so horrid about these novels. So over the summer I sat down and read the The Italian. And then I wondered if maybe I’d picked the wrong module.

So, Radcliffe and I did not get along at first. It wasn’t that I thought it was bad, or boring. But on that first reading there was, as they say, no spark. I just couldn’t seem to find what was supposed to be so engaging or enthralling, and it certainly didn’t seem ‘scary’. Either I was missing something, or I had become significantly less of on easy scare without realising. (Sadly, this was not the case...much to the amusement of the rest of Sheffield Gothic every time a film session rolls around.) But, a few weeks later, now armed with four lectures worth of context and a working understanding of what the Gothic actually was, I sat down to The Italian and tried again.

 

Virgil's Tomb by Moonlight (1782) by Richard Wright

This is not to say, however, that The Italian is a novel that is only good within context. It is perhaps Radcliffe’s most powerfully and beautifully written work and, thematically at least, her most complex. In our session, we discussed in some depth Radcliffe’s employment of the Sublime and her evocative descriptions of scenery:

‘She approached the windows, and beheld thence an horizon, and a landscape spread below, whose grandeur awakened all her heart. The consciousness of her prison was lost, while her eyes ranged over the wide and freely-sublime scene without. She perceived that this chamber was within a small turret, projecting from an angle of the convent walls, and suspended, as in air, above the vast precipices of granite, that formed part of the mountain. Those precipices were broken into cliffs, which, in some places, impended far above their base, and, in others, rose, in nearly perpendicular lines, to the walls of the monastery, which they supported. Ellena, with a dreadful pleasure, looked down them, shagged as they were with larch, and frequently darkened by lines of gigantic pine bending along the rocky ledges, till her eye rested on thick chestnut woods that extended over their winding base, and which, softening to the plains, seemed to form a gradation between the variegated cultivation there, and the awful wildness of the rocks above.’

-Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, p. 90 (Oxford World Classics, 2008)

It’s hard not to see the power of Radcliffe’s prose in passages such as these, even as an inexperienced undergraduate. But reading Radcliffe in context, informed by the French Revolution, by religion, by politics, by class, by sensibility, by chivalry, by Hurd, by Walpole, by Wollstonecraft, by Burke and, for The Italian, by Lewis? There is, if may I be so bold, nothing quite so engaging or fascinating, and Radcliffe’s engagement with her contemporaries is at its most commanding in The Italian.

It has been a long(er time that than I care to admit) since Radcliffe and I failed to see eye to eye. And the more time passes, the more I find in The Italian. And by more, I don’t necessarily mean more to like. Just more. Each of us at that table have our own specialisms, our own focuses. What was important, was not that each of us liked and enjoyed the novel, but that we each had our own distinctly different reason. Is that a terribly cliché thing of me to say? Probably. Regardless- I’m really glad we’re friends now, Ann.

All hail Queen Ann!

 

Lauren Nixon is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Sheffield studying masculinity and the Gothic. She definitely didn't pick the wrong module when she was 19.

Review: Celluloid Screams 2015

Celluloid Screams returned to the Showroom on October 23rd through the 25th with an eerie ensemble of new and classic horror cinema treats (and tricks) to keep us entertained on these darkening autumn evenings. In the spirit of Halloween, I’ve chosen a couple of highlights to keep the momentum alive as we leave behind the spooky season of October and enter the very real horror of ‘almost Christmas’…




Goodnight Mommy (Dir. Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. Austrian: Ich seh, Ich seh)

Creepy kids be creeping...

Communicating my thoughts on this film was a challenge. Initially, I couldn’t get away from the raw, emotional response that this type of cinema commands, but after taking a few days to mull it over, I arrived at a more objective (I hope) standpoint. ‘Goodnight Mommy’ is a deeply uncomfortable, hard-to-watch film about loss and family trauma that will haunt you for weeks. Without giving too much away, there’s a twist that completely changes the tone of the film. A directional debut from Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, ‘Goodnight Mommy’ is a tense, tragic tale of isolation that veers into torture territory at certain moments. What makes this film so unpalatable (and yet, at the same time, so captivating) is the painfully slow pace: the most unpleasant moments seem drawn out and borderline gratuitous. The visceral gore is, thankfully, designated to just a handful of scenes – but it’s enough. More than enough, perhaps. Some themes and ideas are underdeveloped and there’s a sense that the film could have benefitted from a ‘less is more’ approach, however, its boldness is admirable and I don’t doubt that Franz and Fiala will acquire a cult following after this nasty slice of ultra-modern European Gothic.



The Witch (Dir. Robert Eggers)

The big bad witch

Set in a remote, rural stretch of puritanical New England, The Witch explores themes of isolation, the wilderness and what lurks beyond the ‘civilised’ domestic sphere. Set 70 years before the barbaric Salem Witch Trials, this film anticipates the teeming hysteria and widespread moral panic that would later spread throughout the region in the name of primitive superstition. Interestingly, Eggers doesn’t shy away from supernatural explanations. The plot centres on a character’s coming-of-age in the midst of family bereavement and thickening anxiety. Thomasin, the protagonist, struggles to reconcile her ‘duty’ as a daughter with her desire for freedom – freedom from the restraints of the ultimately patriarchal world of her parents’ faith, which threatens to reduce her to a mere commodity when the crops fail. (It is worth noting that the protagonist’s name is doubly significant: ThomaSIN / THOMASin). The Witch boasts stunning locations that shroud the film in darkness and obscurity. In sharp contrast to the clinical look of Goodnight Mommy, the cinematography only allows a furtive glimpse into what the shadows conceal (and reveal). There are moments of gore here, but overall, The Witch is a spellbinding psychological horror with a powerful message at its heart about the liberation of the self from social, moral and religious power structures.


Carly Stevenson is a postgraduate researcher in the Gothic and Keats at the University of Sheffield. She's always up for a science fiction double feature!

Samhain in the Great South Land

It is commonly believed that the celebration of Halloween is a uniquely American practice, and, in a certain sense, this is true: it is highly unlikely that the celebration, as we know it today, with its canon of costumes, colours, and commercial impact, would have grown to its cultural reach and significance anywhere else.

When we look back from Halloween to All Hallow’s Eve, the Christian holy day from which its name was abbreviated, or further back to Samhain, the Celtic festival of the dead which preceded both, we see a particular kind of migration. On one level there is the literal migration of the Irish across the Atlantic, and on another, there is the cultural migration which brought their Celto-Christian cultural customs along with them. These customs were then fed on American culture, with the conversion of offerings to deceased ancestors to the beginnings of the practice of trick-or-treating, and the later addition of specific monsters brought into society through the screen by Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and others. It is telling that the most iconic of these characters, the Wolfman, Count Dracula, and Frankenstein’s monster, are all also examples of cultural migration, whether from the literature of English and Irish writers or from European folklore, and that the commercialism of these figures through film migrated with the characters into the celebration of Halloween.

Why can’t this mobile and mutable cultural practice travel south? There is a great deal of argument as to its suitability in Australia, much of which is quite justified. Max Fisher suggested that it’s a kind of cultural hangover from the Victorian conservative conditions in which Australia became a nation, which included frowning upon Halloween and other such festivities. He also writes that Halloween is “awfully unseasonal for the South Pacific”. As Jenni Ryall’s article on mashable.com noted, even the pumpkins required for jack o’lanterns would pose a problem. They too are out of season at that time, and frequently the act of “[c]arving an unripe pumpkin can end with a knife wound.” The 31st of October heralds the beginning of spring in the Southern Hemisphere, meaning that the Celts would have celebrated Beltane rather than Samhain at this time if they had happened to have lived in Australia.         

Seasonal scares...

 
Perhaps most of all, the possibility of Halloween fitting into Australian culture is made difficult by the general ambivalence of Australians towards America’s cultural influence upon them. On one hand, it is very much the norm among “true blue” Australians to vehemently deny that American culture appeals to them or has an effect on them. On the other, the filmic diet of most Australians still consists almost entirely of Hollywood films, and Australian actors are often only considered to have made it once they have begun to star in big budget American movies. And they take up American accents in these films – dramatizing a particular variant of the very thing feared in the first place, by choosing to turn themselves into stage Americans rather than forcibly being turned.

There is another way to look at this. If a Celto-Christian festival, which was influenced by the Romans, adopted and altered by the Christians, and looked down upon by the Victorians, can travel across the Atlantic to the United States and have its associated supernatural cast updated according to movie releases and other trends, why can’t it also travel south and have its costume wardrobe adapted once more to new settings? With a wealth of mythological material from the culture of indigenous Australians, the celebration could certainly be developed without necessarily following the well-worn American tracks (despite the willingness of Australian cinema-goers to do so).

 

The Bunyip of Berkeley's Creek (Jenny Wagner and Ron Brooks)

Take the bunyip for example. This monster has played its part in many kinds of tales, from indigenous folk lore to children’s books, and its appearance cannot be narrowed down to one description. Percy Mumbulla describes one such creature being “high in the front and low at the back like a hyena, like a lion. It had a terrible big bull-head and it was milk-white”. The eponymous main character of Jenny Wagner’s classic picture book The Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek spends most of the story asking other animals what bunyips look like, finally finding out that they have tails and fur. These examples show the bunyip to be suitable for Halloween for two additional reasons: the costuming possibilities are quite flexible and the interplay between the monstrous and the childlike or comical in books such as Wagner’s is much the same kind of dynamic as that of modern Halloween itself.

Halloween has shown itself not only to survive significant changes and cultural appropriations but to actually grow through them, becoming the cultural and commercial juggernaut it is today. Even in the Great South Land, where opposition to the festival is still vocal in some quarters, more and more toy and department stores are beginning to bring out Halloween ranges of costumes and other paraphernalia, and more children each year are seen on the streets of Australian suburbs, ready to knock and call "Trick or Treat!" There will be the usual ghouls and witches in Australian suburbia this October the thirty-first - but there's definitely room for some bunyips too.

Further Reading:

Mumbulla, Percy. “The Bunyip”, in K. Gelder (ed.) The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories. Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994. 250-1.

“Why Australians cackle in the face of Halloween”. Jenni Ryall. http://mashable.com/2014/10/30/australia-hates-halloween/#e3qa3W.GnSqz

“How British colonialism determined whether your country celebrates Halloween”. Max Fisher. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/10/31/how-british-colonialism-determined-whether-your-country-celebrates-halloween/

Wagner, Jenny. (story), and Ron Brooks (pictures). The Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek.

Jason Archbold is a Cotutelle PhD candidate at Macquarie University and the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at Justus-Liebig-Universität. His dissertation explores morals and ethics in apocalyptic fictions. When he is not dodging zombies as part of his research, he can be found investigating cultures through cooking or buried in a mass of comic books.

Going 'Over the Garden Wall'

Since we find ourselves once again the greatest season of them all (Autumn, in case you were wondering) and fast approaching that most awesome of holidays (Halloween, obviously) it seems like a good time to talk about a little cartoon called Over the Garden Wall, which first aired on Cartoon Network last November, and released on DVD this September. In my humble opinion, Over the Garden Wall is perfect Autumn viewing: ten episodes of pure, animated, New American Gothic brilliance. OTGW comes from writer Patrick McHale, an Adventure Time alumni behind some of my favourite episodes. Not that I’m biased.

Over the Garden Wall is the tale of half-brothers, Greg and Wirt, who lose their way in the woods and find themselves in a land the show refers to as The Unknown where nothing seems quite right. Over the course of its episodes, they attempt to find their way back home alongside a talking bird called Beatrice and warnings to beware the Beast. Though the premise is hardly original in itself, OTGW treads familiar ground with new and very different feet. Visually, its individuality and attention to detail is extremely engaging and entertaining: Greg wears a teapot on his head, there’s a wolf with LSD eyes and villagers wearing pumpkins. The score and soundtrack are equally excellent- the first episode opens with a frog playing the piano, if that gives you any indication of tone and content:

It’s actually (as I am now discovering after deleting the same paragraph four times) rather hard to describe what’s so wonderful and enthralling about Over the Garden Wall without ruining it. It takes it cues from a number of classic Gothic tropes and conventions- there is the strange small town with their odd Harvest celebration, an aging recluse whose sprawling mansion may be haunted and/or he may descending into madness, and even some instances of demonic possession- the show blends these tropes with humour and twists audience expectations. Like Adventure Time, Stephen Universe, and Bee and Puppycat, OTGW exists in the tradition of a children’s animation at face value, with something much more intricate beneath the surface. I watched the first four episodes swinging between hysterical laughter and goose bumps- the first reveal of the shows shadowy antagonist, the Beast, was probably not the last thing I should have watched before bed. Not that it’s much of an indicator, since I’m a terrible Gothicist and very easily scared.

Originally, I had hoped discuss the way in which the show plays with classic Gothic conventions and audience expectations to create something that is at once an evident product of its genre and something entirely original and unique. But to do that, as I mentioned, I’d have to spoil the show. So I’m going to show some self-restraint and refrain from doing that, and instead use this post as PSA. This autumn, watch Over the Garden Wall. You won’t be disappointed- that’s a rock fact.

Lauren Nixon is a PhD researcher at the University of Sheffield studying gender in the early novel and the Gothic. She loves potatoes and molasses! If you want some - oh just ask us!

Review:'The Spirit of Revision: Lovecraft’s Letters to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop,' edited by Sean Branney & Andrew Leman

There is a common conception of H. P. Lovecraft as the struggling artiste, as an author who refused to compromise his aesthetic vision in furtherance of professional profit. While it is true that Lovecraft did, indeed, consider his work to be on an artistic level far above the majority of work-for-hire pulp authors who published in the same magazines as him, it is also true, though rarely examined, that Lovecraft could be a consummate businessman when the need arose. During the period 1927 to 1936 that need arose regularly, and has been detailed rarely so touchingly as in the remarkable The Spirit of Revision: Lovecraft’s Letters to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop.

There is also a romantic idea, among literary types, of the lost packet of letters discovered against all odds, illuminating the life of one’s chosen author of study. It is this idea that pervades A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession, and it is one of the oldest and most wistful dreams of scholars. For who would not wish to stumble upon a never before seen cache of precious data, and thereby further the common knowledge of our literary ancestors? That the idea is romantic does not mean it is impossible; indeed, it was just such a discovery that allowed the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society to assemble and publish The Spirit of Revision.

In brief, Zealia Bishop, client and correspondent with Lovecraft, squirreled away her collection of letters and manuscripts in a trunk before her death in 1968. That trunk passed down, eventually, to her great-great-nephew, Sean McCall, who kept it until he happened to meet Will Gautney and Mary Sullivan, guests at his home for Thanksgiving. Will’s Cthulhu t-shirt inspired a conversation about the letters, and he and Mary were allowed to examine them. Mary arranged for them to be shown to, and eventually published by, her friends at the HPLHS. Finds of this sort are not only rare, they may be the pinnacle of one’s lifelong interest in Lovecraftian literature.

If the McCall family never has another discovery greater than this, then the letters contained within The Spirit of Revision will be enough. Here we see Lovecraft from many different angles: we see Lovecraft as a professional, attempting to increase the business afforded him through revision work; we see him as a literary mentor, offering pages of advice on what young authors should read and how they should write; we see him as a friend, spending his scarce free time to reach out to Zelia’s son, James, to encourage him in his interests; and we see Lovecraft’s prejudice, too, speaking proudly of fascism and condemning bookstores who have Jewish owners. The fact of the matter is that Lovecraft, like most people, cannot be reduced down to one or two clearly defined facets of personality. He was complex as well as troubling, and always overwhelmingly generous, kind, and erudite.

The Spirit of Revision is remarkable, then, for showing us as many different facets of Lovecraft as possible, all in a slim, 190-page volume. We have seen Lovecraft’s philosophy and political thought in A Means to Freedom, his letters to Robert E. Howard, and his attitudes towards professional life versus aestheticism in Essential Solitude, his letters to August Derleth. Of the roughly 100,000 letters that Lovecraft wrote in his lifetime, roughly 13,000 or so survive (the number is contested), and only a handful have been published since Arkham House first began publishing the Selected Letters in 1964. How lucky we are, then, that The Spirit of Revision was not only swiftly brought to press, but also done so with a fine editorial hand, eschewing expurgation entirely.

The Lovecraft represented in these letters, the quality of the whole person that I think they show, is similar to the presentation of Lovecraft in O Fortunate Floridian, his letters to R. H. Barlow, and Lovecraft at Last, his letters to Willis Conover, and this volume deserves to stand with those greats. Lovecraft’s epistolary habits lend themselves to verbosity, and the HPLHS have made every attempt to augment his already impressive letters with samples of historical documents relevant to his subjects. Here are pamphlets for the Endless Caverns, next to the letter in which Lovecraft charmingly relays his visit during an antiquarian tour. Here are postcards of areas in Flatbush where Lovecraft lived part time during his estrangement from his wife. And here are recreations of newspapers, detailing the New England floods that helped inspire Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”.

It may be that Lovecraft will, eventually, be better remembered for his epistolary efforts than for his fiction, as S. T. Joshi has asserted. If that is the case, then we will have to hope for more packets of letters, left neglected for decades in trunks, drawers, and closets, until fortune delivers them to the hands of those who recognize them for what they are. If, instead, we have found all that there is to find, then we must be satisfied with the collections that we already have, and attempt to come to know the mind of the greatest author of fantastic literature in the Twentieth Century from the patchwork remainders. No matter the case, however, we should applaud those, such as Sean Branney and Andrew Leman, who edited The Spirit of Revision, who have worked to ensure that what we do have is given to us in remarkable, memorable, and important volumes like this.

The Spirit of Revision: Lovecraft’s Letters to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop was published in 2015, and is available for purchase from the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society (http://store.cthulhulives.org) for $22.50 USD. Although books have not, as of yet, been a mainstay of the HPLHS métier, this is a fine first entry into a publishing venture. The Spirit of Revision is highly recommended for scholars and fans alike; here we have voices from the past, speaking softly of daily lives long gone, and we should listen. Both to Lovecraft, of course, and through him, his compatriot, the impressive Mrs. Bishop.

Dr. Géza A. G. Reilly has been an avid reader and collector of all things Lovecraftian since he was too young to know better.  Géza received his doctorate in English literature in 2015 and is, to his knowledge, the only scholar of weird fiction ever produced by the University of Manitoba.  An expatriate Canadian, he currently lives in Tampa, Florida with his wife, Andrea, and their cat Mim.

Review: Crimson Peak (dir. Guillermo Del Toro)

Ghosts, family secrets, madness, an inquisitive heroine, a disintegrating country seat complete with imposing architecture, fading aristocracy, monstrous machines, glorious costumes, bad weather and HUNDREDS of giant moths – there probably hasn’t been a more self-consciously Gothic film in years. As Mark Kermode points out in his review, Crimson Peak is steeped in the tradition of terror, and Del Toro subverts the Gothic genre even as he luxuriates in its excess.

Part of the Mondo poster, unveiled at Comic Con

The cinematography is superb. Sumptuous imagery of fragile, fluttering moths and butterflies exaggerate the stifling sense of death and decay that hangs in the atmosphere at Allerdale Hall like the thick, English fog that enshrouds it. Spirits dissolve into the air like plumes of smoke, leaving behind an effervescent trace, bound to a particular place or emotion. Haunted topography is central to the conceptualisation of spirits in this film: ghosts function allegorically throughout, as emblems of memory and trauma. They are, as the protagonist Edith explains, 'metaphors for the past'.

The plot adheres fairly closely to the standard Gothic formula: a young woman falls for a charming, mysterious Baronet, regardless of her father’s disapproval and an obscure, prophetic warning from beyond the grave ('Beware of Crimson Peak!'). The American heroine is whisked away to a remote corner of the Lake District to live in her new husband’s crumbling mansion. Enter creepy sister-in-law, who keeps insisting on making endless pots of questionable-tasting tea, because that’s just what British people do when things feel awkward. Several horrifying apparitions later, Edith decides to investigate the forbidden parts of the house and, predictably, she uncovers a few skeletons in the family closet.

Lady Lucille Sharpe: part Mrs. Dancers, part Bertha Mason. Proud owner of the ultimate 'resting bitch face'

There are shades of Walpole, Radcliffe, Poe and the Brontes here, but also a nod towards more contemporary Gothic texts, such as Virginia Andrews's claustrophobic Flowers in the Attic. Even the protagonist's name, Edith Cushing, may be a subtle reference to the late and great legend of Hammer Horror, Sir Peter Cushing. Perhaps that's a bit of a stretch, but this is a Gothic film by a director who knows his Gothic, so there are surely no coincidences!

Crucially, Edith is not your average Gothic heroine. She may look like a classically Radcliffian damsel with her flowing locks and fluttering nightdress, but Del Toro wastes no time in demonstrating that she is anything but an archetype. An aspiring novelist, Edith is denied the right to be taken seriously as a female writer in the late-Victorian publishing industry. When compared to ‘spinster’ Jane Austen by an odious socialite, Edith remarks: ‘Actually, I’d rather be Mary Shelley. She died a widow’, which highlights Del Toro’s absolute engagement with the Gothic tradition. Furthermore, she takes great pains to dissociate herself from perceived sentimentality, resolving to type out her manuscript on her father's typewriter, lest her handwriting prove ‘too feminine’ in the eyes of her critics.

Speaking of eyes, there is a recurring motif of seeing and not seeing in Crimson Peak: things that lurk just out of sight, waiting to appear ‘when the time is right’. Early photography is introduced at various moments in the narrative to remind us that we are never seeing the full picture. A still image of the past does not tell the full story, but a gramophone might...

Like all gifted filmmakers, Del Toro understands the pivotal role of sound in the art of instilling fear. Allerdale Hall seems to come alive with an eerie orchestra of sounds, some human, some less so: rustling moth wings, violent gusts of wind, mournful piano rhymes, clanging water pipes, the whir of industrial machinery, creaks and groans as the house sinks deeper into the ‘Profondo Rosso’ clay (hence the title of the film) - all of these amalgamate to form a cacophony of noise that accompanies Fernando Velazquez's haunting, wistful score.

Like the blood-red earth that seeps through the floorboards of the Sharpe household (themes of nature reclaiming space and the dissolution of aristocracy) Crimson Peak leaves behind a vivid stain that will haunt your thoughts long after the credits roll. This film sees Del Toro making a triumphant return to what he does best and the handful critics who complained about the lack of ‘scare factor’ have clearly missed the point. As Edith suggests at the very beginning: it is not a ghost story, but a story with ghosts in it. Crimson Peak is not a straightforward horror movie, but rather a collage of familiar Gothic motifs with added depth and modernity. A decade after his critically-acclaimed fairy-tale Pan’s Labyrinth, Del Toro presents another masterclass in Gothic cinema that is enchanting and disturbing in equal measure. And if this doesn’t convince you to see Crimson Peak immediately, then this picture certainly will:

YES!!! ALL THE YES!!!

Carly Stevenson is a PhD researcher studying Gothic literature and poetry at the University of Sheffield. She is currently wandering around a haunted mansion looking for ghosts and/or Tom Hiddleston...

Review: 'The Starry Wisdom Library: The Catalogue of the Greatest Occult Book Auction of All Time' by Nate Pedersen (Editor)

It has always been in the nature of weird fiction (whether we are discussing historical weird fiction, the Lovecraft Mythos, or the Cthulhu Mythos) to treat texts as containers of semantic meaning. That is, texts (usually old, moldering manuscripts written by devotees of forgotten titans) are considered to possess an ontological relationship with the world around them – they both describe things-as-they-are and are those things-as-they-are at the same time, with no necessary distance between “existence” and “sign.” This tradition has persisted over the decades since Robert W. Chambers created the decadent play The King in Yellow and H. P. Lovecraft (however unknowingly) followed up with the awful demonology The Necronomicon. Recently, certain scholars have argued that we should accept the possibility that the dread tomes of weird fiction are not, in fact, containers of semantic meaning, and that there is every possibility that The Necronomicon et al. are incorrect or ill-informed. However, the myth of the malicious manuscript still persists in the fiction – often to our great delight.

It is with that sense of delight that we should receive The Starry Wisdom Library: The Catalogue of the Greatest Occult Book Auction of All Time (PS Publishing, 2014), which is perhaps the most unusual anthology of weird fiction I have ever come across. According to the introduction by S. T. Joshi (here represented as a librarian from Miskatonic University), the book is a recently discovered artifact of the Church of Starry Wisdom (created by Lovecraft and used in his 1935 “The Haunter of the Dark”). As the subtitle suggests, the book purports to be the catalogue of an auction organized by the firm of Pent & Serenade in 1877 – the year of the Church’s disbanding. Each section of the anthology maintains that conceit by presenting the catalogue entry for a specific text (such The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, Thaumaturgical Prodigies in the New English Canaan, or The Necronomicon itself), separated into bibliographic specifics (written for each by Jonathan Kearns) and a vignette of the history of the text in question (written in a scholarly manner by that entry’s author).

Naturally, the entries within The Starry Wisdom Library are pure fiction, but their success at presenting as close to a real-world catalogue as possible renders it understandable why a casual reader might mistake them for the actual thing. This is not the first volume to make an attempt at a realistic portrayal of such a catalogue – Joan C. Stanley’s Ex Libris Miskatonici has been well reviewed, but is now a collector’s item – but it is perhaps the most extensive at its deception. It is interesting to note that the various authors do not all approach their subjects in the same manner. Although many (apparently) buy into the conceit that the texts up for their review are containers of semantic meaning, and therefore dangerous to their readers, others take radically new approaches to the concept of the forbidden tome. Nick Mamatas’ entry, for example, brilliantly rejects any reading of The Black Book of the Skull that hinges on the text having a metaphysical or supernatural truth inspiring its writing. This variety in composition compensates for the uniformity of presentation, although it must be said that the presentation will cause many reader’s eyes to glaze over after a prolonged reading session.

Who you gonna call?

A word needs to be said about the physical makeup of The Starry Wisdom Library, which adds a substantial amount to the verisimilitude of the text. An incredible amount of detail was paid to the design of this slim, 176 page volume, which was done by Andrew Leman and complemented with six internal prints by Liv Rainey-Smith. Everything from the language used, to the font deployed, to mock “Conditions of Sale” and “Bid Sheet” auction pages, to the summaries of lots and contributors’ careers, goes towards the convincing aspect of the whole. Not only is the physical makeup realistic, it is also handsome; available in hardcover for £20 directly from PS Publishing ($35 USD on Amazon), The Starry Wisdom Library is cleanly bound, with an attractive dustcover and beautiful faux-marble endpapers. This is one of the most beautifully designed weird fiction anthologies I have ever encountered, and Leman’s work makes the whole a treat to read above and beyond the quality of the contributors’ writing.

Anyone familiar with any of the various strands of weird fiction should be familiar with the trope of the forbidden tome. “Books can be harmful,” the trope tells us, and furthermore, “books are true things.” The Starry Wisdom Library is not true, it is certain, but it points us towards the tragedy of the nature of signs, and argues for a deeper horror than some of the more tired clichés of the Cthulhu Mythos: that there is no understanding anywhere, nor is any possible. The fictitiousness of The Starry Wisdom Library reminds us that the texts within, and thus their status as containers of semantic meaning, are impossibilities. Signs can only refer to other signs (or so the theory goes), and not to an external world. The grimoires, demonologies, philosophic treatises, and holy texts in The Starry Wisdom Library cannot, therefore, point towards anything “real.” They can only remind us that if texts could, we might be unmade by our own acts of reading.

The Starry Wisdom Library is currently available, and has seemingly made shockingly little impact. It deserves to make much more, however, and I heartily encourage bibliophiles, scholars, role-playing game aficionados, and fans of weird fiction to consider ordering a copy. I suspect that an anthology of this kind will not come around again for some time, and even if it does I cannot imagine that it will have the same attention to detail, excellent design, and overall love of subject matter that this one does. Without a doubt, The Starry Wisdom Library will come to be a centerpiece of many a collection, and I would not be surprised to find it listed as a collector’s item in just a few short years.


Dr. Géza A. G. Reilly has been an avid reader and collector of all things Lovecraftian since he was too young to know better.  Géza received his doctorate in English literature in 2015 and is, to his knowledge, the only scholar of weird fiction ever produced by the University of Manitoba.  An expatriate Canadian, he currently lives in Tampa, Florida with his wife, Andrea, and their cat Mim.