Glossary writers need to tune in to the Weird
On lacking the words to illuminate William Sloane's "To Walk the Night" (1937)
What terms we define and where we define them are curious questions for me. When writing about Weird fiction, I often reach for literary dictionaries to find the right words. And too often, the terms I seek are not defined, or are only partially defined within a broader, too loosely defined concept.
The problem arose when I read William Sloane’s To Walk the Night (1937), one of two tales of cosmic horror published in the New York Review Books reissue of Sloane’s work, The Rim of Morning (2015). (It also includes 1939’s The Edge of Running Water.)
To Walk the Night is a wondrous mashup of two character types from two 20th-century genres: the “stranger in a strange land” from sci-fi horror and the femme fatale from the detective mystery. The novel tells the story of Selena, a captivating woman who walks into the lives of mostly motherless men — a brilliant scientist, his lovesick protege, a jealous friend, and a concerned father — and wreaks all kinds of cosmic havoc. Where did she come from, or perhaps more importantly, from when? How does she know the brilliant things she knows? Is her name her real one? Why is she so distant? And … is she from around here, in the grandest possible sense?
Selena’s presence is defined by an impenetrable strangeness. None of the men she encounters in the story, despite their best efforts, is able to know her. Explain her. And, therefore, contain her. By whatever means they attempt to limit who she is — by describing her beauty, by wondering about her intelligence, by probing her past, or by desperately trying to figure out why she just, one day, appeared from nowhere — Selena escapes until they all arrive at an endpoint where the feeling of fear seems insurmountable. Selena, by persistently evading everyone’s understanding, represents an unwelcome invasion into our minds. Reaching the final page of To Walk the Night constitutes a much-needed emotional reprieve.
Even as I read the paragraph above, I’m not quite sure what I’m trying to say. The best explanation for what Selena represents is provided in the novel by one of the men she is destroying: “Layer after layer of cold and blackness was piling up above me and the fright of death itself was pounding in my pulse. Fear like that, real fear, is a real invasion. A physical thing full of ice and death that enters into every fiber of the body and possesses the mind.”
That’s what it feels like to experience To Walk the Night. Is that “cosmic terror?” If so, why don’t we have a formal definition for it? It seems like a big, important concept.
When I reached for my glossaries and dictionaries, I was disappointed. My three go-to, admittedly cannon-focused sources— Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms (Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray), A Glossary of Literary Terms (M.H. Abrams), and Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Chris Baldick)— don’t have stand-alone definitions for “cosmic” or “terror.” They don’t even have entries on Weird fiction (presumably because the genre is not literary enough).
The closest definition I found for terror was in Oxford Dictionary’s entry on the “horror story”:
“Since the late 18th century, before which there were no horror stories in the modern sense, a distinction has been recognized between stories of this kind that rely on physical horror and ‘tales of terror’ that inspire a more psychological apprehension and suspense, although in practice the boundaries have proved hard to draw. In general, the tale of terror is devoted to the evocation of the ghostly or supernatural (see GHOST STORY, FANTASTIC), while the horror story focuses on the violation of physical taboos.”
Following these words, we are invited to think about “marvelous tales” and “the uncanny.” I was pleased to be pushed along these trails of inquiry by Oxford Dictionary, but as a devotee of the Weird, I didn’t find anything particularly Weird about the definitions I later found. I also was dismayed to observe that each of these glossaries devoted a lot of space to defining other important sensations we encounter while reading: “Sublime,” “fancy,” “the fantastic,” etc.
Why are the feelings of encountering a cosmic horror or psychological terror — which are defining qualities of many Weird and no-so-Weird stories of the 20th and 21st centuries— not glossary worthy?
Is that feeling of being overcome by a cold, invasive, inscrutable fear — something that is important to Sloane and also many of the good writers and directors of our time — still too new? Is fear just a bunch of nothing?
To put it more provocatively, are we still too chicken to really understand H.P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, and their lesser-known ilk like William Sloane?
Maybe I need better glossaries, but I sense a gap in our literary will to define and know.
Books like To Walk the Night, at least to me, are central to a broader understanding of literature because they brave the ineffable. Confusion about who we are, what time is, and our place within time, space, and being — outside of the realms of classic philosophy and organized religion — are very much part of our zeitgeist. We should pay more attention to writers who boldly go where many haven’t thought to go.
Sloane conjures up a story that questions our knowledge of the boundaries of humanity, personality, science, and time itself during a science-fueled era when some pretty big intelligences are very much starting to figure this stuff out. Thus, Sloane seems important to me.
Furthermore, the stories of Weird writers — from the 1930s through the 2020s — are exploring the meanings of new discoveries and often venturing forward. This kind of impulse, writing beyond the edge of what we know, so much a quality of the Weird, is endlessly fascinating to me.
So when it comes to the enduring value of To Walk the Night, Weird fiction, and how these stories continue make us feel — surprised, fearful, terrorized, or cosmically connected to something horrible — I think glossary writers have more work to do.
Or, as I confessed, perhaps I need better glossaries. Recommendations are welcome.
Missed your posts!!! I love weird fiction and I love your reviews. Adding this book to my TBR list and moving it to the top bc it sounds fascinating. I always appreciate your obscure recs.
This was beautiful:
“Books like To Walk the Night, at least to me, are central to a broader understanding of literature because they brave the ineffable. Confusion about who we are, what time is, and our place within time, space, and being — outside of the realms of classic philosophy and organized religion — are very much part of our zeitgeist. We should pay more attention to writers who boldly go where many haven’t thought to go.”