The other day I went to a library book sale, and found the giant 1000 something page Jeff and Anna VanderMeer edited compendium The Weird, a close to definitive collection of short stories that are lumped under the umbrella of Weird Fiction. So I decided, as incentive to get me to actually crack open a giant, intimidating collection I decided I would do short little write ups of every story I got to.
I started at the beginning. Strictly speaking, this collection opens with an Excerpt of Alfred Kubin’s only literary work, a novel called The Other Side, translated from German by Mike Mitchell. The excerpt finds us in the city of Pearl, Dreamland, the Dream Realm. Dreamland is falling. Kubin walks us through the fall of the city in a handful of pages. First, the city sleeps. A strange epidemic renders the entire population unconscious for a span of six days. The only person left awake is a mysterious figure called the American. When the sleeping Dreamers awake? The animals are in revolt. The city is overrun by deer, chickens, vicious dogs, crocodiles, ants, rabbits, pangolins, some vicious, the sole named woman in the story is torn apart by a dog, some just…there. And then Dreamland crumbles, cracks appear in structures, art disintegrates, the city itself begins to rot. All through the chaos, the American stalks the city, stoking the chaos.
It’s the business with Patera, the city’s godlike founder, that really captured me. Our narrator curses him, saying he must be powerless or else he would be able to stop the death that comes for the city, that he would be able to stop the American, who is the one who ‘possesses true life (9). And then the narrator finds himself inexorably drawn to a place of worship. And encounters Patera himself. Patera reveals he called them there, and gives a truly terrifying speech beginning with “Can you hear the dead singing, the bright green dead (10)?” When our narrator implores why Patera let this happen he answers only “I am weary 10.)” When our narrator begs his god “Patera, why did you not help (10.)” Patera replies “I did help, and I will help you(10.” And transforms, before the narrator’s eyes, into the apocalyptic figure of the American.
It’s this that makes this story feel like a classic, to me. Yes, the dream-like surrealism shot throughout is enough to make it weird fiction. The intermingling of the domestic and the horrific alone is a genre marker. But this final reveal of a trusted, benevolent god being responsible for all that came before 1: must have felt very fresh in 1908, and 2: clearly is the root of so many other stories in this vein that came after.
Final thoughts: I mean, I liked it, I like surrealism. It makes me excited for this book and this review project. It makes me want to track down the entirety of Kubin’s novel, which is not at the library I currently have access to, so it may take some hunting. I love the idea of dreams as a physical local (The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath has long been one of my favorite Lovecrafts), and watching the city slowly devolve into chaos was fascinating. I don’t think I know enough about turn of the century Austrian politics to really grasp the Meaning of the story, but I appreciate how it firs into the rest of the genre.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 