Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between IV: Detecting the World-Without-Us – Rafe McGregor

 

The fourth of six blog posts exploring the literary and philosophical significance of the weird tale, the occult detective story, and the ecological weird. The series suggests that the three genres of weird fiction dramatize humanity’s cognitive and evolutionary insignificance by first exploring the limitations of language, then the inaccessibility of the world, and finally the alienation within ourselves. This post introduces the world-without-us.

 

Search and Solve

In part III, I defined occult detective fiction as subgenre of weird fiction and suggested that the easiest way to understand it was as stories that place a detective character in a supernatural setting. The detective can be identical to a crime fiction detective, such as Detective John Hobbes (played by Denzel Washington) in Gregory Hoblit’s Fallen, or a crime fiction detective with esoteric knowledge, heightened sensitivity to the supernatural, or both, such as Sarah Monette’s (b.1974 and also writes under the penname Katherine Addison, pictured) Kyle Murchison Booth. The detective may have some supernatural powers himself, such as Mike Carey’s Felix Castor, or be a supernatural being, such as Cassandra Khaw’s John Persons. The setting can similarly be almost – but never actually – identical to the real world, as in Mark Valentine and John Howard’s Connoisseur, or one in which the illusion of the everyday conceals a supernatural reality, as in ABC and Showtime’s Twin Peaks (1990-2017). Alternatively, the setting can be one in which the supernatural is a ubiquitous to the real world, as in David Tallerman’s Detective Fièvre, or a different world entirely, itself a speculative fiction, as in Simon Kurt Unsworth’s Hell in his Thomas Fool series. The combination of a more or less realistic detective with a less or more supernatural setting provides the subgenre with its great variety, from Kat Richardson’s Greywalker (2006-2022) to the Millers’ Philosopher Rex (2010) to Fox’s Sleepy Hollow (2013-2017) to Brian Taylor’s Hellboy: The Crooked Man (2024). Regardless of the variations in detective protagonist and occult world employed by authors, studios, and directors, occult detective stories usually follow the plot structure associated with detective fiction, which involves that protagonist either searching for a murderer or searching for a missing person (one of the reasons Monette’s Kyle Murchison Booth stories are so striking is that she rarely deploys either).

In explaining the difficulty of creating compelling occult detective fiction in part III, I noted that detective fiction stages the tension between the sequence of events that underpin the narrative and the story that we read or watch. Cultural critic Fredric Jameson (b.1934) takes this tension further, describing the structure of detective stories in terms of two complementary formal devices: the first, which he refers to as temporal or objective, is the solution to the murder or disappearance; the second, which he refers to as spatial or subjective, is the search itself. For Jameson, the search is more significant than the solution and is the focal point for authors because they need to delay the solution as long as plausibly possible (otherwise all murder mysteries would be short stories or television episodes). In combining sequence of events and story, solution and search, the creators of occult detective fiction have a little more flexibility than their crime fiction counterparts and the protagonist-driven-plot can take one of three forms. Detectives are standardly employed to investigate someone else, which is also true of occult detectives. In Paul Crilley’s Poison City (2016), for example, Lieutenant Gideon Tau of the South African Police Service’s Delphic Division is called to investigate the murder of a ramanga, a low-level vampire. The first variation is two detectives investigating one another, which is not necessarily restricted to the work of the occult detective, but easier to achieve with an occult element. In the first season of Amazon Prime Video’s Carnival Row (2019), Inspector Rycroft Philostrate (played by Orlando Bloom) and Piety Breakspear (played by Indira Varma), the Chancellor’s wife, investigate a murder and missing person’s case respectively. Unbeknown to one another, Breakspear is the murderer Philostrate is seeking and Philostrate the missing person Breakspear is seeking (‘missing’ because of his identity as the Chancellor’s natural son). The second variation is the detective investigating herself, a paradox which is almost impossible to represent without an occult element. Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (1987) is a rare and rich success: private investigator Harry Angel (played by Mickey Rourke) is hired to find a missing person, only to discover that he himself is that person (though the plot is considerably more complex, the starting point is that Angel has amnesia following a war injury).

Horror of Philosophy

If the occult detective story stages a series of tensions – rationality and extra rationality, sequence and story, solution and search – but is also, in virtue of being first and foremost a weird tale, essentially rather than accidentally philosophical, the obvious question is the purpose to which all of these carefully curated tensions are put. My definition of weird fiction in part II and, by extension, of occult detective fiction in part III, was that it typically foregrounds the difference between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is. Occult detective fiction explores this difference in its search and grapples with what philosopher Eugene Thacker (year of birth unavailable, but appointed to his first academic position in 2000, pictured) calls the world-without-us in the Horror of Philosophy, a trilogy of short nonfiction. His overarching aim is to first introduce the concept of the world-without-us and then demonstrate that supernatural horror is better equipped to explore that concept than traditional philosophy. As such, In the Dust of This Planet (2011) is primarily focused on conceptualising the world-without-us, which is an articulation of human limitations and contrasted with two related concepts, the world-for-us and the world-in-itself. Starry Speculative Corpse (2014) focuses on reading works of philosophy as if they were horror fiction, which reveals philosophy as a self-defeating activity, undermining its own foundations and paralysing its own thinking. Tentacles Longer Than Night (2015) reverses direction, focusing on reading horror fiction as if it was philosophy. Thacker refines his concern with supernatural horror to the cosmic horror that H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937, pictured) popularised, analysing his apparent futilitarianism to identify the indifferentism at the core of his weird tales. Indifferentism provides the best possible approximation and appropriation of the world-without-us and horror thus succeeds where philosophy fails.

The best way to approach the world-without-us, which will also be of use in explaining Jacques Lacan’s metapsychology in part VI, is to start with philosopher Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) transcendental idealism. Kant differentiates between appearances on the one hand and things in themselves on the other. Appearances constitute subjective reality (the reality of the perceiver) and things in themselves objective reality. Transcendental idealism is an epistemological position maintaining that humans only ever gain access to the phenomenal world of appearances (the world of human experience) and that the noumenal world (the world as it is) remains necessarily inaccessible. What is important to recognise is that Kant’s epistemology is neither pessimistic nor nihilistic. The technological advances made by humanity evince a significant overlap between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds (much like that mentioned in part II), but no scientist (or priest or artist) can make a claim to truth beyond the phenomenal. Thacker begins with the world-for-us, abbreviated to World, which is ‘the world that we, as human beings, interpret and give meaning to, the world that we relate to or feel alienated from, the world that we are at once a part of and that is also separate from the human.’ When the World ‘resists, or ignores our attempts to mold it into the world-for-us’, we conceive of it as the world-in-itself or Earth and the parallels between World and phenomena and Earth and noumena are obvious. Like noumena, Earth is a paradoxical concept – because as soon as we conceptualise it, we transform it into the world-for-us.

 

World, Earth, and Planet

Thacker’s third and most significant concept is the world-without-us, or Planet, an attempt to articulate human limitations while avoiding the paradox of trying to comprehend the Earth from a human perspective (and thus transforming it into World). He describes it as ‘the subtraction of the human from the world.’ The Planet and the Earth are both inaccessible to humanity, but where the Earth coexists with the World, the Planet does not. Thacker’s idea is that the Planet is a way of conceiving of the Earth without collapsing it into the World. What Thacker is not doing is extending Kant’s epistemology from two parts to three, from phenomena and noumena to World, Earth, and Planet. He is, rather, replacing the original dichotomy with a novel one, World and Planet. The Planet is a negative concept – the subtraction of the human – and will remain after the human, although it has also preceded and been contemporaneous to and with the human. In the Anthropocene, the age of humanity, the Planet is a more useful concept than noumena and Thacker describes his taxonomy as conceptualising humanity’s home in an era where global climate change has raised the possibility of our extinction. The overarching thesis of his trilogy is that horror fiction (and weird fiction in particular) provides the best exploration of the world-without-us (or at least a much better one than philosophy does).

Drawing on the work of philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976, mentioned in part I in connection with the unhomely), Jameson regards the tension between the solution and the search in detective fiction as staging, enacting, or dramatizing the rift between World and Earth (Thacker’s terminology is a development of Heidegger’s). I think a good way of understanding the philosophical element of occult detective fiction is as staging, enacting, or dramatizing of the rift between World and Planet. In one sense this is problematic because Thacker’s whole effort in replacing noumena with Planet is directed at articulating the fact that the latter cannot co-exist with the World and can never be apprehended or appropriated by humanity – whether by science, religion, philosophy, or art. On the other hand, approaching occult detective fiction in this way draws attention to its own limits, to the essential incompatibility of the detective as the instrument of reason and the supernatural as defiant of reason. The World does not, in Heidegger’s terms, ground itself on the Planet nor does the Planet jut through the World. Planet is a thingness of things (noumena) that resists assimilation, remains opaque, and can only be grasped as an absence of World. As opposed to the relation between World and Earth, the absence of a relation between World and Planet means that the glimpse of irreconcilability is a glimpse of nothingness, subtraction, and absence. It is this glimpse – of what is essentially rather than accidentally unknown – that fuels a fear more compelling than frightening objects, as Lovecraft was well aware, opening his tour de force, Supernatural Horror in Literature (first published in The Recluse in 1927) with: ‘The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.’

 

Recommended Reading & Viewing

Fiction

Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom, Tor.com (2016).

Carnival Row, Season 1, Amazon Prime Video (2019).

Angel Heart, directed by Alan Parker, Tri-Star Pictures (1987).

Nonfiction

Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of this Planet, Zer0 Books (2011).

Rafe McGregor, The Complex Art of Murder, Journal of Aesthetic Education (2022).

Robert H. Waugh, Lovecraft’s Rats and Doyle’s Hound: A Study in Reason and Madness, Lovecraft Annual 7 (2013).

Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar (Tachyon Publications) | review by Stephen Theaker

This review originally appeared in Interzone #278 (November–December 2018).

Lior Tirosh, an author of pulp detective novels, leaves Berlin and travels home, where he grew up with a famous, militaristic father. His niece has gone missing: she’s a student who was investigating the construction of a great wall around the nation. Home for Tirosh is Palestina, a Jewish homeland established near Uganda, on land offered by the British. In our world, this offer was turned down in the 1900s; in this world, it was accepted, and so the Jews escaped the Holocaust. But this is not a utopia, and a familiar problem remains: how to handle the claims of others to the same land, and maintain security, when the surrounding territory was long since relinquished by the British.

Try the New Candy by Aron Beauregard (Maggot Press) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Exceptional entertainer assembles grab bag of depravity and butchery that leaves a few minor cavities.

In Aron Beauregard’s “Still Under Construction”, newlyweds with a “ghoulish curiosity” visit The Museum of Death where they encounter repulsed spectators fleeing a theatre showing gruesome footage. Like the strange (and potentially dangerous) proprietor who runs the ghastly museum, Beauregard challenges readers of Try the New Candy to witness his repugnant subject matter without turning away. 

Although this gore-spattered short story collection from one of the hottest names in splatterpunk bursts with innovative concepts, it suffers from mistakes (particularly in the use of commas), strange point of view shifts, and an overreliance on narrative summary. Moreover, Beauregard’s choice of language can be jarring. It seems strange, for instance, that a non-intrusive omniscient narrator would use the word “asshole” to describe that body part. 

However, except for one story involving a debaucherous night club (an oversaturated topic in this subgenre), I found the collection disturbingly entertaining. The material, filled with bleakness and characters both engaging and unlikable, is so enthralling that the above shortcomings fade into the background. The collection shows that there’s a fate far worse than freezing to death in a broken-down car and that we should be cautious about what we download from the internet.

Gore extravaganza “House Sitting with Dad” drills its way into the reader’s mind. The sadistic adolescent protagonist and his drug-addled, chauvinistic father watch a house for the latter’s friend Joyce. The duo soon discovers Joyce is collecting something much less innocuous than dolls. Part of the story’s appeal is the way the first-person narrator nonchalantly describes the extreme violence he enacts on victims for no other purpose than sexual gratification. 

In the titular story, protagonist Stanley is shy and oafish yet dependable to a fault. His overbearing boss Red tells Stanley he will eventually transfer his business to him, but then seductress Candy enters the picture. What happens when lust triumphs over loyalty? Carnage.  

“The Donor” is an ultraviolent piece about a woman who gets artificially inseminated. The supposed father mutilates her, and the baby grows up to be a disabled and hideous man-child. 

The collection even has two tamer stories. “Five O’clock Shadow” is a touching tale about friendship and belonging in which a barber shop regular finally decides to get his beard shaved. In “More Than a Feeling”, a beloved aunt with a special ability senses something negative about a partygoer’s glove. Nevertheless, when one buys a Cannibal Corpse album, that individual probably isn’t looking for ballads.  

The candy sits in your lap, and the show is about to start. Is there a point at which you’re willing to stop? If not, you may end up in boiling water. Douglas J. Ogurek ****

The Invisible Man | review by Stephen Theaker

This review was originally written in March 2020 for a previous iteration of the British Fantasy Society website. See also Douglas Ogurek's previous review of this film for TQF.

It was not so very long ago that many boys and men, when asked to choose a superpower, would without any hint of shame pick invisibility, with the express purpose of denying women and girls the right to privacy and dignity. The last big adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel, Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man in 2000, leant heavily into this aspect, Kevin Bacon playing a voyeur and a rapist.

This time the invisible man is not naked as he goes about his business and he is not, so far as we can tell, a voyeur. He doesn't sexually assault his victim in the course of the film, though it's established that he has in the past. This is instead a story about coercive control, illustrating how women trapped in such abusive relationships can be driven to actions that seem utterly irrational to society at large.

Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between III: The Occult Detective Story – Rafe McGregor

The third of six blog posts exploring the literary and philosophical significance of the weird tale, the occult detective story, and the ecological weird. The series suggests that the three genres of weird fiction dramatize humanity’s cognitive and evolutionary insignificance by first exploring the limitations of language, then the inaccessibility of the world, and finally the alienation within ourselves. This post introduces the occult detective story.

 

Ghosts and Detectives

In the late nineteenth century, magazine contributors on both sides of the Atlantic began to explore ways in which the relatively new and incredibly popular figure of the private detective could be merged with the much older but still entertaining milieu of the ghost story. One of the progenitors of this exploration was Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), with Dr Martin Hesselius in In a Glass Darkly (1872). The combination of detective protagonist and ghostly setting saw the initial blossoming of a subgenre of ghost-finders, paranormal physicians, and occult psychologists, with notable contributions by: Arthur Machen (1863-1947), with Mr Dyson in ‘The Inmost Light’ (published as The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light in  1894); Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith (1844-1914, writing under the penname L.T. Meade) and Eustace Robert Barton (1869-1943, writing under the penname Robert Eustace),  with John Bell in The Master of Mysteries (1898); Kate O’Brien Ryall Prichard (1851-1935, writing under the penname E. Heron) and Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard (1876-1922, writing under the penname H. Heron), with Flaxman Low in ‘The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith’ (published in Pearson’s Magazine in 1898); Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951), with Dr John Silence in John Silence (1908); William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918, pictured), with Thomas Carnacki in ‘The Gateway of the Monster’ (published in The Idler in 1910); and Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), with Simon Iff in ‘Big Game’ (published in The International in 1917). The first woman occult detective was probably Ella Mary Scrymsour-Nichol’s (1888-1962, writing as Ella Scrymsour) Sheila Crerar, whose adventures began with ‘The Eyes of Doom’ (published in The Blue Magazine in 1920). The most striking feature of this list is the overlap with the canon of weird fiction. Le Fanu was a precursor to both genres and many of H.P. Lovecraft’s (1890-1937) best-known stories could be described as occult detective fiction (although his protagonists rarely survive sufficiently unscathed for further investigations). Of the five authors I identified as canonical in part I, this leaves only Edward Plunkett (1878-1957, writing under his aristocratic title Lord Dunsany), but several of his Jorkens short stories (the first collection of which, The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens, was published in 1931) combine mystery with fantasy.

The occult detective became a staple of the cheaper weekly and monthly magazines of the Golden Age of the pulp era, particularly Cassell’s Magazine and Weird Tales. As that era came to an end interest in the subgenre waned, being sustained through the nineteen fifties, sixties, and seventies by three main sources: Dennis Wheatley’s (1897-1977) series of eleven novels featuring the Duke De Richleau (published from 1933 to 1970 and including The Devil Rides Out in 1934); the dogged persistence of short story writers such as Seabury Quinn (1889-1969), whose Jules de Grandin appeared in Weird Tales from 1925 (‘The Horror on the Links’) to 1951 (‘The Ring of Bastet’) and were frequently reprinted and collected during the sixties and seventies; and the successful migration from short story to small screen evinced by the popularity of BBC1’s Adam Adamant Lives! (1966-1967), ITV’s Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969-1971), and ABC’s Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-1975). The revival of interest in the occult detective at the end of the twentieth century was heavily influenced by migration to another medium, the graphic novel, specifically the Hellblazer and Hellboy comic series, the first created by Jamie Delano and featuring John Constantine (which began in 1988, pictured) and the second created by Mike Mignola and featuring the eponymous half-demon investigator (which began in 1994). The last decade of the twentieth century saw the subgenre regain some of its mainstream appeal, appearing in novels, television series, and feature films. The most commercially successful of these are likely: Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake (the series subtitled Vampire Hunter, with thirty novels 1993-2023); the CW’s Supernatural (fifteen seasons 2005-2019); and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999). 

Character and Setting

The essence of occult detective fiction has remained largely unchanged since its initial popularity, the combination of a crime fiction character with a horror fiction setting. This combination creates an immediate tension because ever since Edgar Allan Poe introduced C. Auguste Dupin in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (published in Graham’s Magazine in 1841) the detective has been the man or woman of reason, a rational agent who restores the moral and social order following its disruption by harm or crime. Poe referred to all three of Dupin’s cases as ‘tales of ratiocination’ and the same could be said of the investigations of Dupin’s most illustrious descendants, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. In contrast, the setting of horror fiction may be more or less like the real world, but there is at least one aspect of that world into which the irrational in the form of the divine, the supernatural, or the paranormal intrudes. One may catch only the briefest of glimpses of it or it may be supervenient on science, but the divine, supernatural, or paranormal is always in excess of human reason, rationality, and ratiocination. One of the advantages of occult detective fiction is that creators can introduce an additional layer of suspense in having the detective investigate both criminal and supernatural cases and Hodgson employed this device with Carnacki very successfully. The world of the occult detective must nonetheless be one in which the supernatural intrudes into the natural in some way, whether or not that intrusion is revealed in every case.

The crucial tension between the rational detective and the extra-rational setting is difficult to master and demands a rigorous internal logic, which may also be more or less revealed in the narrative. There is a special relationship between detective fiction, including occult detective fiction, and narrative. In every narrative there is a real or imaginary sequence of events that takes place in the storyworld. In an autobiography, this sequence of events would begin with the author’s birth or – more commonly – the birth of her parents or grandparents and end shortly before the decision to write the autobiography or with the publisher’s decision to publish the manuscript. In a detective story, the sequence of events begins with the murderer planning the murder or with a person’s decision to disappear and ends with the murderer being identified and usually (but not always) brought to justice or with the missing person found (whether dead or alive). Typically, the story will start after the discovery of a corpse and end before the trial begins. Even within that limited period, however, the represented events will be a selection of all of those that take place in the storyworld. In both documentary and fictional narratives, the narrative is thus a superstructure underpinned by the base of the real or imaginary sequence of events. Detective fiction standardly dramatizes, stages, or thickens the relationship between story and sequence of events by presenting both the story of the crime (the sequence of events) and the story of the investigation (the story itself) together, with the progression of the detective involving her repeating, retracing, or revisiting the progression of the criminal. The tension between the story and the sequence of events is in addition to the tension between the rational detective and extra-rational setting and the combination of the two is, I think, a large part of why occult detective fiction has proved so difficult to master.

Archivists, Musicians, and Priests

I concluded part II by defining weird fiction as philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview, generically hybrid in character, and foregrounding the difference between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is. This definition would include most of the occult detective stories I have mentioned so far and my take on the genre is that it is most accurately categorised as a subgenre of weird fiction rather than a subgenre of either crime or horror fiction. If one is seeking a more specific definition, then there is no need to reinvent what has already been established: occult detective fiction is philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview and foregrounding the difference between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is and featuring a detective protagonist in an apparently supernatural setting. I shall have more to say about the instantiation of the second part of this definition in occult detective as opposed to other weird fiction in part IV. Like the weird tale, the occult detective story is best-suited to shorter formats, such as the short story, novella, graphic novel, and feature film. I include feature film rather than television series because television in the twenty-first century has taken a narrative turn, by which I mean that each season of a series (if not the whole series) tends to tell a single story rather than a different story each episode. One of the great exceptions to this rule of thumb about occult detective fiction is Amazon Prime Video’s Carnival Row (two seasons 2019-2023), specifically the first season, which is vastly superior to the second.

The most exemplary short story series is by Sarah Monette (b.1974 and also writes under the penname Katherine Addison) and features Kyle Murchison Booth, an occult detective who is an archivist at the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum. Booth’s first case, ‘The Wall of Clouds’, was published in 2003 (in Alchemy) and his first ten cases were collected in The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth (2007, with a second edition published in 2011). Seven more short stories and a novella, A Theory of Haunting (2023), have been published since (for a total of eighteen cases), although the stories can be difficult to find online. I mentioned the most accomplished occult detective novella in part II, Victor LaValle’s (b.1972, pictured) The Ballad of Black Tom (2016), a deconstruction of Lovecraft’s less accomplished occult detective story, ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ (published in Weird Tales in 1927). While my graphic novel recommendation is somewhat outré, I trust it will resonate with readers of my generation (particularly those from the UK), Mark Millar and Chris Weston’s all but forgotten Canon Fodder (published in 2000 AD 1993-1995). Like Carnival Row, the first instalment is followed by a disappointing sequel, but the digital versions of both are still available from Rebellion. For a feature film, one can do no better than Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (1987), starring Mickey Rourke, Lisa Bonet, Robert De Niro, and Charlotte Rampling, which is an adaptation of William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel (1978) and one of the few cinematic adaptations that is unquestionably better than the novel on which it is based.

 

Recommended Reading

Fiction

William Hope Hodgson, The Casebook of Carnacki – Ghost Finder, Wordsworth Editions (2006).

Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth, Prime Books (2011).

Rafe McGregor, The Adventures of Roderick Langham, Theaker’s Paperback Library (2017).

Nonfiction

No comprehensive or authoritative study of occult detective fiction has been published to date and the best sources of information are the editor’s introductions in these three anthologies (I began writing such a study in 2020, during the pandemic, but as soon as I understood what a mammoth task it would be, realised I’d rather spend the time continuing the cases of my own occult detective):

Peter Haining (ed.), Supernatural Sleuths, William Kimber (1986).

Mark Valentine (ed.), The Black Veil and other tales of Supernatural Sleuths, Wordsworth Editions (2008).

Stephen Jones (ed.), Dark Detectives: An Anthology of Supernatural Mysteries, Titan Books (2015).