This Spectacular Darkness: Critical Essays by Joel Lane | review by Rafe McGregor

This Spectacular Darkness: Critical Essays by Joel Lane, Tartarus Press, paperback, £14.95, 29 August 2018, ISBN 9781719848800

 

Joel Lane (1963-2013) was an English author from Birmingham who was best known as a short story writer and poet, but was also a novelist, critic, and editor. He won two British Fantasy Awards and one World Fantasy Award for his short fiction and the Eric Gregory Award for his poetry. Most of Lane’s fiction was in the speculative genre, at the intersection of horror and crime (which was his first love as an essayist), and published by small or independent presses. In the two decades before his death at the age of fifty, he published five short story collections, four collections of poetry, two novels, and a novella and two more short story collections were published posthumously. This Spectacular Darkness is another posthumous collection, first published as one of Tartarus Press’ elegant limited edition sewn hardbacks in 2016. The volume is edited by Tartarus regulars Mark Valentine and John Howard and includes a foreword by Valentine, seventeen of Lane’s critical essays, and reflections on his essays, short stories, poetry, and novels by Howard, Valentine, Mat Joiner, and Nina Allan respectively. As such, it is divided into four parts: the eponymous essay, which was first published in Supernatural Tales in 2002; eight essays published in Wormwood, the Tartarus journal that was also edited by Valentine (from its first issue in 2003 to its last in 2022) from 2004 to 2013; eight essays published in other magazines and collections from 1981 to 2009; and the commentaries on Lane’s work, only one of which (Allan’s critique of his novels) is previously published, also in 2016. My sole criticism is that with exception of Allan’s, which includes a fascinating discussion of Lane’s unpublished novel, The Missing Tracks, I found the commentaries somewhat gratuitous, adding little to Valentine’s excellent foreword.

Lane’s essays themselves are all excellent, achieving exactly what I look for when I read writing of this kind and in this form: eloquent and succinct, presenting precisely the right amount of the content of the work under scrutiny, and original and interesting enough to prompt me to both seek out new authors and revisit familiar ones. Both Valentine and Allan mention that Lane had been working on a nonfiction volume that was never completed and would have been either a monograph or a series of themed essays on the subject of horror fiction in the twentieth century. The first essay in this volume, ‘This Spectacular Darkness’, is a manifesto for that book and would likely have been an early draft of its introduction had it been completed. It is the most accomplished and thought-provoking – even inspiring – of the entire collection and I return to it below. Lane is particularly compelling when it comes to his own area of expertise, the very specific overlap of weird and noir within the broader intersection of horror and crime. For Lane, it is a literal overlap in that some (but not all) noir narratives actually are exemplary (rather than marginal) weird fiction. ‘The Dark Houses of Cornell Woolrich’, which was first published in Wormwood in 2004 and focuses on Woolrich’s (1903-1968) ‘Black’ novels, makes an especially good case for this claim. In a similar vein, ‘Hell is Other People: Robert Bloch and the Pathologies of the Family’, which was first published in The Man Who Collected Psychos: Critical Essays on Robert Bloch in 2009 and takes Bloch’s (1917-1994) entire oeuvre as its subject, is equally engaging, presenting his most famous work, Psycho (1959), in an entirely new light (for me, anyway). On a different note, in ‘No Secret Place: The Haunted Cities of Fritz Leiber’, first published in Wormwood in 2008, Lane offers the best appreciation of Leiber (1910-1992), about whose work I am ambivalent, that I’ve ever read. His discussion of Leiber’s flawed but nonetheless brilliant Our Lady of Darkness (1977) is simply exceptional. 

One of my main interests as a critic and author of weird fiction has been the question of the genre itself: can weird fiction be defined or delineated in any meaningful way, how does it relate to similar genres such as Gothic, horror, and supernatural fiction, and if it is in someway distinctive from these broader categories, what is the best way to approach it? All of these and others, I tried to set out in a manner that was both comprehensive and concise in Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between, which was published in seven parts on the TQF blog and is available as a single document here. Lane’s approach is different to and – I’m going to admit it – more convincing than mine, dividing supernatural horror into two distinct forms or strands in the twentieth century. The first, which he calls ‘existential’ or ‘humanistic’ horror, had its origins in Judaeo-Christian belief, is anthropocentric, and was exemplified by Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) and Stephen King (b.1947). The second, which he calls ‘ontological’ or ‘anti-humanistic’ horror, had its origins in literary-critical modernism, is biocentric or cosmocentric, and was exemplified by H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) and M. John Harrison (b. 1945). Lane’s main reference to the two strands is to existential and ontological horror, which I found confusing given the close relation between the two adjectives in twentieth century philosophy, but the latter is similar to what I attempted to articulate with my conception of the ecological weird and to what many others before me have called cosmic horror or indifferentism (usually in reference to Lovecraft). Like all engrossing essays, Lane’s was a provocation, challenging me to first rethink the relation between the ecological and the cosmic and then the relation between ontological and existential horror…is absolute horror not when the existential is supervenient on or collapses into the ontological and, if so, are there narratives that combine both strands? Although Lane mentions Ramsey Campbell (b. 1946) in this connection, he doesn’t answer the question in full, but the wonder and triumph of the essay is simply in raising it (and so many others). This is a genuinely unmissable collection for weird fiction enthusiasts.