The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 2: How I Detest Those Fools

In the category of the modern weird story, it’s hard to know quite where to place Mark Samuels. This is probably because, outside of Thomas Ligotti and a few others, very few contemporary horror writers do anything more than dabble in this vaguely defined subgenre – it can’t help that, in my case, I only read my first pair of Samuels stories a few days ago, a fact which is, itself, explained by the troubling rarity of his books. His first collection, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales was first published in 2003 by Tartarus Press, and is currently out of print. His most recent book, Glyphotech, was published by PS Publishing in 2008, and it, too, is out of print. Used copies of each, as well as the two Samuels books that were published in between, fetch a very steep price, unless you happen to luck out (as I did, in the case of White Hands, at least). What this says about the state of the modern horror fiction market – both Tartarus and PS Publishing are very small presses – is both very clear and entirely depressing, so it’s best that we move on.

I first heard about Mark Samuels a few years ago when, in the early throes of my newfound passion for the fiction of Thomas Ligotti, I read an interview with the latter writer, in which the two were roughly compared. Essentially, Ligotti acknowledged Samuels as someone he was in tune with, but wondered if writers like Samuels were disturbed, and cut off from regular society, enough to achieve the stature in the horror field enjoyed by the likes of Poe, Lovecraft and (he doesn’t say but implies) himself.

Probably not, is the answer. Samuels, as it happens, is that rarest of creatures: a 21st century writer of horror fiction who is also a Christian – a Catholic, to be exact. On his website, Samuels writes:

Frankly, one has to tread carefully on horror messageboards if one admits to having faith. Particularly if you’re a Catholic (which I am, albeit not much of a churchgoing one). Once this fact is discovered it seems to be the case that it’s open season on your beliefs. I guarantee you’ll be the target of all sorts of wily attempts to draw you into an argument designed to make you see the errors of your ways and embrace the “rationality” of atheism (or agnosticism, most of whose adherents are, it seems, practically 99% atheist, but hold back a 1% doubt in order not to appear too judgemental).

And elsewhere on the site:

God, for me, is the fundamental core of reality itself. God does not exist, in the way we know a certain mountain exists. Without God there is no reality; God is the prime consciousness. God is infinite and eternal. He (I use the term “he” only for convenience) is not able to be directly understood by man, although we have intimations that allow us to conceive of his nature.

Science is not incompatible with belief in God. Since God is eternal and infinite, a process such as evolution, which may seem an incredibly inefficient way of producing humankind, is only inefficient from our temporal perspective.

Science cannot tell us why there are laws of physics. If one responds that this question is an irrelevance, since science makes no claim to explain the why in this instance, then it is an example that science cannot explain science. No closed system can explain a closed system.

If you don’t spend a great deal of time reading contemporary horror fiction -- and so it would follow you wouldn’t be spending any time on horror messageboards – you’ll have to take my word for it that Samuels is absolutely correct about the ways in which faith is treated in that community. Ligotti, the writer to whom Samuels is most often linked, is a full-bore atheist, at one point accepting the purely metaphorical existence of a creator only so that he could blame someone or something for the nightmare of human existence.

So all of this places Samuels in a unique position. In his faith, and fictional subject, he really does hearken back to the old days of Machen and M. R. James, a comparison that isn’t coincidental once you actually start reading Samuels’s fiction. His Catholicism isn’t exactly explicit in his story “White Hands” – a story I’ll get to in a bit -- though once you know his faith, the reader can sort of say, “Oh, okay. Sure.” Which is completely fine, and serves the story, or doesn’t, depending on what you want. Unfortunately, Samuels attempt to place his faith front and center doesn’t pay off too well in the other story I read, called “The Grandmaster’s Final Game”. Though the truth is that the Catholic nature of the story isn’t the problem – not only is that hardly the kind of thing that I, personally, am likely to complain about, but where would The Exorcist be without its faith? – but rather Samuels’s inability make the elements of this story cohere. Essentially a story of demonic possession and chess, most of “The Grandmaster’s Final Game” is told in the form of a confession told to Father Mooney by a man named Leonard Hughes. Hughes has specifically sought out Father Mooney to deliver his confession because, he says, “I know you were one of the finest chess players in Europe before you were called to holy orders.” Hughes goes on to tell of his life as a professional chess player, a career which didn’t take off until he found a bizarre chess set being sold for next to nothing in a local bookshop. The set was made unique by, among other things, featuring only black chess pieces. As I’ve already revealed that this is a story of possession, you can probably guess where we’re heading, and you’ll be correct.

Which is obviously a problem, but is not the problem, and, in fact, didn’t need to even be a problem at all. Though I strongly resist the idea that genre fiction – and, really, pick your genre, because this is said about them all – must necessarily follow formula and pay off in the way the reader expects, and that the only thing that can distinguish one genre writer from another is style and technique, I also know full well that great, brilliant work can be done while adhering to a given formula. So Samuels, a good writer who is a Catholic, and who, additionally, is very knowledgeable about his chosen genre, should have sailed through “The Grandmaster’s Final Game”. But he doesn’t. For one thing, there is no genuine sense of the infernal, something you obviously can’t say about The Exorcist, so that the inevitable final chess match feels as though it’s being waged between a priest who really wants to win, and a guy who really hates to lose.

On a much more encouraging note, the other Samuels story I read was “White Hands”, and it follows a familiar track of weird fiction in that it concerns itself with horror fiction and scholarship. The story is about an ambitious unnamed narrator who seeks out Alfred Muswell, at once a well-known academic and scholar of of “literary ghost stories”. Muswell was a disgraced former don at Oxford, who instructed his students to focus their reading on the works of J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Vernon Lee, M. R. James and Lilith Blake (Blake being the one fictional character on this list, and, the reader discovers, the source of the story's horror). Though Muswell is a scholar of all of these writers, when Muswell meets our narrator and discovers that he prefers the work of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, Muswell immediately dismisses those other writers (of Machen he says, "That red-face old coot with his deluded Anglo-Catholic rubbish!") and says:

“…No, no. Believe me, if you want the truth beyond the frontier of appearances it is to Lilith Blak you must turn. She never compromises. Her stories are infinitely more than mere accounts of supernatural phenomena…”

As the reader will shortly learn. Despite his ambivalence about her, our narrator is looking to make his name by writing a monograph on Lilith Blake, a proposition that becomes more and more likely the more time he spends with Muswell. He sought out Muswell in the first place because Muswell is the foremost – and probably only – expert on Blake’s life and writing, and once our narrator has gained his confidence, the older scholar makes his collection of pictures, biographical material and unpublished writing free to the young man. Everything except one unpublished book called The White Hands and Other Tales. Muswell explains:

”This volume…contains the final stories. They establish the truth of all that I have told you. The book must now be published. I want to be vindicated after I die. This book will prove, in the most shocking way, the supremacy of the horror tale over all other forms of literature. As I intimated to you once before, these stories are not accounts of supernatural phenomena but supernatural phenomena in themselves.”

Samuels’s terrific story – both old-fashioned and unique – is one of those small but intriguing number of works of horror fiction that seems to take the horror genre itself as its subject (others in this category that I can think of off the top of my head are Joe Hill’s chilling “Best New Horror”, Ligotti’s bizarre “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story”, and the Amicus film The Skull). Lilith Blake is clearly bad news, and at least two men, two fans, get sucked far too deeply into the genre’s genuinely black heart. Muswell, in fact, disdains all other kinds of fiction, and the title of this post, How I Detest Those Fools, is taken from a line delivered by Muswell about a group of scholars studying James Joyce. Horror is all to him, and it will become all for our narrator. The nastiness and violence and hopelessness of horror consumes them. Had they enjoyed some other kind of reading material, there would be no “White Hands” by Mark Samuels. Though I suppose there still would be a “White Hands” by Lilith Blake, waiting for some other poor curious soul to take things too far.

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UPDATE 10/12/09: In the comments section, a fellah by the name of "tartarusrussell" informs me that not only is Mark Samuels's The White Hands and Other Weird Tales not out of print, but is available for a very reasonable price through Tartarus Press here. Call me a shill if you must, but Samuels deserves to have somebody shilling for him. Even if it's only me.