Weird Murmur

  Clark Ashton Smith, "The Last Incantation" in  Weird Tales , June 1930. Read the story here at The Internet Archive Readers of genre fiction are used to encountering the dangers of necromancy. Time and time again, protagonists give in to the strong temptation to bring back a long-dead loved one, only to find “they’ve come back wrong.” From Stephen King’s Pet Sematary , and W. W. Jacobs' “The Monkey’s Paw” to John Langan’s The Fisherman , grief brings out some of the most powerful human emotions. The fantasy/horror fiction of Clark Ashton Smith is filled with necromancers, diabolists, and all types that are into raising the dead. Smith’s short story “The Last Incantation” features an aging sorcerer thinking back to a long-lost love of his youth, but Smith flips the script. The change, the off-ness that is sensed, not only comes from the object of the raising. Particularly if the long years of time and experience have passed, the mourner too has changed, and that change c...

  Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams , (1907).  Lucien Taylor, the main character of Arthur Machen's novel T he Hill of Dreams , takes himself to have solved the mystery of the alchemists when he hits upon the primacy of the imagination and language over physical reality. The historical, popular focus on the alchemical transformation of lead to gold is myopic and that change is usually understood in a way that largely misses the point. For Lucien, the change is a matter of a shift of mind, imagination, and conceptualization. Finding the base world appallingly cruel and miserable, Lucien changes it. For him, things start with language, with words; words to generate images in the mind. Finding the right words, the right poetry, the right prose--this is the magic. The magic is powerful and all too effective. Lucien ends up transforming himself into something non-human and that comes with a cost. The default interpretive view is that the price Lucien pays is much too high, but it i...