The White Hands

 

Mark Samuels, "The White Hands" from The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (Tartarus Press: 2003).

The work of Mark Samuels is compelling. Like other writers with a strong voice, all of his short stories feel connected, each thematically supporting the others. Samuels often riffs on provocative themes and ideas about weird horror fiction itself, and it is to those ideas that I briefly turn, with a focus on “The White Hands,” all the while recognizing that other stories by Samuels support his ideas.

Two principles emerge (these are often put in the mouth of Alfred Muswell or other disciples of Lilith Blake, all fictional characters in Samuels’ stories):

1. The Isolation Principle: Isolation, particularly in the face of death, disease, or madness, is the essence of weird horror fiction.

As Muswell tells John Harrington, “Mental isolation is the essence of weird fiction. Isolation when confronted with disease, with madness, with horror and with death. These are the reverberations of the infinity that torments us.”

When you’re isolated, that mental isolation strips away every distraction. There is nothing left to look at but the void itself. You’re forced to confront it directly.

2. The Weird Principle: The best weird horror fiction is not just about the horrific and supernatural, but the story itself is supernatural.

In “The White Hands,” Muswell explains to John Harrington the significance of Lilith Blake’s book of her weird fiction: “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.”

To tie the second principle to the first, the weird horror tale is the record of someone who has looked into the abyss without any protective illusions. The story is a piece of that confrontation preserved on the page. You’re not reading about the darkness; you’re holding a fragment of someone else’s unfiltered stare into it as they, like each of us, stumble toward annihilation. In some ways, this is a variation on the notion of a cursed text. There is something active in the text itself.

Within Samuels’ fiction, certain people, though dead, can continue to dream. In “The White Hands,” Lilith Blake is one such person. Lying dead in her coffin, she is the paradigm case of someone in mental and physical isolation. She has no distractions, no connections, nothing left but confrontation with the infinite that torments us all. She is staring straight into the abyss and still writing fiction through Alfred Muswell. In that regard, her work is itself supernatural.

The manuscript itself enacts this process: it passes from Blake (softly dead and dreaming in her coffin) to Muswell and then to Harrington, each recipient becoming more isolated (mostly through their obsession) as they engage with it. The weird tale doesn’t merely describe the horror of isolation; it is a piece of that isolation, and then it often goes on to reproduce it in the reader.

While Poe, Chambers, Machen, and Blackwood were not literally writing from the grave, the point remains. The best weird horror fiction is the product of human minds facing infinite darkness. As a direct record of that unmediated encounter, it carries a supernatural valence that other works of literature do not.