Weird Murmur

  Thomas Ligotti, “Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech” in Songs of a Dead Dreamer (Subterranean Press, 2010). Thomas Ligotti and other writers of speculative and weird fiction often use puppets to evoke horror or associated fear responses. The puppet, an inanimate object that mimics life, is particularly effective at inducing a feeling of eeriness often characterized as the uncanny. In this murmur, I will argue that Ligotti’s short story “Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech” suggests an alternative way of understanding the source of the uncanny, distinct from standard explanations. It also shows how discovering that human beings are mere puppets would disturb us beyond well-worn fears about free will. A quick note about this story: Ligotti is known for re-editing or even writing slightly different versions of a story upon republication. At least two versions of “Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech” exist. The differences are mostly minor stylistic edits with one exception. In the 1989 version, one character is refer...

Mark Samuels, "The Impasse" from The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (Tartarus Press: 2003). Thomas Ligotti, "My Case for Retributive Action" in Weird Tales , January 2001. Mark Samuels cites Ligotti as a literary influence, and he often takes a Ligottian theme and twists it into something nightmarishly different. Samuels is particularly good at showing, through his fiction, the emptiness of our epistemic foundations and the ephemeral or vacuous center of things, whether that be reality, the self, the corporation, or any number of other concepts. I argue “The Impasse” is not merely Ligottian corporate horror. “The Impasse” is the narrative form of a kind of nihilistic theory that claims originality, memory, and the self have no center. The story presents as a metafictional copyright case involving Ligotti’s short story “My Case for Retributive Action.”  Ligotti’s story was published in Weird Tales in the Summer of 2001, while Samuels’s story was published in ...

Thomas Ligotti, "The Bungalow House" from Teatro Grottesco (Durtro: 2006). For those with pessimistic or nihilistic worldviews, Ligotti’s work is sometimes cited as a kind of cold solace. His fiction can validate one’s own feelings by offering temporary comfort in knowing one is not alone in thoughts that lead to what the narrator of our story calls a “killing sadness.” Ligotti gives voice to thoughts that can be isolating and terrifying. As such, his work can be empowering for pessimists given its masterful articulation of the dark and meaningless cosmos. The unnamed narrator in “The Bungalow House” comes across a piece of performance art in the form of a recorded audio tape.   Already steeped in what he calls his philosophy of icy bleakness, the narrator finds something validating by engaging with the audio tape. “I wanted to believe that this artist had escaped the dreams and demons of all sentiment in order to explore the foul and crummy delights of a universe where ...

  Arthur Machen, "N" in The Cosy Room and Other Stories (Rich & Cowan, 1936). Sitting over drinks, Arnold, Harliss, and Perrott reminisce about the London neighborhoods, streets, and architecture that have changed for the worse over time. The old, narrow, and crooked streets, the charming jumble of different shapes, styles, and building designs, the enchanted mix of architectural eras, all now flattened to practical, uniform, and straight lines in a modern age that erases the spirit of a place to replace it with the concrete, the functional, and the mundane. Through memory and imagination, these men peel back that modern facade and recall the old days and the old ways. Without moving from their chairs, they mentally walk the streets of London and its suburbs as the city once stood. There is something eidetic about the tour. As the men talk, they can see the old Strand as it once was. In a telling moment, Arnold even gives directions to the now non-existent St. James’s M...

  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 re...

Jon Padgett, "Organ Void" in The Secret of Ventriloquism  (Dunhams Manor Press: 2016). "Organ Void" brings together philosophical pessimism, gross body horror, Padgett's notion of borrowed realities, and a symbol that triggers gnosis reminiscent of Robert W. Chambers' Yellow Sign. Padgett’s story packs a heavy punch and is ripe for giving a reader’s subconscious free rein.   The story starts with Rose, driving her VW Bug on an interstate exit while listening to a recording of a self-help guru. She stops to help a presumably homeless person who is carrying a cardboard sign that reads " ORGAN  -VOID ." But the narrative facts are constantly shifting, and what is really going on is far from being that straightforward. Throughout, Rose's reality morphs seamlessly between her being a kind and compassionate commuter, to being a homeless person herself living under a freeway, to being a confused patient in a hospital treated by a Dr. Gord Onavi (an an...

  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...

Christopher Slatsky, "Professor Cognoscente's Caliginous Charms Carnival" in  The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature  (Grimscribe Press, 2020). Cosmic horror often features sorcerers in possession of powerful, dangerous, cursed, and ancient texts that reveal our lives to be shams and that what we believe to be important is not really important. Those who have glimpsed the secrets discover that we live in a world of shadows, that the real world sits behind our illusions of reality. Such forbidden knowledge, such truths, often drives such a seeker to madness. Sometimes images of stage magic, ventriloquism, and puppetry are invoked to suggest that our sense of reality is just a kind of trick. The subtext is that we live in a world of illusion. We go on with our lives, just playing a role and taking it to be all-so-important, when really it amounts to nothing—a mere shadow of what is truly real. This familiar line of thought expresses a kind of philosophical pessimism that evokes ...

  Mark Samuels, "Apartment 205" in The White Hands and Other Weird Tales  (Tartarus Press, 2003). Stories of cosmic horror are often most effective when the specifics of the terrifying discovery (or the collation of the facts) are ambiguous. The reader is typically left in the dark with only a vague hint of what drove a protagonist to lose their mind. We don’t see the horrifying passages in the Necronomicon. We don’t peek behind the veil and see the Great God Pan. We don’t get to read Act II of the “King in Yellow.” There is a good reason for this, as readers, we would almost certainly be disappointed. It is much better to leave the details vague because anything that can be said will undermine the great mystery and the horror the reader injects. These are usually truths that we aren’t supposed to be able to handle anyway! With that said, Mark Samuels pulls off the impossible. He reveals the mind-blowing discovery made by the protagonist in “Apartment 205” and still preserves...

For the month of December I have been reading a short ghost story everyday as a kind of Ghost Story Advent Challenge. Here are the final five stories!   Day 20: The Family Night Watchman (2024) by Can Xue This story is set in the south of China during the hot summers when the children sleep on water-cooled bamboo beds in the middle of the road. Cars don’t usually drive through overnight, so they don’t worry about that. Most of the kids fear the corpse drivers that make shrieking noises and wander the night on foot. Little Fly isn’t as scared as most, and he wants to meet one. Something about this story captures the way children remember and navigate the world.   Themes : Ghosts of Family, Past/Present/Future, A Child’s Perspective.   Day 21: An Incident in Monte Carlo (2024) by Peter Straub I was saddened when Peter Straub, author of one of the best ghost story novels of all time, Ghost Story , died in 2022. I suppose this story works as a ghost tale on a meta-...

  For the month of December I am reading a ghost story everyday as a kind of Ghost Story Advent Challenge. I’ll post about the stories that I read at the end of each week. I’m discovery some wonderfully weird tales. Day 14: "Those I Have Never Known" (2024) by Katherine Cart   If you feel a little tickle in your throat and then something hairy brushing your back molars, it might be a ghost coming up headfirst. Just reach in there and pull the bugger out! Sometimes ghosts live inside of us and only reveal themselves after we give up all the things we use to cover ourselves. Then repeat, to cover them all up again.  Themes: Ancestral Influence, Commercialism, Haves and Have-Nots, Shame.   Day 15: " Lady Ferry" (1879) by Sarah Orne Jewett A child is sent to a colonial estate, where she befriends an impossibly old woman who lives in the tower.  The relationship between Lady Ferry and the child is a sweet one, and the story, as a recounting of a childhood experience,...

  For the month of December I am reading a ghost story everyday as a kind of Ghost Story Advent Challenge. I’ll post about the stories that I read at the end of each week. I’m discovery some wonderfully weird tales. Day 7: " The Lost Ghost" (1903 ) by Mary E. Wilkins “. . . it don’t do anybody in this world any good to see things that haven’t any business to be seen in it.” Sitting with their sewing and crochet, the two women of the framing story are wonderful characters. The ghost in this story likes to pull the cat’s tail, which the cat clearly does not like. Otherwise, it is a sweet and most helpful little ghost. The ghost is an eerie one, and its back-story is chilling. This is a sad ghost story, though with lots of charm and a happy ending. Themes: Ghost Can’t Find Their Way, Ghost-Child, Tragic Death.       Day 8:  “Drive" (2024) by Brian Evenson As an unwilling would-be ritual sacrifice, you must be careful when attempting your escape. Killing y...

  For the month of December I am reading a ghost story everyday as a kind of Ghost Story Advent Challenge. I’ll post about the stories that I read at the end of each week. I’m discovery some wonderfully weird tales.   Day 1: “Bad Company” (1955) by Walter de la Mare If you thought soul-saving, death-bed confessionals were cutting it close, boy oh boy, get a load of this ghost. I guess dying and all gives you… perspective. If it is true that you should never go to bed angry, I suppose it is even more important not to die angry. Themes: Regret, Unfinished Business, Needing Help of Living.   Day 2: “The Red Room” (1896) by H. G. Wells Ahh, to be eight-and-twenty years again! At that age, even I might have stayed the night in the haunted room of Lorraine Castle. Lots of shadows, lots of blown-out candles, and weird creepy old people in this one. Wells’ description of the three elderly castle custodians and the meeting they have with the young, fearless man at the...

  Charlotte Tierney, "A Woman's Place Is in the Haunted Home" in  The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Vol. 1 , ed. Michael Kelly (Undertow Publications: 2025). Ghost stories are often stories about underlying anxiety, but Charlotte Tierney’s “A Woman’s Place Is in the Haunted Home” gives vision to devastating threads of anxiety in a most revealing way. The constant worry that something terrible is about to happen and the never-ending rumination, planning, and strategizing to avoid catastrophe is given form in the ghost itself: the ghost as the manifestation of that dreaded consequence. We hold tight to our worries because they seem to have served us so well in the past, after all, they represent strategies for avoiding bad outcomes; we keep them close. This experience becomes an overwhelming burden that is not only exhausting but isolating. Only the anxious can feel the weight of their own dread, while to other people, those worries are nothing, and they can nudge them ...

  Sebastian Gray, "Lustre" in Cosmic Horror Monthly, Issue #64, October 2025. Just outside of Hell stands the city of Lustre—a city where a strange kind of consumerism of hedonism and soul-trade thrives. Ligotti’s pessimism meets Ballingrud’s hellscapes in this wonderfully weird short story by Sebastian Gray. The limping, bleeding, injured demons make an offer, but you are literally damned if you do, damned if you don’t. There is no escape; there is no way to make the hurt stop.

Oscar Wilde, "The Sphinx Without a Secret" (1887) Read the story free on Gutenberg Sometimes, fans of weird fiction fall into the trap of thinking that for a given work, there is some secret to uncover—an interpretation of the story that will unlock its meaning. This scientific-like model treats fiction as something where textual evidence is used to uncover the answer to its interpretation. But that approach comes under fire in Wilde’s work. “My dear Gerald . . . women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.” Good speculative fiction gives form to the unanswerable, and the wonder comes from the questions raised. The best ghost stories don’t have ghosts, the most interesting Sphinx has no secrets. “The Sphinx Without a Secret” is a story without a mystery; there is nothing to figure out. “’I wonder?’” he said at last.” And that, my friend, is the key to unlocking the interpretation of this story.

  Robert W. Chambers, "The White Shadow" in The Mystery of Choice   (D. Appleton and Co., 1897). Read the story here on Gutenburg One way that Robert W. Chambers creates mystery is by offering alternate timelines or histories that may be real or merely the delusions of a narrator. These sometimes involve Carcosa, but not always. From “The Repairer of Reputations” to “In The Court of the Dragon” to “The Demoiselle d’Ys,” timeslips drive much of the weirdness in The King in Yellow . Arguably, even in “The Yellow Sign,” temporal anomalies are at work to explain the decomposed body of the church watchman discovered at the end of the story. “The White Shadow” from The Mystery of Choice is a wonderfully weird tale about the liminal space between childhood and adulthood, and between life and death. It is an “Incident at Owl Creek Bridge” kind of story that focuses on the “magic second” before death that expands for the protagonist into a year of experiences. Reading “The White ...

    Brian Evenson, "It Does Not Do What You Think It Does" in  Good Night, Sleep Tight  (Coffee House Press: 2024).   We have largely shed the Cartesian myth that our own motivations and psychological drives are transparent to our minds. Contrary to the myth, we don’t have indubitable access to our inner mental states, and we often behave in ways that we don’t understand or frequently misunderstand. We think we have one set of reasons for doing something, but it turns out, there are causes and hidden psychological drives that better explain our behavior. Therapy often reveals surprising motivations behind our actions–you don’t do what you think you do! Brian Evenson’s “It Does Not Do What You Think It Does” focuses attention on this phenomenon. What is the “it” in the title that we misunderstand? Tellingly, the man in Evenson’s story hears the answer repeated to himself over and over before interpreting the rest of the phrase; he hears: “YOU.” It is we who do no...

Arthur Machen, "The Happy Children" in The Masterpiece Library of Short Stories , ed. J. A. Hammerton (Educational Book Co: 1920). Read for free here Through its tone and use of description, this story delivers a unique kind of weird creepiness. In addition, the central horror is simultaneously terrifying and non-threatening—a great example of how the very existence of something can horrify even when the thing itself is recognized as something that means no harm. It is worth noting the inspiration that Lovecraft took from this story. Not to diminish Lovecraft, but, in some ways, “The Happy Children” does Lovecraft better than Lovecraft before Lovecraft ever did it!   The description of the old town and the procession to the abbey on the hill is certainly reminiscent of Lovecraft’s “The Festival.” Machen’s story also features impossible geometries folded into architecture and even a gambrel roof makes an appearance!  

  Nebachadnezzar, William Blake (1795) Marcel Schwob, "The Death of Odjigh" in The King in the Golden Mask  translated by Kit Schluter   (Wakefield Press, 2017). Schwob's story can be read through the lens of Thomas Ligotti or Peter Wessel Zapffe, that is, as a work of philosophical pessimism. As the dying world comes to its end, the wolf slayer Odjigh faces his own personal crises of an emerging conscience. Odjigh, by gaining a kind of self-awareness, regrets his role as a hunter and positions himself as an observer and critic standing outside of nature. As he sees the violence around him and pities the suffering of living creatures, he laments existence itself: "Odjigh, deep in his heart, regretted the jigging of the nacreous fish in the meshing of the nets, the serpentine swimming of the conger eels, the heavy gait of the tortoises, the sidelong trot of the gigantic wall-eyed crabs, and the lively yawns of the earthly beasts, hairy beasts decked in scales, beasts...