that unreality, to suggest that its tropes have anything but direct and vital meaning for the reader—and the writer.
Will Rabjohn’s profession as a photographer of dying species is an elegant and, indeed, inspired metaphor for the writer, the filmmaker, the artist of the dark fantastic—in other words, for Clive Barker himself. The truth is underscored in a telling aside about reviews: “The critical response to both the books and exhibitions had often been antagonistic. Few reviewers had questioned Will’s skills—he had the temperament, the vision, and the technical grasp to be a great photographer. But why, they complained, did he have to be so relentlessly grim? Why did he have to seek out images that evoked despair and death when there was so much beauty in the natural world?”
* * * *
Why, indeed? Darkness, Barker counsels, is very much in the eye of the beholder. The bloodthirsty scourge known as Jacob Steep is only the most recent of the light-bearing zealots who burn their way through the pages of Barker’s fiction. Steep fears the dark, and desires more than anything to hold it at bay; but Will Rabjohns, like Clive Barker, wants to know the dark, to embrace its mysteries, to rid us of the fear of the unknown and all that is done in its name. Sacrament is a testament to the explorers of that darkness, and a challenge to those who would write in its name.
At one juncture, Will offers a brief riposte, discussing a New Age spiritualist who comforts Patrick: “Oh, there’s light in my pictures…light aplenty. It just wasn’t the kind of illumination [she] would want to meditate upon.” [p. 306] Before the Domus Mundi, Will considered his photographs as a kind of bleak magic, one that, like his childhood killing of the birds, might work change in the world, but through negation and despair. But the light Will offers after entering the House of the World shines brightly: “Take pleasure not because it’s fleeting, but because it exists at all.” The light is one that his photographs, like Barker’s own work in so many media, cannot capture, but which, with wisdom and conscience, can suggest and, indeed, exalt: “This presence of all things, seen and unseen, around and about, remember. There will be days in your life when you’ll need to have this feeling again, to know that all that’s gone from the world hasn’t really gone at all; it’s just not in sight.”
EDITORIAL ADDENDA, by Darrell Schweitzer
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
edited by John Clute and John Grant
St. Martin’s Press, 1997
1049 pp. $75.00
We can recommend this massive volume almost without reservations. It is a companion to the similarly enormous tome, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and it will—we predict—sweep all the awards next year. It will also prove to be a definitive reference work for decades to come, and turn out to be even more influential than the science fiction volume.
At first glance, the entries seem to cover the usual: authors, magazines, films, themes, motifs, etc. But the reader notices an great deal of jargon, most of it in small capital letters, which means that each such term has an entry of its own. Thus we are referenced and cross-referenced and cross-cross-referenced to such entries as TAPROOT TEXT, POLDER, WAINSCOTT, LANDSCAPES, MYTH OF ORIGIN, GODDESS, THINNING, THRESHOLD, ACCURSED WANDERER, FOR EST, GNOSTIC FANTASY, SLEEPER UNDER THE HILL, and so on for some distance.
Ultimately it not only makes sense, but proves extremely illuminating. What’s going on here is something very ambitious indeed: an attempt to create an entire critical vocabulary for discussing fantasy literature.
You might ask why this is necessary. Fantasy, after all, is older than everything else. It is older than the written word. (See, in this book, TAPROOT TEXTS, FOLKLORE, and several more.) But fantasy as a genre is a relatively recent development (see GENRE FANTASY) created by Del Rey Books in the mid-1970s under decidedly sub-literary circumstances. And while there are any number of author studies (of Tolkien, Dunsany, Cabell, etc.) around, these often occur within the context of mainstream literature and are written by mainstream critics whose realist or post-realist biases may not leave them quite compatible with the subject matter. It is surprising, but true, that fantasy does not have the same rich body of critical literature that science fiction does. There is very little which addresses topics within the context of a (now inescapable) fantasy genre, which has its own archetypes, tropes, and cross-references.
For example, a great many fantasies deal with the loss of magic. The dragons and wizards go away at the end. The adventure may be glorious, but by the time it’s over we have a sense that this is the last time. Possibly a whole new age or cycle of history begins, as it does at the end of The Lord of the Rings. This can be a powerful metaphor for maturity, old age, the assumption of responsibilities, or other irrevocable change. It is not something found in just one book or one author, but recurrent throughout the genre. Clute and Grant call it THINNING. We need that term and a whole lot of others like it, which are unique to the discussion of fantasy. Such markers will trace the influence of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy for years to come.
The actual entries on individual writers, which range in time from Homer and Lucius Annaeus Seneca to Thomas Ligotti and Ellen Kushner (or, for that matter, Darrell Schweitzer), tend to be expertly done, with few exceptions. Only the Lovecraft entry (by David Langford and Colin Wilson) is seriously skewed, and even manages to cram several factual errors into a single sentence, as when we are told that “The Shadow Out of Time” was the Old Gent’s “last finished work, written about the time he learned he had cancer.” (Wrong on all counts: The story was written in 1934. Lovecraft did not become ill, see a doctor, or begin to express intimations of immediate mortality in his private letters—our most intimate, and often only, source—until well into 1936; besides which, “The Haunter of the Dark” was written later than “The Shadow Out of Time.”)
Any review of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy at this point has to be preliminary. The only way to honestly report on such a volume is use it for several years and then review it, which isn’t very practical. It is too massive to be read from end to end. Those cross-references are like little wormholes which weave in and out of the text, depositing us, sometimes, in surprising places, like a whole long section on Tarzan movies, which is better than you’ll find in most film books. We can browse endlessly. We can turn to our own areas of expertise (Lovecraft, Dunsany, the Weird Tales writers, Mervyn Wall) and find, on the whole, that the facts are sound, the analysis intelligent, and that the scope of the work as a whole is by several orders of magnitude more ambitious than anything previously attempted.
The Best of Weird Tales: 1923
edited by Marvin Kaye and John Gregory Betancourt.
Bleak House (an imprint of Wildside Press), 1997
129 pp. $12.00
It would cost you thousands of dollars to obtain the contents of this book elsewhere. All other considerations aside, The Best of Weird Tales: 1923, is a real bargain. It is the first of a projected series, each volume selecting the best from a given year of “The Unique Magazine.” Since 1923 issues of Weird Tales can easily cost you five hundred collars apiece (more for the first few), if you can find them at all, here you have, for a modest price and with good production values, the truly unobtainable.
Think of it as a core sample, drilled from the lowest sedimentary stratum of pulp horror fantasy. As such, it is of enormous paleontological interest, even if we have to admit that a good deal of what came up was mud.
It’s a deep, dark secret, hidden behind those astronomical prices for the fabulously scarce early issues, that Weird Tales did not make an auspicious start. Had the magazine only survived a year or two, it would have been no more than a curiosity, a failed first effort, for the most part poorly written, badly laid out, and wretchedly illustrated. Fortunately,
