Weird Fiction and Science at The: Fin de Siècle

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE,
SCIENCE AND MEDICINE
Weird Fiction
and Science at the
Fin de Siècle
Emily Alder
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
Series Editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK
Catherine Belling
Feinberg School of Medicine
Northwestern University
Chicago, IL, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new
series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas
in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine.
Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave
Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its sub-
jects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The
series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new
and emerging topics as well as established ones.
Editorial Board
Andrew M. Beresford, Professor in the School of Modern Languages
and Cultures, Durham University, UK
Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK
Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies,
Stony Brook University, USA
Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA
Jessica Howell, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University,
USA
Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies,
University of Oxford, UK
Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College,
University of Oxford, UK
Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania
State University, USA
Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK
Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14613
Emily Alder
Weird Fiction
and Science
at the Fin de Siècle
Emily Alder
Edinburgh Napier University
Edinburgh, UK
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine

ISBN 978-3-030-32651-7 ISBN 978-3-030-32652-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the
whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting,
reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other
physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation,
computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter
developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made.
Cover image: © Library Book Collection/Alamy Stock Photo, Arthur and Fritz Kahn
Collection 1889–1932
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Beth and George
Acknowledgements
This book began not in my doctoral research but in my viva, in the

moment when one of my examiners asked why I had (at the last possible
moment) removed the word “gothic” from the original title of my the-
sis, and the other suggested that “weird” might be the elusive replace-
ment I sought. My first thanks, therefore, are to Roger Luckhurst for
that spark. At around the same time, Laurence Davies introduced me to
the British Society for Literature and Science, in which I found an intel-
lectual home as well as discovering I had been more or less conducting a
literature and science Ph.D. without knowing it—I am grateful to all of
you, as well as to my supervisors Linda Dryden and Sara Wasson for set-
ting me on the path.
Ten years later, this book is not that thesis. I revisited the work of
William Hope Hodgson explicitly through a new lens—weird fiction and
science—and found many new companions for him along the way, too,
as the following chapters unfold.
Over the 4 or 5 years in which I have worked on this monograph,
I have benefited from the help, expertise, and inspiration of a great
many people, especially those in the BSLS, in the International Gothic
Association, and at Edinburgh Napier University—thank you. The ref-
uge, crucible, café, and comedy zone of G6 and its residents have done,
and do, more to keep me going than they probably realise—much love.
I owe further thanks to Anne Schwan, Andrew Frayn, Duncan Milne,
and Xavier Aldana Reyes for reading portions of the manuscript and
for their constructive and encouraging feedback. Any mistakes are,
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
of course, mine. My thanks, too, for the generous knowledge and enthu-
siasm of the scholarly and fan communities of Blackwood, Machen, and
Hodgson, especially to Sam Gafford and Grove Koger. And, lastly, to
Rod, for your irreplaceable personal, practical, and intellectual support.
Edinburgh Emily Alder

March 2019
Contents
1 Weird Tales and Scientific Borderlands at the Fin de Siècle 1

Knowing the Weird 6
Scientific Borderlands 16
Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle 26
Part I Borderlands of Mind, Body, and Spirit
2 Weird Selves, Weird Worlds: Psychology, Ontology,

and States of Mind in Robert Louis Stevenson
and Arthur Machen 45
“Ripples Over the Threshold”: The Weird Case of Jekyll
and Hyde 46
Enchanted Student: Arthur Machen’s Borderlands 54
Symbols of Something and Nothing: The Great God Pan 62
Conclusion 70
3 Weird Knowledge: Experiments, Senses, and

Epistemology in Stevenson, Machen, and Edith Nesbit 79
Body and Spirit as Ways of Knowing 80
Dr. Jekyll’s Self-Experiment 88
“Brain of a Devil”: Arthur Machen’s “The Inmost Light” 92
Expanded Worlds: Edith Nesbit’s “The Three Drugs”
and “The Five Senses” 98
ix
x CONTENTS
“The Three Drugs” 98

“The Five Senses” 103
Conclusion 108
4 Weirdfinders: Reality, Mastery, and the Occult

in E. and H. Heron, Algernon Blackwood,
and William Hope Hodgson 115
The Weirdfinding Profession 116
Flaxman Low’s Real Ghosts 125
John Silence’s Powerful Sympathy 132
Thomas Carnacki’s Occult Inventions 142
Conclusion 149
Part II Borderlands of Time, Place, and Matter
5 Meat and Mould: The Weird Creatures of William Hope

Hodgson and H. G. Wells 159
Biological Borderlands and Where to Find Them 160
Pumas and Rabbits: The Horrors and Hopes of The Island
of Doctor Moreau 165
The “Boundary Kingdom”: William Hope Hodgson’s
Cryptogamy 175
Doubtful Beings: “The Voice in the Night” and “The Derelict” 179
Conclusion 187
6 Weird Energies: Physics, Futures, and the Secrets

of the Universe in Hodgson and Blackwood 195
New Worlds a-quiver: Energetic Realms 196
Energetic Abfutures: The House on the Borderland
and The Night Land 202
“Heat from a Magical Source”: Blackwood, Energy,
and Quantum Weird 214
Conclusion 227
Afterword 237
Index 241
CHAPTER 1
Weird Tales and Scientific Borderlands

at the Fin de Siècle
Near the end of Terry Pratchett’s Sourcery (1988), Rincewind the wizard
finds himself in the Dungeon Dimensions, a dark realm of “skewed
images” and “weird curvature.” He observes a number of Things clus-
tered around a hole in the fabric of reality, including one resembling “a
dead horse that had been dug up after three months and then introduced
to a range of new experiences, at least one of which had included an
octopus.”1 Attracted to the warmth and light of the human world, these
Things are not ghosts or revenants; they are unrelated to any traditional
mythology, individual past, or family history. They are indifferent to
human concerns (or those of any other Discworld species). Motivating
concepts of good and evil, desire and revenge, or hate and compassion
don’t apply to them. Their existence, like that of the Discworld itself,
might be playfully explained by quantum physics and the possibility
of multiple simultaneous realities, but they are also irrational creations
whose shapes buckle the scientific logic of evolutionary adaptation, even
if understood on a cosmic scale.
The Things of the Dungeon Dimensions parody the mythos of the
Lovecraftian weird tale. But H. P. Lovecraft was not the first to manipu-
late the limits of reality and being in this way. In 100 Best Horror Stories,
Pratchett recounts his 1950s childhood encounters with the writing of
William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918), whose The House on the Border-
land (1908) gripped him with the notion that
© The Author(s) 2020 1

E. Alder, Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle,
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4_1
2 E. ALDER
outside the shadow-thin walls of the world itself there were dreadful things,
looking in and biding their time. […] it made me believe that Space was
big and Time was endless and that what I thought of as normality was a
30 W lightbulb with only fivepence left in the meter and there was nothing
anyone could do about it. […] It was the Big Bang in my private universe
as sf/fantasy reader and, later, writer.2
As Pratchett’s reflections suggest, Hodgson’s tales mark an important

stage in weird fiction. They develop the groundwork of earlier horror and
supernatural fantasies in which he was well read, and to which notions
of unstable boundaries to the known world and what lay beyond were
nothing new. In Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), Clarke
glimpses “a presence, that was neither man nor beast, neither the living
nor the dead, but all things mingled, the form of all things but devoid
of all form,” and before that, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Henry Jekyll
peels away the “fleshly vestment” of material existence to access the states
beyond “this seemingly so solid body.”3 Earlier still, “all the attributes
with which superstition clothes the being of the shadowy borderland that
lies beyond the chart of our visual world” surround the enigmatic Mar-
grave of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story (1861), while the “un-
earthly,” “hideous” voice of Edgar Allan Poe’s M. Valdemar, mesmerically
suspended on the brink of death, profoundly affects his listeners with the
“unutterable, shuddering horror” of whatever lies beyond.4 These are all
tales of borderland science, using and stretching the ideas and discourses
of their time to produce narratives of strange horror, although we might
not necessarily call all of them “weird” any more than their authors would
have.
As the examples above suggest, the early roots of the weird tale
are entangled with those of gothic and science fiction. Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein (1818) is a good place to turn and move forward again.
Frankenstein is an important example of how popular fictional forms such
as the gothic romance could work with the wealth of ideas and techniques
offered by science. Victor Frankenstein’s development of “instruments of
life” to infuse a “spark of being” into his lifeless creation positions his
efforts within contemporary interest in galvanism, electrochemistry and
the possibility that a form of electricity might explain the source of con-
scious life.5 It also places him near the start of a respectable line of border-
land scientists in fiction. However, we might label the diverse non-realist
1 WEIRD TALES AND SCIENTIFIC BORDERLANDS AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE 3
literary styles that followed Frankenstein; science is woven into their cul-
tural history, as it is into that of more mainstream Victorian literature.
The close relationship of discourses of literature and science, their mutual
influences on each other, and their functions in nineteenth-century cul-
ture more widely, have been demonstrated in a number of contexts.6 This
book traces one route through this terrain, examining how, by the fin de
siècle, contemporary sciences and their borderlands had helped to stimu-
late a particular variety of speculative fiction, the weird tale.
That said, weird fiction is far from homogenous; a single description is
sufficiently elusive for Michael Moorcock to suggest that “[w]hat is left
after other definitions are exhausted is the weird story.”7 In fact, many of
the texts I will be discussing might also be identified as fantasy, as gothic,
as horror, as ghost stories, and as science fiction. The ways in which genre
writing became organised by writers, publishers, and critics during the
twentieth century have made such labels and their conventions familiar,
but at the fin de siècle they were either non-existent or had little cate-
gorising force. The fin-de-siècle weird tale sometimes gets lost in the gaps
between critical and generic categories, but it rewards examination in its
own right and can offer ways to look anew at texts more commonly asso-
ciated with other modes. Here, I put works like H. G. Wells’s The Island
of Doctor Moreau (1896), Machen’s The Great God Pan, and Stevenson’s
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) alongside rich but less
well-known stories by Hodgson, Algernon Blackwood, and Edith Nes-
bit for examination as weird tales through their shared interest, one way
or another, in fin-de-siècle scientific borderlands. Broadly speaking, works
by these six writers have either been identified as weird but granted little
sustained critical attention, or have attracted considerable critical attention
but rarely in the context of the weird.8 That situation is now changing
healthily, with a number of critical studies recently published, alongside
an influx of “New Weird” fictions since the 2000s.9 With this book, I
contribute an exploration of the weird tale’s development at the fin de
siècle through its relationships with contemporary science.
The fin-de-siècle weird has much to offer our current uncertain politi-
cal, economic, and environmental moment. Weird tales, though at times
reactionary, can offer radical new forms of knowledge—ecological, philo-
sophical, and spiritual, for example—and model new sets of relations
between selves and others. Timothy Morton argues that “[e]cological
awareness is weird,” “twisted,” and “looping,” a distinct response to our
current world.10 Eugene Thacker has proposed that horror (here more or
4 E. ALDER
less encompassing weird) can function philosophically as a way to meet

the challenge of “comprehending the world in which we live as both
a human and a non-human world – and of comprehending this polit-
ically.”11 Other scholars, too, recognise the weird’s capacities to offer
alternative, non-hegemonic ways of knowing the world.12 In what fol-
lows, I extend this argument into fin-de-siècle scientific borderlands and
weird fiction’s often subversive or playful approaches to scientific conven-
tions of the time. The tales I explore expose the limits of certainty in
knowledge and of human capacities for mastery, but, importantly, they
don’t respond with denial or erasure. Once a weird understanding of the
world is out there, there it stays. The stories recognise that human agency
and certainty about the present or the future are limited and provisional—
which might be a frightening state to confront but is a more desirable,
ethical position to take in a frightening world, now as then.
Over the coming chapters, I advance the following arguments. Firstly,
weird fiction has its own place in how we understand the relations
between literature and science in this period. Fin-de-siècle weird fiction, I
argue, was often doing remarkably bold work by plunging into some of
the same ontological and epistemological quagmires as mainstream scien-
tific philosophy. This is what leads S. T. Joshi to describe the weird as less
a genre than “a consequence of a world view.”13 Weird fiction is a conse-
quence of the kind of worldview that was itself both a consequence and a
driver of scientific change in the late nineteenth century. That worldview,
as I will elaborate, is related to those of gothic and science fiction but dif-
ferent to them. The weird is a mode capable of doing different things with
scientific culture than gothic and sf; a weird science lens promises produc-
tive readings of texts more normally recruited to those allied modes.
Secondly, fictions of borderland science in the British fin-de-siècle
period (by which I mean, fairly generously, about 1880 to about 1914)
form a significant component of the history of the weird tale. Recurring
ideas (such as unknowable dimensions, radical teratology, unspeakability)
now strongly associated with the weird tale, developed markedly in the
crucible of fin-de-siècle science and culture (if not necessarily originating
in it). Science is not just an interesting lens through which to interrogate
weird fiction, but is integral to the emergence of the weird tale as a new
mode in the second half of the nineteenth century. At the same time,
weird tales speak back to science through their explorations of often sim-
ilar philosophical or theoretical questions.
At the heart of this book lies the premise that a close relationship with
science is essential to the weird’s existence and takes a unique form. In
many cases, I argue, fin-de-siècle science is not made weird by fiction, but
was already weird to start with. By “science,” I mean not a monolithic
discourse or single set of methods, but a tremendous diversity of stances,
knowledges, and practices, of which I can only (and shortly will) explore
a few. By “weird” I mean—what?
I have already sketched a few traits of the weird, but equally important
to it and to the argument of this book is what cannot be outlined or speci-
fied. William Hope Hodgson’s occult sleuth Thomas Carnacki, explaining
weird phenomena to his in-story listeners, wonders whether he is “making
it all clear to you”—to which writer China Miéville responds: “No. Not
clear at all. These monsters are the opposite of clear.”14 The desire of
much nineteenth-century science to observe, know, and reveal nature’s
secrets conflicts (productively and creatively, for the stories I’ll discuss)
with the weird’s irreducibility and its borderland natural-yet-unnatural
phenomena (what I will at times call the more-than-visible world).15
Roger Luckhurst has suggested that the weird “has no quintessence”
but is “always receding out of sight […] a mongrel that slithers out of
reach.”16 For Luckhurst, the weird is wayward; accordingly, “disorienta-
tion” offers a better guide than an attempt to map out a straight route. To
become disorientated to the weird is to recognise and allow its elusiveness
and inversions, to notice it on the peripheries of what can be understood
and articulated.17
One in particular of Hodgson’s books offers an extended murky disori-
entation of this sort: The Night Land (1912). In a world deprived of sun-
light, the protagonist, X, must navigate across black expanses and nego-
tiate invisible perils that don’t make sense. Hidden “Doorways In The
Night” exude “queer and improper” sounds that are simultaneously close
above his head and at tremendous distance “out of a Foreign Place.”18
X knows the sound, yet also knows he has never heard it before. “[Y]ou
shall know how it did seem,” he tells us
if you will conceive of a strange noise that does happen far away in the
Country, and the same noise to seem to come to you through an opened
door. And this is but a poor way to put it; yet how shall I make the thing
more known to you?19
6 E. ALDER
Like Carnacki, X asks his readers this kind of question frequently. How
shall we make the weird known to us? One answer is to read the noto-
riously unreadable The Night Land (which I recommend nonetheless);
another is that the weird is best left unknown, although a number of
fin-de-siècle weird tale characters fail to realise that. This is especially true
of scientist characters; in weird fiction, the capacity of conventional sci-
ence to know the world has limits, because the waywardness of weird
realities evades grasp.
In that, there may be a warning to the curious critic.20 If so, what is
an author of a book like this to do, as a creator of knowledge, with a
mode of fiction that does not want to be known? Fortunately, this book
is not the account of weird fiction and science at the fin de siècle; it is
one account—my account—written because all three elements intersect
in ways profoundly fascinating to me. It is necessarily selective; I don’t
discuss maths, or astronomy, for example; my weird authors are all British,
and they don’t include (though not for the lack of admiration) M. R.
James or M. P. Shiel. The task is, as X puts it, not to make the thing
known to you, but to make it more known.
Here is some of what I know.
Knowing the Weird

Through Weird Tales , which published “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) and
many others, the name of H. P. Lovecraft “became virtually synonymous
with the weird tale.”21 Hence the adjective I have already used: “Love-
craftian.” Yet such was the weird tale’s low reputation for many years that
the close association may not always have aided either writer or mode.
The place of weird fiction in the history of fantastic writing broadly con-
ceived has not always been noticed. In 1977, when Julia Briggs published
her landmark book on the ghost story, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall
of the English Ghost Story, we can in retrospect see the category of the
weird lurking in the shadows. Briggs describes how the “traditional” out-
look of the ghost story gave way to a “natural successor, science fiction,
[…] better suited to an age at once more materialistic and more obviously
endangered by its own technology.”22 Weird tales, concerned with rather
materialist “ghosts” and responding directly to the changes of a modern
age, underlie this shift, and never went away.
The story of the weird’s journey from “a fugitive category, a blur in
the corner of other genres […] usually abjected as the lowest form of
culture” to a radical contemporary fantastic mode spawning theoretical

elaborations and revisionary literary histories (like this one) has been ably
told elsewhere.23 I draw out the most relevant strands here, not least
because the general picture in literary criticism of fin-de-siècle non-realist
fiction remains mainly that of a privileging of other terminology over the
blur in the corner. Aaron Worth, for example, in a recent article, though
alluding to Machen’s “weird art,” chooses to call his 1890s tales “horror
fiction.”24 Michael Cook’s Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, which
examines E. and H. Heron’s Flaxman Low stories, essentially follows
Briggs’s terminology of “ghost story” and “supernatural,” while Mark
De Cicco proposes a “queer supernatural” to describe Jekyll and Hyde,
The Great God Pan, and Blackwood’s John Silence stories.25 It is not,
it seems, a lack of interest in the texts or their culture that marginalises
the weird as a category but something about the word itself. Perhaps it
didn’t help that Lovecraft (for good reasons) titled an influential survey
essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” rather than, say, “Weird Lit-
erature.” It probably also didn’t help that Darko Suvin’s strategy in the
1970s for elevating science fiction as a serious mode involved distancing
it from irrational, fantastic forms, which were thereby denigrated as less
meritorious or valuable, and less politically relevant.26
Or perhaps the problem with admitting the weird lies as much in sci-
ence as in genre. In A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction (1999),
Robert Mighall notes an ontological tension between horror and science:
“horror fiction has a generic obligation to evoke fear or suggest mystery”
while science “attempts to contain fear and offer a rational explanation for
all phenomena.”27 Yet not only do fin-de-siècle weird tales do all these
things, they depend on it; they depend, as Timothy Jarvis has argued, on
the collapse of the binary distinctions inherent in contrasts between mys-
tery and explanation, or natural and supernatural.28 Weird fiction con-
tests the cultural dominance of positivist science at the fin de siècle. Some
rethinking of what we think science is now, as well as what it was then, is
going to be necessary in order to escape the clutches of binary categories
and the way they appear to fix knowledge, whether of literary modes or
of reality.
The word “supernatural” poses a problem in the fin-de-siècle context
because the premise of such stories is often closely linked to spiritualist
and occult discourses that understood all phenomena as “natural,” just
sometimes governed by laws we do not yet understand. In the Flaxman
Low stories, as Srdjan Smajìc points out, the “frontier of knowledge”
8 E. ALDER
extends “so far that natural and supernatural cease to be useful descrip-
tors.”29 For “supernatural” to have any meaning, there must be a “natu-
ral” against which to define it, and in weird fiction, there is no distinction.
In the next section, I explore the borderlands of science that, at the fin
de siècle, were undermining old certainties about the “natural” world and
the capacities of scientific knowledge. Here, I make a closer examination
of weird fiction’s literary history and explore some definitions of its char-
acteristic tropes and affects, all with an eye to its scientific content and its
relations with scientific ways of knowing.
The word “weird” originally is related to the control of human destiny
and can be traced to some of the oldest known examples of European
literature, including Beowulf. “A” weird is thus a fate or destiny, its form
(curse, prophecy), or one who ordains it—as do the three Fates of classical
mythology and the “wyrd sisters” of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (c.1606).30
This meaning persisted long enough to be used loosely in this way in
the title of M. E. Braddon’s murder mystery sensation novel Wyllard’s
Weird (1885). But “weird” also accrued associations of the fantastic and
supernatural, becoming a word suggesting “unearthly, eerie; unaccount-
ably or uncomfortably strange; queer, uncanny,” and “out of the ordinary,
strange, unusual.”31 Weird affects of this kind emerge in Romantic poetry,
texturing S. T. Coleridge’s “Christabel” (1797–1800) and “The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), while in P. B. Shelley’s Alastor (1816)
“weird” describes an atmospheric sound.32 The creep towards “weird” as
a literary descriptor is therefore visible, but, as James Machin elaborates,
its mid-nineteenth-century uses were ambiguous and it can be hard to tell
if the noun or the adjective is meant.33 Luckhurst makes the point that
the weird has no “‘lost’ tradition simply waiting to be uncovered. It is not
actually there, or only spectrally so”; that spectral tradition is constructed
through the weird’s own “pseudobiblia” (it is littered with invented his-
tories and ancient texts) and the tales’ intertextual self-referentiality.34
The weird is something which both is and isn’t really there, appro-
priately enough. Its literary history, too, is a retrospective creation,
beginning in the 1880s. In the late nineteenth century, changing tech-
nological and economic conditions of printing and publishing, espe-
cially for periodicals, encouraged the production of short speculative fic-
tions.35 In the 1880s, something else happened too. “Weird” started
to be paired with “tale” or “fiction” to describe, retrospectively, the
work of earlier writers. For example, in 1882, a number of Charlotte
Riddell’s best ghost stories were collected as Weird Stories.36 In 1885,
E. T. A. Hoffman’s “Der Sandmann” (1817) reappeared in a newly trans-

lated two-volume collection titled Weird Tales, recommended to “those
who desire to explore the dark by-paths (Irrwege) of the human spirit.”37
Similarly, an 1894 Sheridan Le Fanu collection, The Watcher and Other
Weird Stories, included earlier work such as “Strange Event in the Life of
Schalken the Painter” (1839), and one of several late century Edgar Allan
Poe story collections appeared under the title Weird Tales in 1895.38
One new work in this period was Stuart Cumberland’s A Fatal Affin-
ity (1889). Bearing traces of Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story, Wilkie
Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), and Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two
Worlds (1882), it concerns a series of occult murders perpetrated by a
mysterious Indian cult and curtailed by the intervention of a “Brother of
the Light.”39
In the examples given so far, “weird” is used to describe an odd,
strange, or fantastic story and to hint at (sometimes) the supernatural,
spiritual, or occult. It is being used to describe a diverse range of very dif-
ferent texts—ghost stories like those of Riddell, sensation mysteries like
Braddon’s novel, uncanny horror tales like Hoffman’s “Der Sandmann,”
occult romances like A Fatal Affinity. A Fatal Affinity, though, was sub-
titled “A Weird Story,” echoing Horace Walpole’s famous presentation of
The Castle of Otranto’s second edition (1765) as “A Gothic Story,” which
had more or less initiated a new literary craze. By the 1880s, then “weird”
was being used to label a type of story, and the project of constructing
genres with sets of more or less collectively understood conventions was
picked up by 1920s pulp magazines: Amazing Stories for science fiction
and Weird Tales for the weird.40 Notably, poems by most of the major
Romantic poets featured in Weird Tales —William Blake’s “The Tiger”
(1794) appeared in 1926, for example.41 Weird Tales enveloped most of
the long nineteenth century, publishing, in its first decade, verse from
Blake to Charles Baudelaire, and short stories from Poe to Guy de Mau-
passant, Bram Stoker, and H. G. Wells, alongside original new fiction.42
The weird tale underwent, like science fiction, a process of enrolment
through which pre-existing writing was gathered together under a new
label.43
In this, Lovecraft was instrumental. His fiction and his essays worked
to draw weird tales together and identify their shared characteristics. In an
oft-quoted passage from “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Lovecraft
wrote:
10 E. ALDER
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones,
or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere
of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be
present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and por-
tentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the
human brain – a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed
laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos
and the daemons of unplumbed space.44
Terrible ontological dread, inexplicable forces beyond human knowing—

here, Lovecraft distances the weird tale from the trappings of conventional
gothic fiction and ghost stories, suggesting it as something new, distinct,
more seriously terrifying. Machin makes the important point that few, if
any, definitions of the weird are other than variations on this quotation,
which articulates the weird vividly without tying it down.45 Neverthe-
less, for my argument about weird fiction’s relationship with science, it is
worth drawing particular attention to a couple of features: the emphasis
on the limits of human knowing and the questionable stability of “laws
of Nature.”
What makes these qualities distinctively weird, when similar claims
could be made of the gothic? In Gothic, Fred Botting suggests that
if knowledge is associated with rational procedures of enquiry and under-

standing based on natural, empirical reality, then gothic styles disturb the
borders of knowing and conjure up obscure otherworldly phenomena or
the “dark arts,” alchemical, arcane and occult forms normally characterised
as delusion, apparition, deception. Not tied to a natural order of things
as defined by realism, gothic flights of imagination suggest supernatural
possibility, mystery, magic, wonder and monstrosity.46
Plausibly a “gothic style,” weird also troubles the “borders of knowing.”

However, like science fiction it characterises its “otherworldly phenome-
na” as real, not supernatural. Jarvis suggests that the treatment of borders
is what distinguishes weird from gothic: where gothic works to reinscribe
borders, weird collapses them.47 In their place, the “natural” order of
things is not transgressed so much as recreated.
Weird and gothic modes are allied, but as critical lenses they make
for different readings of texts. The weird cannot be subsumed into gothic
frameworks, as Botting notes by remarking that “Gothic forms and effects
are too limiting for Lovecraft’s mode of writing […] Stories that begin in
gothic guise escalate into fantastic and extreme horrors.”48 This is true of
much fin-de-siècle weird; Hodgson’s House on the Borderland, for exam-
ple, looks gothic and is presented, like Walpole’s Otranto, as an authentic
manuscript that has been rediscovered and prepared by an editor. It is
complete with an oppressive, uncanny building and an unreliable narra-
tor haunted by a past loss, but its bizarre Swine-creatures, time travel
sequences, and dreamy cosmic journeys burst that gothic frame. It is
gothic, but gothic alone is not enough to account for it. This novel is
also horror; it is also supernatural; it is also science fiction; in name and
content, it is a “borderland” tale: it is weird.
China Miéville, for one, sees such genre bleed as critically valuable,
enabling fantasy to provoke questioning of the world rather than retreat
from it.49 Miéville picks up where Botting leaves off, arguing that weird
breaks radically with gothic and is “not just post-it, but is crucially anti-
it.” He asks: “If a ghost is the enfigured monstrous of the uncanny,
an inadequately battened-down guilt-function, what is Cthulhu?”50 To
address this, Miéville counterposes the weird to the “hauntological,”
which is “the recurrence of that which we know and wish we did not”
(and what cannot account for Cthulhu, neither known nor fully know-
able).51 He proposes that the weird is not uncanny but “abcanny”; its
monsters are the “teratological expressions of that unrepresentable and
unknowable, the evasive of meaning.”52 The weird draws on the past—
Old Ones dormant for millennia in Lovecraft’s work, ancient worlds of
cults, pagan gods, and “Little People” in Machen’s—but these histories
and entities don’t depend on “the return of any repressed” or use “goth-
ic’s strategy of revenance”; instead, the weird “back-projects their radical
unremembered alterity into history, to en-Weird ontology itself.”53 In the
storyworlds of weird tales, things that are new, unknown, and cannot be
explained in relation to human concerns are being encountered for the
first time, but yet have always existed, abhistories in which time, space,
and the past are radically reconstructed in unfamiliar ways.
Weird encounters, then, derive from other times, places, or dimensions.
“[T]he one test of the really weird,” Lovecraft continued in “Supernatural
Horror,”
is simply this – whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound

sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a sub-
tle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the
scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost
rim.54
12 E. ALDER
For this, Lovecraft is credited with introducing “cosmic horror” into spec-
ulative fiction, while the affect he describes is visible in many of the works
he covers in this essay. Weird entities or events are not caused by human
thought or action (although they may be found by them), and they do
not operate within moral schema. They are attempts to “think about, and
to confront the difficult thought of, the world-without-us,” which is, in
Thacker’s formulation, the world with the human “subtract[ed]” from it.
Calling it hostile attempts to comprehend it in human terms as a “world-
for us,” while calling it indifferent recognises the “world-in-itself,” some-
thing that obtains without reference to us. The world-without-us “lies
somewhere in between, in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal
and horrific.”55 Yet we are drawn to it because it tells us something
about our own limits as we confront it; supernatural horror enables “the
thought of the unthinkable that philosophy cannot pronounce but via a
non-philosophical language.”56
The Lovecraftian weird universe is a vast, incomprehensible, and
indifferent place, without human teleology.57 The weird is non-
anthropocentric in the sense that its horrors are not punishments or
judgements; that would be impossible in the world-without-us and
given “that in the real fabric of the cosmos we are but the slightest
insignificant thread.”58 The original meaning of the word weird has
now flipped entirely; rather than facing a ready-woven destiny, Miéville
observes, we are confronted with its unravelling: “[t]he fact of the Weird
is the fact that the worldweave is ripped and unfinished. Moth-eaten,
ill-made. And that through the little tears, from behind the ragged
edges, things are looking at us.”59 Weird is not a consolatory form;
it replaces a fatalistic totality with a cosmos decidedly not organised
around the fulfilment of human narratives or fantasies. The “evils” of
weird fiction are amoral and generalised forces; the narratives are not
arranged around a binary of good and evil or according to a moral
code. The menacing entities hovering around Hodgson’s Night Land
or ushered into human bodies by Machen’s Dr. Raymond in The Great
God Pan and Dr. Black in “The Inmost Light” (1894), for exam-
ple, simply are; monsters are “innocently going about the business of
being monsters.”60 The narratives’ moral judgements may fall on the
scientists, but not on the monsters they unleashed (terrible as her acts
are, it is not Helen Vaughan’s fault that she is how she is). Science is
implicated in this amoral construction of terror and often (as in The Night
Land) is explicitly blamed for unleashing it; or rather, a certain version of

science is blamed, as I’ll come to shortly.
One effect of a spreading materialist worldview was to undermine a
sense of cosmic teleology, and in the weird, there is no moral guide to
replace it, though often it is sought. For Mark Fisher, this effect is “eerie”
(a mode he sees as distinct, though related to weird, and which I will for
now fold into it), a state particularly bound up with questions of agency
and characterised by “a failure of absence” or “a failure of presence.”61
Fin-de-siècle sciences regularly generated such failures and produced eerie
conditions. The loss or failure of presence of a consolatory human des-
tiny, however, doesn’t have to mean despair, but may prompt new ways
of finding meaning in the world. Weird tales can also be motivated by an
urge to convey “the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder,
beauty, and adventurous expectancy.”62 Implicit in the weird aesthetic is
the potential for the phenomena breaching natural law to generate admi-
ration and wonder, even if they might turn out to be insanely terrifying.
Machen and Blackwood both understood the normal world to be con-
cealing a miraculous and potentially ecstatic reality and it is only in some
of their writings that this turns to horror.
In Blackwood’s “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” (1912), for exam-
ple, Sophia Bittacy struggles against the seductive, terrifying “Collective
Consciousness of the Forest” that consumes her husband, experiencing
the sound of the trees as “a spell of horrible enchantment. They were
so mild, each one alone, yet so terrific in their combination.”63 The
story sustains an atmosphere of combined dread and awe, juxtaposing
the trees’ remorseless siege of Mrs. Bittacy’s health and sanity with her
husband’s dreamy wonder and the bliss of tree-being, as they “tossed
their bushy heads beneath the clouds with a wild, delighted shuffling of
great boughs.”64 The weird’s openness to the possibility of atmospheres
that are expansive and uplifting, even while they are also terrible, pro-
duces a useful ambivalence. Narratives are sometimes left unclosed, with
the mystery only partially solved or explained, purposely leaving room
for strangeness in the world, as something worth keeping as part of real-
ity even if it might be better not to get too close to it. Further, at least
in Blackwood’s scheme, nature itself is an actor and the overturning of
human assumptions of supremacy and centrality is a progressive ecologi-
cal move.
14 E. ALDER
Approaching fin-de-siècle weird fictions as tales of possibility and

opportunity offers one alternative to what some have seen as a produc-
tive but unduly dominant analytical paradigm of cultural anxiety in which
popular Victorian fictions are valuable only or mainly for what they can
reveal about nineteenth-century culture.65 The monsters of gothic fiction
can embody troubling concerns over gender roles, class structures, or the
workings of the mind, for example, but under a weird lens, horrifying fig-
ures like Helen Vaughan or the monstrous animals of Wells and Hodgson
can also be viewed as “promising monsters”66 ; innovations and develop-
ments, albeit ones for which their contemporary world may not be ready.
When, and they are not always, weird monsters are physically embod-
ied, their shapes are only partially recognisable. Even when looking like
hybrids, like Pratchett’s horse-octopus, they are presented as indescrib-
ably different, as new corporeal forms rather than recreations of mythical
creatures. The weird’s teratology, as Miéville describes it,
renounces all folkloric or traditional antecedents […]. [T]heir constituent

bodyparts are disproportionately insectile/cephalopodic, without mythic
resonance. The spread of the tentacle – a limb-type with no Gothic or
traditional precedents (in “Western” aesthetics) – from a situation of near
total absence in Euro-American teratoculture up to the nineteenth century,
to one of being the default monstrous appendage of today, signals the
epochal shift to a Weird culture.67
The formless disintegration of the dying Helen Vaughan in The Great God
Pan and the tentacled weed men and devil-fish of Hodgson’s The Boats
of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (1907) are examples of this radical monstrous.68
Later, the “gelatinous” form of Cthulhu with its “writhing feelers,” and
the transformed body of Wilbur Whateley, whose “odd” arrangement
of tentacles “seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geom-
etry unknown to earth or the solar system,” follow the earlier split
from conventional monstrosity.69 Tentacles are notoriously prominent in
depictions of weird monsters (again like Pratchett’s horse-octopus), and
“[t]here is never just one tentacle, but many,” making cephalopods, for
Thacker, into the epitome of inhuman alterity while also being anthro-
pogenic creations of biological naming and classification.70
Like science fiction, the weird often works closely with whatever are
the current dominant knowledge systems, but sits closer to their limits,
revelling in rather than avoiding the irrational or implausible. In fantasy
styles, the impossible does not have to be explained: fantasy is “not real,”
although, as James and Mendlesohn point out, some fantasy tales may
“have originated from the minds of people whose ideas about the loca-
tion of the boundary between ‘real’ and ‘fantastic’ were different.”71
One culture’s supernatural may be another culture’s natural, much as
nineteenth-century spiritualism explained the existence of a spirit world
in rationalised, naturalised terms. As Fisher expresses it, discussing Love-
craft, although “ordinary naturalism – the standard, empirical world of
common sense and Euclidean geometries – will be shredded by the end
of each tale, it is replaced by a hypernaturalism – an expanded sense of
what the material cosmos contains.”72 Weird insists on the material basis
of its world; any supernatural-seeming phenomena in weird fiction are but
natural phenomena we cannot yet explain or understand.
For instance, in Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1931), a
staggering recreation of knowledge and reality is asserted while incom-
prehensible mystery is simultaneously maintained. The truths of the cos-
mos to which Wilmarth is exposed bring him “dangerously close to the
arcana of basic entity – never was an organic brain nearer to utter anni-
hilation in the chaos that transcends form and force and symmetry.”73
Wilmarth presents what he “learned,” “guessed,” or “was told” as a set
of firm truths of which he has been totally convinced, while at the same
time these secrets from the edge of sanity remain opaque and withheld
from the reader: “I learned whence Cthulhu first came, and why half the
great temporary stars of history had fired forth. I guessed – from hints
which made even my informant pause timidly – the secrets behind the
Magellanic Clouds and globular nebulae” (216). “Behind” this screen of
language, however, is where the secrets of what, whence, and why remain.
Those secrets depend for their awesome terror both on their sugges-
tion of the cosmos as monstrous on a vast scale and on the inability
of language to represent those secrets as anything other than hints and
secrets. “No other writer,” Graham Harman argues, “is so perplexed by
the gap between objects and the power of language to describe them, or
between objects and the qualities they possess.”74 The unknowability of
the weird is closely tied to its unspeakability. Monstrosity can be “natural”
and yet remain terrifyingly mysterious, a real part of the way the world
is and a sign that more remains beyond our understanding. Weird mon-
sters are attempts to represent the truly unknown. Operating under laws
we can never properly know, understand, or challenge, the most terrible
of weird horrors lie beyond our ability to destroy, although they may be
16 E. ALDER
temporarily contained, evaded, or held off; it is possible to kill Dracula

and defeat Sauron, but in his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dream-
ing. Irreducible terrors, radical embodiments, reconstructed abhistories,
and reshaped spaces and materials are all characteristics of weird.
Fin-de-siècle weird narratives may also retreat from such radical con-
frontations, but they do stage progressive or subversive possibilities for
alternative ways of thinking and being, whether wonderful or terrifying,
that can’t be wholly undone. It has been suggested that weird fiction of
the early twentieth century represents a parallel to high modernism: a
“pulp modernism,” responding to the same cultural crises as high mod-
ernism, “shadows the modernist avant-garde and replicates its autocri-
tique of modernity in crisis.”75 William Touponce argues similarly, that
in the stories of Dunsany, Lovecraft, and Bradbury “the experience of the
supernatural is linked in complex ways to the experience of society under
capitalism.”76 In this sense, weird tales offer a different kind of worldly
knowledge, using genre to produce it. Fisher points out that “to those of
us in a globally tele-connected capitalist world,” forces that are “not fully
available to our sensory apprehension” (like capital) nonetheless have very
meaningful agency.77 Scientific authority, as we will see, does too.
Weird fiction joins other kinds of writing in the attempt to find ways
of understanding and representation to cope (or attempt to cope) with
changes and shocks to the social world. In this book, I investigate how
weird fiction at the fin de siècle offers challenges to forms of hegemony
and mastery through its treatments of science, including its uses of radical,
weird dimensions discernable within sciences themselves.
Scientific Borderlands
In a review of The Great God Pan, the Glasgow Herald declared that:
“Nothing more striking or more skilful than this book has been produced
in the way of what one may call Borderland fiction since Mr Stevenson’s
[…] Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.”78 Robert Louis Stevenson died in Samoa in
December 1894, and an obituary by Alexander Cargill appeared in a new
spiritualist and psychical research journal established the previous year by
W. T. Stead: Borderland (1893–1897).
Cargill describes Stevenson as “first among the romancers of our time
because he dwelt in Borderland.”79 The “borderland,” usually, referred
to the spirit world, and Stead expresses complete confidence in it in the
Preface to the journal’s first volume:
If future progress is as steady and rapid as that of the last year, it will
be difficult to convince anyone, when the Twentieth Century dawns, that
he or she, or any sane citizen, ever seriously doubted the existence of
Borderland and the inhabitants thereof.80
Yet Cargill’s use of the past tense suggests that Stevenson “dwelt” there as
a living writer, in “our time.” He had reasons to feel this way; Stevenson
famously attributed his creative inspiration to “brownies” who visited him
in dreams, and in the same issue as Cargill’s obituary, Stead dwells at
length on Jekyll and Hyde in an essay titled “The Man of Dreams.”81
Stevenson’s and Machen’s imaginations and literary creations evidently
resonated for their contemporaries with the idea of the “borderland”—
but neither The Great God Pan nor Jekyll and Hyde are “about” spiritu-
alism, nor, really, psychical research. The Great God Pan involves a piece
of brain surgery, and Jekyll and Hyde uses a carefully concocted chemi-
cal potion. The effects are legibly spiritual or psychical—Mary communes
with “the god Pan” to the loss of her sanity and the birth of a strange
offspring, and Jekyll becomes Hyde in body and soul—but in both cases
the method is a laboratory experiment, not a séance, and the outcome
is horrifying, not consolatory. Séances were regularly subject to the sys-
tematic investigations of psychical researchers, but that is not what Jekyll
and Dr. Raymond are doing. They both describe their fields as “tran-
scendental”; they are neither conventional scientists nor conventional psy-
chical researchers or spiritualists, though they have leanings towards all
three. Their beliefs and methods along with the outcomes of their experi-
ments posit and demonstrate weird versions of reality in which distinctions
between the material (or the natural, or scientific) and the immaterial (or
the unnatural, or spiritual) collapse.
I return to these two books in more detail in Chapters 2 and 3. Weird
fiction, “the” Borderland, and borderland science align particularly pro-
ductively in Jekyll and Hyde and in its wake, but the union originates
in much earlier blendings. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The facts in the case of
M. Valdemar” (1845), for example, draws on contemporary popular inter-
est in mesmerism to offer a borderland tale hovering on intersections of
science fiction and horror.82 As the nineteenth century went on, occult
and spiritualist ideas of psychic sensitivity, phenomena of communications
from souls surviving bodily death, notions of astral planes, spheres, or
journeys, and concepts of mesmerism, vibrations, and electric currents
18 E. ALDER
increasingly made their way into weird, gothic, and fantastic tales. Mar-
garet Oliphant, Vernon Lee, Le Fanu, and others became particularly
known for their ghost stories, but almost every major Victorian writer
turned their hand to this short form, including Charles Dickens, Elizabeth
Gaskell, George Eliot, and Henry James.83 Some tales, such as Eliot’s
“The Lifted Veil” (1859) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Playing with Fire”
(1900), were directly inspired by spiritualism, while others played with
different kinds of science. Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” (1872) explores how
the effect of a drug (the tea) on the brain produces a demonic halluci-
nation, investigated by Dr. Hesselius, a close ancestor of Carnacki, John
Silence, and Flaxman Low, discussed in Chapter 4.
Some full-length novels, too, such as Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (1842)
and A Strange Story, and Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds , owe as
much to old and new discourses of magic, mesmerism, and occultism as
to the ghost story and gothic traditions.84 In A Strange Story, doctor
Allan Fenwick is a positivist committed to the hard facts of science and
dismissive of anything spiritual or supernatural. Confronting the sinister
figure of Margrave, whose apparently occult or magical powers and quest
for eternal life threaten the life of Allan’s rather more spiritually sensi-
tive fiancée, Lilian, Allan is led to question his previously fiercely held
convictions. This and other novels, including Zanoni and The Coming
Race (1871), present Bulwer-Lytton’s ideas about a life force, a kind of
mesmeric fluid or energy implicated in survival and physical and social
development.85
In A Romance of Two Worlds , the sick heroine seeks healing at the
house of the mystic Heliobas and begins a process of spiritual discovery
that culminates in an astral journey through the planets of the solar system
and beyond to learn the truths about creation. One critic has described
Corelli’s novel as a “creative blend of science, paganism, the Hebrew God,
and quasitheosophical mysticism.”86 It explicitly promotes a theistic (and
gender-equal) account of the universe, reconciled with scientific material-
ism, drawing on ideas around hypnotism and electricity incorporated into
the discourses of the occult revival.
Both novels engage with contested, borderland scientific ideas in order
to question assumptions about ways of knowing the world; A Strange
Story leaves questions open, while A Romance of Two Worlds works to
affirm a new spiritual worldview over one based solely in scientific fact.
These are novels stimulated by recurring conflicts and potential reconcil-
iations in British nineteenth-century culture around the nature of matter,
the place of spirituality and religious faith, the relative determinacy of

body and mind, and the methods and ways of knowing the answers.87
In part, this nineteenth-century conversation responds to seventeenth-
century Cartesian philosophy, which set up lines of division between
human beings and the rest of the material world; mind was distinct from
body, and superior to it, establishing “the idea of reality as a dichotomy
between matter and spirit.”88 The male mind, in particular, was associ-
ated with rational thought, while constructions of the female remained
associated with nature, superstition, and irrationality.89 A hierarchy was
established that has never really been overturned, in which rational scien-
tific principles could be used to explain the world mechanically and bend
“nature” to the service and dictates of humankind. For example, Enlight-
enment efforts to classify and understand abnormal births in humans and
animals contrasted sharply with early modern constructions of “monsters”
and “freaks” as portents or curios.90 Changes in attitudes to supersti-
tion and the supernatural may partly explain the weird’s acquisition of its
second meaning of “strange.” Supernatural influence over destiny was a
part of the fabric of early modern worldviews in the Jacobean period in
which Macbeth was first performed91 ; the Enlightenment’s valorisation of
reason over superstition, however, would oust “wyrd” from the modern
construction of reality, marginalising it as odd, strange, fantastic, unac-
countable. From here, nineteenth-century science became
the guide to all reasoning and will provide the answers to all the questions
which can reasonably be asked; behind it lay the faith that the answers
given in the sciences were independent of time and place; that they were
truths, and that a scientific method led to certitude.92
From this perspective, knowledge and truth can exist absolutely; the
world is amenable to being understood, and positivist science showed
the path.
The existence of the kinds of borderlands in which weird fiction flour-
ishes depends upon this prevailing perspective; in worldviews without
gulfs between magic and reality (or between “supernatural” and “nat-
ural”), there is no space for borderlands. Yet, Sarah C. Alexander argues,
“the story of the Victorians as steeped in scientific empiricism, committed
to materialism and devoted to literary realism ignores important strains
20 E. ALDER
of thinking that privileged the spaces between the material and immate-
rial in the physical sciences, social sciences and literature.”93 Not all sci-
ences were materialist, while spiritualism was often presented as inherently
empirical. Shane McCorristine suggests that “instead of reading spiritu-
alism and the occult as responses to things, we can take the alternative
perspective of seeing the engagement with supernatural other worlds as
discoveries which ran alongside secularization and scientific naturalism.”94
At stake was the question of the validity of different kinds of knowledge;
borderlands existed in the gaps between confidence that the scientific
method led to truth and establishment of what that truth was.
Following the work of philosopher Karl Popper, who argued in the
1930s that empirical science is demarcated by its falsifiability rather than
its verification, it has become recognised that “no scientific theory is
incontestably true” (though on a practical level, like effects of gravity,
they may be undoubtable).95 In this sense, and the argument was used
by Madame Blavatsky and others, there was enough room for doubt and
contestation within accepted science anyway to give occult knowledge a
fighting chance.96 Theosophist Annie Besant explained that “Theosophy
accepts the method of science – observation, experiment, arrangement
of ascertained facts, induction, hypothesis, deduction, verification, asser-
tion of the discovered truth – but immensely increases its arena.”97 The
extended arena, though, was where problems battled it out.
Developing schools of science were differentiated, as Thomas Kuhn
describes it, “not by failure of method—they were all ‘scientific’—but
by […] their incommensurable ways of seeing the world and of practic-
ing science within it.”98 The existence of a more-than-visible spirit world
or astral plane was supported by more-than-visible evidence (Besant calls
it “super-physical”). Such forms of evidence didn’t sit comfortably with
prevailing empiricist models, yet occultists sought to work with them
anyway, in hopes of making their version of truth unequivocally accept-
able in the same way as other emergent scientific claims.99 If knowledge
progressed incrementally and by accumulation, occultism and psychical
research could do it as much as botany. Occultists and spiritualists dis-
played and asserted what they knew in periodicals like Borderland, Light ,
The Spiritualist , The Theosophist, and Two Worlds.100 Blavatsky’s method
of constructing authority in The Secret Doctrine (1888), for example, is to
saturate the text with scientific language, strategically blending regular ref-
erences to well-known scientists from Newton onwards alongside occult
writings.101 The Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR),
for their part, accumulated numerous reports, articles, and case studies on
phenomena from thought-transference and spirit manifestation to water
divining and haunted houses.
Henry Sidgwick, in one of his first presidential addresses to the SPR,
in 1883, emphasised the society’s “scientific spirit” and “desire to bring
within the realm of orderly and accepted knowledge what now appears
as a chaos of individual beliefs.”102 Science, indeed, had an obligation to
investigate spiritual and psychical phenomena; William Crookes saw it as
“the duty of scientific men who have learnt exact modes of working to
examine phenomena which attract the attention of the public.”103 As for
how to do it, empiricism was the obvious, if not only choice. Our view
from a twenty-first-century perspective on what valid knowledge can be
is textured by a century or more of epistemological diversification under
the influence of the social sciences.104 For most of the nineteenth century,
however, positivism dominated over other forms of knowledge, and amid
the advance of science, “[t]he loopholes for spirit were closing rapidly.”105
A scientific construction of the world either had to include God and all
the mysteries of creation, or allow something to remain beyond the cur-
rent reach of human minds and instruments, or else there was no God,
only matter. For some, solutions lay in the reconciliation of religious faith
with physical facts and principles, prompting accounts such as Guthrie
Tait and Balfour Stewart’s The Unseen Universe (1875), into which “the
authors pitch all the normally invisible manifestations of energy – radi-
ation, electricity, and heat – and so create a modal allegorical cosmos, a
bifurcated world that equivocates at all points between physical and meta-
physical realms.”106 Science, then, did not have to do away with God,
souls, and the afterlife, but could be used to explain and prove at least
some aspects of spiritual existence and establish its material basis.
At root was a simple adjustment of what was conceived as “natural,” or
indeed “material.” The more-than-visible world was as natural as the nor-
mal one and could interact with it, communicating through a medium or
even taking on matter from the medium’s body. What was spiritual was
not necessarily immaterial: according to Besant, “all living things act in
and through a material basis, and ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ are not found dis-
associated.”107 The kinds of physical propositions offered by The Unseen
Universe could be used to rationalise the spirit world, the multiple planes
that made up Theosophy’s conception of reality, and the ten Kabbalistic
worlds of the Order of the Golden Dawn.108 With all this going on, even
the SPR, populated with respected scientists, had to defend its area of
22 E. ALDER
enquiry against what one member described as the “barbed-wire entan-

glement of hostile human prejudice”—in other words, against those who
saw psychical research as at best a “pseudoscience,” dressing up indefen-
sible superstitious belief in the language of science.109
Yet phenomena of spirit manifestation or communication at a distance
were contested not only by those who thought them nonsense but also by
those (such as Machen) who believed that taking a scientific approach to
wondrous phenomena was misguided in the first place. Elana Gomel con-
siders spiritualism as doomed to failure because of its attachment to con-
ventional science, fatally underscored by “a schism within its own defin-
ing concepts […] in the oxymoronic view of materiality, expressed in the
movement’s defining trope of ‘natural supernatural’.”110 This problem
extends through occultism. So while William Kingsland claimed Theos-
ophy as “a Higher Science, which is also Religion in its truest sense,
and which deals with the hidden forces in nature at which Physical Sci-
ence stops short,” this new kind of science was hobbled by the problems
of using conventional empiricism with an epistemology fundamentally at
odds with it or, as Janet Oppenheim puts it, of using the spaces, methods,
and language of experimental science to “grop[e] for a knowledge that
was beyond the scope of physical science to either confirm or deny.”111
In this sense, Theosophists shared, with spiritualists and psychical
researchers, physicists and psychologists, an understandable reluctance to
accept the definitive establishment of a blind, mechanical universe, in
which no special teleology distinguished human beings from other ani-
mate matter.112 For historian Alex Owen, however, religious doubt and
the search for “consolation or meaning in an otherwise bleakly material-
istic world,” while important, do not fully explain the fin-de-siècle inter-
est in hermetic occultism and its differences from mid-century spiritual-
ism.113 For Owen, the popularity of occultism at the fin-de-siècle reflected
a renegotiation of belief in an increasingly rationalised world—less a way
to cope with the implications of materialism through deference to its
worldview and adoption of its reasoning than a forging of a new under-
standing of the world that “re-enchanted” it, maintaining its wondrous
dimensions.114 In this way, fin-de-siècle occult movements borrowed rea-
soning from science while offering alternatives to conventional Christian
teachings, constructing themselves as uniquely suited to a more secular
and scientific modernity in need of new ways of seeing the world’s mar-
vellousness.
Either way, the urge towards an alternative sense-making was not lim-
ited to science and occultism, nor even to fantastic fictions. Victorian real-
ist writers, George Levine has argued, were also engaged in an effort to
“rediscover moral order,” in a century whose scientific, philosophical, and
political tumult could provide no firm confidence in reality underpinning
literature.115 One did not have to believe in spirits or reject positivism to
recognise that the secrets exposed by science could be scary:
while one might have faith in reason and […] believe that organized
science, at least, could lay bare the structure of the universe and eventually
codify all of the “laws of nature,” what those structures or laws were
– the truths revealed by science – could be highly disturbing, even
nightmarish.116
The new truths of fin-de-siècle science included material and temporal

nightmares. Evolutionary theory, for example, positing the shared ances-
try of all life on earth, ran counter to the Christian divine creation myth
and threatened its core tenets.117 Thermodynamics, whose second law
told a story about the gradual death of the universe through the dissi-
pation of energy, seemed to undermine the prospect of either afterlife or
human civilisation’s earthly survival.118 Weird fictions relish the imagina-
tive borderlands generated by these revelatory new ways of thinking.
The natural and physical sciences upset the stability of a divinely
ordered universe even as they pointed a way towards re-ordering it
through the establishment of its natural laws. For the most part, the
question was what that re-ordering looked like, not whether there were
such laws governing the universe in a reliably uniform, meaningful way.
Weird fictions, however, create incomprehensible universes that don’t
make meaningful sense; or, they force acceptance of a much more limited
state of knowledge, or of multiple states that cannot be simultaneously
held by one person. These stances challenge assumptions of human intel-
lectual superiority, capacity to know, mastery over nature, and teleological
centrality in the cosmos. As far as that goes, weird fiction is in keeping
with the fragmentary state of knowledge at the fin de siècle.119
The limits of conventional scientific methods and reasoning for reveal-
ing order in the secrets of nature were exposed in the late nineteenth cen-
tury by, for example, the inadequacy of biological determinism to explain
human psychology, or the puzzling discoveries in physics that would lead
to the bizarre invisible world of quantum mechanics, as I discuss in later
24 E. ALDER
chapters. The reason Blavatsky saw “no possible conflict between the
teachings of the occult and so-called exact science” was not because occult
science was exact but because “Official Science” (as she calls it) wasn’t
as exact as it sometimes presented itself anyway.120 The “radical empiri-
cism” of the new psychology of the 1880s, for example, “transcended
the traditional barrier between positivism and anti-positivism.”121 This is
where Jarvis sees the “topos of a collapsed occult/science binary” aris-
ing from the combination of scientific treatment of the occult alongside
turns towards occultism as an alternative to the predominant positivist
mode.122 For if spiritualism and other occult movements had endeav-
oured to become more scientific, science was also becoming more occult.
Increasing specialisation and professionalisation of sciences themselves
made them less accessible and more “occult” to lay audiences, while the
enigmatic workings of modern technology could seem as obscure as those
of the séance.123 Historian of science Richard Noakes has pointed out
that telegraphy could look not so different from spiritualism, given that
both presented invisible communication at distance.124 The late nine-
teenth century’s “new” physics of atoms, X-rays, and more-than-visible
forces was not only marvellous and so far little understood, but could be
hard to tell apart from theories proposed by psychical researchers—not
least because concepts like the luminiferous ether were used by both.
“Like atoms, like suns, like galaxies, our spirits are systems of forces
which vibrate continually to each other’s attractive power,” wrote F. W.
H. Myers in 1903, conflating energy, atomic physics, astronomy, and
magnetism in a single account of disembodied communication.125 These
ideas all describe or populate the more-than-visible world, the “something
beyond that which is visible” that Tait and Stewart called the Unseen Uni-
verse.126 In theory, if unseen worlds of microbes, atoms, and energy could
be real and true without being empirically verifiable or totally understood,
governed by laws as yet undiscovered, why not unseen worlds of spirits?
That said, it was not entirely settled whether energy and atoms were
“real.” Blavatsky, needling at physicists and chemists in The Secret Doc-
trine, wrote that “Science has first to learn what are in reality Matter,
Atom, Ether, Forces. Now, the truth is that it knows nothing of any of
these, and admits it.”127 Such mysteries conveniently left plenty of room
for Theosophy to be correct, but were, too, contested in mainstream sci-
ence. From the empirical perspective, atoms and forces were problematic
because they could not be observed. For some, these abstract concepts
were “the means by which observational facts may be better described,”
for others they were the ends, representing “the true reality behind the
phenomenon.”128 Physicist Ernst Mach, for example, held that the atom
was a “mental artifice […] a product especially devised for the purpose in
view. Atoms cannot be perceived by the senses; like all substances, they
are things of thought.”129
Other physicists, however, understood this more-than-visible world to
be the objectively “real” world, in contrast to the everyday one experi-
enced by people through their normal senses.130 For “despite its reputa-
tion, ‘materialistic’ is precisely what 19th-century physics was not. Instead
of taking matter to be the fundamental stuff that the world is made of,
physicists were driven by an attempt to find out what matter itself really
was.”131 Nevertheless, the invisibility of the subjects of theoretical physics
made it more reliant on analogy and metaphor compared to predomi-
nately empirical, observational sciences such as botany. The imagination of
physicists gave us Maxwell’s demon, Schrödinger’s cat, and now-familiar
diagrammatic representations of atoms like suns circled by spinning elec-
trons like planets. Approached the other way, the imaginative qualities of
fiction mean that narratives have the capacity to theorise physical ideas, as
the following chapters will elaborate.132
My final weird scientific borderland lies in biology. The impact of
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) on nineteenth-century
literature and culture is well documented.133 By presenting species
(including humans) as existing in a constant state of adaptation to envi-
ronmental conditions instead of as static, divinely created forms, evolution
by natural selection made imaginable an almost limitless variety of ani-
mal shapes—of which late nineteenth and early twentieth-century writ-
ers often made use to justify bizarre monstrous forms as “natural.”134
Remote and mysterious environments like oceans, jungles, polar regions,
and even the upper atmosphere and the moon made favourite locations
for new monstrous animals, often modelled on insects, aquatic inverte-
brates, and, of course, cephalopods. Even real, known species such as
amphibians, carnivorous plants, and fungi existed in biological border-
lands because they transgressed conventional distinctions between land-
dwelling and water-dwelling, or the animal and plant kingdoms.
In weird, sf, and gothic tales, as in Hodgson’s The Boats of the ‘Glen
Carrig’ , Wells’s “The Sea Raiders” (1896), Conan Doyle’s “The Hor-
ror of the Heights” (1913), or Frank Aubrey’s “The Devil-Tree of El
Dorado” (1896), the encounter between humans and unexpected species
is usually antagonistic.135 George Levine, however, stresses the wonder in
26 E. ALDER
nature that Darwin showed in Origin of Species and other works; Darwin-
ism itself represents a form of secular re-enchantment, showing a world
“not mechanical and drained of meaning, but thrillingly fluid and trans-
formative, unpredictable – and thus at least always slightly mysterious,
and yes, poetic.”136 A Darwinian world was not only a creative, imagi-
native space, but was already weird. The strange animals encountered in
fin-de-siècle weird fiction inspire awe at their bodily strangeness as well as
disgust, fear, and hostility and show that the terrestrial, visible world too,
was far less known and stable than it supposedly should be.
As well as possibilities for physical shape, attitudes to animal intelli-
gence underwent a shift in the late nineteenth century as a consequence of
developments in psychology. Animal intelligence in the Victorian period,
historian Rick Rylance explains, was understood as “absolutely different
in kind from human intelligence. But the acknowledgement that animals
may have any kind of intelligence at all admits a leakage from the new
conceptual world [of psychology].”137 This small but radical recognition
alters relations between humans and animals on psychological as well as
biological levels. It opens the way to imagining weird entities who could
possess an intelligence of an utterly different kind from humans, but per-
haps equal to it in degree, or even exceeding it.
Weird tales revel in the awesome terrors, physical and cerebral, that
might dwell in the borderlands of science. Predicated on the presence of
forces or entities outwith the limits of the normally knowable world, weird
fiction questions assumptions that accessing the other world is necessarily
desirable and that what is found there is necessarily benign. The “Border-
land” of Hodgson’s House on the Borderland, for example, is no simple
home of patient human souls, but a suitably weird dimension allowing
access to the monstrous extents of time and space (see Chapter 6). Fin-
de-siècle weird fiction is fascinated by science, but can also critique its
limitations. It allows room for or even welcomes the unknown and unex-
pected, and for uncertainty and unanswered questions, however frighten-
ing or awesome these might be, or perhaps especially when they are.
Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle

In this book, I conceive weird fiction as a literature of borderland sci-
ence. In its fin-de-siècle forms, the weird tale arises because scientific dis-
courses had murky edges, because the limits of knowledge and the extent
of what was or wasn’t possible in the world were unclear, because the
boundaries of valid scientific enquiry itself were not stable. Weird fictions
flourish in gaps in knowledge or beyond its edges. As the following chap-
ters will elaborate, some tales attack positivist or materialist science, and
some explore alternative, enweirded epistemological terrains that validate
abcanny realities. Some tales exploit the gaps and possibilities in material-
ist science opened up by late nineteenth-century biology and evolutionary
theories; some extrapolate from theories of physics, from classic thermo-
dynamics and the “new” physics of unseen, subatomic worlds. All pick up
on the strangeness of science, of what is already weird.
My case is that weird fiction emerged because of, and could not have
emerged without, the particular state of late nineteenth-century biology,
physics, psychology, and the scientific discourses constructed around the
occult revival—and this is an argument that could be extended into other
disciplines (into maths and geometry, for example). Rachel Crossland has
pointed out the problems with identifying primacy in either literature or
science: whether literature is seen to anticipate or reflect scientific discov-
ery, one or the other must be put first.138 Rather, she suggests, as inter-
woven parts of the same culture, both science and narrative can be seen
as different (though related) ways of thinking about similar topics and
problems. This is particularly evident in the way, for example, Wells wrote
about xenotransplantation in both The Island of Doctor Moreau and “The
Limits of Individual Plasticity” (1895), or in the enthusiasm of psychical
researcher Frederic W. H. Myers for Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. But it is
also visible in the way some of Blackwood’s short stories exhibit qualities
that, with hindsight, resonate with the then very young field of quantum
mechanics: both quantum theory and weird fiction responded to some
well-established questions in the nineteenth century about physical phe-
nomena.139 Weird fiction and science belong to the same, widespread
cultural conversation taking place at this time about new knowledge and
between competing versions of what valid knowledge is. Weird tales not
only take part in that conversation but contribute their own versions of
knowledge.
In the chapters that follow, we visit places where the walls of normal-
ity are thinnest. The structure of the book isn’t strictly chronological, but
starts with Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in Chapter 2. Stevenson
(1850–1894), also known for adventure romances like Treasure Island
(1881), and Kidnapped (1886), wrote a number of strange or gothic
tales around this time, including “Markheim” and “Olalla” (both 1885).
Jekyll and Hyde, however, was particularly influential. It has a crucial place
28 E. ALDER
in the emergence of the weird tale, especially when the weird tale’s emer-
gence is viewed through its entanglement with contemporary scientific
practices and philosophies. The novella demonstrates, not least, what was
already weird about late nineteenth-century science (in this case, psychol-
ogy and psychical research) through its representation of Hyde as a char-
acter and in the construction of the narrative itself as unstable, eluding
secure closure or certainty.
The influence of Jekyll and Hyde on the weird tale can be seen in the
work of later writers including Arthur Machen (1863–1947) and Edith
Nesbit (1858–1924).140 Machen’s weird tales, mystic and supernatural
fantasies, and autobiographical writings have attracted increasing critical
attention in recent years. Machen now is “widely accepted as a founda-
tional figure […] in the development of modern horror fiction […] a high
priest retroactively canonized by later practitioners of his weird art” such
as Lovecraft.141 Machen’s ambivalent attitude to science and occultism
and his deep commitment to his own mystic worldview inevitably inflect
his fiction. Chapter 2 examines some of the weird qualities of Machen’s
fiction, particularly The Great God Pan. Dr. Raymond’s experiment
demonstrates the dangers of meddling in scientific borderlands with only
conventional methods and assumptions as tools. His dreadful success
causes the weird to irrupt into normal reality, particularly through the
figure of Helen Vaughan, who presents, like Hyde, as a weird monster.
Chapters 2 and 3 both focus on the figures of doctors and other sci-
entists, and the means by which they attempt to access, understand, or
control the borderland and what occupies it. Chapter 3 examines the cen-
tral role of the senses and the relations between researcher and subject in
scientific positivism and in spiritualism, and how tensions between these
systems are negotiated in weird tales. The methods and the results of
weird experiments defy the nineteenth century’s dominant epistemology,
and the narratives construct alternative ways of knowing better suited to
a weird ontology. These include Machen’s “The Inmost Light” and Nes-
bit’s short stories, “The Three Drugs” (1908) and “The Five Senses”
(1910). Nesbit is best known for her children’s stories, including The
Railway Children (1906) and Five Children and It (1905).142 A pro-
lific writer for nearly thirty years, she also authored a number of weird
and gothic tales, collected as Grim Tales (1893) and Fear (1910). Some
of these, including “Man-Size in Marble” (1887) and “The Five Senses,”
have attracted attention from critics for their feminist qualities and their
interest in science.143 “The Three Drugs” and “The Five Senses” merit
particular attention in the context of the weird tale because of the char-
acteristics they share with their predecessors by Stevenson and Machen,
and because of their emphasis on expanded sensory experience as a way
of knowing radical weird realities.
In questioning what science can explain, weird fictions challenge what
science stands for, including its authority as an institution and its impli-
cation in projects of domination. Chapter 4, however, looks at stories in
which an occult investigator—a weirdfinder—contains or at least explains
a weird irruption. Occult investigation is technologised and profession-
alised in weird tales that attempt to contain the horrors breaking through
from the outside. In these detective stories, the mystery is weird or at
least believed to be so at first. The sleuth’s expertise manifests variously
as esoteric knowledge, occult equipment, or mental powers, as hybrids of
the ghost-finding practices and technologies of the Society for Psychical
Research and the rituals or experiments of occultism are translated into
fiction. Championing the credentials of borderland science, Flaxman Low,
John Silence, and Thomas Carnacki are expert figures used to reassert
human control over the unknown, and who, like Sherlock Holmes, wield
the power of knowledge to explain, categorise, and contain the psychic or
occult wonders and terrors experienced by their clients.
The Flaxman Low stories were written in collaboration between Kate
and Hesketh Prichard, mother and son, and first published under the
pseudonyms of E. and H. Heron. The character of Flaxman Low belongs
to a healthy swathe of such figures in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies, following Le Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius, and is an important predeces-
sor of Blackwood’s John Silence and Hodgson’s Carnacki.144 Blackwood
(1869–1951), whose work I also visit in Chapter 6, had a long career and
wrote in a great variety of forms, including journalism, radio plays, and
children’s stories.145 He travelled widely and lived in Canada and Switzer-
land as well as in New York and England. Urban and wild locations both
colour his fiction. He was an “omnivorous occultist” who belonged to
a number of groups at different times and in different places.146 Like
Machen, Blackwood believed there was more to spiritual existence than
conventional Christian teachings defined, and both were involved with
occult movements including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.147
For Blackwood, as his biographer Mike Ashley summarises,
30 E. ALDER
The “supernatural” was not something magical or unnatural, in the super-

stitious sense. Everything was “natural” but mankind could no longer see
the whole. The world-view of mankind had become diminished, and thus
the only way to see the whole was to step beyond the everyday world into
the “super-natural.”148
Ashley’s quotation marks indicate the unsuitability I have noted about

“natural” and “supernatural” as terms in this context. As a result, in
Blackwood’s fiction, horror is only one possible result of a human char-
acter learning to experience the wholeness of the world. While the char-
acters in “The Willows” (1907) do undergo terrifying experiences, in the
John Silence stories, the expert figure of the psychic doctor functions as
a negotiator making it possible to “see the whole” without being over-
whelmed by horror. David Punter has observed that chilling the blood
“was not [Blackwood’s] main concern,” and admits to “shy[ing] away”
from applying the term “gothic” because “Blackwood occupies, in my
opinion, a strangely oblique position in relation to the Gothic.”149 That
oblique position, as Punter’s geometric language invites, is weird, a term
to capture the borderland qualities of the relations in Blackwood’s stories
between human and nature, material and spiritual, ecstasy and terror.
The final section of Chapter 4 explores the Hodgson stories collected
as Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, and their deployment of occult knowledge
derived from esoteric texts updated in combination with modern technol-
ogy to investigate and (sometimes) to solve or explain weird mysteries.
As a young man, Hodgson’s first career was as a sailor in the Merchant
Marine, followed by a stint as a bodybuilding teacher in Blackburn, Lan-
cashire, before he turned concertedly to writing from the 1900s until the
Great War, in which he was killed in 1918.150 Many of Hodgson’s novels
and stories are set at sea, and many, too, exhibit an interest in contempo-
rary science, including energy physics and psychical research.151 “Few can
equal him,” Lovecraft wrote, “in adumbrating the nearness of nameless
forces and monstrous besieging entities.”152 Carnacki the Ghost-Finder,
along with The Night Land and The House on the Borderland discussed in
Chapter 6, generates situations in which the walls of the world grow thin
or split entirely and presupposes, in Lovecraft’s words, “lurking worlds
and beings behind the ordinary surface of life.”153
In the tales explored in Chapter 5, however, Hodgson’s weird beings
are terrestrial products. This chapter examines weird embodiments in the
context of borderlands of biological science represented by nineteenth-

century physiology and cryptogamy. Hodgson and H. G. Wells (1866–
1946) both produced innovative animal monsters in new, unknown
shapes defying familiar taxonomies. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, “The
Derelict” (1907), and “The Voice in the Night” (1912), monstrous crea-
tures are presented as real theoretical, if extreme, possibilities. Moreau’s
Beast People and Hodgson’s mould and fungus creatures belong to ter-
restrial environments; they are weird, non-human life forms springing
from the material potentiality of biological borderlands. The narratives
are set in remote locations in which the usual expectations of evolution-
ary mechanisms, animal body shape, and distinctions between humans
and non-humans can be reimagined and scientific knowledge can be rein-
vented. All three narratives work to destabilize assumptions about the
nature of life and consciousness, as monstrous vitality, by human or by
its own agency, overwhelms taxonomical boundaries and recreates life in
weird forms. The stories’ seas and islands are heterotopic spaces in which
weird versions of reality can be constructed within the visible, known,
material, physical world.
Chapter 6 examines stories in which the protagonists accidentally
encounter the weird, in remote locations where the walls of the visible
world are thin, frayed, or torn. Blackwood’s “The Willows” and Hodg-
son’s The House on the Borderland and The Night Land revel in the
narrative potential of the borderland and the dissolving boundaries of
the known material world it suggested. This chapter outlines how the
laws of thermodynamics in the mid-to-late nineteenth century helped to
inspire physical rationales for the other world on the basis that dissipated
energy had to be conserved somewhere, thus counteracting the inevitable
entropy and solar heat-death otherwise predicted as earth’s future. Hodg-
son’s extraordinary The Night Land is an eschatological romance set in a
sunless future earth millions of years after solar heat-death. Like The Time
Machine, it uses vast lengths of geological time to imagine the long-term
implications of evolution and thermodynamics for the future of humanity
and the material (and any other) world. Boundaries between dimensions
weaken, and strange new hostile entities—in the forms of physical mon-
sters and invisible forces—menace the remains of human civilisation. Nev-
ertheless, The Night Land and The House on the Borderland, infused with
occult tropes and principles, seek to imagine ways in which humans can
understand their existence as meaningful despite facing a vast and indiffer-
ent material universe. In “The Willows,” interactions between our world
32 E. ALDER
and another become legible in the context of heat engines and energy
exchange as weird terrors increase in power at the expense of humans.
Blackwood’s short stories also reflect a new uncertainty about reality par-
tially spurred by the way the new physics opened up the invisible inner
world of atoms as well as invoking invisible forces, ultimately paving the
way for quantum mechanics and its accompanying instabilities.
The weird, in Miéville’s words, grew out of a “burgeoning sense that
there is no stable status quo but a horror underlying the everyday.”154
Open to the unknown, the wondrous, and the terrifying, the weird
favours unstable, usually alarming versions of reality that run counter to
the prevailing nineteenth-century positivist account of the world as some-
thing amenable to human understanding and about whose phenomena
rational intellectual processes and empirical methods will reveal sure truths
and natural physical explanations. Nineteenth-century sciences were ask-
ing questions about how the world could be understood, and finding or
at least seeking answers. Weird tales asked such questions too, using the
imaginative freedom of fiction to present answers from the extremes of
wonder and terror in storyworlds that could treat them as if they were
real.
The weird fictions discussed in this book prise open spaces in the
borderlands of fin-de-siècle sciences and explore their narrative potential.
They are at root tales of terror, variants of ghost stories and akin to
gothic, and they glory in the fresh possibilities for fearful atmosphere,
novel monstrosity, and awesome wonder offered to speculative fiction
by science. Weird fiction deserves recognition on its own terms. Clus-
tering the texts of this book together as weird offers fresh insights to
how these kinds of story could respond to science and intervene in the
cultural and philosophical questions and debates it raised at the fin de
siècle. Weird tales flourish at intersections between literary modes, where
they imagine the world differently. They react to changing ways of under-
standing generated by scientific exploration, considering how their impli-
cations might be experienced by individuals in the present, projected into
the future, and reconciled with competing worldviews. The borderlands
of fin-de-siècle science were pivotal for the emergence of the weird and
shaped its contribution to the development of speculative fictions there-
after.
Notes
1. Terry Pratchett, Sourcery (London: Gollancz, 1988), 250.
2. William Hope Hodgson, “The House on the Borderland,” in The House
on the Borderland and Other Novels (London: Gollancz, 2002); Terry
Pratchett, “William Hope Hodgson: The House on the Borderland,” in
Horror: 100 Best Books, ed. Stephen Jones and Kim Newman (London:
Carroll and Graf, 1988), 72–73.
3. Arthur Machen, “The Great God Pan,” in The Great God Pan and the
Inmost Light (London: John Lane, 1894), 12; Robert Louis Stevenson,
“The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” in The Strange Case of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror, ed. Robert Mighall
(London: Penguin, 2003), 56.
4. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, A Strange Story (London: Sampson Low, 1862),
148; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” in
Selected Writings, ed. David Galloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967),
537.
5. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York; London: W. W. Norton, 1996),
34; see Maurice Hindle, “‘Vital Matters’: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
and Romantic Science,” Critical Survey 2, no. 1 (1990).
6. For the development of literature and science as a field, see, for exam-
ple, Daniel Cordle, Postmodern Postures: Literature, Science and the Two
Cultures Debate (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Charlotte Sleigh, Literature
and Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
7. Michael Moorcock, “Foreweird,” in The Weird: A Compendium of
Strange and Dark Stories, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (London:
Corvus, 2011).
8. Gothic is often preferred; see, for example, gothic analysis of Stevenson
and Wells by Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles:
Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and
of Hodgson and Machen by Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality,
Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1996).
9. On fin-de-siècle weird fiction, see, for example, James Machin, Weird
Fiction in Britain, 1880–1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018);
on the New Weird, see Alice Davies, “New Weird 101,” SFRA Review
291 (2010).
10. Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 6.
11. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet (Winchester: Zero Books,
2011), 2.
12. See, for example, Mark Fisher, “Memorex for the Krakens: The Fall’s
Pulp Modernism,” k-punk (2006); Sherryl Vint, “Introduction: Special
Issue on China Miéville,” Extrapolation 50, no. 2 (2009).
34 E. ALDER
13. S. T. Joshi, The Weird Tale: Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon
Blackwood, M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft (Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 1990), 1.
14. China Miéville, “On Monsters: Or, Nine or More (Monstrous) Not Can-
nies,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23, no. 3 (2012), 380.
15. The ecological phrase “more-than-human world” derives from David
Abram. See Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language
in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage, 1997).
16. Roger Luckhurst, “Where the Weird Is: At the End of the Passage” (pre-
sentation, The Weird: Fugitive Fictions/Hybrid Genres, Birkbeck, Univer-
sity of London, November 7–8, 2013).
17. To undertake a disorientation to the weird, see Roger Luckhurst, “The
Weird: A Dis/orientation,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017).
18. William Hope Hodgson, “The Night Land,” in The House on the Bor-
derland and Other Novels (London: Gollancz, 2002), 397.
19. Hodgson, “Night Land,” 398.
20. I am not the first to wonder this; see Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain,
13.
21. Philip A. Shreffler, The H. P. Lovecraft Companion (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1977), 3.
22. Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story
(London: Faber, 1977), 55. Briggs’s interpretation of “ghost story” is
inclusive: she addresses Le Fanu, Machen, Hodgson’s Carnacki stories,
and Blackwood’s John Silence stories, among others, but doesn’t identify
them as part of a weird tradition.
23. Luckhurst, “The Weird: A Dis/orientation,” 1041. See also China
Miéville, “Weird Fiction,” in The Routledge Companion to Science Fic-
tion, ed. Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sheryll
Vint (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009); Mark Fisher, The Weird and the
Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016); Nick Freeman, “Weird Realism,” Tex-
tual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017); and Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain.
24. Aaron Worth, “Introduction,” in The Great God Pan and Other Horror
Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), x.
25. Michael Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story (Springer, 2014);
Mark De Cicco, “‘More Than Human’: The Queer Occult Explorer of
the Fin de siècle,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23, no. 1 (2012).
26. Darko Suvin, “Estrangement and Cognition,” in Speculations on Specula-
tion: Theories of Science Fiction, ed. James Gunn and Mathew Candelaria
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1979).
27. Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping His-
tory’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xxiv.
28. Timothy Jarvis, “The Weird, the Posthuman, and the Abjected World-in-
Itself: Fidelity to the ‘Lovecraft Event’ in the Work of Caitlín R. Kiernan
and Laird Barron,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017).
29. Srdjan Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists Theories of Vision
in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), 187, italics original.
30. “Weird,” n., Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 2, 6th edition
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For discussion of the word’s
etymology, see also Morton, Dark Ecology; Fisher, The Weird and the
Eerie, 12; and Luckhurst, “The Weird: A Dis/orientation,” 1049.
31. “Weird,” adj., def. 2 and 3, Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 2.
32. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Verse: A Selection (London: Faber
and Faber, 1972); Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Alastor; or, the Spirit of Soli-
tude,” in The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), l.30.
33. Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 36.
34. Luckhurst, “The Weird: A Dis/orientation,” 1045, 1047.
35. See Joseph McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914–
1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
36. Charlotte Riddell, Weird Stories (London: Home and Van Thal, 1946).
37. J. T. Bealby, “Biographical Notice,” in Weird Tales by E. T. A. Hoffman
(London: John C. Nimmo, 1885), lxxii.
38. Sheridan Le Fanu, The Watcher and Other Weird Stories (London:
Downey, 1894); Edgar Allan Poe, Weird Tales (Philadelphia: H. Alte-
mus, 1895).
39. Stuart Cumberland, A Fatal Affinity: A Weird Story (London: Spencer
Blackett, 1889).
40. On this process of genre establishment, see Will Tattersdill, Science, Fic-
tion, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2016).
41. For discussions of Weird Tales, see Peter Haining, Weird Tales
(London: Sphere, 1976); Terence E. Hanley, “Weird Tales from
the Romantic Era,” Tellers of Weird Tales, accessed 13 July
2015, http://tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/weird-tales-
from-romantic-era.html.
42. Weird Tales was itself “strip-mined” later by anthologised reprints. Can-
dace R. Benefiel, “Shadow of a Dark Muse: Reprint History of Original
Fiction from Weird Tales 1928–1939,” Extrapolation 49, no. 3 (2008),
463.
43. Tattersdill, Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press, 12.
44. H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Fiction (New York: Dover,
1973), 6–7.
45. Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 2–3; on Lovecraft’s pivotal role in the
development of the weird tale, see also Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie,
especially pp. 16–25.
46. Fred Botting, Gothic, 2nd edn., (London: Routledge, 2014), 2.
36 E. ALDER
47. Jarvis, “The Weird, the Posthuman, and the Abjected World-in-Itself,”
1140.
48. Botting, Gothic, 167.
49. Tony Venezia, “Weird Fiction: Dandelion Meets China Miéville,” Dan-
delion 1, no. 1 (2010), para. 17; see Joan Gordon and China Miéville,
“Reveling in Genre: An Interview with China Miéville,” Science Fiction
Studies (2003).
50. Miéville, “On Monsters,” 379.
51. Miéville, “On Monsters,” 380.
52. Miéville, “On Monsters,” 381. Miéville stresses that his use of “ab”
derives from “abnormal” and the “abhuman” creations of William Hope
Hodgson, rather than from Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection.
53. Miéville, “Quantum Vampire,” Collapse IV (2008), 113.
54. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror, 7.
55. Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, 5–6.
56. Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, 2.
57. Jason V. Brock, Disorders of Magnitude (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2014), 14; Burleson, Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe, 158.
58. Burleson, Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe, 158.
59. China Miéville, “Afterweird: The Efficacy of a Worm-Eaten Dictionary,”
in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange & Dark Stories, ed. Ann and
Jeff VanderMeer (London: Corvus, 2011), 1115.
60. Shreffler, The H. P. Lovecraft Companion, 23.
61. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 61.
62. H. P. Lovecraft, “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” The H. P. Lovecraft
Archive, accessed 15 February 2019, www.hplovecraft.com.
63. Algernon Blackwood, “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” in Pan’s Gar-
den (London: Macmillan and Co., 1912), 91.
64. Blackwood, “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” 98.
65. Christine Ferguson, “From Anxiety to Ecstasy: Arthur Machen, A. E.
Waite, and the Mysticist Redemption of Victorian Popular Fiction,”
(2014); Mighall, Victorian Gothic.
66. Luckhurst, “The Weird: A Dis/orientation,” 1054.
67. Miéville, “Quantum Vampire,” 105.
68. William Hope Hodgson, The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’, in The House on
the Borderland and Other Novels (London: Gollancz, 2002).
69. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” in H. P. Lovecraft Omnibus 3:
The Haunter of the Dark (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 95, 97; H. P.
Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror,” in H. P. Lovecraft Omnibus 3: The
Haunter of the Dark (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 123.
70. Eugene Thacker, Tentacles Longer Than Night (Winchester: Zero Books,
2015), 150.
71. Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James, A Short History of Fantasy (Far-
ingdon: Libri, 2012), 3.
73. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Whisperer in Darkness,” in H. P. Lovecraft
Omnibus 3: The Haunter of the Dark (London: HarperCollins, 2000),
216.
74. Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester: Zero
Books, 2012), 3.
75. Venezia, “Weird Fiction,” para. 9.
76. William F. Touponce, Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury:
Spectral Journeys (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), x.
78. Quoted in Mark Valentine, Arthur Machen (Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan:
Seren, 1995), 27.
79. Alexander Cargill, “Our Gallery of Borderlanders: Robert Louis Steven-
son,” Borderland 2, no. vii (1895), 12.
80. W. T. Stead, “Preface,” Borderland, Vol. 1 (1894).
81. Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Chapter on Dreams (1888),” in The Strange
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ed. Martin A Danahay (Peterborough,
ON: Broadview, 2005), 103–5; W. T. Stead, “The Man of Dreams,”
Borderland 2, no. vii (1895), 17–24.
82. On Poe’s tales and the terrifying limits of the knowable, see Robert Tally,
“The Nightmare of the Unknowable, or, Poe’s Inscrutability,” Studies in
Gothic Fiction 1, no. 1 (2010). Weird Tales editor Clark Henneberger
aspired to produce “a periodical of modern literature in the Poe tradi-
tion” pointing to Poe’s influence on the development of the horror story
field broadly conceived (Haining, Weird Tales, 16).
83. On supernatural fiction in this period, see Andrew Smith, The Ghost
Story: A Cultural History, 1840–1920 (Manchester: Manchester Univer-
sity Press, 2010).
84. On Bulwer-Lytton’s contributions to the development of the ghost story
tradition, particularly as endeavours to “strengthen the status of the mar-
vellous,” see Mark Knight, “‘The Haunted and the Haunters’: Bulwer
Lytton’s Philosophical Ghost Story,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 28,
no. 3 (2006), 253.
85. See Allan Conrad Christensen, Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of
New Regions (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1976).
86. Annette R. Federico, Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian
Literary Culture (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia,
2000), 131.
87. For excellent discussions of nineteenth-century spiritualism, occultism,
psychical research, science, technology, and literature, see, for exam-
ple, Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical
38 E. ALDER
Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1985); Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology, and Mag-
ical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001); Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002); and Hilary Grimes, The Late Victorian
Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2011).
88. Anne Stiles, “Introduction,” in Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920,
ed. Anne Stiles (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 3; René
Descartes, Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings, trans. Desmond
M. Clarke (London: Penguin, 1998); and see also Bruno Latour, Pan-
dora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999).
89. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scien-
tific Revolution (London: HarperCollins, 1980), 1–5.
90. Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1993); Michael Hagner, “Enlightened Monsters,” in
The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and
Simon Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
91. Stephen Regan, “Macbeth,” in Shakespeare: Texts and Contexts, ed. Kier-
nan Ryan (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan and The Open University,
2000).
92. David Knight, The Age of Science: The Scientific World-View in the Nine-
teenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 5.
93. Sarah C. Alexander, Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponder-
able (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015), 7.
94. Shane McCorristine, “Introduction,” in Spiritualism, Mesmerism and
the Occult, 1800–1920, Vol. 3, Spiritualism and Mediumship, ed. Shane
McCorristine (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), xiii.
95. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge,
2002), 17–18; David Kottler, Seven Ways of Knowing (Lanham, MD:
Hamilton Books, 2010), 50.
96. On relations between science and occultism, including Theosophy specif-
ically, see especially the work of Egil Asprem, e.g. “Science and the
Occult,” in The Occult World, ed. Christopher Partridge (London: Rout-
ledge, 2014) and “Pondering Imponderables: Occultism in the Mirror
of Late Classical Physics,” Aries 11, no. 2 (2011).
97. Annie Besant, Theosophy (London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1912), 21.
98. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2012), 4. Roger Luckhurst and Christine Ferguson
have highlighted the importance of recognising the ways in which so-
called borderland sciences were understood by their own central figures.
Luckhurst, Telepathy; Christine Ferguson, Determined Spirits: Eugenics,
Heredity, and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writ-

ing, 1848–1930 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
99. Peter Lamont, “Spiritualism and a Mid-Victorian Crisis of Evidence,”
The Historical Journal 47, no. 4 (2004). Lamont argues that for the
Victorians, the question of whether or not psychical phenomena were
real not so clear cut as it can appear now in retrospect. See also Richard
Noakes, “The Sciences of Spiritualism in Victorian Britain,” in The Ash-
gate Research Companion to Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. Tatiana
Kontou and Sarah Willburn (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). Hereafter, I will
usually distinguish occultism from positivism rather than from “science,”
since both were constructed as “scientific.”
100. Mark S. Morrisson, “The Periodical Culture of the Occult Revival: Eso-
teric Wisdom, Modernity, and Counter-Public Spheres,” Journal of Mod-
ern Literature 31, no. 2 (2008). Morrisson demonstrates how instru-
mental the periodical press was in establishing the authority of occult
knowledge.
101. H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion,
and Philosophy, Vol. 1 (London: The Theosophical Publishing Company,
1888).
102. Henry Sidgwick, “President’s Address,” Proceedings of the Society for Psy-
chical Research 1 (1882), 247; see also Janet Oppenheim, “Physics and
Psychic Research in Victorian and Edwardian England,” Physics Today,
May (1986).
103. William Crookes, “Spiritualism Viewed by the Light of Modern Science,
1870,” in Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (Manchester: Two
Worlds Publishing Company, 1926), 7.
104. Theodore M. Porter, “The Social Sciences,” in From Natural Philoso-
phy to the Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed.
David Cahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Dorothy
Ross, “Changing Contours of the Social Science Disciplines,” in The
Cambridge History of Science: Volume 7. The Modern Social Sciences, ed.
Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2003); see also Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and John Henry,
Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis (London: Athlone, 1996).
105. George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian
Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 161.
106. Guthrie Tait and Balfour Stewart, The Unseen Universe or Speculations on
a Future State (London: Macmillan and Co., 1875); Bruce Clarke, “Al-
legories of Victorian Thermodynamics,” Configurations 4, no. 1 (1996),
85.
107. Anne Besant, Why I Became a Theosophist (1890), quoted in Oppenheim,
Other World, 191.
40 E. ALDER
108. Besant, Theosophy; Susan Johnston Graf, Talking to the Gods: Occultism
in the Work of W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and
Dion Fortune (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press [SUNY],
2015), 8.
109. F. C. S. Schiller, “On Some Philosophic Assumptions,” Proceedings of the
Society for Psychical Research 15, 1900–1901 (1901), 64.
110. Elana Gomel, “‘Spirits in the Material World’: Spiritualism and Identity
in the Fin-de-Siècle,” Victorian Literature and Culture 35 (2007), 191.
111. Oppenheim, Other World, 196, 159–60.
112. Oppenheim, Other World, 2, 4; see also De Cicco, “More Than Human,”
6.
113. Owen, Darkened Room, 27; see also Alex Owen, “The Sorcerer and His
Apprentice: Aleister Crowley and the Magical Exploration of Edwardian
Subjectivity,” Journal of British Studies 36, no. 1 (1997).
114. Owen draws on Max Weber’s discussion of the way intellectual rational-
isation “disenchanted” the world by stripping it of wonder and mystery.
115. George Levine, The Realistic Imagination (London: University of
Chicago Press, 1981), 20. See also Freeman, “Weird Realism” on rela-
tion between the weird and other modes including literary realism.
116. Patrick Brantlinger, “Introduction: Zadig’s Method Revisited,” in Energy
and Entropy: Science and Culture in Victorian Britain, ed. Patrick
Brantlinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), xviii.
117. Ian Hesketh, Of Apes and Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the
Oxford Debate (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
118. For full discussions of thermodynamics, see Ted Underwood, The Work
of the Sun: Literature, Science, and Economy, 1760–1860 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Brantlinger, “Introduction: Zadig’s Method
Revisited”; and Barri Gold, Thermopoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature
and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
119. Christine Ferguson, “Decadence as Scientific Fulfillment,” PMLA 117,
no. 3 (2002).
120. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Phi-
losophy, Vol. 1, 487; Egil Asprem, “Theosophical Attitudes Towards Sci-
ence: Past and Present,” Handbook of the Theosophical Current 7 (2013).
121. David F. Lindenfeld, The Transformation of Positivism (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1980), 79.
122. Jarvis, “The Weird, the Posthuman, and the Abjected World-in-Itself,”
1138.
123. Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and
the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century (Kent, OH: Kent State
University Press, 2006).
124. Richard Noakes, “Telegraphy Is an Occult Art: Cromwell Fleetwood Var-
ley and the Diffusion of Electricity to the Other World,” History of Sci-
ence 32, no. 4 (1999), 422.
125. Frederic W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily

Death, Vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 282.
126. Their book in turn gives its name to Pratchett’s Discworld’s Unseen
University.
127. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Phi-
losophy, Vol. 1, 482, italics original.
128. Lindenfeld, Transformation of Positivism, 81, italics original.
129. Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics, trans. Thomas J. McCormack
(London: Watts & Co., 1893), 492.
130. See Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
131. Asprem, “Pondering Imponderables: Occultism in the Mirror of Late
Classical Physics,” 141, italics original; see also David B. Wilson, “A
Physicist’s Alternative to Materialism: The Religious Thought of George
Gabriel Stokes,” in Energy and Entropy: Science and Culture in Victorian
Britain, ed. Patrick Brantlinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1989).
132. On physicists and imagination, see Daniel Brown, The Poetry of Victorian
Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013).
133. See, for example, Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative
in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Boston: Ark
Paperbacks, 1985); Levine, Darwin and the Novelists.
134. Hurley, Gothic Body; Kelly Hurley, “The Modernist Abominations of
William Hope Hodgson,” in Gothic Modernisms, ed. Andrew Smith and
Jeff Wallace (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
135. On The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’, see my “(Re)encountering Monsters:
Animals in Early-Twentieth-Century Weird Fiction,” Textual Practice 31,
no. 6 (2017). On anthropophagic trees, see Cheryl Blake Price, “Veg-
etable Monsters: Man-Eating Trees in Fin-de-Siècle Fiction,” Victorian
Literature and Culture 41, no. 2 (2013).
136. George Levine, “Reflections on Darwin and Darwinizing,” Victorian
Studies 51, no. 2 (2009), 239.
137. Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 28.
138. Rachel Crossland, Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in
the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2018).
139. For a discussion of weird as quantum fiction, see Christina Scholz,
“Quantum Fiction!—M. John Harrison’s Empty Space Trilogy and
Weird Theory,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017).
140. See David Trotter, “Introduction,” in The Three Impostors (London:
Everyman, 1995) for Machen’s acknowledged debt to Stevenson and
The Dynamiter (1885).
42 E. ALDER
141. Worth, “Introduction,” x.

142. See Julia Briggs, A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit 1858–1924
(London: Penguin, 1987); E. Nesbit’s Psammead Trilogy: A Children’s
Classic at 100 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006).
143. Victoria Margree, “The Feminist Orientation in Edith Nesbit’s Gothic
Short Fiction,” Women’s Writing 21, no. 4 (2014); Nick Freeman, “E.
Nesbit’s New Woman Gothic,” Women’s Writing 15, no. 3 (2008); and
Keir Waddington, “More Like Cooking Than Science: Narrating the
Inside of the British Medical Laboratory, 1880–1914,” Journal of Liter-
ature and Science 3, no. 1 (2010).
144. Briggs, Night Visitors; Sage Leslie-McCarthy, “The Case of the Psychic
Detective: Progress, Professionalisation and the Occult in Psychic Detec-
tive Fiction from the 1880s to the 1920s” (diss., Griffith University,
2007).
145. Mike Ashley’s biography Starlight Man (London: Constable, 2001) is
the best source for Blackwood’s life, travels, and careers.
146. Graf, Talking to the Gods, 81.
147. See Graf, Talking to the Gods for a full account of both authors’ occult
interests in relation to their lives and works. Neither, according to Graf,
were known as occultists when their work was first published. She points
out how rarely occult elements in their work are investigated, despite
the fact that the influence of their membership in the Golden Dawn
“has become a truism” (3).
148. Ashley, Starlight Man, 53.
149. David Punter, “Algernon Blackwood: Nature and Spirit,” in Ecogothic,
ed. William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Manchester: Manchester Uni-
versity Press, 2013), 45.
150. R. Alain Everts, William Hope Hodgson: Night Pirate: Volume 2. Some
Facts in the Case of William Hope Hodgson: Master of Phantasy (Toronto:
Soft Books, 1987).
151. See my “The Dark Mythos of the Sea: William Hope Hodgson’s Trans-
formation of Maritime Legends,” in William Hope Hodgson: Voices from
the Borderland, ed. Massimo Barruti, S. T. Joshi, and Sam Gafford (New
York: Hippocampus Press, 2014); “‘Passing the Barrier of Life’: Spiritual-
ism, Psychical Research, and Boundaries in William Hope Hodgson’s The
Night Land,” in Boundaries, ed. Jenni Ramone and Gemma Twitchen
(Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008).
154. Miéville, “Weird Fiction,” 510.
PART I
Borderlands of Mind, Body, and Spirit

CHAPTER 2
Weird Selves, Weird Worlds: Psychology,

Ontology, and States of Mind in Robert Louis
Stevenson and Arthur Machen
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

and Arthur Machen’s 1890s fiction did much to establish the terms of
the weird tale in the late nineteenth century. Jekyll and Hyde and The
Great God Pan (1890) use scientific ideas to rationalise the generating of
a weird monster that then exceeds the capacity of science to know it. The
predominant scientific worldview wobbles under its inability to cope and
a weird version of what reality is takes its place. These stories, I argue, find
weird crevices in nineteenth-century science and prise the cracks open to
imaginatively explore what the implications might be.
In this chapter, I put a case for reading Jekyll and Hyde as a weird
tale. The novella’s instabilities, misdirections, and mysteries produce a
text that, like the weird, contests a deterministic, mechanistic, positivist
worldview. Hyde always remains unknowable, a representative of realms
of existence beyond those of the human, while the novella’s engagement
with psychological theories question the knowability of any conscious
self. Machen’s fiction delves even further into weird worlds. Encounters—
accidental or deliberate—between humans and weird dimensions or their
occupants produce awe, wonder, insanity, horror, terror and, potentially,
an advanced state of knowledge. Rather than rejecting the current state
of scientific knowledge (in favour of fantasy, metaphysics, gothic revenant
or supernaturalism), these weird tales rework it, suggesting that differ-
ent conceptions of “science” or “knowledge” may do better at describing

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4_2
46 E. ALDER
reality while still allowing rational (rather than superstitious) scope for the
unknown and unknowable lying beyond.
“Ripples Over the Threshold”: The Weird Case

of Jekyll and Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson’s most famous story is not usually claimed for the
weird—it is more often recruited to the gothic tradition and sometimes
to sf.1 Yet, James Machin points out, it was received by contemporary
readers as “a ‘weird story’ and a ‘weird novelette’ with a ‘weird hero’, but
not a Gothic novelette.”2 Traits critics identify in the novella also mark
it as weird even when they don’t call it that. In a centenary essay on the
multiple narrative voices of Jekyll and Hyde, Ronald R. Thomas remarks
that readers “move through [the] secret door” of Enfield’s story “into a
world where names cannot be named, points cannot be reached, stories
cannot be told.”3 Thomas’s language here is strikingly weird. It describes
a storyworld that resists knowing, while doors themselves, Mark Fisher
argues of another fin-de-siècle story, H. G. Wells’s “The Door in the Wall”
(1911), are portals, “thresholds leading […] into the weird.”4 Thomas’s
description expresses the particular way Jekyll and Hyde’s plot and narra-
tion interlock—between them they make it, among other things, a weird
tale. Added to this is the problematic figure of Hyde, whose “pathology,”
Michael Davis notes, “real enough in its effects on others, is nonetheless
ghostly rather than material, somehow present yet simultaneously absent,
and so beyond the scope of mapping or diagnosis in physical terms.”5 In
these terms, Hyde is a weird force, eerily failing to be entirely absent or
present, an invisible agent that nonetheless produces real effects.
Jekyll and Hyde can be understood as a weird tale through the way it
unfolds an unstable conception of reality—a reality of multiple selves—
which (like the ambiguities built into the narrative’s construction) ulti-
mately eludes being fully comprehended or comprehensible. What the
novella’s premise has to do with late nineteenth-century science is sim-
ilarly multiple—evolutionary theory, psychology, psychoanalysis, spiritu-
alism, medical pathology, criminology, sexology, and chemistry are all
among the contexts in which a number of absorbing critical studies have
read it.6 Davis’s argument, for example, links the instability of the self in
Jekyll and Hyde to a “chemical fluidity” that explores relative psychologi-
cal and physiological contributions to consciousness and identity.7 These
scientific borderlands enweird Jekyll and Hyde.
2 WEIRD SELVES, WEIRD WORLDS: PSYCHOLOGY, ONTOLOGY … 47
The radical, new, weird reality that the text demands to have accepted
has roots in nineteenth-century psychology and especially in the profound
changes the discipline was undergoing in the 1880s—changes that chal-
lenged not only assumptions about the nature of human consciousness
and selfhood, but also those about the stability and comprehensibility of
reality itself. Jekyll and Hyde, I suggest, picks up on the weirdness of this
rapidly evolving area of fin-de-siècle science, while also pushing the limits
of its implications even further.
By the 1880s, the “unshapely, accommodating, contested, ener-
getic discipline” of psychology showed a clear drift towards the firmer
rules of experimentalism.8 Such tightening reflected a shift away from
understanding the mind predominantly on an intellectual, metaphysi-
cal level and towards biological models basing mental health in the
body. Modern empirical approaches driving nineteenth-century pos-
itivism understood the brain as an organ, its functions (and dys-
functions) observable in physical effects. Nonetheless, Rick Rylance
emphasises, Victorian psychology maintained a “discursive turbulence,”
remaining a “mosaic always in process of completion.”9 Physiological
explanations were not universally accepted. Theosophist Annie Besant,
for example, looked back at the last quarter of the nineteenth cen-
tury from the vantage point of 1912 and complained of the way
that ‘‘physiology had captured psychology” to render mental life bio-
logically determinable (from which, of course, Theosophy offered res-
cue).10 In principle, from different perspectives, many shared Besan-
t’s complaint. The psychologists of the Society for Psychical Research
were among those who disputed the limiting of investigation of men-
tal capacities to the methods and epistemologies of the physical sciences.
F. W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney both recognised multiple levels of
consciousness; the ego as a concept was in circulation well before Freud
and provided a way to describe consciousness that released it from reduc-
tive, psychophysiological models.11
Without necessarily discounting the value of physiological understand-
ings of the brain, many were convinced they were insufficient on their
own. For Henri Bergson, physical determinism offered a tempting logic,
but was inadequate and could never be experimentally proved. Critiquing
mechanistic, unitary models of the mind, Bergson understood conscious-
ness as, rather, made up of heterogenous states. As he put it in Time
and Free Will (1886), we “grasp our inner states as living things, con-
stantly becoming, as states not amenable to measure, which permeate each
48 E. ALDER
other.”12 David Lindenfeld explains that for Bergson, psychological atom-

ism couldn’t account for
psychic intensity, the emotional nuance that is present in all our mental
states, and ebbs and flows in a way that can be neither quantified nor
verbalised. Once the preconceptions stemming from outward experience
are removed, inner experience reveals itself as a continuous, heterogenous
flow of mental states, melting into one another in a way that could not be
analysed.13
To theorise a fluid melding of the mind’s pathways and the unanalysable

quality of those states is to work against the notion of a knowable, con-
stant self, and so to pose potentially radical challenges to conventional
suppositions of a single unified individuality, in control of its thoughts and
actions. In place of that coherent self is a conception of human conscious-
ness that sits much closer to that of the weird, open to the possibility of
multiplicity and contradiction, resisting stable and absolutely determined
answers.
Jekyll and Hyde is widely recognised as a text working with psychologi-
cal ideas about selfhood, personality, and consciousness, and this is where
it grows weird. It is a story capturing “the sense of potentialities on the
cusp of a reconceptualization of the psyche, where splitting contains mul-
tiple and contradictory valences.”14 For Peter Garrett, in Jekyll and Hyde
“a plural, disunified model of the self displaces traditional dualities and
seems to anticipate the decomposition of the unitary subject” in modern
literature.15 In a way, though, this critical work was done for us, almost
as soon as the novella was published: that critic was Frederic Myers.
Myers and Stevenson corresponded over Jekyll and Hyde, with Myers
expressing his admiration for the story and suggesting corrections which
Stevenson never chose to take up.16 Although an essay by Myers often
connected to Jekyll and Hyde, “Multiplex Personality,” was published
in late 1886, a number of his remarks in the later Human Personal-
ity and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903) particularly illuminate the
implications of borderland psychological theorising for the new capacity
at the fin de siècle to conceive identity weirdly. In Human Personality,
Myers emphasises both the plurality and the instability of consciousness:
“I regard each man as at once profoundly unitary and almost infinitely
composite,” he wrote.17 A person may possess multiple subliminal selves,
“quasi-independent trains of thought” between which could exist “not
only co-operations ” but also “upheavals and alterations of personality of

many kinds, so that what was once below the surface may for a time,
or permanently, rise above it.” These subconscious emergences he called
“ripples over the threshold.”18
Ideas of surfaces, thresholds, and interactions across them position
mental existence itself as a weird state, neither fixed and stable nor fully
knowable, from which inward rather than outward monstrosities might
erupt. Jekyll and Hyde, evidently, dates too early to be simply reflecting
fin-de-siècle psychological explorations like those of Bergson and Myers.
It was cited in medical studies, and Julia Reid argues that a creative dia-
logue is visible at work between Stevenson and Myers. For Reid, Steven-
son’s work “may resist as well as affirm, may even influence, late-Victorian
science” and “creative literature […] can intuit truths which are as yet
denied to science.”19 Speculative literary modes like the weird have a
degree of creative freedom to imagine, or intuit, alternative ways of know-
ing the world less accessible to mainstream intellectual enquiry in the grip
of the dominant nineteenth-century positivism.
As a weird tale, Jekyll and Hyde shares this intuitive freedom with the
borderlands of late nineteenth-century psychology. Nancy K. Gish, for
example, demonstrates connections between Hyde and psychiatric stud-
ies of hysteria by Pierre Janet, and makes the point that the story presents
multiplicity of consciousness as a normal, not pathological, state; Jekyll’s
discourse “both parallels the [hysterical] dissociation theory of [Steven-
son’s] time and anticipates recent neo-dissociation theory that assumes
originary plurality rather than fragmented unity.”20 By posing the “mul-
tifarious polity” of personality as standard, Stevenson’s story demands
acceptance of an explanation of the nature of the self that was not part of
contemporary orthodox philosophy. Adjusting to a new view of abnormal
as normal is challenging, though, since that plural self is not metaphorical
or merely mentally internal in this storyworld, but makes an embodied
irruption, as Hyde, into contemporary London life, where he both does
and does not belong.
The novella presents a reconceived version of the self, driven by Jekyll’s
central insight that “man is not truly one, but truly two.”21 That recon-
stituted self is, however, not a stable one—the tempting binary simplicity
of the notion of the “double self,” so popularly associated with this story,
conceals continually shifting ground. Indeed, Jekyll and Hyde is notable
for its eluding of absolute certainties. It appears to encourage speculations
about Jekyll’s relationship with Hyde (such as blackmail for illegitimacy
50 E. ALDER
or homosexuality) only to demolish them later.22 The text occludes the

precise nature of the vicious deeds that not only Jekyll but also Enfield,
Utterson, and Lanyon are careful and willing to ignore or smooth over.23
The narrative also refuses to pin down who the central character really
“is.” Jekyll is shifty on this point and plays the uncertainty to his moral
advantage in his so-called Full Statement which, while presenting “the
last pieces of the narrative puzzle, […] also works against [his] assertions
of duality.”24 As critics have noted, Jekyll’s self-vindicating, apparently
innocent welcome of Hyde, that “[t]his, too, was myself. It seemed nat-
ural and human,” transforms into a rejection when he needs to distance
himself from Hyde the murderer: “He, I say – I cannot say, I. That child
of Hell had nothing human” (58, 67).25 Self or other, human or inhu-
man, Jekyll or Hyde, natural or unnatural: such dualisms litter the text as
if they can stabilise the self and fix the story in place with comprehensible
binary explanations.
Yet the narrative consistently works against such surety until the end.
In Chapter 8, for example, Utterson and Poole break into the cabinet and
find Hyde’s body in Jekyll’s clothes, inverting Hyde’s function as Jekyll’s
“cloak” (59), but whether this death was murder or suicide is unclear.
Further, the story “ends” three times, as the documents contributed by
Lanyon and Jekyll in Chapters 9 and 10 each provide another version
of events. Chapter 10 concludes with the words “I lay down the pen and
[…] bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end” (70). But who
is in control of the pen at this point? This chapter is Jekyll’s “Full State-
ment,” but as Garrett observes, “[t]he more we ponder its disclosures,
the more mysterious and unstable it becomes.”26 The “I” thus far, we
suppose, has been Jekyll, but if so, why refer to himself as “that” Henry
Jekyll rather than “this”? If Hyde has taken over, as we know he now can
without Jekyll taking the potion, at what point did that happen; when
did we start reading his words? The figure of the author, too, shadows
this final line, adding another textual layer that further undermines cer-
tainty right at the narrative’s close by drawing attention to its inherent
fictionality.
In this way, Jekyll and Hyde constructs a weird narrative reality. Hyde
and Jekyll do not so much exist in a dualistic balance as, rather, the only
two facets that are presently visible of a profoundly fragmented, plural-
istic self. Jekyll and Hyde has become widely known, even among those
who have not read the original book, primarily for its trope of the dou-
bled self.27 For Rylance, the story reveals “the persistence of well-worn
conceptual archetypes” in its binary divisions that follow a nineteenth-

century tendency to treat psychological pathology as “largely an all-or-
nothing game.”28 But Jekyll’s discovery, or revelation, is really somewhat
more troubling, and undermines binary conceptions; he predicts, in lan-
guage not unlike Myers’s, that “man will be ultimately known for a mere
polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens” (56).
The binary language of good and evil so often associated with Jekyll
and Hyde in fact emerges only from Jekyll—none of the other charac-
ters use it.29 Gish relates Hyde to “a theory of a ‘normal’ multiplicity of
the self that, in this case, takes the form of a good/evil split.”30 But this
binary is normative rather than descriptive, part of Jekyll’s untrustworthy
efforts to impose what Jerrold Hogle calls a “grid of intelligibility” on his
relations with Hyde rather than being an accurate expression of what they
actually are.31 Jekyll’s problem (or one of them) is that there is no bet-
ter philosophical discourse available to him: as Roger Luckhurst remarks,
“Jekyll, sensing the flicker of an alternative multiplicity but having no
means to name it, can only resort to moralistic and materialistic bina-
ries, collapsing back into an account that divides the pathological doctor
and his savage self.”32 Deflected from the radical insights of multifarious-
ness and simultaneity, Jekyll returns to conventional and more comforting
choices between two fixed knowns: saint or sinner, self or other, “an angel
instead of a fiend” (59). But it is too late: having roared out of his cage,
Hyde cannot be put back.
Hyde is a troublingly liminal figure, the physically manifested proof
that a radical new understanding of reality must be accepted. This mate-
rial identity that returns after Jekyll’s severe physical and existential trial
is, in effect, a weird horror, monstrous and amoral and unknown; he is
an embodiment of the kind of world Villiers uncovers in The Great God
Pan, a ripple across the threshold of “a world before which the human
soul seemed to shrink back and shudder.”33 Jekyll separates spirit from
body and exposes himself to occupation by a “foul soul” whom Utter-
son and Enfield are unable to describe, but who produces in Utterson
a “hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear” (16). As an expression
of something these Victorian gentlemen may not want to acknowledge
about themselves, Hyde, through their eyes, lets us “see the inside from
the perspective of the outside.”34
None of the other characters, including Jekyll, can fully admit or
describe Hyde. They comprehend him partially, obliquely, uncomfortably,
in horror. As Martin Tropp observes, Jekyll and Hyde “is about Utterson’s
52 E. ALDER
and Lanyon’s incomprehension as much as it is about Jekyll’s new under-

standing. […] Both a detective case and a case in abnormal psychology, it
constantly escapes pinning down by the lawyer’s methodical logic”35 ; for
Garrett, similarly, “the power of naming” fails, and Hyde remains “face-
less […] a blank to be filled in by each interpreter.”36 Despite Utterson’s
efforts to explain him as “troglodytic” or as “Satan’s signature” Hyde
remains inexplicable and indescribable (16). Enfield “can see him at this
very moment” yet “can’t describe him,” “couldn’t specify the point,”
“really can name nothing out of the way” (10). The language does not
exist, it seems, to articulate Hyde or what he means; Stiles argues that the
novel “lays bare the limitations of scientific prose.”37 The other charac-
ters experience Hyde empirically at the level of individual impression and
emotional response, but he eludes the systemic mastery of language, and
remains troubling.
The mismatch between the weird outcome of Jekyll’s hybrid chemical-
occult experiment (Hyde’s existence) and the capacity of scientific dis-
course to articulate it is clear. Jekyll does try, though. Late on, to his
tortured imagination, Hyde appears as
not only hellish, but inorganic. This was the shocking thing: that the slime
of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust ges-
ticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, would usurp
the offices of life. (69)
Jekyll’s effort to express such extremities of horror presents a Hyde who

is monstrous in the way of weird monsters, assimilable neither to con-
ventional mythological traditions nor to any available moral frameworks.
Despite the moral language of “sin” and “hell,” Jekyll has by now given
up on the false comfort of stable binaries. What form the sin and gestures
of the “amorphous dust” take can hardly be pictured; these are only the
best words available to Jekyll to signal its awfulness. This horror is “inor-
ganic” yet slimy, dead with no shape, yet taking on a form and function
like life.
The monstrousness of Hyde cannot be reduced to such comprehen-
sible dualities like other weird monsters, as Kelly Hurley demonstrates
of fin-de-siècle fiction in The Gothic Body and Graham Harman shows of
Lovecraft’s weird tales, he exists in gaps and occlusions—conceptually,
psychically, physically, and linguistically.38 However, clearly Hyde is no
outer monstrosity. Of twenty-first-century weird fiction, Timothy Jarvis

finds
themes and tropes no longer orientated outward, or only outward, at a

cosmos indifferent or hostile to humanity, but also inward at the crossings
of borders forced upon us by our changing bodies, by the revelation of
the world-without-us.39
An inward orientation of the weird like this also marks Jekyll and Hyde
as a weird tale. Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde dissolves all internal
boundaries that might have been thought to exist around Jekyll’s physical
and intellectual identity. Originating within Jekyll, Hyde feels “natural”
to the doctor, even to the extent of being more of a self than the origi-
nal. “In my eyes,” Jekyll reports, the new form “bore a livelier image of
the spirit, it seemed more express and single” than he did (58). At first,
in Jekyll’s unreliable testimony, at least, Hyde appears as something pro-
gressive, a purer (which is not to say gooder) self in comparison with the
contaminated doctor.
Yet Jekyll did initially hope to produce a better version of the self,
which finds a corollary in spiritualist speculations on the possibilities for
spiritual development. W. T. Stead, in “The Man of Dreams” (1895),
offers the remarkably optimistic spin that while people may be brewing a
Hyde, “under the outward semblance and mask of an unregenerate repro-
bate, the suppressed other self may be building up, little by little, the
higher and purer nature, which will only be seen in its reality when the
mortal scaffolding of the flesh falls into the tomb.”40 Myers, in “Multiplex
Personality,” also argued that identity is “capable of being reconstituted
after an improved pattern” and that “spontaneous readjustments of man’s
being are not all of them pathological or retrogressive.”41 Although these
aspirations are undermined rather than fulfilled by the actual results of his
experiment, what Jekyll has produced may look horrifyingly forward to
future unthinkable possibilities for the human self as much as back to its
perceived savage, primitive biological past. Jekyll’s discovery reveals pre-
viously unthought of possibilities and hints at unknown wonders beyond
the limits of the physical world as currently understood. These revelations,
too, must be acknowledged as components of the narrative if Hyde’s ori-
gin, actions and extant corpse are accepted as such.
Hyde’s depravity, crimes, and the horror of Jekyll’s gradual disintegra-
tion may ultimately dominate in most readings of the novella, but Jekyll’s
54 E. ALDER
discovery has nonetheless revised what must be accepted as reality in this

storyworld. This revision is more or less in line with emerging contempo-
rary psychological theories of the self and consciousness, and yet exceeds
them by invoking occult language of dimensions beyond the visible every-
day world. It presents a weird, reconfigured version of reality and ways
of knowing, while revealing that behind the everyday is something hor-
rific and soul-threatening, unknowable, shapeless, beyond current grasp
or ken.
Jekyll and Hyde’s engagement with contemporary debates and devel-
opments in psychology establishes a weird ontology or conception of real-
ity—one which secures the novella’s place in the weird tradition as well
as helping to account for its recognised influence on later writers. Onto-
logically and narratologically, Jekyll and Hyde is an unstable, ungraspable,
irreducible text, never fully knowable, resisting the fixing of meaning and
existing on the brink of the weird. Through its multiplicity, the novel-
la’s rich and varied contributions to literary and popular culture exist not
only at the level of its tropes and plot premise, but also at the level of the
story’s underlying worldview. That includes its contributions to the emer-
gence of the weird tale, as this and the next chapter will show through
stories by Machen and Nesbit. Jekyll’s experiment exposes a new and per-
haps unwelcome aspect to reality—and he also deploys an unorthodox
mixture of knowledge and methods in order to prove it. The “stamp-
ing efficacy” (58) shaping the amorphous, indescribable, and “hitherto
unknown” (16) horror that is Hyde rests on an enweirded epistemology
that rewrites the relative contributions of body and spirit to the nature of
the self and the nature of reality. I return to the epistemological dimen-
sions of Jekyll’s experiment and its outcomes in Chapter 3, but for now I
continue exploring ideas about weird borderlands—this time through the
writing of Arthur Machen.
Enchanted Student: Arthur Machen’s Borderlands

In Far Off Things (1922), Machen describes his young self as “an
enchanted student of the daylight country, which […] for me never was
illuminated by common daylight, but rather by suns that rose from the
holy seas of faery and sank down behind magic hills.”42 As a writer
still best known for chilling weird tales like The Great God Pan and
“The White People” (1899), Machen’s visionary emphasis on magical
illumination and holy enchantment may seem out of kilter with the
unspeakable horror confronted by so many of his 1890s characters, for

whom the strange wonder of the world often manifests as miraculousness
gone wrong.
Dreadfulness was only one expression of the vision of a writer whose
formative years in Gwent in Wales impressed on him the ways in which
“[e]verything visible was the veil of an invisible secret.”43 Machen was
a lifelong Anglo-Catholic, yet, like Algernon Blackwood, was drawn to
the occult (and to writing) in search of the kind of visionary revelation
and mystical experience the regular church couldn’t provide.44 Machen’s
interest in occult texts and ideas dates to at least 1885 and his employ-
ment by publisher George Redway, and he became a member of the Her-
metic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1899 after the death of his first wife
and on the encouragement of his friend A. E. Waite.45 His writings are
seen as a set of elaborations on a single project; Mark Valentine and Roger
Dobson observe that “[p]ractically his entire writing career was devoted
to expressing a spiritual philosophy: that the world and everything in it is a
good deal stranger and more miraculous than we know.”46 This is visible
across his work—in weird tales like The Three Impostors (1895) and “The
Terror” (1917), autobiographical fiction like The Hill of Dreams (1907),
and non-fiction like Hieroglyphics (1902). S. T. Joshi considers Impostors
to be “Machen’s most sustained weird work” and it and The Great God
Pan are also significant for the weird tale as successors to Jekyll and Hyde
and the Stevensons’ co-authored The Dynamiter (1885).47 They were
received as such by contemporary readers, and a direct line can be traced
from Jekyll and Hyde through The Great God Pan to Lovecraft’s “The
Dunwich Horror” (1929), which refers to Machen’s tale.48
Machen’s weird tales are sure that a wondrous reality lies beyond the
everyday, but the capacity of the modern world’s state of knowledge
to understand it is severely limited, especially by its narrow material-
ism. Machen’s mystic, anti-science worldview is well known, articulated
in his own work as well as through those of his critics and biographers.49
According to James Machin, although Machen was “willing to press con-
temporary scientific (and pseudoscientific) ideas to his own ends” in fic-
tion, his interest in it was “superficial and rebarbative.”50 He certainly
had strong feelings about it, especially its modern, materialist iterations.
“If I were writing in the Middle Ages,” he remarked in a letter to his
publisher,
56 E. ALDER
I should need no scientific basis […] In these days the supernatural per
se is entirely incredible; to believe, we must link our wonders to some
scientific or pseudo-scientific fact, or basis, or method. Thus we do not
believe in “ghosts” but in telepathy, not in “witchcraft” but in hypnotism.
If Mr Stevenson had written his great masterpiece about 1590-1650, Dr
Jekyll would have made a compact with the devil. In 1886 Dr Jekyll sends
to the Bond Street chemists for some rare drugs.51
Here and elsewhere, Machen suggests that changes in attitudes to wonder

have been a matter not of essence but of construction or labelling, which
links Jekyll and Hyde to a literary tradition as well as to its contemporary
context. Wonders remain wonders, however they are constructed, while
old forms of knowledge may be better at recognising truths about the
world than the modern late nineteenth-century variety.52
For Machen, however, the nature of wonder is not inherently a force
for good but occupies, as Vincent Starrett describes it, “a strange bor-
derland, lying somewhere between Dreams and Death”; Machen’s read-
ers “see only dimly the phantasmagoria beyond [the veil]; the ecstasies
of vague shapes with a shining about them, on the one hand; on the
other the writhings of animate gargoyles.”53 Thus the secrets uncovered
by characters in Machen’s stories are never clearly represented, but like
Hyde, they are only half-known, lingering on the cusp of the weird: what,
exactly, makes the opal of “The Inmost Light” shine both beautifully and
horribly, or, in The Great God Pan, lights up Mary’s face a moment before
she succumbs to madness?
The fates of scientific figures and their human subjects in The Great
God Pan, “The Inmost Light,” and The Three Impostors imply that
modern science involves severe moral, physical, and spiritual risk. Won-
der can be horrifying as well as uplifting, and much depends on how
it is approached. Those “who understand nothing but materialism” are
“very bad people” according to Machen, in Hieroglyphics.54 In Impostors ,
Machen’s fictional critique of positivist materialism is reflected as much
in structure as content. Its nested, obliquely related sequence of stories—
as the eponymous “three impostors” tell a series of tall tales to Dyson
and Phillips, the two idle investigators of the mystery of the Young Man
in Spectacles—makes for an uncertain narrative world. Within the sto-
ries, individual episodes such as “The Novel of the Black Seal” and “The
Novel of the White Powder” involve characters delving into hidden or
unknown occult knowledge and the unstable relationships between body
and spirit. Like Jekyll and Hyde, Machen’s novel constructs a weird nar-
rative reality that is only partially knowable and resists fixing to a single
state or meaning.
In The London Adventure (1924), Machen recommended a different
method of knowing: “I try to reverence the signs, omens, messages that
are delivered in queer ways and queer place, not in the least according to
the plans laid down either by the theologians or the men of science.”55
As the narrator of the short story “A Fragment of Life” (1904) puts it
Our stupid ancestors taught us that we could become wise by studying

books as “science,” by meddling with test-tubes, geological specimens,
microscopic preparations and the like; but they who have cast off these
follies know that they must not read “science” books but mass-books, and
that the soul is made wise by the contemplation of mystic ceremonies and
elaborate and curious rites.56
The path of science, then, is a path of folly, of meddling with false wisdom
at the expense of true understanding. Through the use of inverted com-
mas, even the pairing of “books” and “science” appears to be distaste-
ful. Even more seriously, accepting a modern, materialist standpoint on
knowledge is dangerous—it could make the difference between achieving
an ecstatic spiritual experience or a dreadful one.
Critics have noted ways in which practices of reading and writing were
central to Machen’s search for the ecstatic experience through a “fusion
of research, belief, and creative art.”57 Reading popular fiction, assisted by
its democratic level of shared accessibility, could be a route towards “the
possibility of sheer spiritual bliss and occult citizenship”58 ; in Hieroglyph-
ics, Machen identifies “Ecstasy” as the defining quality of “fine literature”:
Substitute, if you like, rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery,

sense of the unknown, desire for the unknown. All and each will convey
what I mean […] but in every case there will be that withdrawal from the
common life and the common consciousness which justifies my choice of
“ecstasy” as the best symbol of my meaning.59
Through writing, Machen “intertwines the spiritual experience with artis-

tic pursuit, defining art as a gateway, if an inadequate one, to the numi-
nous.”60 The corruption of art, Zoë Lehmann Imfeld argues, such as in
the elaborate artifice of the invented tales of the three impostors and their
ritual treatment of the young man in spectacles, can tip everything over
58 E. ALDER
into horror. Machen’s weird tales “show the numinous to run a troubled
path” between ecstasy and evil.61
“The White People” walks that line, functioning as “an exploration of
knowledge as grace, and of knowledge corrupted.”62 It is the story, told
through her own diary, of a sixteen-year-old girl introduced to pagan
magic by her nurse, and who learns the rituals enabling her to encounter
the “white people” at a secret place in the woods, ultimately leading to
her self-destruction. Ambrose, the scholarly recluse into whose possession
the diary has passed, argues that the girl’s story is emblematic of true sin,
which has nothing to do with the intentions or innocence but rather with
transgression against the known order. Kimberley Jackson argues that
“The White People” constructs “the world of true sin” as “a world of
transgression and transcendence always present beneath the known and
the civilized”63 ; in this sense, the numinous, perhaps, does not so much
tread a line between two states as encompass a broader sublime experi-
ence. Sin, as Ambrose claims, is “simply the attempt to penetrate into
another and a higher sphere in a forbidden manner […] sin is an effort to
gain the ecstasy.”64 Since both ecstasy and sin arise out of the same nat-
ural urge towards mystic experience, the distinction between them is fine
or almost non-existent; as Machen later remarked in Far Off Things , man
“is by his nature designed to look upwards […] to discern the eternal in
things temporal.”65
“A Fragment of Life” (1904) explores the same impulse more posi-
tively, in an effort “to imbue London life with a condition of visionary
strangeness that would inspire rather than alienate.”66 It is one of several
tales in which London’s urban spaces become uncertain and unreal (as
happens at moments in “The Red Hand” and Impostors , for example).67
“Fragment” tracks the escape of a young couple, Edward and Mary
Darnell, from their mundane mid-income domesticity through the teach-
ings of the ancient Celtic church. Mr. Darnell realises that “the whole
world is but a great ceremony or sacrament, which teaches under visible
forms a hidden and transcendent doctrine. […] he found in the ritual of
the church a perfect image of the world; an image purged, exalted, and
illuminate.”68 Darnell and his wife gradually acquire the kind of knowl-
edge required to gain this transcendental borderland, discarding the “fol-
lies” of scientific knowledge.69 Even so, there are “darker perils” in these
exalted teachings too—“suggestions of an awful region into which the
soul might enter […] of evocations which could summon the utmost
forces of evil from their dark places,” while childhood memories carry
“a note of warning, as a symbol of dangers that might be in the way.”70

Here ends Mr. Darnell’s own third-person narration, and the ultimate fate
of the Darnells is left ambiguous as the narrative declares it “impossible
to carry on [their] history” any further.71 The exact nature of the state of
transcendence they have reached is no longer the business of this story of
a fragment of life.
Such transcendence, it seems, is an absent presence, a gap beyond the
current state of knowledge that, for exactly that reason, cannot be filled.
This is the space of the weird. Lehmann Imfeld argues that in The Great
God Pan, for example, Helen Vaughan is not so much an evil presence as
“an absence of something,” locating her outside a Christian humanist tele-
ology and problematising attempts to characterise her straightforwardly as
a devil figure.72 Since this absence is nihilistic, presenting it as horrifying
reinforces Christian humanism: “The humanity which can only be realised
through grace haunts the empty and negative spaces which provide the
very horror to these tales.”73 These traits—absence of supernatural tele-
ology, negative spaces, fine line between ecstasy and evil—mark Machen’s
tale as weird, while as an unspeakable absence, a “nothing present when
there should be something,” Helen Vaughan also resonates with Fish-
er’s conception of the eerie.74 Fisher’s examples are questions about built
monuments like Stonehenge, but we could ask similar questions about
Helen: “What kind of symbolic order did these beings belong to?” and “Is
there a deliberative agent here at all?”75 Answers are not entirely forth-
coming, though as Villiers reminds Austin, “those who are wise know
what all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing” (92). But
their system of meaning has been lost (which, Helen’s career shows, is
just as well for human sanity). We never hear Helen’s version of her story,
or discover much about what kind of agency of her own she possesses.
The failures of presence in Pan, the absences and negations, are
abcanny traits, unknowable and unrelatable to human teleology; as a
weird monster, as the next section of this chapter explores, Helen is an
example of the “unrepresentable and unknowable, the evasive of mean-
ing.”76 Her existence is, however, tied to a history of sorts, to what Joshi
describes as the “Little People mythology.”77 In several of Machen’s tales,
including Impostors , “The Red Hand” (1895) and “The Shining Pyra-
mid” (1895), a lost pagan Celtic world lingers alongside modern civilisa-
tion. Often located in remote regions of Wales (where the child Helen
meets strange playmates), it occasionally surfaces in London, through
objects like the black seal, symbols like the Red Hand, and people such
60 E. ALDER
as Jervase Craddock (in Impostors ’ “The Novel of the Black Seal”). In

“The Shining Pyramid,” a missing girl and a series of objects and symbols
lead Dyson and Vaughan (no relation) to witness the “Pyramid of fire,”
in which they glimpse a loathsome gathering of “things made in the form
of men but stunted like children hideously deformed” and hear a sibliant
language.78
Machen’s Little People mythology constructs an enweirded history, an
impossible history that, if it were to be true, explodes the consensus real-
ity of what history is (or was) and demands acceptance of an alternative
or co-existing, even conflicting, history existing in parallel. Aaron Worth
argues that the term “little people” is not intended to suggest that a fairy
superstition is real, but rather is an expression of something more pro-
found, the “predatory, nocturnal horrors who form the kernel of truth
behind folk traditions of fairies or ‘little people’.”79 Worth argues that
Machen’s little people exist both within and outside history. They are
unwelcome prehistoric irruptions, but their possession and creation of
artefacts and their capacity to use symbolic language “signals their partic-
ipation in the cultural stage of civilization, placing them in the domain of
history proper.”80 The arts, not the capacity for reason, were what “dis-
tinguished [humans] from other animals,” Machen concluded in Far Off
Things, and “we may say that all artists are in reality survivals from an
earlier time”81 ; the little people’s capacity to create locates their history
that much closer to that of human beings.
The idea of a weird alternative past lying behind the everyday is cap-
tured by some of Kimberly Jackson’s remarks on abhistory:
The ab-historical past that Machen invokes is that which cannot be claimed
by the present or by history because it remains always past, a past with no
future, or a past with no present. It is in this past where true savagery
resides; and because it lies, unclaimed, alongside human history, it is capa-
ble of intruding into the human world, the world in which man has come
to define himself as the most imposing figure. In Machen’s tales, what has
never been human cannot claim man’s shape, and yet it is precisely from
out of a human face that it peers. Contained within the human form itself
is the very real existence of the possibility of never-having-been, or the
possibility of another rationality and another physique.82
In this account, abhistories, like the weird, hover between true reality
and unthinkable alternative, hinting of possibilities neither fully present
nor entirely erasable. Jackson identifies Machen’s tales as “supernatural”
rather than weird, and doesn’t connect abhistory with either Miéville’s
abcanny or Kelly Hurley’s and William Hope Hodgson’s abhuman.83
Nonetheless, making the link (particularly since Jackson cites Hurley’s
The Gothic Body) is irresistible: the “ab-historical past” described here
is evidently a weird past. As Miéville puts it, the weird is “suffused
with abness,” producing an “invented cultural memory” and “back-
project[ing]” a “radical unremembered alterity into history.”84 Machen’s
abhistory is a numinous history, lying alongside the dominant modern
British construction of the past and occasionally brushing wondrously,
horribly against it.
The history of science, too, becomes abhistorical in Machen’s hands.
Worth deftly distinguishes Pan from science fiction by suggesting that the
story is premised on an “‘antiquum’, a recovered piece of older, occult
knowledge” as a counterpoint to the “novum” posited by Darko Suvin
as the marker of sf.85 Tales like Pan and “The Inmost Light,” Worth
argues, imply “that such modern disciplines [as neuroscience] are only
catching up with the ‘sciences’ of a bygone age.”86 The knowledge likely
to be mishandled by modern science is not new, but has always been
there, lying behind the mainstream history of science and out of view
to most people. The existence of Machen’s Little People and the secret
knowledge they represent expose the delusions of anthropocentricity: its
definitions of the world and its history, the limits of its knowledge and
ways of knowing. The normal reality that has been constructed by histo-
ries and language, scientific rationality, and visible material forms (such as
bodies and objects) is undermined.
The dangers of unwise picking and prodding at the relationships
between these is one of the subjects of The Great God Pan, discussed
next. As far as his early weird tales go, at least, Machen’s worldview con-
sists in a sometimes-known but only partly knowable true reality, which
must be approached with caution. The weird borderland in Machen’s fic-
tion is a numinous more-than-visible world of evil and terror, or awe and
ecstasy, or all of these, always there but mostly out of reach of human
knowing. An understanding that the world is not limited to materiality is
essential for a meaningful existence—if it is the right sort of understand-
ing. In Machen’s weird tales, scientists and experimental techniques often
unleash the most destructive and unknowable terrors, in fictional attacks
on materialist ontology as well as on the practices and epistemology of
nineteenth-century positivist science.
62 E. ALDER
Symbols of Something and Nothing: The Great God

Pan
The Great God Pan first appeared in 1890 and was published in book
form along with “The Inmost Light” (of which more in the next chapter)
in 1894. They share several parallels in plot and premise; in each case, an
occult neurological operation opens a path to shadowy realms beyond the
known world. The Great God Pan opens with an experiment conducted
by Dr. Raymond on his ward Mary, in which an incision in her brain
enables her to “see the God Pan.”87 This encounter, “a metaphor for the
experience of ecstasy,” turns appalling and leads to her loss of sanity and
to her pregnancy.88 Their occult offspring grows into a woman usually
known as Helen Vaughan, who draws the attention of Villiers and others
after a series of London gentlemen are found dead, apparently of fright;
she is eventually tracked down and forced to end her own life. Like Jekyll
and Hyde, The Great God Pan is to an extent presented as a mystery
uncovered by a third party, supplemented with documents and additional
accounts from other characters.
Through its piecemeal construction as well as through its content, the
narrative resists absolute knowing. In the narrative’s gaps and elisions, in
the suicides, insanities and deaths, and in documents discovered by Villiers
and collected by Clarke, hints lurk of the terrible unknown world, beings,
and history behind everyday reality. “It is an old story,” says Villiers to
Austin,
an old mystery played in our day, and in dim London streets instead of
amidst the vineyards and the olive gardens. […] Such forces cannot be
named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a
symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to
some a foolish tale. (92–3)
Villiers’s efforts to articulate his sense of the numinous are marked by

eerie failures of presence—language can’t bring these mysteries into exis-
tence, which is just as well because their failure of absence would be over-
whelmingly terrifying; as it is, weird forces are both there and not there.
The documents included in the narrative are often fragmentary or stop
short of full representation (such as Dr. Matheson’s account, discussed
later).
Again like Jekyll and Hyde, The Great God Pan uses a scientific experi-
ment on a human subject to demonstrate radical theories that, if correct,
would entail accepting a revised version of the nature of reality—one that
consists in much more than what is visible. Dr. Raymond explains that “I
devoted myself to transcendental medicine” (2)—a new inter-discipline to
complement Jekyll’s “mystic” and “transcendental” chemistry. He posi-
tions himself as an explorer, the discoverer of a world of knowledge:
“[…] the great truth burst upon me, and I saw, mapped out in lines
of sight, a whole world, a sphere unknown; continents and islands, and
great oceans” (5). A combination of research and insight leads him to new
truths about reality and to understand, he thinks, the nature of the border
separating one world from another. As he explains to Clarke, the friend he
has invited to witness his experiment, the “real” world is not ours but the
other one, the one that exists “beyond this glamour and this vision […]
beyond them all as beyond a veil” (3). To access this world, Dr. Raymond
will demonstrate the physiological manipulation of spiritual consciousness
by means of “a slight lesion in the grey matter […]; a trifling rearrange-
ment of certain cells” (4). He proposes a physical, neurological basis for
the activities of the mind and spirit, resembling the suggestions put for-
ward by the SPR of receptive nerves accounting for telepathy.89
Raymond applies, in short, materialist, positivist approaches to an
occult experiment in “transcendental medicine”; the incompatibility of
the two is partly what causes the terrible events that follow. Jack Poller
argues that Machen drew primarily on alchemical rather than modern
occult ideas, given his ambivalence to materialist science and scepticism
of the SPR’s adoption of positivist methods.90 For Machen, materialist
science, including in an occult pseudo-scientific form, could never prove
a successful route to ecstatic experience, and indeed, might lead to far
worse. As Ambrose remarks in “The White People,” “we are so drenched
with materialism, that we should probably fail to recognise real wicked-
ness if we encountered it.”91
Dr. Raymond is therefore set up for failure despite (or because of) his
sincere conviction of achieving success. Over those “certain cells,” Dr.
Raymond claims complete knowledge and precise control: “I am perfectly
instructed,” he informs Clarke, “as to the possible functions of those
nerve centres in the scheme of things. With a touch I can bring them
into play, with a touch, I say, I can set free the current” (7). The “nerve
centres” in question belong to the girl Mary, who is about to undergo a
drugged but not anaesthetised brain operation. In the public imagination,
64 E. ALDER
Anne Stiles outlines, neurologists were popularly conceived as villains

“due to their controversial research methods (especially vivisection) and
the obvious ways in which their research undermined the widespread
lay perception of the ‘soul’ or the ‘will’ as the governing force behind
human action.”92 Dr. Raymond’s psychophysiological leanings and cold
attitude to his experimental subject positions him among such villains;
he is an exemplary cool, detached experimental scientist, practicing, as
Natasha Rebry puts it, a “soulless science.”93 Jeffrey Renye points out
that Raymond’s urge to “tear the folds that separate modes of percep-
tion” is irresponsible in that the experiment serves no obvious useful
purpose.94 Raymond pushes moral boundaries further than his real-life
colleagues. Late-Victorian neurologists “could conceive of no physical
locus for spirituality in the human brain”95 : this is exactly what Raymond
does conceive and locate. But rather than his experiment providing
potentially welcome scientific evidence for some kind of spirituality, it
overwhelmingly backfires in a profoundly destructive way.
Raymond’s beliefs and methods prove inadequate for dealing with
occult realities. Despite Raymond’s confidence in his skill, there are hints
of doubts when he speaks of the “spirit”; he tells Clarke that “probably,
for the first time since man was made, a spirit will gaze on a spirit world”
(7). The comma after “probably” indicates it is the outcome that is uncer-
tain, not the method (of which Raymond is entirely confident). Nor does
he really know what that other world is. He ends his claim for perfect
control over the “nerve centres” by saying: “with a touch I can complete
the communication between this world of sense and – we shall be able to
finish that sentence later on” (7). Yet he never really does. The failure to
complete this sentence suggests that mysteries endure beyond the limits
of knowledge, and indicates the lack of adequate language to describe the
world beyond. Only metaphors are available: currents, veils, “seeing the
god Pan” (3).
Ordinary people, though, are evidently not equipped to cope with
whatever occupies the inarticulable gap beyond this world of sense, and
Mary loses her sanity. Dr. Raymond is “still quite cool” as he brings Clarke
to see her: “it is a great pity; she is a hopeless idiot. However, it could not
be helped; and, after all, she has seen the Great God Pan” (15). He regrets
his broken instrument, but his main concern is that he has proved his
point; only years later does Raymond acknowledge that although “[w]hat
I said Mary would see, she saw,” he “forgot that no human eyes can
look on such a sight with impunity” (108). Raymond, then, makes sev-
eral erroneous assumptions due to his positivist cast: that the knowledge
set to be gained will be gained by himself, and will be beneficial to him;
that he, the scientist, is in control of the situation; that the condition of
the body determines the state of spirit or consciousness; and that Mary
herself is no more than an operational instrument. The ultimate result of
the experiment, though, is Helen Vaughan, the spirit of Pan made flesh
from Mary’s body. Helen can be seen as both an invoked demon and a
distortion of the spirit forms channelled by mediums and clothed with
their bodily matter; as a weird being she is both of these and more. With
Mary unable to communicate her experience, Helen is the only worldly
evidence for what “seeing the God Pan” is all about—and she, like Hyde,
is at root an unknowable being who defies ultimate comprehension.
Reports of the childhood of Mary’s daughter filter into the narrative
through the memoirs of Clarke, telling of her corruption of two play-
mates (a young boy who loses his reason and a girl who later dies). As
an adult, she comes to the attention of Villiers after a series of London
gentlemen are found dead. The beautiful Helen, it seems, seduces her
victims and reveals to them certain horrific unnameable evils that drive
them to suicide. Helen has been read as a degenerate and transgressive
figure, linked to fin-de-siècle decadence, social anxiety over women’s sex-
uality, and inherited madness.96 The insanity of Mary signals her intellec-
tual inferiority (the power of her will cannot maintain her psychological
unity in the face of her experiences), and she passes on her degenerate
traits to Helen.
But Helen does not have to be understood as degenerate. Machin, for
one, disputes aspects of reading “Machen as a deeply engaged cogitator
and interpreter of contemporary scientific discourse and accompanying
neuroses surrounding evolution and degeneration” and calls for a greater
range of responses to his weird fiction.97 Like Hyde, Helen is legible in
more ways than only as a degenerate horror. If Raymond represents, as he
claims, a peculiarly advanced state of human scientific understanding, then
Helen is a being well beyond that understanding. As a union of human
with one of “the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of
all things” (93), she is also a progressive creature: something new. She
may derive from an abhistorical past and ancient knowledge, but those
are revived through the modern scientific methods were used to create
her, and, unlike the “little people” encountered on rural fringes in “The
Shining Pyramid” and The Three Impostors ’ “Novel of the Black Seal,”
66 E. ALDER
she is a being capable of living as a modern woman in London society.

Humans like Mary, Helen’s childhood friends, and her adult lovers have
not the strength of mind, body or will to assimilate the knowledge that
she embodies and conveys.
The world is not ready for Helen Vaughan, as she too seems to
acknowledge by her final, if coerced, decision to end her life. Her sui-
cide is reported in the narrative’s final chapter, “The Fragments,” in
an account I’ll examine in detail. Helen’s death is reported by a Dr.
Matheson, summoned by Villiers for the sole purpose of bearing wit-
ness to the event. Although he doubts whether “science would benefit
by these brief notes if they could be published,” he nevertheless presents
them scientifically (98). As a professional, the doctor takes his duties seri-
ously:
As was befitting, I did all that my knowledge suggested to make sure that
I was suffering under no delusion. At first astounded, I could hardly think,
but in a minute’s time I was sure that my pulse was steady and regular,
and that I was in my real and true senses. I then fixed my eyes quietly on
what was before me. (99)
Dr. Matheson appeals to the reliability of his senses and the supremacy
of his mind; though briefly thrown in astonishment, he soon gets his
body under control and calmly observes what is happening. His report
is thus to be received as an empirical account conveyed by his “real and
true senses” and is rationally presented. The scientific gaze is needed to
confront the weird—at the same time as its power is shattered by that
confrontation.
What Dr. Matheson witnesses is far from rational and instead violates
many assumptions about the stability of the world. He watches Helen’s
body undergo a series of changes, in a much-quoted passage describing
how
the firm structure of the human body that I had thought to be unchange-
able, and permanent as adamant, began to melt and dissolve. […] I saw
the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then again
reunited. Then I saw the body descend to the beasts whence it ascended,
and that which was on the heights go down to the depths, even to the
abyss of all being. (99–100)
Critics often focus here on Helen’s horrible bodily instability and how it
reflects anxieties over sexual transgression or evolutionary degeneration.
Certainly, her transformations, like Jekyll’s efforts to describe his experi-
ence of Hyde, plausibly reflect “a flickering backward-run down the evo-
lutionary tree towards protoplasm.”98 They flout several supposedly safe
distinctions: female and male, human and beast, body and world, and
Darryl Jones points out that “these interstices […] in their violation of
seemingly clear category distinctions, are the sites of revulsion and there-
fore of horror.”99 These interstices are also sites of weird, whose affect is
not horror alone but comprises awe and wonder too.
The above quoted passage needs to be understood in the context
of the whole scene. The scene’s weirdness shows more fully when the
entirety of Dr. Matheson’s report is taken into account, especially the
contrast between its confident beginning and its troubled, fragmentary
end. Watching Helen’s bodily changes, Dr. Matheson acknowledges that
“horror and revolting nausea rose up within me, and an odour of corrup-
tion choked my breath,” but assures his implied reader that he “remained
firm” (99). Such scientific resolution in the face of revulsion is necessary
to bring him to the brink of the weird and enable him to observe the
world around him turning distinctly Lovecraftian:
The light within the room had turned to blackness, not the darkness of
night, in which objects are seen dimly, for I could see clearly and without
difficulty. But it was the negation of light; objects were presented to my
eyes, if I may say so, without any medium, in such a manner that if there
had been a prism in the room I should have seen no colours represented
in it. (100)
Observing the remainder of the scene appears to require a whole new

kind of seeing, one for which there is no known word. The limits of Dr.
Matheson’s senses to perceive in this alternative way—he can see clearly
but only partially—as well as the limits of language, are discernible here
in his struggle to articulate it; this weird experience resists the scientific
grid of intelligibility. His endeavours can only describe the unknown with
reference to the known, in language of analogy, negation, and inversions.
Helen, though, belongs to some entirely other reality and other way
of thinking and being. Her most horrifying form, too, is beyond mean-
ingful description. First, she reduces to “nothing but a substance as jelly”
68 E. ALDER
(100), identifiable as alchemical “first matter.”100 This substance is sig-

nificant not least because from it Helen develops once last time; she is
an alchemical being “conceived from the tenebrae activae and in contact
with it, who then, to the dismay and terror of her earth-bound witnesses,
ascends.”101 Dr. Matheson records the process with difficulty: “the ladder
was ascended again … [here the MS. is illegible] … for one instant I saw
a Form, shaped in dimness before me, which I will not farther describe”
(100–101). The elision in the middle of this quotation is in Machen’s
text: within it, Helen’s most advanced position is attained in a form so
indescribable that not only does Dr. Matheson now shirk his declared
duty but even ink on paper revolts. Her least knowable, most unspeak-
able, and most horrifying shape is not, after all, the jelly-like matter at
which the ladder begins, but her most developed (and ancient) state at its
top.
In Helen’s death throes, progression and decline, ancient and new, past
and future, awe and horror, collapse into one. Dr. Matheson’s inadequate
report is a final indictment by Machen of the failure of science to explain
the real meaning of existence, illustrating his later remarks in Far Off
Things that the “‘truth’ of science […] is a figment of the brain, a non-
existent monster, like dragons, griffins, and basilisks.”102 Scientific truth,
as in Dr. Matheson’s account, is meant to be pinned down by accurate
empirical observation, conveyed through the symbolic order of written
or spoken language, which here fails. His problems with describing and
representing Helen, however, are not his alone, but pervade the narra-
tive (and echo the irreducibility of Hyde). Austin, for example, earlier
remarks on Helen’s “strange” expression; there is “something about her
face which I didn’t like” and feels familiar, but which he can’t identify
except as “that odd feeling one sometimes has in a dream” (76).
Austin’s and Dr. Matheson’s language is consistent with the discourse
around mystic experience, which contributes to the story’s weird affect. In
The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), psychologist William James
noted that mystic experience is characterised by “Ineffability,” which he
defined as a “negative” state. Of it, the subject “immediately says that it
defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in
words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it
cannot be imparted or transferred to others.”103 The difficulty the other
characters have in imparting how they experience Helen echoes Machen’s
own reflections on his literary efforts to “recreate those vague impressions
of wonder and awe and mystery that I myself had received from the form
and shape of the land of my boyhood and youth”; these he saw as impos-
sible “in a story of material incidents” but perhaps possible in “an interior
tale of the soul and its emotions.”104 Both Mary and the boy Trevor met
by Helen as a child are profoundly psychologically affected and have no
means of attempting to impart their knowledge, which is instead retained
and silenced by men. Helen’s childhood playmate Rachel has her “wild
story” cut off unsaid by Clarke closing the book of his memoirs (26),
while in her adult life, Herbert “would not dare whisper” what Helen
told him (34), and a written account of her “entertainment” is so terri-
ble Austin cannot read it (92). Natasha Rebry understands these stallings
as an inability to cognitively process the shock, and thus as further evi-
dence for the story’s relationship with contemporary debates over the
physiological basis of the mind and for Machen’s opposition to biologi-
cal reductionism.105 However, part of these ineffable encounters between
humans and the god Pan is a corrupted form of ecstasy.
In this sense, Pan and Helen stand not for the transcendental mystery
of A Fragment of Life, but rather for the transgressive knowledge of The
White People. Dr. Matheson’s account presents his witnessing of Helen’s
death as enweirded and twisted, made terrible and horrifying. Although
his account is partial and his experience is indirect, it is the fullest articu-
lation the narrative contains of the distorted, corrupted mystic experience
that “seeing the god Pan” might offer. Machen himself seems later to
have considered the effects of The Great God Pan as something of a mis-
take, reflecting on “my real failure; I translated awe, at worst awfulness,
into evil; again, I say, one dreams in fire and works in clay.”106 Hence,
perhaps, the ambiguous affect of this weird tale, hovering between won-
der and horror.
A different understanding of the nature of reality and a different
understanding of knowledge—of the relationship between body, mind,
and spirit—is demanded by The Great God Pan, in an illustration of
Machen’s own opposition to a materialist, mechanistic ontology in favour
of the wonder and horror of a more enchanted world. An eerie, abhis-
torical figure, Helen exists outwith conventional moral, philosophical,
and semiotic frameworks that might otherwise explain her. Hers is an
advanced state beyond human comprehension that can barely be wit-
nessed, let alone narrated, understood, or controlled by conventional sci-
entific eyes. She violates the stable boundaries that are supposed to struc-
ture the world and its history for us, and, like Hyde, eludes the empirical
knowing represented by direct description.
70 E. ALDER
Yet if Helen can’t be held in place by a scientific grid of intelligibility,

it is only fair to reflect that she can’t be pinned down by a literary criti-
cal one either. Like Jekyll and Hyde, Pan offers a multivalent, polysemic
plurality at the levels of plot, character, narration, and meaning which
ensures its lingering influence in later weird fiction and the fascination of
current criticism. For Machen “the whole matter of imaginative literature
depends upon this faculty of seeing the universe from the aeonian pebble
of the wayside to the raw suburban street as something new, unheard of,
marvellous, finally, miraculous,” and readers also must acquire that new
way of seeing the world, accepting the co-existence of ecstasy and horror
in the miraculous numinous of Machen’s weird tales.107
Conclusion
Jekyll and Hyde helped to pioneer the weird tale by exploiting certain
fractures and debates in contemporary science; it found the weird already
present within the innovations of 1880s efforts to rethink psychology, and
thus already part of the fin-de-siècle world in which the novella is rooted.
The multiplicity and indeterminacy of reality and consciousness and their
implications for relationship between body and mind are all explored
in Stevenson’s novella, as is the almost blasphemous alarm, horror, and
perturbation experienced during the encounter with the unknown and
unknowable (Hyde) which characterises the weird tale.
In Machen’s weird tales, too, pure materialism is challenged as the
defining relation of body to spirit becomes fluid and uncertain. Hyde
and Helen Vaughan figure as amorphous monstrous shapeless things,
unknown weird beings of shapes and textures that don’t belong in the
known natural order of physical existence. Ideas of the multiplicity of
human consciousness or soul in Machen’s work take the form of connec-
tions with lost, ancient, pagan worlds, abhistories that trouble the dom-
inant narratives about modern civilisation. Machen’s weird tales refuse a
single, knowable construction of the world, but insist on other realms,
too mysterious and sometimes too evil for human beings to cope with.
When a scientific framework of knowledge or investigation is applied to
the world beyond the veil, particular trouble ensues—for the characters
but also for dominant positivist assumptions about the nature of reality.
Machen’s anti-science takes the form of a call for a new, truer kind of
knowledge. He objects to science in its particular materialist, positivist
form, relabelling and reducing old knowledge instead of broadening its

modern state.
Ways and failures of knowing weird realities is the subject of Chapter 3,
but for Machen, the real world beyond the veil exists outwith and regard-
less of science; Dr. Raymond does not attempt to explain its existence—
his concern is how to interact with it. Machen does not need modern sci-
ence to validate the more-than-visible world. Chapter 3 returns to Jekyl-
l’s experiment to show how the weird reality constructed by the novella
depends upon an equally enweirded epistemology: a revised understand-
ing of how this reality can be known (and the limits to knowing it). In
different ways, the stories discussed next also interrogate the nature of
reality as conventionally understood: from a single stable entity it becomes
something expanded or multiple. They also participate in reconfiguring
ways of knowing that reality, emphasising the value of direct experience,
sensation, and spiritual or emotional feeling alongside the conventional
empirics of scientific experiment.
Notes
1. Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping
History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Linda
Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and
Wells (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Donald Lawler, “Re-
framing Jekyll and Hyde: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Strange Case of
Gothic Science Fiction,” in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred
Years, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1988); and Anne Stiles, “Jekyll and Hyde as Science Fic-
tion,” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed.
Caroline McCracken-Flesher (New York: The Modern Language Associ-
ation of America, 2013).
2. James Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 1880–1939 (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018), 14.
3. Ronald R. Thomas, “The Strange Voices in the Strange Case: Dr. Jekyll,
Mr. Hyde, and the Voices of Modern Fiction,” in Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde After One Hundred Years, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 76.
4. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016), 31.
5. Michael Davis, “Incongruous Compounds: Re-reading Jekyll and Hyde
and Late-Victorian Psychology,” Journal of Victorian Culture 11, no. 2
(2006), 2011.
72 E. ALDER
6. See, for example, Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Cul-
ture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991); Robert Mighall,
“Diagnosing Jekyll: The Scientific Context to Dr Jekyll’s Experiment
and Mr Hyde’s Embodiment,” in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror (London: Penguin, 2003); Andrew
Smith, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the
Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Nancy
K. Gish, “Jekyll and Hyde: The Psychology of Dissociation,” Interna-
tional Journal of Scottish Literature 2, no. Spring/Summer (2007); Anne
Stiles, Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Cen-
tury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Martin Danahay,
“Dr. Jekyll’s Two Bodies,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 35, no. 1
(2013); and Mario Ortiz-Robles, “Liminanimal: The Monster in Late
Victorian Fiction,” European Journal of English Studies 19, no. 1 (2015).
7. Davis, “Incongruous Compounds.”
8. Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7.
9. Rylance, Victorian Psychology, 21.
11. See Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical
Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), 247; Srdjan Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritu-
alists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 183–85, for discussions of Myers’
ideas about consciousness.
12. Henri Bergson and F. L. Pogson, trans., Time and Free Will: An Essay
on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (London: Swan Sonnenschein &
Co., 1910), 231, italics original.
13. David F. Lindenfeld, The Transformation of Positivism (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980), 87.
14. Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 203.
15. Peter K. Garrett, “Cries and Voices: Reading Jekyll and Hyde,” in Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years, ed. William Veeder and
Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 61.
16. Paul Maixner, ed., Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage
(London: Routledge, 1995); Julia Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science,
and the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009).
Death, Vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 34.
18. Myers, Human Personality, Vol. 1, 15.
19. Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle, 6; Reid also
notes that Stevenson’s letters and notes reveal his long-term interest in
scientists such as Spencer and Darwin, and he was latterly a member of

the Society for Psychical Research from the distance of the South Seas
(4).
20. Gish, “Jekyll and Hyde: The Psychology of Dissociation,” 3.
21. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,”
in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror,
ed. Robert Mighall (London: Penguin, 2003), 55. All subsequent quo-
tations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in
the text.
22. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy; Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary
Doubles.
23. Martin Tropp, Images of Fear: How Horror Stories Helped Shape Modern
Culture (1818–1918) (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990), 104; William
Veeder, “Children of the Night: Stevenson and Patriarchy,” in Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years, ed. William Veeder and Gordon
Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
24. Garrett, “Cries and Voices,” 61.
25. On readings of this moment in Jekyll’s “Statement,” see Peter K. Garrett,
“Cries and Voices,” and Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in
Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003),
108; Gish, “Jekyll and Hyde: The Psychology of Dissociation,” 3.
27. Linda Dryden, “Robert Louis Stevenson and Popular Culture,” Nordic
Journal of English Studies 9, no. 3 (2010).
28. Rylance, Victorian Psychology, 114.
29. Utterson alludes to Hyde’s “evil influence” on Jekyll (31), and identifies
the Jekyll-Hyde “connection” as “evil” (43) but only Jekyll uses the
word to describe Hyde.
30. Gish, “Jekyll and Hyde: The Psychology of Dissociation,” 6.
31. Jerrold E. Hogle, “The Struggle for a Dichotomy: Abjection in Jekyll
and His Interpreters,” in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred
Years, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1988).
32. Luckhurst, Telepathy, 194.
Inmost Light (London: John Lane, 1894), 66.
35. Tropp, Images of Fear, 102. See also Smith, Victorian Demons, 39, on
Hyde’s resistance of medical interpretation.
37. Stiles, Popular Fiction and Brain Science, 30.
38. Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration
at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
74 E. ALDER
Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester:

Zero Books, 2012).
and Laird Barron,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017), 1145.
40. W. T. Stead, “The Man of Dreams,” Borderland 2, no. vii (1895), 24.
41. Frederic W. H. Myers, “Multiplex Personality,” Proceedings of the Society
for Psychical Research IV (1886), 502, 496.
42. Arthur Machen, Far Off Things (London: Martin Secker, 1922), 11.
43. Machen, Far Off Things, 24–25.
44. See Nick Freeman, “Arthur Machen: Ecstasy and Epiphany,” Literature
and Theology 24, no. 3 (2010); Machen, Far Off Things, 27; and Susan
Johnston Graf, Talking to the Gods: Occultism in the Work of W. B. Yeats,
Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune (Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press [SUNY], 2015).
45. Aidan Reynolds and William E. Charlton, Arthur Machen: A Short
Account of His Life and Work (London: Baker, 1963).
46. Mark Valentine, and Roger Dobson, “Introduction,” in Arthur Machen:
Artist and Mystic, ed. Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson (Oxford;
Northampton: Carmaen Books, 1986), viii; Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, The
Victorian Ghost Story and Theology: From Le Fanu to James (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
47. S. T. Joshi, “Introduction,” in The White People and Other Weird Sto-
ries (New York: Penguin, 2011), xv; David Trotter, “Introduction,” in
The Three Impostors (London: Everyman, 1995), xviii; and Worth, “In-
troduction,” in The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2018).
48. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror,” in H. P. Lovecraft Omnibus 3:
The Haunter of the Dark (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 120.
49. See, for example, Aaron Worth, “Introduction”; Mark Valentine, Arthur
Machen (Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan: Seren, 1995); Jessica Webb, “What
Lies Beneath: Orthodoxy and the Occult in Victorian Literature” (diss.,
Cardiff University, 2010); and Machen, Far Off Things.
50. Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 1880–1939, 146.
51. Quoted in Valentine, Arthur Machen, 26.
52. Arthur Machen, The London Adventure (London: Martin Secker, 1924),
21–22.
53. Vincent Starrett, Arthur Machen: A Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin (Tartarus
Press and the Arthur Machen Society, 1996), 11–13.
54. Machen, Hieroglyphics, 34.
55. Machen, London Adventure, 14.
56. Arthur Machen, “A Fragment of Life,” in The White People and Other
Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin, 2011), 215.
57. Freeman, “Arthur Machen: Ecstasy and Epiphany,” 248.

58. Christine Ferguson, “Reading with the Occultists: Arthur Machen, A. E.
Waite, and the Ecstasies of Popular Fiction,” Journal of Victorian Culture
21, no. 1 (2016), 54.
59. Machen, Hieroglyphics, 11.
60. Lehmann Imfeld, Victorian Ghost Story and Theology, 44; Machen, Hiero-
glyphics, 39.
61. Lehmann Imfeld, Victorian Ghost Story and Theology, 44.
63. Kimberly Jackson, “Non-evolutionary Degeneration in Arthur Machen’s
Supernatural Tales,” Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 1 (2013),
124.
64. Machen, “The White People,” 114.
65. Machen, Far Off Things, 125.
66. Freeman, “Arthur Machen: Ecstasy and Epiphany”; see also Freeman’s,
Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art 1870–1914 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007) for discussion of Machen’s representa-
tions of London.
67. Arthur Machen, “The Idealist,” in The Great God Pan and Other Hor-
ror Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Presenting the city
of London as a weird and mystical space or borderland is recurrent in
weird fiction: see Lord Dunsany, “‘The Hashish Man’ ‘the Beggars’ ‘the
Field’,” in A Dreamer’s Tales (London: George Allen & Sons, 1910);
Tim Earnshaw, “Strange Magic,” in Arthur Machen: Artist and Mystic,
ed. Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson (Northampton: Carmaen Books,
1986).
68. Machen, “A Fragment of Life,” 215.
69. Similar epiphanies happen in some of Blackwood’s stories, such as “May
Day Eve” and The Centaur where “false” scientific or materialist knowl-
edge is discarded in favour of true awareness. See S. T. Joshi, The Weird
Tale: Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James,
Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press,
1990), 88–90, for comparison of Machen’s and Blackwood’s worldviews.
70. Machen, “A Fragment of Life,” 200, 217.
71. Machen, “A Fragment of Life,” 220.
76. China Miéville, “On Monsters: Or, Nine or More (Monstrous) Not Can-
nies,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23, no. 3 (2012), 381.
77. Joshi, “Introduction,” xiv.
76 E. ALDER
78. Arthur Machen, “The Shining Pyramid,” in The Great God Pan and
Other Horror Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 236.
79. Aaron Worth, “Arthur Machen and the Horrors of Deep History,” Vic-
torian Literature and Culture 40, no. 1 (2012), 220.
80. Worth, “Arthur Machen and the Horrors of Deep History,” 223.
81. Machen, Far Off Things, 95, 97.
82. Jackson, “Non-evolutionary Degeneration in Arthur Machen’s Supernat-
ural Tales,” 130.
83. Hurley, Gothic Body. Hurley links Hodgson’s “abhumans” from The
Night Land to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the “abject.”
84. Miéville, “On Monsters,” 381; China Miéville, “Weird Fiction,” in The
Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould, Andrew M.
Butler, Adam Roberts and Sheryll Vint (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009),
113.
85. Worth, “Introduction,” xiv.
86. Worth, “Introduction,” xiv.
87. Machen, “The Great God Pan,” 7. All subsequent quotations are from
this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text.
88. Eckersley, “A Theme in the Early Work of Arthur Machen,” 283.
89. See, e.g., William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism
(London: J. Burns, 1874).
90. Jake Poller, “The Transmutations of Arthur Machen: Alchemy in ‘The
Great God Pan’ and The Three Impostors,” Literature & Theology 29,
no. 1 (2013).
91. Machen, “The White People,” 115; Machen’s biographers and critics
point to his dislike not only of scientific materialism, but also of many
forms of occultism and Christianity; see, e.g., Freeman, “Arthur Machen:
Ecstasy and Epiphany,” 252; Luckhurst, Telepathy, 203.
92. Anne Stiles, “Introduction,” in Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920,
ed. Anne Stiles (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 3; see also
Rylance, Victorian Psychology, and Oppenheim, Other World, 266, on fin-
de-siècle psychology’s “stark choice between determinism and free will”
in explanations of how the brain works.
93. Natasha Rebry, “‘A Slight Lesion in the Grey Matter’: The Gothic
Brain,” Horror Studies 7, no. 1 (2016), 13.
94. Jeffrey Michael Renye, “Panic on the British Borderlands: The Great
God Pan, Victorian Sexuality, and Sacred Space in the Works of Arthur
Machen” (diss., Temple University Libraries, 2013), 15.
95. Stiles, “Introduction,” 13.
96. Eckersley, “A Theme in the Early Work of Arthur Machen”; Mark De
Cicco, “‘More Than Human’: The Queer Occult Explorer of the Fin
de Siècle,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23, no. 1 (2012); and
Machen’s reputed sexual anxiety is critically discussed in Machin, Weird
Fiction in Britain, 149.
97. Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 147.

98. Eckersley, “A Theme in the Early Work of Arthur Machen,” 283.
99. Darryl Jones, “Borderlands: Spiritualism and the Occult in Fin-de-Siècle
and Edwardian Welsh and Irish Horror,” Irish Studies Review, 17, no. 1
(2009), 37.
100. Poller, “The Transmutations of Arthur Machen”; Ron Weighall, “Sorcery
and Sanctity: The Spagyric Quest of Arthur Machen,” in Arthur Machen:
Artist and Mystic, ed. Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson (Oxford;
Northampton: Carmaen Books, 1986); and Machin, Weird Fiction in
Britain, 147–48.
101. Renye, “Panic on the British Borderlands,” 149.
103. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1985), 302.
105. Rebry, “A Slight Lesion in the Grey Matter.”
CHAPTER 3
Weird Knowledge: Experiments, Senses,

and Epistemology in Stevenson, Machen,
and Edith Nesbit
Weird tales are sites of experiment, narrative laboratories in which alterna-

tive systems of knowledge and knowing can be imaginatively tested. The
analogy—of narrative as laboratory experiment—may sound like a con-
tradiction in terms, conflating two very different schemes of knowledge.
But this is just what the weird mode does; it creates an imaginative space
wherein things—entities, concepts, schemata of knowledge, worldviews—
that conflict in the real world can be reconciled, with remarkable and hor-
rifying results. To better understand how it does so, this chapter explores
four stories about weird scientific experiments: a brief return to Jekyll and
Hyde, followed by a closer look at Machen’s “The Inmost Light” (1894)
and two of Edith Nesbit’s short stories, “The Three Drugs” (1908) and
“The Five Senses” (1910).
These tales subvert the heartland of rigorous modern science, the lab-
oratory, by combining the methods of chemistry and surgery with bor-
derland epistemologies that suggest radical revisions of the relationships
between body, mind, and spirit. The subject of each experiment is some-
times the scientist himself, sometimes another person, but always a human
being, made up of body and mind: the only instrument apparently capa-
ble of knowing the world psychically or spiritually as well as physically.
Empiricism, the basis of scientific knowledge, finds new forms in these
stories; it is reconstructed out of a commingling of spiritual and physical
sensory capacities, while valid knowledge itself is shown to extend beyond
the empirical and include the soulful, personal, emotional, or social.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4_3
80 E. ALDER
In Chapter 2, I examined what weird versions of reality based on bor-

derland science look like in Jekyll and Hyde and The Great God Pan, and,
through them, began to explore where limits to positivist and materialist
understandings of the world can be found. In this chapter, I investigate
what a corresponding weird epistemology might look like: the kinds of
knowledge and ways of knowing upon which weird realities are based.
These, too, derive from borderland sciences whose discourses existed in
tension with the nineteenth century’s prevailing positivist frameworks.
What comes to be known, in these weird stories, eludes the order and
control that positivist science was supposed to acquire over the world’s
phenomena. Instead, each experiment and its outcomes get disastrously
out-of-hand. For all the scientist-protagonists’ radical vision and ambi-
tion, they are dogged by positivism’s legacies; even though their beliefs
about what reality is are unorthodox, they hold, at least at first, to con-
ventional scientific approaches to understanding it, which turn out to be
inadequate. The doctor in Nesbit’s “The Three Drugs,” for example,
believes there is an unseen dimension to the world, which he can access
using scientific methods and with the assumptions that it can be rationally
understood and will offer some profound new truth. Like Jekyll and Dr.
Raymond, what he finds, however, is unreliability, instability, and unpre-
dictability; these stories test the limits of positivism as a way of knowing
the world even as they take fright at the implications of possible alterna-
tives.
Body and Spirit as Ways of Knowing

The grip of positivist science as a guide to understanding the world in
nineteenth-century Britain had much to do with the persuasiveness of its
underlying epistemological principles, in which “knowledge comes only
from sense experience and logical mental operations.”1 In this formula-
tion, reality was what was empirically observable (directly or by instru-
ments) and the world’s phenomena had rational, physical explanations
(not divine, magical, or supernatural ones). This external reality, trans-
mitted by the body’s senses, undoubtedly existed, and could ultimately
be understood to the point of certainty as nature gradually yielded its
secrets through the steady application of the scientific method.2 These
assumptions were enshrined in the emphasis placed on empirical eviden-
tial proofs and in prevailing ways of thinking about sensory knowledge
and its relationship with the intellect.
3 WEIRD KNOWLEDGE: EXPERIMENTS, SENSES, AND EPISTEMOLOGY … 81
Nevertheless, observed T. H. Huxley in an 1881 essay, “On Sensation

and the Unity of Structure of Sensiferous Organs,” the “sensory opera-
tions” were “the battle-ground of philosophers.”3 The central question
was about the relationship between mind and body: Do direct sensory
experiences give rise to mental life, or have people innate mental qualities
such as reason in which originate understanding of the world? Huxley’s
conclusion is that certainty in knowledge depends on both. The sensory
experience and the intellectual comprehension of it happen simultane-
ously and therefore present as a unity: a sensation is “an intuition – a
part of immediate knowledge.”4 He distinguishes between the sensation
(the smell) and the thing that causes the sensation—the “sensorium” (a
particle of scent from a plant).
His essay and his reasoning belong to widely constituted debates about
the relationship between the real and the observed world, particularly dis-
tinctions between direct empirical realism (which rests on the assumption
that the senses with which we observe the world are reliable and provide
unmediated facts about reality for the mind to comprehend) and repre-
sentative realism. The latter recognises that the facts we inspect are not
really the external objects of heat, a book, the ring of a bell, the taste
of lemons, or the smell of smoke, but a sensation in our skin, an image
transmitted by our eyes, the effect of vibrations in our ears, and so on.
The fact we inspect does not necessarily match the reality of the thing
itself, and further sets of information and beliefs come into play to help
us to determine, as far as we can, what is true.5
Ernst Mach, a leader of the 1880s and 90s school of “empirocriticism”
that sought radical revisions in empirical epistemology, emphasised the
ways in which reality was constructed only out of what we could observe
of it. For Mach, there was no “realm of ‘reality’ […] behind the realm of
appearance.”6 Sensations, he wrote,
are not signs of things; but, on the contrary, a thing is a thought-symbol

for a compound sensation of relative fixedness. Properly speaking the world
is not composed of “things” as its elements, but of colors, tones, pressures,
spaces, times, in short what we ordinarily call individual sensations.7
Reconsiderations of the nature of sensory experience and its relation to

either interior mind or external reality raised awkward questions about
what could be said to be “true” about the world, and how reliably it
could be said. Huxley found some security by taking the middle ground.
82 E. ALDER
Sensations, he concludes, are “immaterial entities,” things of the mind,

but they have as “real existences as any others.”8 A reality created by the
mind is a valid reality, but only when related to the physical, observable
world (with observation understood as not limited to sight).9
This 1880s climate of epistemological debate promises well for the
weird tale. Here, conceptual spaces open up for weird realities that are
both subjective immaterialities and grounded in an objective reality. They
are natural not supernatural, yet not restricted to a narrow materialist out-
look, yet not dependent on theological belief either: it becomes possible
to know a secular expanded world. Huxley’s agenda, ultimately, is to make
clear that not only does knowledge not come from body or mind alone,
it does not come from God either; he dwells on the physical structure of
nose, eye, and ear to emphasise their biological explicability.
The stories of the weird tales discussed in this chapter all pivot in one
way or another on sensory experience, its relationship with the mind, and
the knowing (and limits to the knowing) of a more-than-visible world.
The five senses were, and are, the human instrument’s primary source
of direct knowledge about the world and yet they cannot operate totally
unaffected by mental interpretation or response. Huxley saw the sense
organs as processors of the physical world rather than transmitters and
compared them to factories: “sensiferous apparatuses are, as it were, fac-
tories, all of which at the one end receive raw materials of a similar kind
– namely, modes of motion – while, as the other, each turns out a special
product, the feeling which constitutes the kind of sensation characteristic
of it.”10 And in some epistemological formulations the senses did directly
convey external reality to the mind.11 In The Five Gateways of Knowledge
(1856), professor George Wilson painted such a picture when he wrote:
These gateways – which we otherwise name the Organs of the Senses, and
call in our mother speech, the Eye, the Ear, the Nose, the Mouth, and the
Skin – are instruments by which we see, and hear, and smell, and taste,
and touch; at once loopholes through which the spirit gazes out upon the
world, and the world gazes in upon the spirit.12
As “gateways,” Wilson’s senses are not processors but “loopholes”

through which “world” is directly observed by “spirit.” In a divinely
made rather than naturally evolved world, it was inconceivable that human
senses (created by God) should imperfectly perceive the world He also
created.
In their different ways, however, Wilson and Huxley both present

mechanised bodies subservient to spirit or mind (two categories that were
often conflated): the body’s sensory organs are “apparatuses,” “factories,”
and “instruments.”13 Mind (or spirit) is required to interpret the “prod-
ucts”; the body itself has no meaning-making agency (except that the
site of reason itself, the brain, was also part of the body). Calling sensory
organs “instruments” aligns the body with the latest communication tech-
nologies, often also used to explain the working of psychical phenomena
like telepathy.14 Oliver Lodge explained that
just as a signalling key in London causes a telegraphic instrument to

respond instantaneously in Teheran […] so the danger or death of a distant
child, or brother, or husband, may be signalled, without wire or telegraph
clerk, to the heart of a human being fitted to be the recipient of such a
message.15
Using technological analogies to construct the body as instrument turned

not just its normal senses but also its spiritual knowing into a more reli-
able, objective system of detection. On both sides of spiritual and scien-
tific debates, it was necessary to secure knowledge claims by appealing
to empirical principles. To claim valid status, other kinds of knowledge
(such as the spiritual, the magical, the artistic, the social) would have to
be brought within the same framework of reason and evidential proofs, as
Auguste Comte pioneered with sociology, and as the Society for Psychi-
cal Research, and many spiritualists and Theosophists, endeavoured to do
with psychical phenomena.16 Weird fiction, or, rather, a weird epistemol-
ogy, contests the hierarchy of intellect over instrumental body, as we will
see, although the scientist characters in the stories I’m about to discuss all
think at first that bodies are subservient and can be used as instruments
of knowledge-gathering and control.
Conceiving bodies as instruments compared them to the apparatus of
the laboratory experiment, whose precise measurements were relied upon
to produce objective knowledge.17 Sensations, after all, were ephemeral,
not constant and permanent like mathematical laws.18 Not all phenom-
ena could be bodily sensed, anyway, and human senses themselves, despite
forming the basis of empirical knowledge, could also be capricious. Analo-
gies between instruments and bodies, therefore, reinforced both as reli-
able empirical tools: the scientist as tool of observation, the subject or
apparatus as tool of measurement.19 The position of the positivist scientist
84 E. ALDER
is at a distance from his or her experiment, receiving and interpreting but

not influencing the results. Objective and unswayed by personal feeling
or interest, such evidence could be more readily relied upon as accurate,
contributing to stability and certainty about the nature of reality and the
capacity of science to apprehend it.
In the context of occultism and the spiritualist séance, a number of
these issues spike. As already discussed, collapsing the distinction between
matter and spirit was a key tactic of spiritualists and Theosophists in the
battle to establish some higher realm of meaning to existence in nat-
ural, physical terms. This move also opened the spiritual dimension to
empirical enquiry, as something on which both sensory observation and
instruments of measurement could be brought to bear, to demonstrate
the reality of psychical phenomena beyond question: “If mediums could
be subjected to laboratory experiments, the results, surely, would be as
conclusive as any findings from a chemist’s flask.”20
In a successful séance, spirits might take on visible material bodies
and leave physical traces of writing, sounds, or touches; Victorian spir-
its themselves were “objects of proof, capable of leaving traces and being
sensed.”21 Understanding mediums’ bodies as types of instrument pre-
sented them as mechanically as Huxley’s sensiferous apparatuses, and pre-
senting their unique sensitivity as a kind of sixth sense helped spiritu-
alist or psychic knowledge to position itself as empirically equal to that
acquired by the usual five senses.22 For Helena Blavatsky, the occultist
must develop the facilities of consciousness in order to “probe the inmost
secrets of Nature [and] transcend the narrow limitations of sense” and be
able to gather scientifically equivalent (which is not to say conventionally
empirical) facts.23 This logic was used by psychical researchers as well as
by occultists. In a 1911 lecture, W. F. Barrett argued that an unspecified
sixth sense “feels” unseen facts about the world, and therefore psychi-
cal phenomena need not violate the assertion that “all knowledge must
come through the senses,” the only “recognised channels.”24 Indeed,
these phenomena ought to be more compatible with conventional science
than unobservable forces, energy, and atoms, because empirical evidence
could be directly observed. But disagreement existed between believers
and sceptics over what it was that had been observed, who decided, and
how.25 What passed for reality during the séance appeared to be multiple,
hard to pin down, and based on more than what was strictly observable
and measurable—in other words, rather weird.
The career of medium Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–1886) pro-

vides a good example.26 Writing in the Cornhill Magazine in 1904,
Andrew Lang reviewed Home’s career, dwelling on the multiple accounts
of his séances that circulated privately and in the press, and on phe-
nomena such as levitations which scientific investigators could neither
explain nor expose as fraud. Lang’s discussion shows some of the chal-
lenges that séances presented to empiricism. No one account of reality is
offered; instead, observable materiality and intangible immateriality coex-
ist. Home’s hands are simultaneously present but ungraspable; a table is
in two places at once. As Lang reports, W. B. Carpenter, one of spiritual-
ism’s most prominent antagonists, complained that
The most diverse accounts of a séance will be given by a believer and a

sceptic. One will declare that a table rose in the air, while another (who
had been watching its feet) is confident that it never left the ground.27
The evidence of sight, in this case, apparently could not reliably yield
a single truth. Neither could touch: those who seized Home’s, or the
spirits’, hands “could not hold them. The hands melted away, so people
said.”28 For Lang, the mystery of Home “is solved by no theory or com-
bination of theories, neither by the hypothesis of conjuring, nor of col-
lective hallucination, nor of a blend of both.”29 Lang uses the language
of science: of problem-solving, theory, and hypothesis. He acknowledges
its inadequacy to address the problem, but it remains the only discourse
available to him for evaluating and determining “facts.”
To an extent, the séance itself invited scientific readings. It was laid out
rather like an experiment, replicating certain conditions (such as darkness,
hand-holding, the presence of a medium) to produce certain results (such
as knocking, spirit forms, writing). So the séance looked like it ought to be
amenable to scientific investigatory methods and to facilitate experimental
tests, mediums submitted to being tied up, encaged, or attached to mea-
suring equipment; it became “perfectly acceptable for a medium to be
first searched, then tied around the neck, wrists, or body with tape, cot-
ton, or silk thread.”30 This very cooperation, however, partly subverted
the terms on which the knowledge generated by the séance claimed to
be based. Tie the medium up too tightly and communication with the
spirits is impeded; tie her (for it was very often her) too loosely, and there
is too much scope for fraud. Imposing experimental conditions, rather
86 E. ALDER
than eliminating doubt, potentially interfered with the sitting and created
more doubt.
In addition, for a successful séance, active involvement was required
from the sitters. Not only were their testimonies crucial, but each indi-
vidual, body and mind, had to be invested in the séance for it to be suc-
cessful, which was at odds with the position of the distanced positivist
researcher. By holding hands, sitters formed a “community of sensation”
promoting the right harmonious atmosphere for communicating with
spirits.31 The presence of a sceptic could be detrimental. In 1885, the
spiritualist weekly Light recounted the failure of slate-writing observations
by SPR members with medium Mr. Eglinton: “[t]he sensitive and his
controls, feeling that they were surrounded by a hostile prejudging audi-
ence, were thus paralysed.”32 Spiritualists asked only that sceptics kept
an open mind; self-respecting scientifically minded people could hardly
refuse, when spiritualists themselves allowed that “[h]onest scepticism is
no barrier to the enquiry, but prejudice and superstition are undesirable
everywhere.”33 Yet such a requirement meant that the sceptic could be
accused of possessing a “spirit of opposition” if they did not engage hon-
estly with the séance, and if they did, that made them complicit as a par-
ticipant rather than objective as an observer.34 Arguably, many spiritualists
did not fully understand the scientific methods they were trying to use.35
Either way, rather than providing empirical evidence which would lead
to acceptance of the results, by relying on pre-existing faith among its
participants a séance could effectively turn the scientific requirement for
rigorous and replicable experimental conditions against the healthy posi-
tivist scepticism that was supposed to accompany it.
In this way, theory, methods, and evidence combined to construct
the séance as something amenable to positivist science, but in practice it
enacted something quite fundamentally oppositional. As Richard Noakes
points out, “[b]y maintaining that the causes of spiritualistic phenom-
ena involved both disembodied and embodied intelligences, [spiritualists]
were also denying that physiologists and others holding materialist views
of the mind had the sole right to reliable knowledge in spiritualism.”36
Value placed on personal, spiritual forms of knowledge as well as depen-
dence on theories and methods that mainstream science did not accept
made spiritualism a challenging practice on several levels.
Witness testimony was an important part of evidence for phenomena,
though of course, “[t]he situation sketched out in the anti-spiritualist
discourse was one in which the credulity of the spectators of spiritual-

istic séances acted against the very notion that they could witness the
truth.”37 However, valuing pre-existing faith over dutiful scientific scepti-
cism and distance was consistent with spiritualist ontology; the significant
roles of the spirit and sensitive psychical feeling logically followed belief
in the existence of souls and their invisible survival after bodily death.
Whether spiritualists realised it or not, séances were operating according
to a hybrid blend of positivist and anti-positivist methods—which did not
in fact lie comfortably together. Positivist assumptions that there is one
truth to reality and that it can be witnessed or apprehended, but only by
an open-minded (not credulous) observer, were incompatible with spiri-
tualist epistemology in which faith and individual, multiple, spiritual expe-
rience represented valid knowledge.
It is this epistemological radicalism that makes spiritualism, especially
as practised in the séance, such important fertiliser for weird fiction. This
point, too, carries forward into other areas of fin-de-siècle occult such as
Theosophy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Secret, ritual,
and mystic, the occult seemed to be at odds with the openness of rational
and empirical enquiry, but was often seen by practitioners as an alterna-
tive kind of science, pursuing questions that couldn’t be answered by con-
ventional methods.38 The Golden Dawn’s teachings, Susan Graf explains,
“posit the Kabbalah as a symbol system that makes the cosmos intelligible
to the limited mind of man,” indicating the movement’s recognition of its
alternative epistemology.39 Theosophy, similarly, could be positioned as a
science based on expanded notions both of matter and of empirical sen-
sory observation; as Annie Besant put it, “[w]hile ordinary science con-
fines Matter to the intangible, Theosophical science extends it through
many grades, intangible to the physical but tangible to the super-physical,
senses.”40
Although on some level endeavouring to use positivist science to bol-
ster their claims to valid knowledge, occult knowing relied on a revised
epistemology that included multiplicity, subjectivity, and a dissolved bor-
der between material and immaterial. This is an epistemology ready-made
for weird fiction, and accordingly the rest of this chapter examines stories
that reconfigure scientific epistemology weirdly.
88 E. ALDER
Dr. Jekyll’s Self-Experiment

Following the analysis in the last chapter of Jekyll and Hyde as a weird tale,
I revisit Jekyll’s experiment here to examine its epistemological basis. It
is significant that Jekyll experiments on himself, collapsing his own mind,
body, and spirit into a single test site. Jekyll, evidently, is a medical doctor,
with expert knowledge of chemistry, as revealed by the complex phar-
maceutics observed by Lanyon as Hyde mixes the antidote.41 Yet he is
no conventional materialist scientist and makes clear his discovery derives
from interdisciplinary studies leading “wholly towards the mystic and the
transcendental.”42 His researches probe metaphysical questions extending
beyond the normal empirical range of conventional scientific enquiry, ask-
ing similar questions to those posed by occultism about the relationship
between body and spirit (his language is usually of “spirit” and “soul,”
not “mind”) in the make-up of the self.
Thus Jekyll comes to recognise that the body’s apparent stability and
the conventional material limits of the world are an illusion: “I began to
perceive,” he reports, “more clearly than it has ever yet been stated, the
trembling immateriality, the mist-like transience, of this seemingly so solid
body in which we walk attired” (56). The body, rather than the spirit,
becomes something ghostly; as a “fleshly vestment” (66), it is something
worn by rather than constituting the self, demonstrating literally what
Jerrold Hogle calls the novella’s “polymorphic body language.”43 Jekyll
finds that a person’s existence is not confined to one physical form but
is somewhat more fluid, and is spiritually rather than biologically deter-
mined; his body is the “mere aura and effulgence of certain of my powers
that made up my spirit” (57). Roger Luckhurst notes the uncertain and
non-deterministic place of the body in Jekyll’s “Statement,” remarking
that Jekyll’s “account of the revivified body sounds vitalist, even spiri-
tist.”44 Jekyll’s account recalls mediums’ physical manifestation of spirit
forms, especially those which occupied or took on the flesh of the medi-
um’s body.
His spirit, moreover, is also amenable to chemical—that is, material-
ist—manipulation. In Jekyll’s laboratory, “the self becomes as fluid and
transformable as the chemicals which he mixes together.”45 His drug,
like a medium’s psychic capacities, offers a means by which one set of the
spirit’s “powers” (the “aura and effulgence” that form the body) “should
be dethroned from their supremacy and a second form and countenance
substituted” (57). Jekyll’s experiment enacts a spirit manifestation from
a séance, in which, according to The Spiritualist , it seemed that “spirits,

when clothing themselves with matter, find it most convenient to take the
material form of the instrument through whom they act.”46 Simultane-
ously it models the related psychology elaborated by Frederic Myers, in
which, as Janet Oppenheim summarises, the self was
a not particularly well integrated bundle of parts; strata and streams of con-
sciousness did not form one seamless web, but remained distinct entities.
[…] Whatever its constitution, it [personality] was liable to abandon its
own home, leaving that vulnerable to invasion and possession by another
personality.47
Jekyll’s experiment is a psychological one as much as a chemical, spiritual,

and physiological one. In both séance and experiment, spirit and body
can be separated, with the body taking on a new form according to the
“elements in [the] soul” that “stamp” it (57).
The goal of Jekyll’s experiment is to isolate one strand of the subject’s
being, to separate the “polar twins” (56), which he learns it is possible to
do with scientific methods and the help of chemical agents. The moment
at which a “side light began to shine upon the subject from the laboratory
table” (56) is critical to his progress; the empirical side of science, as rep-
resented by the lab, provides the philosophical side with practical means.
Jekyll’s experiment sets itself out as the final test of a carefully researched
and devised hypothesis, taking place under replicable conditions (both
potion and antidote are, after all, remade and retested many times, and
when the antidote fails, the cause is fairly readily traced to a single vari-
able of the unknown impurity in the salt). The theoretical knowledge that
Jekyll gains from his researches and his experimental development of the
requisite chemical compound must be tested on his body for a full, expe-
riential, empirical knowledge of its effects to be gained. As in a successful
séance, in a successful weird experiment maintaining a sceptical distance
will not do, only commitment to participation.
Jekyll is directly involved in the experiment as subject as well as
researcher. Jekyll chooses not to observe the effects of his experiment on
a research subject (as we have seen Raymond does on Mary in The Great
God Pan, and the doctor of “The Three Drugs” does on Roger, discussed
shortly), but to test his potion on himself. Professor Boyd Thompson
makes the same choice of self-experimentation (for more explicitly eth-
ical reasons) in Nesbit’s “The Five Senses.” Self-experimentation, often
90 E. ALDER
with gases or drugs, was not an uncommon practice among nineteenth-

century scientists (as Humphry Davy and colleagues did by inhaling
nitrous oxide), intended to extend the basis of empirical scientific enquiry
while maintaining the rigour of the scientific method through careful
experiment and observation.48
Whether he chooses to self-experiment for reasons of ethics, ambition,
or arrogance, Jekyll doesn’t say. Arguably, however, the experiment could
only work, or could only yield any meaningful knowledge, through direct
experience of it—experiences that couldn’t be observed from an objec-
tive distance, only from the inside. He is clear that he made his discov-
ery in relation to his own self; he informs us that he advanced “in one
direction only. It was on the moral side, and in my own person that I
learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man” (56).
Further, Jekyll’s particular attitude appears to be an essential ingredient
in the experiment. As he reflects,
Had I approached my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the

experiment while under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all
must have been otherwise, and from these agonies of death and birth, I
had come forth an angel instead of a fiend. (59)
Individual motivation is clearly a powerful shaping force, yet these reflec-

tions suggest he would have needed to be already virtually saint-like to
alter the results; agency lies on the weird side of the experiment as well as
on the scientific. Nevertheless, Jekyll’s personal involvement and state of
mind seem as crucial to his experiment’s outcomes as they would be to
the success of a séance.
Jekyll’s “Statement” serves as a written report of the experiment and
his observations. He records spiritual as well as physical sensations; after
he takes the potion, “[t]he most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding
in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be
exceeded at the hour of birth or death” (57). The core of the experiment
collapses the boundary between the empirical knowledge gained conven-
tionally from the body’s five senses, and that acquired by the spirit. When
the pain passes, Jekyll feels
something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and,

from its novelty, incredibly sweet […] within I was conscious of a heady
recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race

in my fancy. (57)
In this first moment, Jekyll acquires his knowledge of being Hyde through
his senses united with his mind; he is “conscious” of the “heady” rush
of sweetness and sensual experiences. This knowledge is vivid, but also
strange, new, and indescribable; although his experience is real and intense
to him, it still remains slightly out of reach.
The weird experimental method is superior to the ordinary kind, and
so is the quality of the knowledge gained. Jekyll gains it immediately, com-
pared to the slow self-recognition of the old doctor who took so long to
“reach years of reflection, and [begin] to look around me and take stock
of my progress and position in the world” (55), and gains it incontestably:
“I knew myself,” he declares, “at the first breath of this new life, to be
more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil” (57).
Jekyll is instantly and absolutely sure of what he knows, to the extent
of putting a numerical multiplier on its severity, which paradoxically ties,
albeit more figuratively than literally, the relative concept of “wickedness”
to the eternal truths of mathematics.
In keeping with the earlier declared immateriality and transience of
the body, Jekyll’s self-knowledge of his physical appearance comes only
second: “I stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of these sen-
sations; and in the act, I was suddenly aware that I had lost in stature”
(57). The mirror reveals Hyde’s younger, slighter body with its “imprint
of deformity and decay” (57), his inner wickedness marked on his phys-
ical form. The state of the spirit stamps the shape of the new body. Yet
proof of the new knowledge has a bodily manifestation as well as a spir-
itual one; neither has supremacy, and the line, if there is one, between
spirit and matter is blurred. Any balanced dualistic relationships set up
earlier in the narrative are now irretrievably upset or undermined.
Despite Hyde’s elusiveness and resistance to pinning down, as dis-
cussed in Chapter 2, a revised, weird epistemology does offer possible
ways of knowing the weird—at least, for those, like Jekyll, who are pre-
pared to get sincerely and directly involved. Jekyll’s commitment to his
own experiment might be the most honest thing he ever does. Between
them, Jekyll’s experiment and the narrative’s representation of Hyde
establish some ontological and epistemological foundations that become
important for weird fiction, drawing from an 1880s scientific climate in
which a number of options for knowing the world coexisted. There are
92 E. ALDER
many commonalities between Jekyll and Hyde and the three tales I exam-
ine next.
Explicitly set in those spaces of incontrovertible scientific authority,
laboratories, all four are stories of experiments whose subjects take on
the role of medium, becoming instruments for accessing an other world
under experimental conditions. Sensory experience for most of these sub-
jects extends beyond the usual five senses; the knowledge of the spirit or
soul is admitted as valid, and leaves physical traces in or as a body as dis-
tinctions between matter and spirit or mind crumple. Constructions of
the human body as mechanism or instrument, of scientists as objectively
detached, and of will or consciousness as biologically determined are both
offered and undermined. Assumptions that stable truths about the world
can be attained are resisted; instead, the stories posit inherent unknowabil-
ity, instability, and multiplicity. Existing discourses are shown to be inade-
quate, so that weird knowledge remains out of reach. Language struggles
to represent it. Brains (human ones anyway) cannot hold it and must
either lose it or go mad. The narratives do not present straightforward
anti-scientific attacks; rather, they critique assumptions of certain kinds of
science and their limitations. In its place, they imagine a reconstruction
of methods and knowledge that complements the weird reality of their
storyworlds.
“Brain of a Devil”: Arthur Machen’s “The Inmost

Light”
In “The Inmost Light,” Dyson (who also features in The Three Impos-
tors , and other tales) investigates the mysterious death of Mrs. Black, the
wife of a doctor, in connection with his glimpse of a demonic face at
the Blacks’ window and a phrase of code on a scrap of paper. The latter
leads him to retrieve a jewel (containing the titular “inmost light”), and
Dr. Black’s pocketbook which reveals what remains of the story: that he
devised a method to exchange his wife’s soul for “what the mind cannot
conceive without a horror more awful than the horror of death itself” and
afterwards, as he had promised her, killed her.49
“The Inmost Light” works with many of the same ideas as The Great
God Pan, even to the point of some identical passages, but dwells, as
I will explore, much more on the neurological operation itself and the
puzzles posed by the state of Mrs. Black’s brain. The bodily beings of Mrs.
Black and Mary both play shaping roles in the experiments’ outcomes,
and are treated as neutral research subjects by the male scientists. I will
first briefly revisit Dr. Raymond’s experiment in The Great God Pan by
way of a bridge between Jekyll’s experiment just discussed and that of
“The Inmost Light.”
Dr. Raymond sees Mary as little more than a passive conduit for the
“current” of the spirit.50 Passivity is necessary in as much as “[t]he true
mystical experience is one not sought, but given,” and so Mary’s sub-
missiveness is consistent with the well-planned conditions of the experi-
ment.51 Yet her reduction to a piece of experimental apparatus also speaks
to Raymond’s positivist stance: he plays the objective, distanced scientist
(quite in contrast to the self-experimenting Jekyll who understands his
own self to be at the epistemological centre of his experiment) conducting
research upon a mechanical body and always remaining “perfectly cool”
(14). The knife is a “necessary” part of the operation on her brain tis-
sue that means “a spirit will gaze on a spirit world” (7). The spirit, too,
becomes instrumental here, a device of empirical observation, which will,
he wrongly thinks, “gaze on” but not interact with the spirit world.
In his conception of the submissive Mary as an instrument whose body
and spirit are under his control, Raymond fails to consider the personal
involvement inherent in mystic experience and the impact of that involve-
ment on the experiment’s outcomes. As Raymond administers to his sub-
ject a drug from a green phial, Clarke “watche[s] changes fleeting over
[Mary’s] face as the changes of the hills when the summer clouds float
across the sun” (14). Mary’s physical and mental self is evidently already
involved in this experience. Following the operation on her brain, as, pre-
sumably, her spirit views or enters the world beyond, the results register
visibly on her body. Her eyes, suddenly opened, “shone with an awful
light, looking far away, and a great wonder fell upon her face, and her
hands stretched out as if to touch what was invisible” (15). Mary responds
both physically and emotionally to what she sees and strives (and perhaps
succeeds) to know by touch what is invisible to the two onlookers.
Body and spirit are both profoundly involved in Mary’s experience of
the phenomenon, similar to Jekyll’s “racking pangs” and “horror of the
spirit” the first time he takes his potion. Natasha Rebry draws the connec-
tion between body and soul here: “the alteration in Mary’s brain is simul-
taneously an alteration in her spirit.”52 Knowledge, as Huxley expressed
it in the essay discussed earlier, is a simultaneity of experiencing and com-
prehending; in Machen’s story, the spirit or soul is part of that knowing.
Body and mind also both participate, and the results of the experiment are
94 E. ALDER
inscribed on all three. Afterwards, Mary loses her reason and cannot intel-
lectually communicate what she knows. Her body, however, records the
results: her impregnation, bodily and soulfully, by “Pan.” In this sense, as
with Hyde, spirit determines body, not the other way round; the meet-
ing of spirits facilitated by Raymond’s scalpel has observable physiological
effects.
Mary’s full participation in the experiment is key. Her ecstasy is evi-
dent on her face, where too it is soon succeeded by “the most awful
terror. The muscles of her face were hideously convulsed, she shook from
head to foot; the soul seemed struggling and shuddering within the house
of flesh” (15). Raymond proves his point that the human brain could
allow the spirit access to the world beyond the veil, but nothing cer-
tain comes of it; whatever ecstatic, terrible truths Mary learns to remain
mysterious and hers alone. Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, in her exploration of
Machen’s artistic search for ecstatic experience, argues that “Machen’s
concept of art follows Coleridge’s description of symbol (as opposed to
fancy) as something participatory” and therefore leads to greater access
to truth, whether divine or mystic; for Machen, “Cartesian assertion of
human ‘truth’ repositions creative power and thus removes mystery.”53
Mary’s participatory experience reinstates it.
A similar point is proved by Dr. Black in “The Inmost Light.” Dr. Black
seeks esoteric knowledge, wishing to “gratify my desire of knowledge of a
peculiar kind, knowledge of which the very existence is a profound secret
to most men,” and, sort of, finds it (163). There is a delicious irony in
the way this “secret” knowledge ends up picked over by other scientists
and publicly displayed across newspapers and a courtroom, yet is rendered
meaningless because nobody knows what to do with it. In this way, “The
Inmost Light” is arguably an even more cutting attack by Machen on
modern positivist scientific culture than is The Great God Pan. No won-
der they were published together. Adrian Eckersley has argued that Dr.
Black’s ambitions align him with Dr. Raymond and that the story is a
“parallel with the task of science itself: it is the materialist scientist who
has ripped the decent theological clothing from humanity and shown us a
demon.”54 And yet dualisms of matter and spirit or demon and decent are
insufficient, underplaying Machen’s complex take on science, occultism,
and religion as well as obscuring how the text resists the stabilising effects
of binary structures and absolute knowledge.
Dr. Black is not a materialist scientist—or, not only. Like Raymond and
Jekyll, he is both a materialist surgeon and an occult scientist who recog-
nises that “[w]hen men say there are strange things in the world, they lit-
tle know the awe and terror that dwell always with them and about them”
(149). Dr. Black recognises the limits to knowing the world through con-
ventional methods: “in the work I had to do there must be elements
which no laboratory could furnish, which no scales could ever measure”
(165). Conventional empiricism can only produce partial knowledge and
understanding about the world. He has fewer illusions than Raymond
about the nature of the knowledge he seeks and its rewards; his “paths,”
he knows, lead to “regions so terrible, that the mind of man shrinks
appalled at the very thought” (163). Dr. Black expresses, in effect, his
sense of a weird numinous behind the everyday, not beyond a veil, but
interlocked with the world we know.
Further, where Dr. Raymond treats the spirit as a tool for gaining
knowledge, Dr. Black better understands the significance of individuals’
essential being: to complete his experiment, he realises that “from some
human being there must be drawn that essence which men call the soul”
(165). There is no question of self-experimentation; his wife eventually
consents to be the subject, with tears of shame, and in a barred and shut-
tered laboratory he “did what had to be done, and led out what was no
longer a woman” (167). Mrs. Black’s soul is transferred to the “opal with
its flaming inmost light” (167) and what remains is the thing whose face
at the window horrifies Dyson so profoundly.
Dr. Black suffers personally and morally from what he has done and
his death follows, but it is only in a private letter to Clarke that Dr. Ray-
mond acknowledges any regrets or responsibility, admitting that “[i]t was
an ill work I did that night when you were present” (108). Clarke himself
takes no steps to expose him, refusing Villiers the vital information that
would help to halt Helen’s career. The Great God Pan presents us with a
cold, arrogant scientist and a moral coward, and a narrative littered with
fatal consequences of their action and inaction, but no public or narra-
tive retribution visits either of them. The story’s target is not so much
Raymond’s inhumane attitude towards the women as people (including
Helen, for whom he disavows responsibility and ejects from his home at
an early age), but rather his stance as a scientist.55
Dr. Black, too, escapes public exposure. He falls under suspicion of
his wife’s murder, but, as Dyson learns from the newspaper report of the
inquest, the doctors who conducted the autopsy of Mrs. Black’s body
96 E. ALDER
“could not discover the faintest trace of any kind of foul play; their most
exquisite tests and reagents failed to detect the presence of poison in the
most infinitesimal quantity” (124). Subtle and sensitive as these forensic
tests are, the real nature of Dr. Black’s “foul play” remains hidden; he is
not blamed for the “somewhat obscure and scientifically interesting form
of brain disease” that is identified as the cause of death (124). Only a
physiological cause can be officially acceptable in the prevailing medical
culture, and no poison or pathogen can be found in the body. However,
the autopsy does find that “[t]he tissue of the brain and the molecules of
the grey matter had undergone a most extraordinary series of changes”
(124). The action of the spirit has left its traces on the body, which are
taken for marks of a physical disease; again, body and spirit (or soul or
consciousness) are inseparable, but the epistemological significance of that
passes unnoticed. On the basis of this evidence, the inquest concludes that
death was of “natural” causes, and Dr. Black is acquitted.
The real, unofficial conclusion of the (unnamed) doctor who examined
the brain is rather different. The newspaper quotes his “curious” claim
that the brain’s appearance “indicated a nervous organization of a wholly
different character from that either of man or the lower animals” (125).
But this claim fails to alter the course of the court hearing. It eludes
pinning down to a meaning that would secure it as evidence: exactly what
is a nervous system neither human nor animal, and in any case, what
would that prove? No one knows. The empirical, observable evidence
can be pointed to, but is essentially useless.
Nevertheless, the doctor’s conversation with Dyson reveals him to be
more open than most to the significance of this weird evidence. He is
convinced that “in spite of all the theories, what lay before me was not
the brain of a dead woman – was not the brain of a human being at
all” (142); crucially, he reaches this conclusion “in spite” of neurological
theory, not because of it. But this evidence cannot be assimilated to an
officially accepted scientific framework, and consequently nothing can be
done with it in an inquest which can only make decisions based on facts
sanctioned by that framework. “[T]he verdict was given in accordance
with the evidence,” the doctor later tells Dyson; “the jury acted very sen-
sibly; in fact, I don’t see what else they could have done” (141). Scientific
investigation of evidence and the judicial system built upon it both have
limits as ways of knowing and ordering the world, or the weird.
The best the doctor can come up with is that Dr. Black was “justified”
in killing his wife because she had “[t]he brain of a devil. […] Whatever
Mrs Black was, she was not fit to stay in this world” (143). The notion
of a devil’s brain suggests a reassuring moral motivation for Dr. Black’s
final action (though the necessity for it was his fault in the first place).
However, attributing physical anatomy to a superstitious construct sug-
gests that it is both material and immaterial—in other words, impossible,
but there is no better descriptive language. The doctor’s discourse echoes
the binary language of good and evil to which Jekyll resorts and is like-
wise insufficient. Other efforts to articulate what Mrs. Black has become
operate through negation or absence. She, or her body, at least, becomes
“what is no longer a woman”; what Dyson glimpses at the window is
“the face of a woman, and yet it was not human” (121). There is no
language to describe what is, only what isn’t. A similar moment occurs
in The Three Impostors : “Miss Leicester” “cannot say I saw a face or any
human likeness” when she sees something with burning eyes staring from
her brother’s window.56 Like Hyde, and Helen, these weird entities are
unknowable, emerging through the gaps and occlusions of what is known
and how that is signified in language.
Weird monsters are unspeakable, but weird tales endeavour to find
ways to speak them. Weird fiction and science both meet the limits of
language at encounters with new phenomena. Ernst Mach explained this
point in The Science of Mechanics: “[i]n the reproduction of facts,” he
wrote, “we begin with the more durable and familiar compounds, and
supplement these later with the unusual by way of corrections. Thus, we
speak of a perforated cylinder, of a cube with bevelled edges, expressions
involving contradictions, unless we accept the view here taken.”57 The
doctor’s choice of phrase—“the brain of a devil”—is the familiar supple-
mented by the unusual to become a description of reality that looks like a
contradiction, but isn’t. Empiricism itself becomes weird when it operates
at the limits of knowing. Weird tales don’t need to make science weird—it
already is.
The over-determined observability of “Mrs Black” and her devil’s brain
provides the kind of longed-for unequivocal evidence for extra-human
existence that eluded occultists: evidence that could be presented and ver-
ified at an inquest. Not only does this evidence fail to persuade because of
failure to see it for what it is, but we are thankful for that. At the end of
the story Dyson, in his horror, crushes the opal, and the “inmost light” is
extinguished. In exploiting empiricism and rationalism at the same time
as undermining it, Machen’s story both “proves” the existence of weird
98 E. ALDER
dimensions to what is thought of as reality, lurking behind the every-

day world as it is normally experienced, while showing the evils—and the
futility—of trying to use ordinary science to approach it.
Expanded Worlds: Edith Nesbit’s “The Three

Drugs” and “The Five Senses”
Like Jekyll and Hyde and The Great God Pan, Nesbit’s stories revolve
around ambitious scientific experiments and the search for enhanced tran-
scendental knowledge through the use of drugs and experiments. Each
protagonist comes to know a weird new reality, to which the five senses,
along with other kinds of feeling or observing, are central, while the plots
turn on the limits of that knowing.
“The Three Drugs”

In “The Three Drugs,” Roger’s encounter with an expanded world
of knowledge is, like the other experimental subjects I have discussed,
enabled by a scientific procedure, involving the administration of a
sequence of drugs. Two of these “must be offered directly to the blood
that absorbs it,” combining physicality and intellect into a single form
of knowing.58 The story revises ways of knowing by tying mystical, psy-
chological experience not just to the brain but to the body’s blood and
nerves too, while the transiency and incommunicability of the insights and
revelations that result ensure that they remain ultimately out of reach.
The setting is Paris. The protagonist, a troubled young man called
Roger Wroxham, takes refuge in an unknown house from a group of
Apaches (as Parisian criminal gangs were known). It belongs to an
unnamed doctor, who treats Roger’s wounds and offers him a bed for
the night. As it turns out, the doctor’s treatment included administering
the first of three drugs, making Roger a non-consenting participant in an
experiment that aims “to make the superhuman” by opening conscious-
ness to omniscience (53).59 When the experiment on Roger is a success,
the doctor applies the first two drugs to himself. Since the second induces
a passive state of submission, the third must be administered by another
person, but the doctor has bound Roger to a chair. Without the third
drug, the Elixir of Life, the doctor dies in a fit of terror, and Roger is
rescued by his former assailants after passing an anguished day alone with
the corpse.
The narrative emphasises the importance of observation as a way of

knowing external reality as well as its close connection with mental con-
sciousness or awareness. At first, Roger is so oppressed by his personal
troubles that he moves “blindly” through Paris with “little thought to
spare for the detail of his surroundings” (44). Consequently, he is sur-
rounded by his attackers in Montmartre almost before he realises where
he is and why it is dangerous. In the ensuing struggle, he becomes acutely
aware of “[t]he contact with these creatures, the smell of them, the warm,
greasy texture of their flesh” (46). He pulls apart “two clammy hands”
and hears something “clattering” in the gutter. A knife “bit sharply” at
his arm and “at the sting of it Roger knew that he did not desire to die”
(47). Sensations, here, generate self-knowledge and a consciousness that
spurs him to action.
The incident heightens Roger’s nervous sensitivity, reflected in the way
he experiences the spaces around him. Escaping into the doctor’s house, a
“spacious silence that soothed at first, presently clawed at the set, vibrating
nerves already overstrained” (48). Like a sensitive instrument, his body
responds to the world around him and his consciousness of what happens
continues to be conveyed in detail through his senses. His awareness of
sensory impacts remains acute; after the doctor’s initial treatment of his
wound, he wakes to “the close intimacy of a bandage clasping his arm, and
in his mouth the vivid taste of some cordial,” while it is primarily the doc-
tor’s “gold-rimmed pince nez” that stand out visually (49). His height-
ened nerves and awareness turn out to be crucial for the experiment. For
the doctor, Roger’s “perfect physical condition” makes him ideal for test-
ing the three drugs, in contrast to the doctor’s previous doomed subjects
who were “unsound. Decadent students, degenerate Apaches” (42). This
perfection includes Roger’s brain; as the doctor exclaims, “God to be
good to the Apaches who so delicately excited it to just the degree of
activity needed for my purpose” (52). The assault, it seems, has warmed
up Roger’s entire bodily system into the optimum state for expanding his
consciousness and capacity to know the world.
Roger is ready to enter a state corresponding closely to a mediumistic
trance and the kind of psychological state marking mystic experience. In
Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James describes mystic
states as “states of knowledge. They are states of insight into the depths of
truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, rev-
elations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they
remain.”60 The mystic state is marked by its “Transiency”: “half an hour,
100 E. ALDER
or at most an hour or two, seems to be the limit beyond which they

[the revelations] fade into the light of common day” and are imperfectly
remembered.61 Yet “[s]ome memory of their content always remains, and
a profound sense of their importance. They modify the inner life of the
subject between the times of their recurrence.”62 The third drug propels
Roger along exactly this trajectory.
Roger enters a profound state of insight and revelation, feeling himself
at the centre of radiating threads that
linked one to all knowledge past and present. He felt that he controlled
all wisdom, as a driver controls his four-in-hand. Knowledge, he perceived,
belonged to him, as the air belonged to the eagle. He swam in it, as a
great fish in a limitless ocean. (55)
Roger not only has (temporarily) ownership and control over time,
knowledge, and even the elements, he knows emotionally and intellec-
tually that he has it (feeling it, perceiving it) at the same time as he physi-
cally experiences it (driving, flying, swimming), in a perfect union of mys-
tical, empirical, and rational knowing. However, this limitless wisdom is
transient, since it cannot be held by the mind in its normal everyday state.
Roger gains only one piece of lasting knowledge, a piece of personal infor-
mation of use only to him. At the story’s start, we learn that he has an
unspecified “trouble”: “There was a woman in it, of course, and money,
and a friend, and regrets and embarrassments” all woven into a “puzzle-
problem” he can’t resolve (45). All he retains from his few moments of
limitless knowledge is a solution, in words of “very simple wisdom”: “To
end the trouble, I must do so-and-so and say such-and-such” (58). This
knowledge would be meaningless to anyone else, to the extent that there
is apparently nothing for a reader to gain by even knowing the details of
the “trouble,” let alone of its solution.
Roger’s personal mental as well as physical condition is a significant fac-
tor in the result of the experiment. Entry to this state of knowledge and
insight depends on the subject being consciously ready to submit: “the
whole life of the subject, risen to an ecstasy, falls prone in an almost vol-
untary submission to the coming super life,” the doctor tells Roger; “Sub-
mission – submission!” (54). Submission, indeed, was seen as essential to
the mystic state.63 The “more pliable” a medium, for example, could be
“beneath the will of others, the greater are his powers as a medium.”64
James identifies “Passivity” as another psychological marker of the mystic
state: “when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the
mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as
if he were grasped and held by a superior power.”65 “I submit,” Roger
confirms, and when his own turn comes, so does the doctor: “I submit
– I submit” (54, 58).
This time, submission will lead to disaster. There are hints that the
doctor’s past actions (which include numerous animal vivisections as well
as previous experiments on people) may be affecting his own experience
of the drugs. He suffers more profoundly than Roger from the first drug;
to Roger “it seemed that, either this man was less able to bear pain than
he, or that the pain was much more violent than had been his own” (57).
The second drug gives Roger a sort of psychic second-sight, enabling
him to look through a locked door at the doctor’s previous victims, now
“quiet people lying along the floor in their death clothes” (53) which
further hints at the doctor’s remorseless callousness.
But with the third drug withheld (since the bound Roger cannot
administer it), for the doctor the second drug leads to a moment of fatal
exposure to an overwhelming horror not unlike Mary’s in The Great God
Pan: “I see what I will,” he claims, but he is wrong:
“I close my eyes, and I see – no – not that – ah! – not that! […] Not
that,” he moaned. “Not that,” and writhed in a gasping anguish that bore
no more words. […] presently he writhed from the chair to the floor,
tearing feebly at it with his fingers, moaned, shuddered, and lay very still.
(59)
Like Mary, the doctor sees something beyond what is apparently visi-
ble and is swamped by the horror of it. Denial is futile; the will gives
way under the impact of overwhelming experience. That experience is
also beyond words—“not that” identifies, in negation, some nameless
unknown, the realm of the weird, lying out of sight.
Like Dr. Raymond, Nesbit’s doctor is ambitious and arrogant. He
seeks to gain God-like wisdom, and he is entirely sure of himself and his
achievement. The proofs Roger gives of the experiment’s success demon-
strate to the doctor that “[i]t was not a dream, this, the dream of my life.
It is true. It is a fact accomplished” (56). From this positivist stance, that
absolute truths about the world are obtainable, the doctor has no doubts
that the experiment will work equally well on himself: “I shall begin to be
a new man. It will work quickly. My body like yours, is sane and healthy”
102 E. ALDER
(56). Based on his mechanical assessment of the health of body and brain,
the doctor assumes that the experiment is replicable, but his emotions and
his over-confidence betray him. The temporarily wise Roger perceives that
he must be unbound to help with the third drug, but the doctor refuses
out of fear: “no, and no, and no many times. I am afraid of you. You
know all things, and even in your body you are stronger than I” (57).
Instead, the doctor apparently supposes he can self-administer the third
drug, but the first two drugs overpower him more than he expects. The
second drug induces an almost paralytic submission, and the doctor can-
not reach the third despite its being by his elbow. The doctor has also
forgotten the accelerated action of the three drugs on Roger’s perfect
body and mind; Roger’s state of knowledge and strength has passed, and
he is now too weak to break his bonds.
The story plays with ideas of will, submission and receptivity, turning
submission itself into a form of agency. The doctor’s specific researches—
he is a physiologist and a vivisector, experimenting first on animals and
then on people who stray into the trap of his house—position him at
a clinical distance from the experience of his research subjects. Retain-
ing control of the administration of each drug, and assuming he would
remain in control of the final self-experiment, he has failed to notice the
crucial catch, that the third drug cannot be self-administered because the
subject must be passive. The ethical success of the experiment depends
on cooperation between researcher and researched; the inaction of either
leads to disaster.
In this way, the tale’s weird mode exposes flaws in scientific myths of
control. The capacities of the human body for knowing can be extended
beyond the usual range of senses and consciousness, and the knowledge
to be gained is real, but a distanced positivist stance is not sufficient. The
results sought by the doctor can only be obtained by surrendering one’s
whole self, body and mind, to a greater power; only then can an expanded
reality, a weird, more-than-visible reality, be experienced. For the human
mind, what lies there on the edges of the known is overwhelming; contact
may be fleeting and it cannot be fully mastered or apprehended—Roger
retains a minute fraction of what he knew—and the ecstasy of weird expe-
rience may manifest as horror as easily as wonder.
“The Five Senses”

“The Five Senses” also tears back the veil created by the limits of the
body’s ordinary sensory capacities, this time by intensifying the senses
rather than extending their range. The story uses the imaginative free-
dom of the weird mode while working with some of the new epistemo-
logical thinking emerging at the fin de siècle. The protagonist, Professor
Boyd Thomson, achieves his results by a series of self-experiments with a
remarkable new drug. His work is described in terms not unlike Jekyll’s
and Raymond’s interdisciplinary approaches, as “those dreadful researches
which tend to merge the chemist and biologist in the alchemist and the
magician.”66 His is a weird, hybrid, borderland science, embracing non-
conventionally scientific forms of knowledge: “Like all imaginative scien-
tists, he was working with stuff perilously like the spells of magic, and
certain things were not possible to be foretold” (156). His chemically
enhanced sensory experiences reveal new knowledge about the world,
but also draw attention to the unreliability of empirical observation by
presenting multiple sensory realities, co-existing just beyond the limits of
everyday awareness.
Set within a romance plot between the professor and his fianceé Lucilla,
who rejects him for refusing to stop using vivisection, the experiment
grounds personal, emotional consciousness in a reconfigured understand-
ing of empiricism. The story exploits, as Vicky Margree demonstrates,
“a dichotomy between science and the emotions” as well as a tension
between a narrator most interested in scientific details and “an implied
author and reader for whom it is something other than the scientific issues
that are of consequence – namely, the emotional and perhaps the ethical
ones.”67 After the professor’s overly successful experiments lead to nearly
fatal consequences, Lucilla rescues him and, having gained a new capac-
ity for empathy, he gives up his scientific career in favour of marriage.
The relationship is thus foregrounded in the story as the means by which
Boyd Thomson arrives at a healthier, more rounded understanding of
the world. However, it cannot be separated from the terms of his self-
experiments, which bring him to the brink of hitherto unknown worlds.
At first, Boyd Thomson has no room for emotion in his worldview; the
supremacy of the “high ideals of the new science” in governing how the
world is to be understood is self-evident to him (152). For him, there
is no question that the widespread medical benefits to human beings
are worth the suffering of animals, although, in the tradition of Victor
104 E. ALDER
Frankenstein and Doctor Moreau, he is primarily driven by the “fever of

scientific curiosity” rather than philanthropy. To him, Lucilla seems to him
to “unreasonable, narrow, prejudiced” (152). Her emotional response—
“I understand that dogs are tortured. I can’t bear it”—is coupled with
her flat refusal to listen to reason: “‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘I don’t
want to hear’” (151). Margree, however, argues that “neither antagonist
is presented as being entirely in the right”; the “emphasis on [Lucilla’s]
bourgeois parental home […] appears to suggest the partial grounding of
her opposition to vivisection in naivety and convention.”68 Lucilla’s reac-
tion is attributed to her upbringing; in the house where this conversation
takes place, “[e]very article of furniture in the room spoke eloquently
of the sheltered life, the iron obstinacy of the well-brought-up” (151).
While the story mostly, in the end, bears out Lucilla’s anti-vivisectionist
perspective, it modifies rather than rejects scientific enquiry. Valid knowl-
edge expands to include contributions from non-positivist realms such
as the magical, ethical, and emotional; empiricism itself supports a more
fluid and multiple understanding of what reality is made of, suggesting
that even weird realities have a basis in observable fact.
After the break with Lucilla, Boyd Thomson throws himself into his
research. He discovers that an unusual drug chancing to be in his posses-
sion has the capacity to dramatically intensify sensation. It is “an unaccred-
ited, wild, magic, medicine obtained by a missionary from some savage
South Sea tribe and brought home as an example of the ignorance of the
heathen. And it worked a miracle” (152). Ever the careful scientist, how-
ever, he proceeds to “make sure of the cause, to eliminate all those other
factors to which that effect might have been due. He experimented cau-
tiously, slowly. These things take years, and the years he did not grudge”
(152). He follows the scientific method and gains a great deal of mastery
over the drug’s use (how to direct its efficacy to one sense or another, for
example).
By this, however, he is also borrowing from and validating a different
system of knowledge and belief. The “unaccredited” drug is the active
ingredient in his concoction; the beliefs held by the “ignorant heathen”
in “wild, magic, medicine” are thus shown to be well-founded. Further,
he, like Jekyll, is committed to a path which unavoidably leads him to
abandon the position of distanced, objective researcher and get directly
involved in his own experiment. To “achieve his ambitions of glory”
(158), he must test a “human rabbit”—himself—because without it, there
can be no certainty about the drug’s capacities:
He knew that this drug with others, diversely compounded and applied,
produced in animals an abnormal intensification of the senses; that it
increased – nay, as it were magnified a thousand fold, the hearing, the
sight, the touch – and he was almost sure, the senses of taste and smell.
But of the extent of the increase he could form no exact estimate. (154)
It is only through his own experience, through the embodied results mea-
sured and reported by his senses, systematically tested in turn, that he can
gain a full knowledge of the experiment’s outcomes.
In doing so, he glimpses the weirdness behind the quotidian world.
The intensification of each sense is so remarkable that it reveals, in effect,
the unobservable worlds that lie out of reach of normal experience, as
each altered sense exposes hidden subtleties. His enhanced hearing, for
example, makes audible a fly’s footsteps and the movements of glass bot-
tle stoppers, while under intensified sight he sees vague shapes he later
concludes “were the microbes and bacilli that cover and fill all things, in
this world that looks so clean and bright” (156). Through the efficacy of
the “wild, magic” ingredient, Boyd Thomson acquires empirical knowl-
edge of phenomena to a level unavailable to normal senses or instruments.
His enhanced senses push back the boundary between the realm of reality
and the realm of appearance; he can see and hear tiny things that normally
are not humanly observable. Knowledge, here, is constructed as neither
stable nor absolute, either empirically or intellectually, but as subjective
and relative. He might have expected increased certainty about the world
at a more detailed level than ever before, but what he gets is a shifting
multiplicity, shaped in part subjectively, according to how the scientist
mobilises his will, in a way more suggestive of quantum than traditional
mechanics.
Boyd Thomson finds that sensory knowledge offers more than one
simultaneous truth. His enhanced touch, for example, reveals two coex-
isting versions of reality as he holds a syringe: “When he looked down
at his fingers, he saw that what they grasped was the smooth, slender
tube of clear glass. What he felt that they held was a tremendous cylinder,
rough to the touch” (154). Realities multiply as the professor’s exper-
iment accentuates the way in which the two senses supply conflicting
rather than corresponding information. Neither sensation gives any more
“true” a knowledge of the syringe than the other, though much depends
on where the mind directs its attention:
106 E. ALDER
He examined the new phenomenon with cold care. It seemed that only
that was enlarged on which his attention, his mind, was fixed. He kept
his hand on the glass syringe and thought of his ring, got his mind away
from the tube, back again in time to feel it small between his fingers, grow,
increase, and become big once more. (154–5)
One effect of the “unaccredited, wild, magic” drug is to alter the relation-
ship between mind and senses in the process of observation. The drug
not only intensifies sensory observation but increases the mind’s capac-
ity to know at will the aspect of the world currently being observed. As
a consequence, Boyd Thomson’s stance as a scientist in relation to this
knowledge also has to move beyond the positivist position of objective
distance and mastery. As long as he applies the drug to only one sense
at a time, Boyd Thomson maintains his “cold” detachment and proceeds
systematically. However, his detachment gradually decays as each sense
brings startling experiences. Sight, which he saves for last, offers the most
profound transformation of his observed world: “the whole of the stable
earth seemed to be suddenly set in movement, even the air grew thick
with vast overlapping shapeless shapes” (156). What was once constant
and empty is put into motion and populated. The experience overturns
Boyd Thomson’s remaining faith in definitive knowledge, as through the
intensification of his sight, the “stable” reality he thought he knew is most
profoundly revealed as an illusion.
This imagined experiment demonstrates arguments put forward by
physicists such as William Crookes against extreme empirical reasoning
like that of Mach’s. Richard Noakes explains that
The argument for the subjectivity of interpretations of phenomena was a

warning to those who took “too terrestrial a view” and denied the possi-
bility of an unseen world. Crookes insisted that the unseen world to which
he was referring was not the “spiritual or immaterial world” but the “world
of the infinitely little” whose dimensions were comparable to the size of
homunculi, the wavelengths of X-rays, and the mean free path length of
molecules.69
Boyd Thomson’s experiment shows that there is indeed a (normally)

unseen world. What he sees is not the infinitely little, but it is little
enough to prove the point; if microbes can be revealed to the naked eye
simply by enhancing it, then logically greater enhancement, if it could be
procured, would even more precisely observe the true reality is beyond
everyday experience, but that always there, out of reach.
Although Boyd Thomson can later offer an explanation of what he
saw (microbes and bacilli), the experience at the time is profound and
overpowering enough to make him think twice about what he is doing;
the weird world he experiences is somewhat beyond what he can handle.
He is particularly affected by “the little things that were no longer little,
the invisible things that were invisible no longer” (156). There is indeed,
it seems, a populated reality beyond the veil of everyday experience, yet
one which contains the potential for horror that even a scientist is not
quite ready to deal with; the professor feels “grateful for the first time in
his life, for the limits set by Nature to the power of the human body”
and “could not but feel that success, taking the bit between its teeth, had
gone just a little bit too far” (156).
Nevertheless, he has not learned yet. He concludes that the logical next
step is to take all five versions of the drug at once, reasoning that with all
five senses intensified he will acquire the “supreme” power of a “demi-
god” (156). He is right about the effects, but wrong about his ability to
use them; he has not quite acquired the mastery over the physical world
he thought he had. Though alive, though “hearing, taste, touch, scent
and sights were intensified a thousandfold,” he becomes “as powerless
as a cat under kurali” (159). Thus, the professor experiences for himself
the helplessness of his own former animal experimental subjects, and his
magnified senses produce horrors: intolerable charnel scents, a distended
sense of time, earwigs and beetles appearing as giant monsters. Totally
paralysed, the professor is taken for dead. Anticipating unforeseen side-
effects, however, he has taken the precaution of leaving instructions to
his servant Parker to visit him in the family mausoleum every day for
a fortnight. Now Boyd Thomson suffers the consequence of his long-
standing failure to recognise that human emotions and their irrationality
and unpredictability matter. Parker is too spooked to enter the vault and
the Professor is left alone until saved by Lucilla, brave and loving enough
to enter the tomb and approach close enough to notice he is conscious.
As a result, with “an awakened heart” (163) and a new respect for the
value of emotional feeling, he naturally renounces his researches in favour
of marriage and farming.
However, the narrative ends with rumours that he is resuming science,
albeit confined to “extending paths already well trodden” (162). The con-
clusion is thus rather ambivalent. Well-trodden paths, after all, need not
108 E. ALDER
exclude vivisection. Boyd Thomson’s ambition and cold scientific detach-

ment may be criticised, but Lucilla’s blanket rejection of his methods and
her refusal to listen or enter discussion aren’t fully condoned either. One
point seems clear, though. Chastened by “the depth of that gulf of fear
which lies between the quick and the dead,” Boyd Thomson has left the
radical researches of the weird scientist behind him (163). The wondrous
breakthrough of his discovery is overshadowed by the horror of where it
might lead. The limits to the capacity of a human being in understand-
ing and operating in the world are exposed, and turn out to be a built-in
safety feature; there apparently is more to reality and the world’s phenom-
ena than most people can cope with knowing, which is a recognition that
lies at the heart of the weird. A full understanding of the world, there-
fore, is not to be found by pushing empiricism beyond its natural limits,
but by opening oneself to additional ways of knowing. “The Five Senses”
undermines the notion of a single direct unmediated and absolute truth
based on empirical observation, by showing how sensory experience pro-
vides multiple simultaneous version of reality. By questioning a severely
materialist, rationalist scientific worldview, it makes the point that other
kinds of knowledge must also be recognised as valid for a meaningful
understanding of the world.
Conclusion
In these stories, weird realities are not amenable to conventional ways
of knowing. Once questions about how we know reality are raised, the
possibility of reality being other than what we thought can follow, and
other forms of knowledge than disinterested, objective and observable
facts about nature can and must be taken into account or revealed. Jekyll’s
indeterminate self, Machen’s often-demonic “world beyond the veil,” and
the expanded sensory reality and ocean of wisdom of Nesbit’s stories all
conceive new ontological dimensions. Knowing these extended worlds
requires the observation of the senses added to the feeling of the spirit
and undergoing some form of intellectual processing.
The nature of the self as discovered by Jekyll wouldn’t yield to a model
that separated mind or spirit from body, or distanced the researcher from
experiment, or constructed the world in neat binaries. The hidden worlds
and others with which Raymond, Black, and Nesbit’s doctor connect their
subjects can only be known by body, mind, and spirit. Success relies on
the discovery of a physiological basis to spiritual knowing, but that alone
is shown to be inadequate. The nature of Helen, Mrs. Black, and the

world of knowledge briefly acquired by Roger prove resistent to the con-
ventional epistemological frameworks; they elude being known. “The Five
Senses,” by contrast, demonstrates the indelible materiality of the world
and the power of the body’s physical and mental apparatus to know it, but
reveals material reality itself to be multiple and unstable. A weird reality,
as Chapter 6 also explores, does not require another world beyond the
veil—it can also be lifted in this one.
These weird tales reconfigure ways of knowing as well as what there is
to be known. Without rejecting science, these narratives target the lim-
its of a purely materialist, positivist stance as an adequate way of knowing
the world. They unsettle conventional hierarchies of intellect over feeling,
human over nature, mind over body. Chapter 4 follows by examining sci-
entist figures who do manage to reconcile disparate forms of knowledge,
who have adapted their minds and instruments, and generally succeed
against weird horrors and realities where this chapter’s scientists fail.
Notes
1. Dorothy Ross, “Changing Contours of the Social Science Disciplines,” in
The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 7. The Modern Social Sciences,
ed. Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
2. See Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the His-
tory of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Ted Benton
and Ian Craib, Philosophy of Social Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2011). On the scientific method, see Peter Kosso, A Summary of
Scientific Method (London: Springer Science & Business Media, 2011).
3. Thomas H. Huxley, “On Sensation and the Unity of Structure of Sensif-
erous Organs,” in Science and Culture (London: Macmillan, 1881), 249.
4. Huxley, “Sensiferous Organs,” 263.
5. Charles Landesman, Introduction to Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell,
1997), 22.
6. John Losee, A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Oxford:
7. Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics, trans. Thomas J. McCormack (Lon-
don: Watts & Co., 1893), 483.
9. Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and John Henry, Scientific Knowledge: A Soci-
ological Analysis (London: Athlone, 1996).
110 E. ALDER
11. Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge, 3.

12. George Wilson, The Five Gateways of Knowledge (Cambridge: Macmillan,
1856), 1–2.
13. On mechanised bodies in the Victorian period, see Alison Winter, Mesmer-
ized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), 37–38, 103–4.
14. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to
Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Jill Nicole Galvan,
The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Commu-
nication Technologies, 1859–1919 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010);
and Richard Menke, “The Medium Is the Media: Fictions of the Tele-
phone in the 1890s,” Victorian Studies 55, no. 2 (2013).
15. Oliver Lodge, “Thought Transference: An Application of Modern
Thought to Ancient Superstitions (1892),” in Spiritualism, Mesmerism
and the Occult, 1800–1920, Vol. 4, Telepathy and the Society for Psychical
Research, ed. Shane McCorristine (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012),
12.
16. Auguste Comte (1798–1857) applied the term “positivism” to this style of
scientific thinking in his Treatise on Positive Philosophy (1830–42)/Cours
de Philosophie Positive, in an attempt to validate sociology as scientific
knowledge The Essential Comte, Selected From Cours De Philosophie Pos-
itive, trans. Margaret Clarke (London: Barnes & Noble, 1974).
17. Lissa Roberts, “The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The New Chemistry
and the Transformation of Sensuous Technology,” Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science Part A 26, no. 4 (1995); Keir Waddington, “More
Like Cooking Than Science: Narrating the Inside of the British Medi-
cal Laboratory, 1880–1914,” Journal of Literature and Science 3, no. 1
(2010).
18. David F. Lindenfeld, The Transformation of Positivism (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1980), 83.
19. On experimenters’ bodies as instruments of knowing, see Simon Schaffer,
“Self Evidence,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992), 362; on experimental
subjects as instruments, see Winter, Mesmerized, 62–66.
20. Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research
in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),
200.
21. Shane McCorristine, “Introduction,” in Spiritualism, Mesmerism and
the Occult, 1800–1920, Vol. 3, Spiritualism and Mediumship, ed. Shane
McCorristine (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), xiv.
22. See, for example, W. T. Stead, “‘The Law of Psychic Phenomena’ [Book
Review],” Borderland 1, no. 1 (1894); A [Anon.], “How Many Senses
Have You?,” in Spiritualism, Mesmerism and the Occult, 1800–1920, Vol.
4, Telepathy and the Society for Psychical Research, ed. Shane McCorristine
(London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012).
1888), 477.
24. William Fletcher Barrett, “Seeing Without Eyes,” in Spiritualism, Mes-
merism and the Occult, 1800–1920, Vol. 4, Telepathy and the Society for Psy-
chical Research, ed. Shane McCorristine (London: Pickering and Chatto,
2012), 307.
25. Richard Noakes, “Instruments to Lay Hold of Spirits,” in Bod-
ies/Machines, ed. Iwan Rhys Morus (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 155.
26. On the séance and questions of evidence, see, e.g. McCorristine, “In-
troduction”; Richard Noakes, “Natural Causes? Spiritualism, Science, and
the Supernatural in Mid-Victorian Britain,” in The Victorian Supernatu-
ral, ed. Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Noakes, “Instruments to
Lay Hold of Spirits.”
27. Quoted in Andrew Lang, “Historical Mysteries IV: The Strange Case of
Daniel Dunglas Home,” in Spiritualism, Mesmerism and the Occult, 1800–
1920, Vol. 3, Spiritualism and Mediumship, ed. Shane McCorristine (Lon-
don: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 269. On William Benjamin Carpenter,
see Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, 287–305.
28. Lang, “Historical Mysteries IV: The Strange Case of Daniel Dunglas
Home,” 263.
29. Lang, “Historical Mysteries IV: The Strange Case of Daniel Dunglas
Home,” 271.
30. Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late
Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 68.
31. McCorristine, “Introduction,” vii.
32. Noakes, “Instruments to Lay Hold of Spirits,” 8; Alex Owen, The Place of
Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 69; A [Anon.], “The Telepathy
Theory,” in Spiritualism, Mesmerism and the Occult, 1800–1920, Vol. 4,
Telepathy and the Society for Psychical Research, ed. Shane McCorristine
(London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 141.
33. J. J. Morse, “The Study of Psychic Phenomena. How to Investigate,”
Borderland 1, no. 2 (1894).
34. M. A. [Stainton Moses] Oxon, “How to Hold Séances,” Borderland 1,
no. 1 (1894), 53.
35. Oppenheim, Other World, 200–1.
36. Richard Noakes, “The Sciences of Spiritualism in Victorian Britain,” in The
Ashgate Research Companion to Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. Tatiana
Kontou and Sarah Willburn (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 34.
112 E. ALDER
37. McCorristine, “Introduction,” ix.

38. See Egil Asprem, “Science and the Occult,” in The Occult World, ed.
Christopher Partridge (London: Routledge, 2014); Egil Asprem, “Pon-
dering Imponderables: Occultism in the Mirror of Late Classical Physics,”
Aries 11, no. 2 (2011).
39. Susan Johnston Graf, Talking to the Gods: Occultism in the Work of W. B.
Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune (Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press [SUNY], 2015), 12.
41. Mark Griep and Marjorie Mikasen, Reaction! Chemistry in the Movies
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
42. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,”
in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror,
ed. Robert Mighall (London: Penguin, 2003), 55. All subsequent quota-
tions are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the
text.
43. Jerrold E. Hogle, “The Struggle for a Dichotomy: Abjection in Jekyll and
His Interpreters,” in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years,
ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1988), 163.
44. Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 193.
45. Michael Davis, “Incongruous Compounds: Re-reading Jekyll and Hyde
and Late-Victorian Psychology,” Journal of Victorian Culture 11, no. 2
(2006), 211.
46. [Anon.], “Spirit Forms,” The Spiritualist 3, no. 29 (1873), 451.
47. Oppenheim, Other World, 260.
48. Humphry Davy, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concern-
ing Nitrous Oxide (1800) [Facsimile Reproduction] (London: Butter-
worths, 1972), 453–559.
49. Arthur Machen, “The Inmost Light,” in The Great God Pan and the
Inmost Light (London: John Lane, 1894), 166. All subsequent quotations
are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text.
Inmost Light (London: John Lane, 1894), 7. All subsequent quotations
51. Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, The Victorian Ghost Story and Theology: From Le
Fanu to James (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 51.
52. Natasha Rebry, “‘A Slight Lesion in the Grey Matter’: The Gothic Brain,”
Horror Studies 7, no. 1 (2016), 11.
54. Adrian Eckersley, “A Theme in the Early Work of Arthur Machen: ‘De-
generation,’” ELT 35, no. 3 (1992), 285.
55. See Rebry, “‘A Slight Lesion in the Grey Matter’,” for discussion of the
gender and ethical issues involved in the choice of women as experimental
subjects in these two stories.
56. Arthur Machen, The Three Impostors (London: Everyman, 1995), 119.
57. Mach, Science of Mechanics, 483.
58. Edith Nesbit, “The Three Drugs,” in In the Dark (Wellingborough:
Equation, 1988), 54. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and
page numbers are given in brackets in the text.
59. A comparable situation appears in one of Blackwood’s short stories, “Max
Hensig,” in which Williams through alcohol achieves a state close to clair-
voyance that gives him, briefly, unusual perception, concentration and
motor control; Algernon Blackwood, “Max Hensig,” in The Listener and
Other Stories (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907).
60. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1985), 302.
61. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 302.
63. Nick Freeman, “Arthur Machen: Ecstasy and Epiphany,” Literature and
Theology 24, no. 3 (2010), 248.
64. [Anon.], “Mediumship,” The Spiritualist 3, no. 14 (1873), 210.
66. Edith Nesbit, “The Five Senses,” in In the Dark (Wellingborough: Equa-
tion, 1988), 162. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and
67. Victoria Margree, “The Feminist Orientation in Edith Nesbit’s Gothic
Short Fiction,” Women’s Writing 21, no. 4 (2014), 437.
68. Margree, “Feminist Orientation,” 437–38.
69. Richard Noakes, “The ‘World of the Infinitely Little’: Connecting Physical
and Psychical Realities Circa 1900,” Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science Part A 39, no. 3 (2008), 324.
CHAPTER 4
Weirdfinders: Reality, Mastery, and the Occult

in E. and H. Heron, Algernon Blackwood,
and William Hope Hodgson
Based on the experiences of characters in weird tales discussed so far,

a better understanding of weird phenomena requires not a rejection of
science, but a revised version of it, incorporating occult elements. Addi-
tionally, it appears to require certain personal qualities—an open mind
and humility (as we have seen, those who approach the weird in arro-
gance have reason to regret it). This chapter explores three short story
series from the 1890s and 1900s revolving around characters who under-
stand, more or less, what they’re dealing with: E. and H. Heron’s Flax-
man Low, Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence, and William Hope Hodg-
son’s Thomas Carnacki. All three series (and there are other examples of
their type) are detective stories in which the mystery (usually a haunt-
ing) is thought to be weird or supernatural, and the sleuth is a man of
particular psychic or occult powers or skills.1
This expert figure, like Sherlock Holmes and other popular crime
detectives, wields the power of knowledge to explain, categorise, and con-
tain the weird phenomena experienced by his clients. Compared to sci-
entists of Chapter 3, weirdfinders are more informed about the serious-
ness of what it is they tackle at the brink of the unknown and have well-
grounded confidence in their capacity to deal with it. Low and Silence
are not only learned but have trained mental powers on which they often
rely; Carnacki is not a psychic, but instead combines esoteric research and
modern technologies. In different ways, the stories use occult science as

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4_4
116 E. ALDER
the foundation of a new profession, and work to reassert human (and

male) scientific control over weird unknowns.
Weirdfinders are constructed as trained experts, but not as positivist sci-
entists. Their toolkit is a varied array of knowledges and methods. They
are open-minded but not sceptical; they don’t conduct their investiga-
tions from an objective distance, they get involved, body, mind, and soul.
They step into the medium’s role, but they don’t adopt a medium’s pas-
sivity any more than they adopt a scientist’s distanced control. Rather,
they tread a middle ground in which a new kind of professional identity
is forged. It is a masculine identity; supposedly feminine qualities of sym-
pathy associated with mediums, for example, are essential for weirdfind-
ing but are subordinated to the weirdfinder’s will. Their expertise elevates
occult practices to a place in mainstream society and asserts authority over
the weird encounter, while at the same time making weird realities more
“real” than ever.
The Weirdfinding Profession

The naming of sleuths is a difficult matter. Flaxman Low is described
as a “psychologist,” even as an “occult psychologist” in the title of one
collection2 ; John Silence is a “physician extraordinary” and “the Psychic
Doctor”; Carnacki is a “ghost-finder,” although what he “finds” are rarely
so neatly identifiable. Despite the varying nomenclature, the stories and
the sleuths have much in common and reward discussion together. Nev-
ertheless, finding an adequate descriptive single term can be tricky. Smajić
titles one chapter of his book “Psychic sleuths and soul doctors”; Mark
De Cicco selects “occult explorer,” and Marilena Parlati uses “psychic
doctors/detectives” and “occult detectives” in her discussion of this sub-
genre.3 Like them, I consider the terms “doctor,” “psychic,” “occult,”
and “detective” individually restrictive or inaccurate for discussing the
whole, and propose my own contribution: weirdfinder. While it is no bet-
ter or worse than the alternatives, it does two things for my current argu-
ment: focusses attention on what is “weird” about these encounters, and
signals what distinguishes these fictional figures from others who resemble
them.
Low, Silence, and Carnacki are qualitatively different from Stevenson’s,
Machen’s, and Nesbit’s doctors. H. P. Lovecraft later observed that “Dr.
Silence is one of those benevolent geniuses who employ their remark-
able powers to aid worthy fellow-men in difficulty.”4 These are not lone
4 WEIRDFINDERS: REALITY, MASTERY, AND THE OCCULT … 117
researchers pursuing borderland science for their own ends, but work-
ing experts who, like Sherlock Holmes, are called upon by their clients
for help to deal with strange and dangerous phenomena. In the process,
they create a new profession based on the realising of occult and psychical
theories and practices: weirdfinding.
For Lovecraft and S. T. Joshi, the detective casebook formula is a major
flaw. For Lovecraft (who felt similarly about the Carnacki stories), the
John Silence tales are “[m]arred only by traces of the popular and conven-
tional detective-story atmosphere,” while Joshi calls Blackwood’s whole
concept of the psychic detective “grotesque”: “Blackwood, in having the
know-it-all Silence obtrude, usually at the end, with a prosy explanation
of the phenomena, introduces a fatal element of rationalism into some-
thing that should not be rationalized.”5 There is a case to be made for this
view that rationalisation spoils what would otherwise be a perfectly good
weird tale. Roger Luckhurst suggests that the problem lies in “the fusion
of opposed genres of discourse: the rule-bound, denotive statements of
science with the playfulness of literature.”6 In Carnacki the Ghost-Finder,
as we will see, Hodgson exploits the mismatch between Carnacki’s expert
truth claims and his wildly far-fetched experiences to ludic, almost paro-
dic effect. In Blackwood’s case, the Silence stories are not better at being
weird tales than, for example, “The Willows,” “The Wendigo,” and “The
Man Whom the Trees Loved.” But they can be understood as a different
kind of weird tale.
The Low, Silence, and Carnacki stories, I argue, become weird because
of the presence of the weirdfinder and his ability to identify and explain—
if not always to solve or eradicate—the haunting in question. Discussing
the popularity of story series about these figures in her Night Visitors, Julia
Briggs notes that “a character of this sort conferred a certain continuity
on diverse material while himself gaining in authority and interest.”7 His
explanation “need not detract from the terrors of the tale, since it does
not explain them away, but merely reveals some sort of logic of cause and
effect behind them.”8 The success of such a story is due to its method
of linking the weird mystery to a scary but recognisable phenomenon,
making it terrifying because, rather than despite, its having natural causes.
Thus, the horribleness of a Flaxman Low story where dreadful events turn
out to be caused by the spores of an unusual efflorescent fungus (“The
Story of Konnor Old House”) works as effectively as the one about a
zombie that can be felt and tasted but not seen (“The Story of Yand
Manor House”).
118 E. ALDER
Weirdfinders are a new kind of scientific figure, dealing with new kinds
of haunting. Literary predecessors to this figure include Sheridan Le
Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius from “Green Tea” and other stories collected in In
a Glass Darkly (1872), while Dr. Lloyd from Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange
Story is credited by Julia Briggs as “the first mesmeric doctor in English
literature, though […] he had several notable forebears in life.”9 Mike
Ashley cites Samuel Warren’s 1833 Passages from the Diary of a Late Physi-
cian as the earliest forerunner of John Silence, but notes that the premise
was “given great impetus by the creation of the SPR.”10 Like psychi-
cal research, fin-de-siècle weirdfinders arose in part from the nineteenth-
century popularity of mesmerism, but were also doing something new.
Tracing this development, Michael Cook points to the interventions made
by the Flaxman Low tales: “If the Hesselius tales were essentially ghost
fiction with a dash of pseudo-scientific thought, then the arrival of the
Flaxman Low stories saw a genuine fusion between the detective story
and supernatural fiction.”11 In the late Victorian and early Edwardian
cultural context of weirdfinding, science, gender, and ghosts were figured
differently than they had been earlier in the century. “[G]hosts, phan-
tasms, and spirits” may belong to old traditions, Peter Keating observes,
but they
also seemed new. As one commentator noted in 1900: “The old spectre of
our childhood with his clanking chains has faded into nothingness in this
age of inquiry. If he appears again it is in a new character and he must at
least be civil to the Society for Psychical Research.”12
The “new character” of the ghost was as something scientifically expli-

cable—or at least explicable in scientific language and, if not as a ghost,
then as something else.
The SPR was less interested in verifying spiritualist claims about com-
munication with the other world than in explanations for phenomena like
thought reading in terms of “nervous stimuli,” “radiant energy,” “syn-
chronous vibration,” or other electrical or magnetic means.13 When Fred-
eric Myers did define a ghost, it was as “a manifestation of persistent
personal energy,” a “force [that] is being exercised after death.”14 The
description fits many of the phenomena encountered by Low, Silence,
and Carnacki well, albeit that Myers’s “passive, accidental, and largely
benign” forces contrast with the “active, wilful, and malignantly Satanic”
manifestations of many weirdfinding tales.15 If such manifestations were
indeed human relatives surviving in the spirit world, all was well, but
occult practices risked channelling evil personalities too, or might “urg[e]
us towards evil if our spirits are open for evil.”16 Magnetism, etheric
vibrations, forces and energies, electric instruments—such language popu-
lates discourses of physics, occultism, psychical research, and weirdfinding
alike, not only inflecting weirdfinding tales with scientific reasoning but
profoundly reshaping the nature of the hauntings weirdfinders investigate.
The weirdfinder almost invariably identifies an unconventional combi-
nation of causes producing a weird phenomenon entirely unlike ordinary
revenants. To remind of some of China Miéville’s arguments outlined in
Chapter 1, the weird enacts a rationalising of the irrational that is never-
theless unable to reduce it; it is
about the positing of something impossible – whether not-yet-possible or

never-possible – and then taking that impossibility and granting it its own
terms and systematicity. It’s carnivalesque in its impossibility and overturn-
ing of reality, but it’s rationalist in that it pretends it is real.17
Weirdfinding stories perform this break and demonstrate this paradox.

The weirdfinders’ cases often present characteristics familiar in gothic or
ghost stories—haunted houses, vampires, and past misdeeds resurfacing
to cause mischief in the present—and, without the weirdfinder’s interven-
tion, there they would remain. But he defines a weird reality, supported
by a unique system of knowledge built out of ancient secrets, contempo-
rary occultism, and the rationally impossible abilities or methods of the
weirdfinder himself.
To this end, the detective story format is essential; weirdfinding tales
offer a variant on a narrative model well-established by the 1890s. Crit-
ics Srdjan Smajìc and Michael Cook have both examined the relationship
between the detective story and the ghost story more broadly, with Cook
arguing that “the ghost story […] was actually a building block of the
detective fiction narrative” rather than its antithesis.18 Weirdfinding tales
make a haunting the focus of a detective story, and they deploy scientific
methods to explain the mystery. That Sherlock Holmes applied science
to the solving of crimes would, Cook points out, have made sense to
contemporary readers: “After all, science was truth; more and more, it
was becoming associated with solutions to the intractable problems of
the world, it enabled that which was hidden to be seen, and that which
120 E. ALDER
was unknown to be recognised.”19 Weirdfinder tales just push the bor-

der of truth further towards the unseen and unknown. Yet Hilary Grimes
has shown how saturated Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories themselves are
in spiritualist traits, including in Holmes’s modern methods, reliance on
insights, and his own person: “despite assumptions that Holmes and pho-
tography were the epitome of ruthless, rigorous figuring, they were nev-
ertheless sensitive to invisible elements normally undetectable to rational
perception, such as the supernatural.”20 She argues that Holmes himself
functions like a photographic plate, sensitive and receptive to insights.
Weirdfinders share such traits, but they are rooted in a different concep-
tion of reality. The gap between Sherlock Holmes and a weirdfinder is
not particularly big—the main difference lies in what it is that is solved
and the knowledges yoked to do so.
Weirdfinding tales break both with traditional detective stories and
with traditional ghost stories. Smajìc notes this contrast: Holmes’s “crav-
ing for the sensational does not extend beyond the boundaries of the nat-
ural world,” while Flaxman Low is “overtly fashion[ed] […] as the kind
of detective one would seek out after someone like Holmes had declined
to involve himself in a more outré case.”21 Just as Holmes makes himself
master of specialist knowledges, weirdfinders undertake their own specific
training and carve out their own professional niche in occult science and
detection at a time when science was becoming increasingly specialised
and professionalised. The word “scientist” itself was only coined in the
1830s and even when Conan Doyle and the Prichards (i.e. the Herons)
were writing, “science” as a profession was still fairly young and mark-
ing off its areas of expertise—including from psychical research as well as
occult magic.22 Janet Oppenheim summarises the situation as she sees it
in the 1880s:
In this period, as British science emerged from the grip of gentleman ama-
teurs to achieve a professional status both in academe and industry, trained
scientists were likely to feel uneasy about a group like the SPR. In part,
too, the scientific profession feared that spiritualism and psychical research
threatened to reintroduce into modern science those links with magic and
the occult from which it had only recently broken free.23
The notoriety of the scandalous figure of Aleister Crowley, for example,

did little to give the occult a good name, though he worked hard to
treat magic as science.24 To be credible as professionals (although, follow-

ing Holmes, none of my weirdfinders ever issue an invoice), weirdfinders
work to avoid the damage of association with the questionable scientific
reputations of occultists and psychical researchers at the same time as rein-
stating “those links with magic” credibly. For John Silence, “occultism”
is “that dreadful word!”—but he still speaks its language.25
Nonetheless, the diversity of late nineteenth-century science made a
conducive climate for a professional like Silence:
The rise of spiritualism, the discovery of atomic particles, and the theories
of forces unavailable to the human eye all cast a more supernatural light on
the contemporary sciences. The scientist added to this increased paranor-
mality; professionalization was creating a scientific culture that was more
and more unintelligible for a lay audience, and with a lack of understanding
comes a sense of mystery and occult.26
A paranormal scientist would not seem out of place in an environment

where science itself looked “paranormal” and he may, in fact, be abso-
lutely required. Whatever the phenomenon, William Crookes argued,
“[i]n investigations which so completely baffle the ordinary observer, the
thorough scientific man has an extraordinary advantage” due to his pre-
cise and trained methods and knowledge.27 Here, Crookes defends psy-
chical research on the grounds that it is science’s obligation to investigate
spiritualist phenomena, but his remark could apply equally to the baffling
marvels of physics.
The SPR insisted that “we can accept no arbitrary ‘scientific frontier’
between them [psychical phenomena] and the nature that we all know.”28
Flaxman Low would agree, declaring “[y]ou know I hold that there is no
such thing as the supernatural; all is natural […] We need more light,
more knowledge.”29 Low, Silence, and Carnacki appear to know more
than most, presented in ways designed to avoid some of the pitfalls that
undermined psychical research and spiritualism, as well as those that lead
the scientists of Chapter 3 into disaster or near disaster. They more suc-
cessfully adopt an epistemological stance in which the personal knowledge
of the spirit is as valid as that of the body and intellect, which is possible
partly because in their storyworlds, such knowledge is already accepted as
valid, and not just by the lone researcher.
In weirdfinding tales, the reality of the weird is public knowledge.
Clients call upon weirdfinders for help because they are already convinced,
122 E. ALDER
rightly or wrongly, that they have a weird haunting to deal with and need
expert help. In this way, weirdfinders evade the “mad scientist” trope also
prominent at this time, a trope that, Anne Stiles describes, “traces its roots
to the clinical association between genius and insanity that developed in
the mid-nineteenth century” and “coincided with the growth of scien-
tific professions.”30 To an extent, Low, Silence, and Carnacki could easily
follow in the “mad scientist” vein—they are educated, intelligent, and,
like Victor Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau (and most of the fictional scientists
I have discussed so far), “unmarried [and] single-mindedly devoted to
research.”31 Joachim Schummer’s take on the modern “mad scientist” of
the nineteenth century was that he “did harm primarily to other people
through his obsession with playing God.”32 Weirdfinders, however, set
out to help, and generally succeed. Silence, for example, takes no pay-
ment but possesses “[t]he native nobility of a soul whose first desire was
to help those who could not help themselves” (1).
It is obviously important for weirdfinding stories that their clever
experts cannot be dismissed as either mad or, as I will come to, feminine.
The clients, whether men or women, usually have unreliable or incom-
plete impressions, or incorrect theories of their own, while the weirdfind-
ers’ trained minds means what they observe and assert is accepted as fact.
Their intelligence and extensive knowledge are presented not as genius
but as a rational mind put to the discipline of solid hard work and spe-
cialist education. In Marilena Parlati’s words, they are
exceptional individuals whose expertise is and must remain unrivalled; their

uniqueness as human beings allows them to adopt all possible methods of
inquiry, occult ones included, and yet ensures the stability and power of
systematic education, qualifications and police.33
As (implicitly independently wealthy) experts motivated to help people

and solve occult mysteries, weirdfinders are hardly socially subversive, in
that they work with rather than against publicly recognised structures and
institutions. But at the same time, these systems are what makes it possible
to professionalise the occult. Significantly, weirdfinders benefit from the
greater opportunities, of scientific education and working at a profession,
that are available to them as men.
As men, they are less subject to the marginalisation experienced by

fictional women doctors and detectives.34 Yet they also require that par-
ticular nervous or psychological apparatus associated with women’s medi-
umship. Women were considered to be particularly successful as medi-
ums because they were more sympathetic, sensitive, and finely tuned to
ghostly or telepathic transmissions.35 Indeed, “both the Spiritualists and
their antagonists elaborated the electrical mysteries of the telegraph into
a theory of woman as technology.”36 The passive, instrumental bodies of
mediums were therefore often subject to an expert operator—their spirit
control, or their sitters. The medium may be in a trance, or bound to a
chair in a cabinet as a guard against fraud, or simply part of a circle of
joined hands. Spiritualist as well as psychical researchers’ rhetoric around
mediums explicitly represented them as technology: sensitive, passive, and
controllable technology. According to an 1873 article in The Spiritualist ,
Just as some of the best telegraphic instruments require to be under the

care of a skilled electrician, and not an ordinary clerk, even so should a very
sensitive medium be surrounded by experienced Spiritualists only, that the
best results may be obtained.37
The medium, here, becomes a delicate instrument in need of care by

the trained expert. Nevertheless, spiritualism offered many women medi-
ums, often of lower classes, a social empowerment otherwise difficult to
obtain.38 So too did writing; as Hilary Grimes demonstrates in relation
to late Victorian women ghost-story writers, “authorship, ghostliness, and
female identity are closely entwined.”39
As a result, women’s knowing takes a distinct gendered form. It coun-
ters claims for universal truths based on an epistemology assuming a mas-
culine norm, but was not necessarily recognised as an acceptable replace-
ment. Susan Schaper notes that “[f]emale ghost-seeing […] is profoundly
equivocal in Victorian culture. It can serve as a testimonial to woman’s
highly developed sensitivity” but “can also indicate psychological instabil-
ity.”40 To ensure distance from such associations, the Low stories break
with “haunted house” narrative conventions of connecting hauntings with
unmanly superstitions. They present occult investigation as a serious mat-
ter for the professional man’s enquiry and, at the same time, “[annex] the
home as a male space”:
124 E. ALDER
The men who gather at the haunted house […] resemble a hunting party,
scientific expedition, or group of military officers planning a coup against
an elusive enemy, and the house itself is constructed as a battleground, a
laboratory, or a supernatural dark continent.41
In such spaces, women and their activities are marginalised. The gen-
dered difference of women’s lived experience extends to epistemol-
ogy. Fictional women detectives, for example, as Joanna Wargen shows,
were marginalised as knowers or discoveries by androcentric nineteenth-
century scientific institutions and systems of knowledge.42
The male weirdfinders, however, are able to operate in both spheres
of masculine and feminine knowing and spirituality or, perhaps, collapse
and reconfigure them into one new sphere of operation. Andrew Smith
describes an internal crisis in hegemonic masculinity at the fin de siècle as
the dominant masculine scripts became pathologised.43 Male weirdfind-
ers use their occult and psychical expertise to combat that sense of crisis
through a construction of an alternative masculine and professional iden-
tity. Sage Lesley-McCarthy argues that “[t]he uncontested masculinity of
Flaxman Low and the other professional psychic detectives is […] intrin-
sically connected to their status as trained occultists, rather than ‘dab-
blers’ in the mystical.”44 Weirdfinders accordingly develop their mental
faculties through occult training along the lines of the Golden Dawn.
“All of the occult work within the Golden Dawn,” Susan Johnston Graf
explains, “was trained on elevation and control of consciousness,” includ-
ing “evocation” of subconscious energies and “invocation” of divine ener-
gies; “[t]he imagination and the will were the key elements of the human
psyche with which the Golden Dawn ritual magician worked.”45
Through occultism, men could regain some of the authority lost to
women with their feminine spiritual apparatus, because the occult offered
a way to be manly as well as psychical or magical. Alex Owen argues that
as “masculinity was assuming a variety of different faces” in the 1890s,
“the occult offered men the possibility of a direct spiritualized experience
of the other world that avoided the feminized connotations of spiritual-
ist mediumship.”46 Pitfalls included avoiding the passivity of the ecstatic
state, for example, through the exercise of willpower. Willpower, Owen
notes,
was closely associated with what Victorians referred to as the “masculine

temperament,” and the will was considered by many physicians to act as the
guarantor of manly health and efficacy. […] Within occult circles, however,
the will was to be tutored and honed as the essential attribute of the
magician regardless of distinction of sex.47
Occultism offered broadly egalitarian opportunities for success, but its

reputation in wider culture was shaky. Weirdfinding stories therefore fall
back on, or recreate, a more robust masculine script, incorporating the
emphasis on individual will.
Weirdfinders tread the line between their sensitivity and their self-
control, taking occultism into the public sphere of detective work and
retaining, or regaining, the professional authority of the latter role despite
the former. Forging a profession with elements of the detective, the sci-
entist, the medium, and the occultist, they assert what the scientists of
Chapter 3 learn—that scientific theories and methods, occult knowledge,
and spiritual sensitivity must unite in order to understand and tackle the
weird. The weird mysteries they deal with are natural, based in revised,
secular empirics that extend into the more-than-visible world, while as
professional detectives, weirdfinders bring occult knowing and methods
from the hermetic margins to the public mainstream.
Flaxman Low’s Real Ghosts

Written by Kate and Hesketh Prichard under the pseudonyms of E. and
H. Heron, the Flaxman Low stories were first published in Pearson’s Mag-
azine in 1898. There they were presented as “Real Ghost Stories” (possi-
bly in an echo of W. T. Stead’s Real Ghost Stories [1891], which were to
be considered authentic).48 The Introduction to the first story in Pear-
son’s explains that Low offered his “clear and ample” notes to the authors
for turning into published stories.49 Part of this Introduction becomes, in
the Preface to the 1899 book, a letter from Flaxman Low himself; either
way, Low’s fictional status was at first unclear, with the authors, them-
selves under fictional identities, presented as “editors” given the task of
preparing the stories for a public readership.
It is a public good, it seems, to report occult phenomena responsibly.
Therefore, the authors explain in the Introduction to “The Story of ‘The
Spaniards’, Hammersmith,”
With a view to meeting the widespread interest in these matters, the fol-
lowing series of ghost stories is laid before the public. They have been
126 E. ALDER
gathered out of a large number of supernatural experiences with which

Mr. Flaxman Low – under the thin disguise of which name many are sure
to recognise one of the leading scientists of the day, with whose works on
Psychology and kindred subjects they are familiar – has been more or less
connected.
Low is immediately established as already a well-known expert, called in

to deal with the cases encountered by his clients and based, readers are
encouraged to believe, on a “leading scientist” of the day (he even writes
up cases for the SPR, and it’s certainly tempting to suspect Frederic Myers
as a model). The authors position Low’s cases as part of the project of “re-
ducing Psychology to the lines of an exact science,” alluding to the SPR’s
work of identifying and classifying phenomena (“Spaniards,” 60). Having
studied at Oxford, he has “devoted his life to the study of psychical phe-
nomena” and cautions against injudicious dabbling.50 Weirdfinding is a
serious business.
The narrative construction of the story series itself is designed to
perform Low’s expert knowledge. At the start of “The Story of Bael-
brow,” the authors acknowledge choosing “the completer cases, those
that ended in something like satisfactory proof, rather than the many
instances where the thread broke off abruptly amongst surmisings, which
it was never possible to subject to convincing tests.”51 The chosen cases
present only Low’s untarnished professional success—only, as the refer-
ences to “proof” and replicable “tests” imply, those cases where the scien-
tific method worked. When in a later story Low asserts that “by drawing
upon our experience of things we know and see, we should be able to
form accurate hypotheses with regard to things which, while clearly per-
taining to us, have so far been regarded as mysteries” (“Saddler’s Croft,”
184), everything we have read only proves him right. The authors’ refer-
ence to what has been omitted generates a spectral array of unsolved (or
at least unproven to be solved) cases that lies behind the published stories.
Literally fictitious and unwritten, their shadowy absent presence hints at
the weird’s irreducibility, its resistance of scientific conventions and com-
prehensibility, even while the visible display is solely of Low’s professional
expertise and the success of scientific reasoning.
Low’s point of departure is psychology in the pre-Freudian vein of
Frederic Myers and Henry Jekyll, as discussed in Chapter 2. In “The
Story of Sevens Hall,” a vengeful ghost drives two brothers to suicide
and Low saves the third. Low’s explanation of the haunting could have
come straight out of “Multiplex Personality”:
“Contemporary psychology has arrived at the conclusion that every man

possesses a subconscious as well as a conscious self,” added Low, after
a pause. “This second or submerged self appears to be infinitely more
susceptible of spiritual influences than the conscious personality.”52
As we will see, Low takes his psychological investigations deep into the
spiritual and the occult. Psychology, he tells us
is unfortunately a science with a future but without a past, or more prob-

ably it is a lost science of the ancients. However that may be, we stand
to-day on the frontier of an unknown world, and progress is the result of
individual effort; each solution of difficult phenomena forms a step towards
the solution of the next problem. (“Spaniards,” 63)
Low is someone prepared to push at the limits of scientific knowledge

and even to draw on long-discarded unconventional methods to do it.
The hauntings Low investigates usually connect, gothic fashion, to past
misdeeds and ancient places; many causes are “otherworldly” and some
are not, but they are never conventional ghosts.53 Many exhibit material
solidity and turn out to be spirits or forces that have managed to bridge
the gulf between the world of matter and the world of spirit—or show
it to be one and the same. “The invisible is the real,” says Low of the
haunting thing in “The Story of Baelbrow”; “the material only subserves
its manifestation.” In this story, an “elemental psychic germ” connected
to the ancient barrow upon which the house is built grows into a “help-
less intelligence,” lingering until it is able to take possession of a mummy
brought home by Low’s client (the sceptical Mr. Swaffam) and mani-
fest itself as a vampire (“Baelbrow,” 374). There is nothing supernatu-
ral here—the ghost is a psychic intelligence, the mummy is simply mate-
rial, and the vampire is something naturally “self-created” under the right
conditions. Three traditionally supernatural revenants are demolished in
one go; Low’s expert explanation constructs instead a weird phenomenon
(inhuman, amoral, materialist, irrational but real), whose threat is easily
neutralised by burning the mummy.
Some of the phenomena, though, have no personal motivations against
any individual or no particular link with a house. In “The Story of Moor
128 E. ALDER
Road,” the haunter is an “Elemental Earth Spirit,” which are things that
“absorb the vitality of any ailing person until it is exhausted” and are
“animated solely by a blind malignity to the human race.”54 Such ele-
mental spirits sit closer to the weird notion of outer monstrosities, and
similar explanations are offered in some of Blackwood’s tales, such as
the Silence story “The Nemesis of Fire.” Low distances himself from the
occultist account of these spirits, however. He refers to his “own research-
es” into the relationship between “atmospheric influences,” gases, and
spiritual phenomena “generated when certain of the primary formations
are newly exposed to the common air,” adding atmospheric chemistry to
his repertoire of scientific knowledge (“Moor Road,” 256). In this way,
Low “defines the supernatural in his reality.”55 Weird phenomena exist,
as a natural part of this world.
Low’s own personality helps make a weird construction of reality seem
rational and acceptable. He is presented as a calm, unflappable presence,
reassuring to his clients and called upon because he is “the sort of man
one could rely on in almost any emergency” (“Spaniards,” 61). When Mr.
Swaffam tries to goad him that “‘you don’t look sufficiently high-strung
for one of your profession’[,] Mr Low merely bowed” (“Baelbrow,” 369).
As Schaper puts it, he is a “seasoned ghostbuster whose confrontations
with household haunts affirm his masculinity rather than feminizing him”
and the stories demonstrate that “only a man in full command of him-
self can safely confront the supernatural.”56 Low is unafraid to confront
weird phenomena, however horrible some of them certainly are. That is
not to say he is never scared, but he has the willpower to keep control
of himself. As the opening narration to “The Story of Saddler’s Croft”
explains, “[e]xtremely few persons are sufficiently masters of themselves
to permit of their calling in the vast unknown forces outside ordinary
human knowledge for mere purposes of amusement” (176). Low’s work
is no casual hobby, and he is no passive instrument; he is trained to deal
masterfully with the unthinkable.
As a professional, Low is distinguished to a significant degree from his
often-hapless client. In “Saddler’s Croft,” an American woman with an
interest in spiritualism, Mrs. Corcoran, is lured in her sleep to a temple
in the garden haunted by the powerful spirit of a Greek man, Agapoulos,
which takes physical form by possessing the body of a local gentleman,
Sinclair. Flaxman Low is able to explain and disrupt these circumstances,
persuading the Corcorans to move house and undertaking to close “what
may be called the doors of life” in Sinclair’s spirit or psyche that had,
when open, made him vulnerable (185). In the events of the story, Mrs.
Corcoran and Sinclair take on the passive role of medium. Mrs. Corcoran
enters trances in which she sings and sleepwalks, while Sinclair (as Low
later explains):
invited the control of a spirit, and, having no inherent powers of resistance,

he became its slave. Agapoulos must have possessed extraordinary will-
force; his soul actually dominated Sinclair’s. Thus not only the mental
attributes of Sinclair but even his bodily appearance became modified to
the likeness of the Greek. (185)
Sinclair, with no willpower of his own to speak of, is an instrumental body

open to possession by a spirit control which acts through him and alters
his physical appearance.
Mrs. Corcoran has dabbled in some occult activities such as sleep-
ing with moonlight on her face, and Sinclair is a British colonial whose
health and will have been weakened by a harsh Ceylon climate. These cir-
cumstances do render them more vulnerable than usual, but Agapoulos’s
power, his “extraordinary will-force,” is genuine. For when investigating
the spell encountered around the temple, Low is almost caught in it him-
self:
It was only by an immense effort of will that he was able to throw off
the trance that was stealing over him, holding him prisoner – how nearly a
willing prisoner he shudders to remember. But habits of self-control have
been Low’s only shield in many a dangerous hour. (183)
Mastery over oneself is key to mastery of the occult. Low possesses a

“will-force” equal to that of otherworldly spirits.
Even his willpower, though, has its limits. Low is presented as an ath-
letic, healthy type, a “Corinthian male figure” who “mirrors the image
of Holmes as both a man of action and one capable of profound rational
thought.”57 He needs all of it. His most difficult challenge, logically, takes
place at the end of the series. It takes the form of a Dr. Kalmarkane, first
introduced and left undefeated in “The Story of Crowsedge,” then tack-
led in the final story, “The Story of Flaxman Low.” Here, Kalmarkane
boasts he has “grasped the supreme secret […] of the Mother-force of
nature – cosmic ether! […] I have discovered how to control the pri-
mal force, for the human Will is above all.”58 The battle between these
130 E. ALDER
two masters takes place firstly on a psychic level, as Kalmarkane’s control

of a “parasite intelligence” through his manipulation of “etheric energy”
enables him to attack Low from a distance, and finally as a good old-
fashioned duel with pistols somewhere on the French coast near Calais
(Low is injured but manages to shoot his opponent dead) (586). Win-
ning (if barely) these battles after a severe struggle with a particularly
powerful combatant demonstrates Low’s manly superiority in the realm
of action as well as his intellectual willpower and, the authors hope, “that
high-mindedness which has always formed one of his most prominent
characteristics” (587).
In one of the earlier stories, Low comes close to losing his self-control
almost entirely. In “The Story of Yand Manor House,” one of the most
chilling of the collection and worthy of M. R. James in its depiction of an
emphatically tactile and savoury ghost that can be tasted, felt, and leaves
traces in the form of scraps of hair and fingernails, Low is almost crushed
to death in his panic to escape a haunted room:
Low pushed out his hands with a mad longing to touch a table, a chair,
anything but this clammy, swelling softness that thrust itself upon him from
every side, baffling him and filling his grasp.
He knew now that he was absolutely alone – struggling against what?
His feet were slipping in his wild efforts to feel the floor – the dank flesh
was creeping upon his neck, his cheek – his breath came short and labour-
ing as the pressure swung him gently to and fro, helpless, nauseated!59
For once Low is not only “baffled”—“struggling against what?”—but his

self-control deserts him in favour of “mad longing” and “wild efforts”
(he has a similarly described narrow brush with what turns out to be a
plant, an unusual Malaysian creeper, in “The Story of the Grey House”).
The “Yand Manor” phenomenon presents, for a time, as a weird entity,
something incomprehensible and unknowable. It exhibits an illogical kind
of immaterial solidity: the pressure of what he later calls “spiritualised
matter” (590), a failed absence, a presence that is not a presence. Con-
sequently upon the ontological distress this causes, Low’s knowledge and
will both temporarily fail and he only escapes by chance, accidentally
breaking a window and falling out into the garden.
Fortunately, he is able to redeem himself. His direct experience of the

phenomenon has allowed him to know it sufficiently to give his client
Blackburton and his logician friend Thierry the explanation: the room is
haunted by a deceased Blackburton ancestor, whose arcane activities sus-
tained his spirit after death and preserved his body’s growth of hair and
fingernails. When Blackburton asks “[b]ut why should Sir Gilbert haunt
the Manor House, and one special room?” Low responds that “[t]he ten-
dency of spirits to return to the old haunts of bodily life is almost univer-
sal. We cannot yet explain the reason of this attraction of environment”
(590). The word “yet” indicates that it is only a matter of time before
such secrets give themselves up. Thierry presses him on the mystery of
the pressure in the room, and Low admits he can’t explain it “as fully
as I could wish, perhaps. But the power of expanding and contracting
to a degree far beyond our comprehension is a well-known attribute of
spiritualised matter” (590).
This episode is about the closest Low gets, in the stories his editors
selected, to his explanatory limits. But as Thierry finally concedes in the
lines that not only close the story but conclude that year’s six instalments,
“[i]n time, my dear Monsieur Flaxman, you will add another to our sci-
ences. You establish your facts too well for my peace of mind” (591).
Bearing witness as a scientific sceptic, after all, is the purpose of Thier-
ry’s presence in this tale; as Leslie-McCarthy points out, “a key part of
creating [Low’s] new discipline is being able to promote its validity to
a mainstream professional audience whose criteria for proof are typically
established along more traditional scientific lines.”60 To this end, Low’s
establishment of facts is not limited to convincing theoretical explication
but includes empirical proof. The clues and proofs in some stories—a
mummy’s foot shot by a pistol (“Baelbrow”), hair and a missing finger-
nail (“Yand Manor”)—present a clear trail, making these stories unsettling
because rather than despite the materiality of these haunters.
However, the demonstration of tangible empirical proof is deceptive
and conceals an underlying weird instability. For example, in “Spaniards,”
the evidence for the haunting of the house (by a leper murderer and
suicide) ends up on public display:
The skeleton is now in the museum of one of our city hospitals. It bears
a scientific ticket, and is the only evidence extant of the correctness of
Mr. Flaxman Low’s methods and the possible truth of his extraordinary
theories. (69)
132 E. ALDER
Cook, drawing on Sarah Crofton, points out a gap in the logic here:
that attributing the murderous ghost to this skeleton is inference, not
the proof expected from a trail of clues readable by the detective, and
still needing a leap of faith to believe in the weird.61 Cook argues, how-
ever, that the reliance on inference, the stories’ “partial compliance” with
detective fiction conventions, and the “broken chain of clues” are signifi-
cant:
This balance between knowledge and supposition, while inhabiting its

structures, offers an alternative universe to the prescribed detective nar-
rative where knowledge always morphs into certainty. It challenges the
reader to ponder: which of these alternatives describes the world in which
I live?62
The gap between an intuitive leap and logical deduction makes a space
for the weird, wherein exists another construction of the world, one only
partially comprehensible or amenable to scientific truth claims—and that
is the way it should be, leaving us on the limits of the known.
The real-world evidence and “casebook” presentation of Low’s stories
are narrative devices to bolster their authenticity, and through that the
authenticity of his particular brand of psychical science. The stories work
satisfyingly partly because the solution to the puzzle is not obvious—
the haunting is never a traditional ghost but always an unexpected com-
bination. Although Low can explain everything, the phenomenon first
presents itself as an inexplicable weird encounter that seems to defy nat-
ural law but yet leaves empirical evidence. Low’s explanations arguably
contain and neutralise weirdness, but in doing so, they also acknowledge
that reality is not what we thought it was. The “standard of reality,” as
an Algernon Blackwood character would later put it, has changed.63 The
weird is real; a male scientist, occultist, professional detective says so, with
unquestionable authority.
John Silence’s Powerful Sympathy

In one of the happiest ghost stories I’ve ever read, Blackwood’s 1907
“The Woman’s Ghost Story,” a female psychical researcher is sent to
investigate a house supposedly haunted by the ghost of a murdered
woman.64 Instead, she encounters a mysterious caretaker, who turns out
to be the real ghost (she had been lied to about the nature of the haunt-
ing). The encounter is at first terrifying, and she declares “I was an utter
fool to go in for psychical research when I had not the necessary nerve.”65
What she does have, however, is the necessary sympathy to provide what
the ghost wants to release him from his liminal state: love. Since he is
“well dressed, youngish and good looking, but with a face of great sad-
ness,” responding to the request isn’t all that difficult. Feelings of pity and
love released by his demand sway her to kiss him in “a momentary ecstasy
of flaming sweetness and wonder” (348), and the house is left empty.
Here, the narrator’s feminine capacities of feeling are what enable her
to identify and then exorcise the ghost, not her intellectual control. It
is a “woman’s” ghost story in more ways than one—she tells her own
story and solves her own case successfully within the domestic space of an
ordinary house. It is a case particularly suited to her femininity, requir-
ing emotion and sympathy rather than strong will and reasoning. In the
end, she decides not to bother her uncle with the true story and thus
avoids subjecting the situation to rational mansplaining. All in all, her
method of dealing with the haunting is an almost exact inverse of that of
Flaxman Low’s. The contrast fulfils Susan Schaper’s argument that when
“female characters subdue household ghosts with their feminine compas-
sion, they demonstrate the power of the domestic woman,” while “the
ultimate source of cultural authority lay not in essential middle-class fem-
ininity but in essential masculine ‘animal instincts’ governed by rational
self-discipline.”66
Blackwood’s own psychic doctor character, John Silence, however, has
it all: the nerve and the sympathy, the intellect and the intuition. He is not
quite such a man of action as Low, but combines sympathy and willpower
to diagnose and assist his clients and, where necessary, to subdue weird
phenomena.
John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (1908) was Blackwood’s first big
success as a writer, enabling him the financial independence to move to
Switzerland. The book published the first five stories. “A Psychical Inva-
sion,” “The Nemesis of Fire,” and “The Camp of the Dog” all centre on
a case investigated by Silence himself, while “Ancient Sorceries” and “Se-
cret Worship,” according to Blackwood’s biographer Mike Ashley, were
probably written earlier with Silence “grafted on to the story in a final
revision.”67 A sixth story, “A Victim of Higher Space,” was added to the
134 E. ALDER
collection later.68 I focus mainly here on the first story, “A Psychical Inva-
sion,” which outlines Silence’s background and the methods he uses in
the six cases that unfold.
Blackwood’s conception of the more-than-visible world was a realm
not of (human) ghosts or souls but of far greater powers or energies.
In “The Genesis of Ideas” (1937), Blackwood recalled that as a child he
“longed to see a ghost” and later “to understand what faculty enabled one
to see a ghost, or, rather, be aware of any ‘other-worldly’ manifestation at
all.”69 He held that awareness of the expanded world was based in con-
sciousness: “My interest lay then in the extension of human faculty, and in
the possibility that the mind has powers which only manifest themselves
occasionally. And this interest is even stronger in me today than ever.”70
Developing the mind’s faculties gives the practitioner capacity for agency
in relation to the more-than-visible world, in contrast to the latent talents
and passive, controllable sensitivity that might typically attend a spiritual-
ist medium. Belief in these possibilities had scientific support, Blackwood
explained:
It leads into an enormous and tricky field, of course. The researches of

modern psychology, studies of multiple personality, new conceptions of
time and space, and the serious possibility that normal consciousness may
experience strange extensions, give to the whole question now a semi-
scientific flavor.71
Ambivalent, however, about the place of science in this conception of

reality, Blackwood had doubts about the adequacy of occultism as well—
though he had sincere interests in both.
Blackwood joined the Theosophical Society in New York in 1892, and
the Golden Dawn in 1900, and Silence is understood to be based on a
fellow Golden Dawn member.72 Like Machen, Blackwood left the Order
after finding its teachings could not provide the answers he sought.73 S. T.
Joshi notes a “systematic repudiation of occultism” in Blackwood’s work
because he did not want his own philosophy of expanded awareness of
the world to be confused with it.74 Nevertheless, Ashley records the way
occult knowledge and Golden Dawn involvement “brought an authen-
ticity to his stories” and shows that the Silence stories are all based on
impressions Blackwood had himself received in various places.75 Occult
concepts influence several of his novels; John Silence is one possible work-
ing out for Blackwood, through fiction, of what neither occult teachings
nor science alone could provide.76
The weird is as real in Silence’s world as it is in Flaxman Low’s. He
doesn’t deny the existence of strange phenomena, but he rejects both nor-
mal scientific and normal superstitious explanations; Cook remarks that,
“in Blackwood’s stories, the question of the existence of the supernatural
world is not in doubt.”77 However, the terminology is misleading. For
Blackwood, Ashley makes clear,
The “supernatural” was not something magical or unnatural, in the super-

stitious sense. Everything was “natural” but mankind could no longer see
the whole. The world-view of mankind had become diminished, and thus
the only way to see the whole was to step beyond the everyday world into
the “super-natural.”78
Silence, in the same vein as Low, explains exactly this point in “Nemesis
of Fire”: “I have yet to come across a problem that is not natural and
has not a natural explanation. It’s merely a question of how much one
knows – and admits.”79 Like other Blackwood characters such as Bittacy
in “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” and O’Malley in The Centaur
(1911), Silence has learned how to step beyond the everyday world and
see the whole—and, unlike these others, how to do so safely and return
unaltered. As he explains to his client in “A Psychical Invasion,” he has
been “inoculated” (34) (unlike Bittacy, O’Malley, and Defago in “The
Wendigo,” who are transformed).
Silence is a unique model. His advanced skills and knowledges—
including medicine, mathematics, anthropology, psychical research, and
occultism—are moulded into a role suited to dealing with the weird
more-than-visible world and legible in specifically Edwardian cultural con-
texts of masculinity, imperialism, and professional expertise. Mark De
Cicco, in a discussion of Silence’s techniques, has argued that “Silence,
while taking similar risks to our other occult scientists, manages to make
use of occult science to harness queer, supernatural forces and to ulti-
mately bring balance to a world that threatens to fall out of sync.”80 De
Cicco’s elaboration of the “queer” to describe what is strange and dif-
ferent in the world compared to consensus normality works well as an
expression of the weird, although he never calls it that. His term for fig-
ures like Silence is “occult explorer,” into which he co-opts, if not the
136 E. ALDER
most obvious choices for comparison, our old friends Dr. Jekyll and Dr.
Raymond. The risks Silence takes may be similar in some ways to Jekyl-
l’s, but they are not to Raymond’s: Raymond puts other people fatally at
risk, never himself. While De Cicco is right about Silence’s role in making
the world a better place by smoothing over weird irruptions (and leaving
aside the point already made that queer or weird forces in Blackwood are
not “supernatural”), Silence is more than an occult scientist.
“A Psychical Invasion” emphasises Silence’s dislike of uncritical con-
ceptions of science and of being associated with either mainstream
medicine or with occultism. For example, he has “a clear knowledge of
the difference between mere hysterical delusion and the kind of psychi-
cal affliction that claimed his special powers” (4). Such an affliction is
both medical and in need of the help of something “special” and mys-
terious. The horrors encountered by Silence’s clients go beyond every-
day maladies, yet are to be taken seriously, and so his abilities must
go beyond familiar skills and knowledge. When his visitor in the open-
ing scene attempts to praise his “sympathetic heart and knowledge of
occultism” and he interrupts her with “please – that dreadful word!” she
amends her phrasing to “your wonderful clairvoyant gift and your trained
psychic knowledge” (1, italics original). A man of latent talents combined
with training is how she sees him in more precise terms than the slippery
catch-all “occultism.” Silence’s learning has taken him far beyond any of
his contemporaries, beyond the Golden Dawn and beyond the Society for
Psychical Research. He calls the SPR’s classificatory work “uninspired,”
yet pities them because he’s too kind to show contempt: “For the modern
psychical researcher he felt the calm tolerance of the ‘man who knows’”
(“A Psychical Invasion,” 4).
What is it, then, that Silence “knows”? His clients call him “the psychic
doctor,” and the texts regularly identify him as “the doctor,” emphasising
his role as a medical practitioner. In the framework of the story, psychi-
cal knowledge is evidently advanced enough that methods can be taught
and doctors trained, just like any other science. No one, we are told,
“ever dreamed of applying to him the easily acquired epithet of quack”
(3–4). Silence has evidently succeeded in creating a convincing new med-
ical field. Yet he has undergone rigorous training in the weird, too: “In
order to grapple with cases of this peculiar kind, he had submitted him-
self to a long and severe training, at once physical, mental, and spiritual”
(3). His training has taken place at exactly the point where distinctions
between these three ways of knowing collapse into one. At the same time,
it remains beyond public ken: “What precisely this training had been or
where undergone, no one seemed to know […] it had involved a total dis-
appearance from the world for five years” (3). The hermetic secrecy sug-
gests an occult training like that offered by the Golden Dawn, and Graf
describes Silence as “an exemplar of adepthood.”81 Members believed,
Graf explains, “that the knowledge and experience gained by attaining
the higher grades actually meant that the candidate was evolving spiritu-
ally and psychically.”82
If so, Silence has taken that evolution to a unique extreme; as far as we
can tell, his training was not a shared activity, since he seems to be the only
one of his kind. He is “the one man in all the world who can understand,
and sympathize,” exclaims Mr. Mudge, the “Victim of Higher Space”
(and a man who should know, since he travels multiple dimensions and
has potentially been everywhere at once).83 Silence, certainly, has devel-
oped beyond the need for systematic, ritual practices; as he explains,
Systems of divination, from geomancy down to reading by tea-leaves, are

merely so many methods of obscuring the outer vision, in order that the
inner vision may become open. Once the method is mastered, no system
is necessary at all. (“A Psychical Invasion,” 5)
Although Silence knows how occult rituals and paraphernalia work, as

he demonstrates by summoning the elemental in “Nemesis of Fire,” his
primary resource is himself: his trained mind and body. The “keynote” of
his power is in
the knowledge, first, that thought can act at a distance, and, secondly, that
thought is dynamic and can accomplish material results.
“Learn how to think,” he would have expressed it, “and you have learned
to tap power at its source.” (“A Psychical Invasion,” 5)
The simplicity of his skill separates Silence from both ritual occult prac-
tice and conventional scientific practice. For Silence, summarises Smajìc,
“[i]mpressions received through the inner senses are more reliable than
corporeal sensations, and one must be careful not to distort the former
with deductive reasoning.”84 Silence’s superior abilities may be down to
his training, but he also values intuition, and surrounds himself with ser-
vants and staff who possess it (including Hubbard in “The Nemesis of
138 E. ALDER
Fire” and “The Camp of the Dog,” and Barker in “A Victim of Higher
Space”).
Silence’s first visitor in “A Psychical Invasion” stresses the value of his
“sympathetic heart” alongside his knowledge, and physical descriptions
of Silence draw out his sympathy as well as his intellectual control. Two
descriptions are worth quoting fairly fully. His eyes are “speaking” and in
them
shone the light of knowledge and self-confidence, while at the same time
they made one think of that wondrous gentleness seen most often in the
eyes of animals. A close beard concealed the mouth without disguising the
grim determination of lips and jaw, and the face somehow conveyed an
impression of transparency, almost of light, so delicately were the features
refined away. […] from his manner, – so gentle, quiet, sympathetic, – few
could have guessed the strength of purpose that burned within like a great
flame. (“A Psychical Invasion,” 5)
In “Nemesis of Fire,” the narrator (Silence’s assistant Hubbard) remarks

on
The absolute control he possessed, not only over the outward expression
of emotion by gesture, change of colour, light in the eyes, and so forth,
but also, as I well knew, over its very birth in his heart, the mask-like face
of the dead he could assume at will, made it extremely difficult to know at
any given moment what was at work in his inner consciousness. (192–3)
Both descriptions combine the knowledge and control of the expert, the
feminised delicacy and sympathy of the sensitive medium, and a masculine
strength and determination. His personality is the epitome of Schaper’s
“essential masculine ‘animal instincts’ governed by rational self-discipline”
quoted earlier.
The development of mental control and the power of the will is cen-
tral to Silence’s successes, but so too is his capacity to sympathise with his
clients’ suffering (which helps lead him to a better understanding of their
case) and his ability to turn his own mind and body into a sensitive medi-
umistic instrument, as he does in “A Psychical Invasion.” In this case,
Silence investigates why his client, a man named Pender, is being haunted
by ancient evil forces emanating from his house and channelled through
his body. Pender has no control over this; it is happening unluckily while
he is under the influence of drugs. Silence describes Pender’s state as “a
surprising psychical condition. Certain portions of your atmosphere are

vibrating at a far greater rate than others” (15). The doctor’s diagno-
sis is simultaneously medical, psychical, and occult: hashish, he explains,
“partially opened another world to you by increasing your rate of psychi-
cal vibration, and thus rendering you abnormally sensitive. Ancient forces
attached to this house have attacked you” (23). Silence claims that forces
lingering after a human death (in this case an eighteenth-century witch, “a
woman of consummate wickedness and great personal power of character
and intellect”) can “coalesce with certain non-human entities who thus
continue their life indefinitely and increase their strength” (33). Unname-
able abominable horrors have been “galvanised into active life again by
the will of a trained manipulator, a mind versed in the practices of lower
magic” (70).
Tackling a trained will takes a trained will, and Silence’s solution is to
battle and exorcise these forces by deflecting the invasion from Pender
to himself. At the climax of the battle, he confronts the weird monster
made of the witch’s personality and the non-human entities, figured as
“the wreck of a vast dark Countenance” with “the mark of spiritual evil
[…] branded everywhere upon its broken features” (63). Although he
is confident he will not be “robbed” of self-control (64), there comes a
point where he must choose to submit to the experience, to enter the
mystic state if he is to know it fully. He starts to
absorb into himself the forces opposed to him and to turn them to his own
account. By ceasing to resist, and allowing the deadly stream to pour into
him unopposed, he used the very power supplied by his adversary and thus
enormously increased his own. (64)
Submission becomes agency, and Silence’s body becomes an instrument,

a “purifying filter” through which the evil, unable to harm him because
“his motive was pure and his soul fearless,” eventually, as I return to
in Chapter 6, exhausts itself (64). As it weakens, he regains his agency:
“with the return of the consciousness of his own identity John Silence
was restored to the full control of his own will-power” (65). A causal
effect is implied here that knowing oneself, essentially a question of per-
sonal, intuitive knowledge, is key to that all-important willpower, rather
than the other way round. Silence’s success is not only down to his men-
tal power and will, but to the state of his spirit; he is both instrument
and operator, passive and active, able to master his own movement in and
140 E. ALDER
out of a mediumistic, mystic, or transcendent state, all in the name of

good. Without his intervention, Pender’s psychical invasion would have
remained either a psychological or a supernatural mystery. Silence’s under-
standing and explanation of the cause, combined with his intensely per-
sonal experiencing of the phenomenon itself, turn the case into a weird
case.
Silence’s efforts reassert mastery over an expanded notion of reality
by engaging with it on its own (weird) terms. At the same time, this is
a controlling, governing move—what De Cicco calls “an extension (or
perhaps colonization) on the part of rational thought into non-normative
space.”85 The impulse towards controlling the occult is legible as part
of wider British nineteenth-century imperial culture, which “devise[d]
unprecedented measures for controlling the physical world and the spa-
tial expanses it occupied,” testing “the borders of supernatural as well as
spatial and temporal distances.”86 It follows that the more-than-visible
world is represented as a geographic place; in “A Psychical Invasion,”
Silence speaks of a place “not far removed from the region of our human
life […] a densely populated region crammed with horror and abomina-
tion of all descriptions” (70). In “A Victim of Higher Space,” the fourth
dimension feels to Mudge as “a world of monsters.” He also experiences
it as an irrational overlay of locations: “To be so confused in geography as
to find myself one moment at the North Pole, and the next at Clapham
Junction – or possibly at both places simultaneously – is absurdly terrify-
ing.” Either way, remote and barbaric regions, whether terrestrial spaces
or higher spaces, are brought uncomfortably close to the local (London)
human world.
John Silence, with his unique gifts and training, is better equipped than
many to govern the unruly empire of the more-than-visible. Sarah Alexan-
der, examining the construction of imperial spaces as a fourth dimen-
sion, argues that works such as Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884) “re-
ject notions of colonized space as two-dimensional and envision multiple,
illegible dimensions, underscoring the limitations of empiricism to reveal
the social and economic dimensions of empire.”87 Parlati notes the con-
nection between Silence’s expertise and his role in policing the borders of
empire:
Silence is a powerful mixture of professional, rational expertise and eso-

teric knowledge, uniting Stoker’s Van Helsing with his Dr Seward. He is
portrayed as a heroic, saint-like figure, on an errand to eradicate evil and

push it beyond the borders of the British homeland.88
Silence, able to transcend the limits of conventional occult and scientific

knowing, can deal with the frontiers of how reality is understood, but only
up to a point. In the case of “Victim of Higher Space,” Silence cannot
master the fourth dimension, admitting “I have made similar experiments
myself, and only stopped just in time-.” All he can do is show Mudge
how to “block the entrances,” and so reinforce the boundary between
their three-dimensional reality and the monstrous world of the fourth.
The more-than-visible world is either governed by knowledge, or
secured as safely separate from human reality. One or other of these out-
comes marks Silence’s engagement with weird realities in his other four
cases, with which I will briefly connect. Three are set in lands beyond
Britain, in Germany (“Secret Worship”), France (“Ancient Sorceries”),
and Canada (“Camp of the Dog”), while in “Nemesis of Fire,” the men-
ace is caused by the theft of a sacred green jasper scarabæus from an Egyp-
tian mummy. Silence’s cases lead him to try a variety of strategies, and he
does not always have it his own way. Limits are recognised and not all evils
are eradicated—nor are they even all “evil.” The cult in “Secret Worship”
is merely dispersed. In “Camp of the Dog,” Sangree’s lycanthropic double
is not exorcised but becomes part of the harmonious self who unites with
his lover Joan. Neither the mummy nor the fire elemental of “Nemesis of
Fire” are destroyed; instead, it is the thief, the elderly Miss. Wragge, who
is killed. In “Ancient Sorceries,” the client, who appears to tangle with
a Satanic cult in a French town, is afflicted by “subliminal up-rushes” of
the “intense activities of a past life,” and Silence can’t fix it; he is left with
“an expression of profound yearning upon his face, the yearning of a soul
whose desire to help is sometimes greater than his power.”89
In all cases, Silence’s intuition and expertise combine to allow him
to tackle weird mysteries. He recognises an expanded version of reality
in which matter and spirit need to be understood and treated as one.
Any single identity or form of knowledge is insufficient, and from the
available array, he creates a new professional role as a weirdfinder that
secures boundaries of expertise, masculinity, and nation against the myr-
iad of weird threats that menace the fin de siècle.
142 E. ALDER
Thomas Carnacki’s Occult Inventions

William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki story series is, like Low’s, structured
as a casebook, but instead of being prepared for the public, Carnacki’s
cases are recounted by him to a select circle of friends who gather at
his house for that sole purpose. In this sense, he is his own “editor,”
and, like Low’s “editors,” his decisions about which cases to select and
how to present them has implications for how far they can be taken as
authentic proof of weird realities. The first five stories ran in 1910 in The
Idler: “The Gateway of the Monster,” “The House Among the Laurels,”
“The Whistling Room,” “The Horse of the Invisible,” and “The Searcher
of the End House.” Together with a sixth story, “The Thing Invisible”
(1912), the collection was published by Eveleigh Nash as a book titled
Carnacki the Ghost-Finder in 1913. A review in The Bookman called the
collection “half-a-dozen of the ‘creepiest’ experiences imaginable” and
described the author as “a fascinating panic-monger with a quick eye for
all the sensational possibilities of ghost-lore.”90 Later collections included
a further three tales: “The Haunted Jarvee” (1929), “The Hog,” and
“The Find” (both unpublished until 1947, when August Derleth included
them in his collection also titled Carnacki the Ghost-Finder). Many of
these mysteries do turn out to be weird phenomena, while others have
more conventional explanations.
Carnacki’s methods differ from those of Silence and Low. His tools
are the occult and magical knowledge acquired from extensive esoteric
research, updated with modern scientific theory and technology. In cases
“where Silence would arrive with no equipment but his knowledge, Car-
nacki brings a trunk of modern instruments”91 ; these include his “Elec-
tric Pentacle” and a modified camera and gramophone. Carnacki shares
with Silence and Low the expanded conception of “natural” reality that
encompasses the weird. “The Hog,” for example, contains a detailed
explanation by Carnacki of some of his notions of how the world is, which
includes the way the planet is surrounded by an “Outer Circle,” some-
thing both physical and psychical. Human beings, too, commingle both;
Carnacki possesses “physical magnetic and psychic ‘haloes’” (188).92 The
stories also use the technique Roger Luckhurst calls “pseudobiblia,” in
which a fabricated textual abhistory creates a foundation of knowledge
with which to bolster the weirdfinder’s reasoning.93 In this section, I
explore the way Carnacki’s worldview, his marshalling of invented knowl-

edge, and his uses of technologised occult methods work together to form
the weirdfinding framework in this series of stories.
Carnacki’s weird monsters are notable throughout the series for the
way that they take material form. In the first story, “The Gateway of the
Monster,” Carnacki is called to investigate a haunting whose physical evi-
dence includes the slamming of a bedroom door and the nightly hurl-
ing of bedclothes into a corner—the actions of “a monstrous hand.”94
Ghostly hands in literature, Jenny Bann has argued, are a particularly
strong (and numerous) literary indicator of the changing nature of spec-
tres in the nineteenth century, “from the powerless hand-wringing of
[Dickens’s] Marley’s ghost to the controlling, guiding, or demonstrative
hands” of later fiction, which she links to spiritualism and the increasingly
material manifestation of spirits in the séance.95 In particular, Bann notes
the new forms of agency and empowerment that spiritualism lent to imag-
inings of ghosts. While embodied spirits in the séance might be benign,
entertaining, communicative, and affectionate, occultism also understood
a greater range of forces and entities dwelling in other planes than the
remains of human souls alone. Carnacki’s weird Hand is of the latter set.
Spending a night in the room within the protection of his Electric Penta-
cle, Carnacki at first observes “a moving shadow, a little darker than the
surrounding shadows”; then, he hears “the slow, dragging slither of the
[bed]clothes; but [he] could see nothing of the thing that pulled” (49).
Finally, a flashlight reveals the giant Hand, groping at the edge of the
Pentacle: “the ghastly thing went round and round, grabbing and grab-
bing in the air at me” (50). What begins as an intangible “ghost” eluding
observation resolves into something solid and corporeal enough to be
visible in light and capable of agency over both matter (the sheets) and
occult or psychic force (the Hand responds to the power of the Pentacle
and affects Carnacki’s mind in its efforts to break through). In Carnacki’s
first case, as in many of his others, material and immaterial forces combine
to make and embody the weird monster.
A similar embodiment happens in “The Whistling Room,” in which
the rotten soul of a dead jester manifests itself as “a pair of gargantuan
lips, black and utterly monstrous” (84) by warping the materials of the
building around it; tongueless in life, the whistling of the lips represents
the monster’s best form of agency. In “Gateway of the Monster,” the
monstrous Hand is part traditional superstition, part materialised ghost,
and part occult force. Searching the room in the light of day, Carnacki
144 E. ALDER
finds a pentagon-shaped ring, which he recognises as one connected with

a sinister legend of his client’s family. Keeping the ring with him the next
night, in the hope of neutralising it, Carnacki discovers he has unwittingly
brought the “gateway” inside the Electric Pentacle, where the monster
starts to manifest:
The convoluting shadows about the ring were taking shape […] the brute
was coming through – pouring into the material world, as gas might pour
out from the mouth of a pipe. […] I saw that it was the Hand, vast and
nearly perfect in form. (53)
The presence of the ring inside the Pentacle turns the protective circle
into a place of danger. Carnacki’s own action has enabled the monster
to subvert the weirdfinder’s most powerful defence, in a “distortion of
that occult staple, the magic circle, such that it becomes both techno-
logical and a portal, enabling the irruption of the weird,” undermining
any sense of firm borders between self and other, this world and that.96
Accordingly, the positions of Carnacki and the Hand are inverted. The
weirdfinder escapes by leaping out over the Electric Pentacle, leaving the
monster “chained, as surely as any beast would be” (53). He has con-
tained the menace, but not exactly defeated it. Only in the safety of the
morning can he end its existence as well by destroying the ring itself.
Appropriately for their ambiguous nature and disregard for ontological
borders, Carnacki’s monsters must be tackled on both a material and psy-
chical level and require the weirdfinder to draw on a blend of different
sets of knowledge.
The giant lips and the ghostly hand may partly function as spiritual-
ist manifestations, but they are also occult forces; Luckhurst argues that
“Carnacki’s protective pentacle, his conjuring of malicious forces, and his
references to the authority of medieval manuscripts owe more to the rites
associated with the Order of the Golden Dawn than psychical research.”97
The Golden Dawn, based on knowledge derived from supposed transla-
tions of ancient manuscripts and ciphers, required initiates to learn eso-
teric texts and ritual practice in detail, often with the goal of incarnat-
ing spiritual powers. “Golden Dawn magic,” Graf describes, “worked
through the embodiment of cosmic energy in talismans and symbols,”
and R. A. Gilbert gives the examples of the “Rituals of the Pentagram
and Hexagram, for the invocation and banishment of assorted spirits.”98
In Theosophy, too, symbols such as circles, crosses, and the five-pointed
star used in ceremonial magic each had their own significance.99 In the
early twentieth century, Egil Asprem details, Aleister Crowley worked par-
ticularly hard at framing the occult scientifically, publishing scientific test
methods for magic in The Equinox between 1909 and 1917, and devising
a dedicated system for the naturalistic proof of visions, spirit communica-
tions, and other occult phenomena.100 Carnacki’s Pentacle and associated
rituals reflect these practices.
Carnacki, following in the footsteps of his weirdfinder, doctor, and
detective predecessors, is presented as a professional too much respected
to function as a Crowley figure exactly. Nevertheless, he is a modern
occult scientist, who both admits his faith in the “old magic figure” of
the pentacle and cites repeated tests and observations as his evidence. “I
ask questions, and keep my eyes open,” he says, seeing himself as the
“twentieth century man” of scientific approach who will not dismiss the
evidence of his own experience (45).
Yet it is questionable how seriously we are meant to take Carnacki,
whose name alludes to an ancient Egyptian temple, Karnak, suggesting
a level of artifice in even the diegetic construction of his identity.101 In
“The Thing Invisible,” Carnacki explains that
most people never quite know how much or how little they believe of mat-
ters ab-human or ab-normal, and generally they never have an opportunity
to learn […] I am as big a sceptic concerning the truth of ghost tales
as you are likely to meet; only I am what I might term an unprejudiced
sceptic.102
He doesn’t dismiss anything out of hand, but he does, so he says, assume

that the cause of a haunting is not a ghost until he’s convinced other-
wise by the evidence. The story that follows, however, fails to bear out
this claim, showing him convinced of the weird phenomenon before rather
than after finding the evidence. The case involves a haunted chapel where
a butler is mysteriously stabbed with a dagger. “There is no doubt at all,”
Carnacki declares, “but that what I might term the Haunting Essence
which lived in the place, had become suddenly dangerous” (16). He
whets his listeners’ appetites further by elaborating his belief that it was
“one of those extraordinarily rare ‘true manifestations’ of the extrusion
of a Force from the Outside” (17). His own experience of the haunting
then supports this hypothesis empirically. Alone in the chapel at night, he
seems to feel “the dark about me press coldly against my face […] I had
146 E. ALDER
a horrible sense that something was moving in the place […] I had a kind
of intuitive knowledge that something had stirred in the darkness” (22).
Later still, he describes himself as “listening with body and soul” (25)
and feeling the “sheer, actual physical pain attendant upon, and resulting
from, the intense nerve strain that ghostly fright sets up in the human
system” (26).
In this way, Carnacki dresses up his tale in a scientised discourse draw-
ing its authority from spiritualist experience, ghost story traditions, occult
forces, and empirical sensory knowing, deliberately leading us to expect
and accept the phenomenon as a “true manifestation.” “[N]inety-nine
cases in a hundred,” Carnacki tells his unquestioning friends, “turn out
to be sheer bosh and fancy. But the hundredth! Well, if it were not for
the hundredth, I should have few stories to tell” (16). And yet the case
he’s about to recount to them, it turns out, is one of the ninety-nine:
the dagger in the chapel is propelled by a hidden mechanism. The ninety-
nine cases evidently can offer stories just as good as the hundredth, as
well as shedding doubt on it. “The Thing Invisible” raises questions over
what is meant be taken as real in Carnacki’s stories; his personal bodily
and mental experience in the chapel clearly can have nothing to do with
mysterious outside forces, but is almost identical to what he undergoes in
the Grey Room in “Gateway of the Monster” which is really haunted. Or
perhaps what is “real” is all in the telling.
Compounding the uncertainty is the way Carnacki builds up his knowl-
edge from (invented) occult sources—the study of esoteric rituals, ancient
manuscripts, like the “Sigsand MS,” and obscure, implicitly recent works
such as “Professor Garder’s “Experiments with a Medium” (“Gateway
of the Monster,” 45) or “Harzan’s Monograph, and my Addenda to
it, on Astral and Astral Co-ordination and Interference.”103 Sometimes
his audience cite these back to him: Arkwright asks “have you any idea
what governs the use of the Unknown Last Line of the Saaamaaa Rit-
ual? I know, of course, that it was used by the Ab-human Priests in the
Incantation of Raaaee” (“Whistling Room”, 86). Are these details well-
known facts in Arkwright’s wider world, are they secret, esoteric knowl-
edge shared by this little circle of initiates and perhaps others—or does he
but parrot it after spending so many evenings sitting in Carnacki’s dining
room? Carnacki’s four friends (Arkwright, Dodgson, Jessop, and Taylor—
they never vary) are entirely credulous. “What talks they were!” enthuses
Dodgson; “Stories of all kinds and true in every word, yet full of weird
and extraordinary incidents that held one silent and awed until he had
finished.”104 Yet despite Carnacki’s naming of clients, friends, and plenty

of circumstantial details, they have only his word for any of it.
Carnacki rationalises the gargantuan lips in “Whistling Room” in terms
that lay on the pseudoscientific occult explanation so thick it reads like
parody; he “liken[s] it to a living spiritual fungus, which involves the
very essence of the aether-fibre itself, and […] acquires an essential con-
trol over the ‘material-substance’ involved in it” (86). He also refers to
his own experience and reminds his listeners of other intriguingly titled
incidents in another form of pseudobiblia since these cases, like Low’s
others, have no existence outwith the story series itself. It’s hard not to
suspect Hodgson of having fun with titles like the “Moving Fur case,”
and “Nodding Door business,” since he never needed to invent a story
to accompany them. Similarly, I find myself how wondering far the “Un-
known Last Line of the Saaamaaa Ritual,” referred to in more than one
case, is even intended to be a convincing invention. Firstly, despite being
“Unknown,” it is nonetheless used and spoken (though not revealed);
secondly, the linguistic peculiarity of the syllables in “Saaamaaa” defamil-
iarises and disconnects it further from a persuasive diegetic reality; and,
thirdly, the term “Ab-human” used by Arkwright is a unique Hodgson-
ism that links the Carnacki world to the weird future of The Night Land
and thus to a world of fictions.105
The Carnacki series’ construction resists the kind of external corrob-
oration that accompanies the public-serving presentation of the Flaxman
Low stories. Nevertheless, the Carnacki storyworld has its own internal
coherence, that of an uncertain, ambiguous reality and doubtful distinc-
tions between the “true,” “weird,” and “extraordinary.” In one case,
however, supporting empirical evidence is presented: in “The Horse of
the Invisible,” Carnacki’s visitors arrive to find him displaying bandaged
injuries, and he produces a set of photographs which Dodgson is invited
to peruse. If the internal truth claims of Carnacki’s cases are accepted,
then one distinctive feature of them is his use of occult technologies that
actually work.
Carnacki uses audio recording equipment and a camera capable of
performing the “Lightless Photography” he has developed from “X ray
work,” which he implies was merely a starting point (“Thing Invisible,”
29). Hodgson was a keen photographer and combines his practical knowl-
edge with the possibilities suggested by X-rays, at the time a relatively new
discovery that had garnered much public interest.106 Cameras as a way
of seeing without eyes, photographs as sources of evidence (whether of
148 E. ALDER
criminal activity or spirit manifestation, for example), and debates over

photography’s reliability have been much discussed, including in rela-
tion to the Carnacki stories where they augment his physical and men-
tal “eyes.”107 I want to end, however, with a discussion of the Electric
Pentacle.
The practical applications of electricity and magnetism as well as the
theories had long been used to explain and even measure phenomena
like spiritual and telepathic communication.108 In the 1870s, William
Crookes designed and used several pieces of apparatus to measure what
he termed the “Psychic Force,” including delicate balances, instruments
for registering vibrations, and an electrified cage.109 The Electric Pentacle
updates such technology at the same time as reviving ancient symbolism
to become “a hybrid of magic and science,” a “layering of the traditional
pentacle with its vacuum tube, steampunk cousin.”110 Amelia Carolina
Sparavigna discusses the contemporary science that would lie behind such
a device, arguing for Hodgson’s awareness of turn-of-the-century exper-
iments involving “glowing discharges in low-pressure gases”; the Electric
Pentacle can be imagined as a “neon luminous tube sign, containing neon
or other inert gases at a low pressure.”111 Overlaying the pentacle symbol
drawn on the floor, it is made of “intertwining vacuum tubes,” powered
by a battery, that give off a “pale blue glare” (“Gateway of the Monster,”
46).
Carnacki assures us that the drawn pentacle itself is not enough, cit-
ing the dangerous experiences of previous cases that led him to try out
his augmentations. In “The Hog,” Carnacki uses a set of defensive rings
according to the colour spectrum; of these, the “blue circle seemed to
vibrate strangely as if minute particles of something were impinging on it
in countless millions” (178). The Electric Pentacle operates, as “Gateway
of the Monster” and “The Hog” show, in the same way as the weird mon-
sters, using both physical processes and symbolic occult power. In “Gate-
way,” the five-pointed star is drawn within a circle made with chalk, gar-
lic, and “a certain water,” among other things (45). Yet, in “The Hog,”
the Electric Pentacle entirely inverts its protective purpose, turning into a
deep black pit that channels the monstrous Hog’s incursion.112
The value of the evidence of any instrument’s measurement depends
on its calibration—its suitability for measuring the phenomenon in ques-
tion:
Instruments’ credit is built up by suggesting that their structure matches

that of the nature to be investigated. Ontologies support practices when
users indicate that some artifice is a good model of a natural system; prac-
tices support ontologies when it is argued that this artifice gives reliable
information about that system.113
This reasoning can be considered in relation to weird phenomena. In the

case of a medium or psychic, their internal apparatus of spiritual sensitivity
is aligned with the nature of phenomena they investigate, while weirdfind-
ers like Silence are particularly highly calibrated. In Carnacki’s case, the
Electric Pentacle is a model for the nature of reality in these stories—their
ontology of commingled physical and psychic planes through which spirit
can manifest in matter. In “Gateway of the Monster,” for example, the
Pentacle confirms the nature of the monster by the way the Hand inter-
acts with it, first testing it and then trapped by it. In “The Hog,” the
Pentacle is too finely calibrated and even exacerbates the weird incursion.
As an instrument, the Electric Pentacle reveals the weird’s existence in
“the between.”114 It gives more reliable information about weird haunt-
ings than, as in “The Thing Invisible,” does Carnacki himself. The weird
is real: modern technology says so.
Conclusion
Whether detected by an instrument or experienced by a body, weird phe-
nomena in these tales are demonstrably real. The mysteries often look
familiar at first, but under the weirdfinders’ explanations, hauntings are
revealed to operate in unconventional combinations (of mind, body, and
spirit, or mummy and vampire). Their investigation is required to make
the haunting reveal itself as a weird phenomenon. Weirdfinders are “men
who know”; they understand the possibilities of other realms of exis-
tence and their combined physical and psychical knowledge proves there
is no divide between the spiritual and material worlds. Carnacki may
use technological devices as well, but all three weirdfinders involve their
own persons in their investigations: they go to experience the phenom-
ena for themselves in order to know it. In their persons, they are both
active agents and sensitive systems. Rather than being passive instruments
requiring expert control, they retain their own agencies, calibrating their
bodies and maintaining their power of will.
150 E. ALDER
Between them, these weirdfinding stories stage both the success and
the failure of positivist science to explain and contain the phenomena
of the universe, and attempt to align borderland science with the main-
stream, turning what they do into a respectable and successful profes-
sion. All the same, the weirdfinders are often severely menaced by weird
phenomena and may escape rather than defeat them. In some ways,
weirdfinding brings these characters closer to the limits of human know-
ing than any other practice—and allows them to return to tell the tale.
Notes
1. Others include E. W. Hornung’s Dr. John Dollar in The Crime Doctor
(1914) and Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer (1914) by Alice and Claude Askew;
see Sage Leslie-McCarthy, “The Case of the Psychic Detective: Progress,
Professionalisation and the Occult in Psychic Detective Fiction from the
1880s to the 1920s” (diss., Griffith University, 2007).
2. E. and H. Heron, Flaxman Low, Occult Psychologist, Collected Stories
(Project Gutenberg of Australia, 2006).
3. Srdjan Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision
Press, 2010); Mark De Cicco, “‘More Than Human’: The Queer Occult
Explorer of the Fin de Siècle,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23,
no. 1 (2012); Marilena Parlati, “Ghostly Traces, Occult Clues: Tales
of Detection in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction,” European Journal of
English Studies 15, no. 3 (2011).
4. H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Fiction (New York: Dover,
1973), 75.
5. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror, 75; S. T. Joshi, The Weird Tale: Arthur
Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Ambrose
Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990),
115.
6. Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford:
7. Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story
(London: Faber, 1977), 59.
8. Briggs, Night Visitors, 59–60.
9. Briggs, Night Visitors, 59. For discussion of Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange
Story and “The Haunters and the Haunted” as tales of scientific inves-
tigation of the marvellous, see Mark Knight, “‘The Haunted and the
Haunters’: Bulwer Lytton’s Philosophical Ghost Story,” Nineteenth-
Century Contexts 28, no. 3 (2006).
10. Mike Ashley, Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Black-
wood (London: Constable, 2001), 135.
11. Michael Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story (Basingstoke: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2014), 16.
12. Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel
1875–1914 (London: Fontana, 1991), 362, 360.
13. William Barrett, “Appendix to Report on Thought Reading,” Proceedings
of the Society for Psychical Research 1 (1882), 62.
Death, Vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 4, italics orig-
inal.
15. Luckhurst, Telepathy, 189–90.
16. J. M. Gully, “Some Experiences and Conclusions Regarding Spiritualism,
No. V,” The Spiritualist 3, no. 14 (1873), 211; see Janet Oppenheim,
The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–
1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 165.
17. Joan Gordon and China Miéville, “Revelling in Genre: An Interview
with China Miéville,” Science Fiction Studies (2003), 368.
18. Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists; Cook, Detective Fiction
and the Ghost Story, 2.
19. Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, 14.
20. Hilary Grimes, The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny,
and Scenes of Writing (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 39.
21. Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists, 187.
22. The word “scientist” is credited to William Whewell. On the creation
of new professional labels, see David Cahan, “Looking at Nineteenth-
Century Science: An Introduction,” in From Natural Philosophy to the
Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David
Cahan (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2003); on pro-
fessionalisation of scientists, see Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, and
Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth
Century (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006).
23. Oppenheim, Other World, 202.
24. See Alex Owen, “The Sorcerer and His Apprentice: Aleister Crowley and
the Magical Exploration of Edwardian Subjectivity,” Journal of British
Studies 36, no. 1 (1997); Egil Asprem, “Magic Naturalized? Negotiating
Science and Occult Experience in Aleister Crowley’s Scientific Illuminism
La Magie ‘Naturalisée’? De La Négociation Entre Science Et Expérience
Occulte Dans L’Illuminisme Scientifique D’Aleister Crowley,” Aries 8,
no. 2 (2008).
25. Algernon Blackwood, “A Psychical Invasion,” in John Silence: Physician
Extraordinary (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1910), 1. All subsequent quo-
the text.
152 E. ALDER
26. Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines, 173.

27. William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (London:
J. Burns, 1874), 5.
28. W. F. Barrett et al., “Report of the Literary Committee,” Proceedings of
the Society for Psychical Research 1 (1882), 150.
29. K. and Hesketh Prichard, Ghosts, Being the Experiences of Flaxman Low
(London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1899), 193.
30. Anne Stiles, “Literature in Mind: H. G. Wells and the Evolution of the
Mad Scientist,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 2 (2009), 319,
323.
31. Stiles, “Literature in Mind,” 332.
32. Joachim Schummer, “Historical Roots of the ‘Mad Scientist’: Chemists
in Nineteenth-Century Literature,” Ambix 53, no. 2 (2006), 126.
33. Parlati, “Ghostly Traces, Occult Clues,” 214.
34. Joanna Wargen, “Subjugated Scientific Knowledges: Detecting the Vic-
torian Female Scientist” (diss., University of Westminster, 2013).
35. See Jill Nicole Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling,
the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2010). On bodies both “feminized” and “galvanized”
in 1860s sensation fiction, see Nick Daly, Literature, Technology, and
Modernity, 1869–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
42.
36. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to
Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 13.
37. [Anon.], “The Protection of Media,” The Spiritualist 3, no. 8 [1873].
38. Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in
Late Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
39. Grimes, The Late Victorian Gothic, 87. On gothic and ghost story writing
as a means of expression of women’s experience in the late nineteenth
century, see also Ellen Moers, Literary Women (London: W. H. Allen,
1977); Emma Liggins, “Gendering the Spectral Encounter at the Fin
de Siècle: Unspeakability in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Stories,” Gothic
Studies 15, no. 2 (2013).
40. Susan Schaper, “Victorian Ghostbusting: Gendered Authority in the
Middle-Class Home,” Victorian Newsletters 100 (2001), 8.
41. Schaper, “Victorian Ghostbusting,” 11.
42. Wargen, “Subjugated Scientific Knowledges.”
43. Smith, Victorian Demons.
44. Leslie-McCarthy, “The Case of the Psychic Detective,” 167.
45. Susan Johnston Graf, Talking to the Gods: Occultism in the Work of W. B.
Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune (Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 2015), 10, 11.
46. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture
of the Modern (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 88.
47. Owen, Place of Enchantment, 88. Annie Besant succeeded Blavatsky as
Theosophy president, for example, and Florence Farr rose through the
Golden Dawn’s senior ranks to become Praemonstrator after William
Wescott; see R. A. Gilbert, Revelations of the Golden Dawn: The Rise
and Fall of a Magical Order (Slough: Quantum, 1997), 140–48.
48. W. T. Stead, Real Ghost Stories: A Record of Authentic Apparitions (Lon-
don, 1891); For an overview of the Flaxman Low stories, see Neil Wil-
son, Shadows in the Attic: A Guide to British Supernatural Fiction, 1820–
1950 (British Library, 2000).
49. E. and H. Heron, “No. I—The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith,”
Pearson’s Magazine 5 (1898), 60. All subsequent quotations are from
50. E. and H. Heron, “Second Series, No. II—The Story of Saddler’s
Croft,” Pearson’s Magazine 7 (1899), 176. All subsequent quotations
51. E. and H. Heron, “No. IV—The Story of Baelbrow,” Pearson’s Maga-
zine 5 (1898), 366. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and
52. E. and H. Heron, “Second Series, No. I—The Story of Sevens Hall,”
Pearson’s Magazine 7 (1899), 37. All subsequent quotations are from
53. Robert Perret, “Flaxman Low, Occult Psychologist,” in Victorian Detec-
tives in Contemporary Culture (Springer, 2017), 78.
54. E. and H. Heron, “No. III—The Story of the Moor Road,” Pearson’s
Magazine 5 (1898), 255–56. All subsequent quotations are from this
edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text.
55. Robert Perret, “Flaxman Low, Occult Psychologist,” 83.
56. Schaper, “Victorian Ghostbusting,” 10–11.
58. E. and H. Heron, “Second Series, No. VI—The Story of Mr. Flaxman
Low,” Pearson’s Magazine 7 (1899), 585. All subsequent quotations are
from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text.
59. E. and H. Heron, “No. VI—The Story of Yand Manor House,” Pear-
son’s Magazine 5 (1898), 587. All subsequent quotations are from this
edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text.
60. Leslie-McCarthy, “The Case of the Psychic Detective,” 169.
61. See Sarah Crofton, “Csψ: Occult Detectives of the Fin de Siècle and
the Interpretation of Evidence,” Clues: A Journal of Detection 30, no. 2
(2012), 36.
154 E. ALDER
63. Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows,” in The Listener and Other Stories
(London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), 153.
64. Joshi, indeed, describes Blackwood as “quite frankly the most wholesome
and cheerful horror writer I know of” (Weird Tale, 89).
65. Algernon Blackwood, “The Woman’s Ghost Story,” in The Listener and
Other Stories (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), 341. All subsequent quo-
the text.
66. Schaper, “Victorian Ghostbusting,” 12.
67. For discussion of the production and impact of the book, see Ashley,
Starlight Man, 131.
68. Algernon Blackwood, “A Victim of Higher Space” (1914), no
pages, accessed 29 August 2018, http://www.luminist.org/archives/
blackwood_victim.htm.
69. Algernon Blackwood, “The Genesis of Ideas” (1937), reprinted in Stud-
ies in Weird Fiction 27 (2005), 35.
70. Blackwood, “Genesis of Ideas,” 3.
71. Blackwood, “Genesis of Ideas,” 3.
72. For discussion of this possibility see Ashley, Starlight Man; Graf, Talking
to the Gods, 83.
73. For a detailed study of Machen, Blackwood, and the Golden Dawn, see
Graf, Talking to the Gods.
74. Joshi, Weird Tale, 116.
76. See Graf, Talking to the Gods, 85–98 for discussion of The Human Chord,
The Promise of Air, Bright Messenger, Julius Le Vallon, and The Centaur
in the context of the Golden Dawn. See also this book, Chapter 6.
79. Algernon Blackwood, “The Nemesis of Fire,” in John Silence: Physi-
cian Extraordinary (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1910), 173. All subsequent
quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets
in the text.
80. De Cicco, “More Than Human,” 18.
83. Blackwood, “A Victim of Higher Space.”
85. De Cicco, “More Than Human,” 21.
87. Sarah C. Alexander, Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponder-
able (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015), 16.
89. Algernon Blackwood, “Ancient Sorceries,” in John Silence: Physician

Extraordinary (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1910), 139–40.
90. Anon., “Novel Notes,” The Bookman 47 (1913).
91. Briggs, Night Visitors, 64.
92. William Hope Hodgson, “The Hog,” in The Casebook of Carnacki the
Ghost Finder (London: Wordsworth, 2006), 188. All subsequent quota-
tions are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the
text.
93. Roger Luckhurst, “The Weird: A Dis/orientation,” Textual Practice 31,
no. 6 (2017), 1048.
94. William Hope Hodgson, “The Gateway of the Monster,” in The Casebook
of Carnacki the Ghost Finder (London: Wordsworth, 2006), 45. All sub-
sequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in
brackets in the text. The order in which the stories were published in The
Idler is not the order in which they appear in book collections; see Sam
Gafford, “Carnacki Order” (2012), accessed 29 August 2018, https://
williamhopehodgson.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/carnacki-order/.
95. Jennifer Bann, “Ghostly Hands and Ghostly Agency: The Changing
Figure of the Nineteenth-Century Specter,” Victorian Studies 51, no.
4 (2009), 664.
and Laird Barron,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017), 1140.
97. Luckhurst, Telepathy, 189.
98. Graf, Talking to the Gods, 11; Gilbert, Revelations of the Golden Dawn,
68.
1888), 5–6.
100. Asprem, “Magic Naturalized?”
101. See, for example, World Monuments Fund, “Karnak Temple” (2017),
accessed 19 August 2018, https://www.wmf.org/project/karnak-
temple.
102. William Hope Hodgson, “The Thing Invisible,” in The Casebook of Car-
nacki the Ghost Finder (London: Wordsworth, 2006), 17. All subsequent
quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets
in the text.
103. William Hope Hodgson, “The Whistling Room,” in The Casebook of
Carnacki the Ghost Finder (London: Wordsworth, 2006), 86. All subse-
quent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in
brackets in the text.
104. William Hope Hodgson, “The Haunted ‘Jarvee’,” in The Casebook of
Carnacki the Ghost Finder (London: Wordsworth, 2006), 132.
156 E. ALDER
105. See Kelly Hurley, “The Modernist Abominations of William Hope

Hodgson,” in Gothic Modernisms, ed. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001) on The Night Land, abhumans, and also
Hodgson’s playful tendencies. See also Leigh Blackmore, “Things Invis-
ible: Human and Ab-Human in Two of Hodgson’s Carnacki Stories,”
Sargasso: The Journal of William Hope Hodgson Studies 1, no. 1 (2013).
106. Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, “Physics in Carnacki’s Investigations: The
Role of New Scientific Discoveries in Literature,” IJLA 1, no. 1 (2013).
On X-rays at the fin de siècle, see, e.g. Will Tattersdill, Science, Fiction,
and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2016), 94–131. On Hodgson’s photography, see Jane Frank,
The Wandering Soul: Glimpses of a Life: A Compendium of Rare and
Unpublished Works (Hornsea; Leyburn: PS; Tartarus, 2005).
107. William Fletcher Barrett, “Seeing Without Eyes,” in Spiritualism, Mes-
merism and the Occult, 1800–1920, Vol. 4, Telepathy and the Society
for Psychical Research, ed. Shane McCorristine (London: Pickering and
Chatto, 2012); Kathryn Miele, “Representing Empathy: Speaking for
Vulnerable Bodies in Victorian Medicine and Culture” (diss., University
of Warwick, 2007), 10; Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists;
and Parlati, “Ghostly Traces, Occult Clues.”
108. Sconce, Haunted Media; Luckhurst, Telepathy; Egil Asprem, “Pondering
Imponderables: Occultism in the Mirror of Late Classical Physics,” Aries
11, no. 2 (2011), 146.
109. William Crookes, “Some Further Experiments on Psychic Force, 1871,”
in Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (Manchester: Two Worlds
Publishing Company, 1926); see also Richard Noakes, “Instruments to
Lay Hold of Spirits,” in Bodies/Machines, ed. Iwan Rhys Morus (Oxford:
Berg, 2002).
2011), 71.
111. Sparavigna, “Physics in Carnacki’s Investigations,” 13.
112. Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, 71.
113. Simon Schaffer, “Self Evidence,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992), 334.
114. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016).
PART II
Borderlands of Time, Place, and Matter

CHAPTER 5
Meat and Mould: The Weird Creatures

of William Hope Hodgson and H. G. Wells
The three stories discussed here—H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor

Moreau (1896), and William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night”
(1907) and “The Derelict” (1912)—use weird strategies to explore the
implications for humans of sharing an entirely physical, embodied exis-
tence with other organisms. They treat premises drawn from the extremes
of biological possibility as material realities at the centre of their nar-
ratives. The stories take place in liminal locations, borderland spaces in
which both marginal and mainstream scientific principles can be recon-
sidered and reconstructed. These tales test the capacity of known sci-
ence to explain the world, in an attempt to reconcile it with a convic-
tion that wonder and terror can still infuse a material universe. Instead
of the notion of matter expanding to include the unseen and unknown,
as it does in the fictions examined in previous chapters, here concepts
of agency, consciousness, and the place of weird others in the terrestrial
world are rooted in the physical and organic: in the plasticity of meat and
mould.
So far, this book has examined weird fictions engaging with those most
obviously “Borderland” of nineteenth-century sciences: occultism, psychi-
cal research, and their relations with mainstream scientific discourses and
methods. The Island of Doctor Moreau is more likely to be called a gothic
novel or a satire than classified as weird, but it has affinities with con-
temporaries such as The Great God Pan, not least in their shared debt to

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4_5
160 E. ALDER
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.1 Doctor Moreau is also impor-

tant to the development of the weird tale because of the way it incubates
previously unimagined creatures, which are made possible through the
narrative’s direct engagement with nineteenth-century biological science
yet elude secure knowing. Biology, too, had its borderlands—weird areas
of speculation and unanswered questions stimulated by scientists’ inves-
tigations into the appearance, workings, taxonomies, and evolutions of
plants, animals, and those species that seemed to be both and neither.
The particular appeal of biological borderlands to weird fiction is their
capacity to authenticate the existence of strange new bodily forms. Weird
creatures are explorations of the organic basis of life, problematising tra-
ditional assumptions about the nature of life and about the relationships
between different types of organism.
Biological Borderlands and Where to Find Them

Out on the ocean, an old wooden hulk, with the characteristic extrav-
agance of Hodgson’s weird tales, metamorphoses into a voracious, liv-
ing, ship-shaped monster. As one critic has seen it, “The Derelict” is
“an attempt fully to realize the horrific potentialities of an utterly mate-
rial universe, to theorize such concepts as life, volition, and conscious-
ness in materialist terms.”2 Kelly Hurley’s remarks here suggest the posi-
tion of the story’s premise on an ontological boundary; in this sense, the
tale debates the relative significance of the material and the spiritual to
a modern fin-de-siècle construction of the nature of organic life. While
she is specifically discussing “The Derelict,” however, Hurley’s comments
could equally apply to H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896),
whose experimental vivisector tests the limits of the bodily basis of ratio-
nal thought in his attempts to create humans out of animals and discover
“the extreme limit of plasticity in a living shape.”3
All three stories in this chapter use marine settings to open up spaces
in which borderland scientific ideas can be explored as realities. The ships,
islands, and oceans of Wells’s and Hodgson’s tales, adrift from the security
and containment of maps, nations and continents, are heterotopic; they
are spaces outside or apart from the spaces of their dominant culture, in
the sense used by Michel Foucault in his 1967 essay “Des Espace Autres”
(“Of Other Spaces”). Foucault’s heterotopia is a “counter-site,” meaning
a place in which “all the other real sites that can be found within the
culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places
5 MEAT AND MOULD: THE WEIRD CREATURES … 161
of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to
indicate their location in reality.”4 Moreau’s island, for example, is legi-
ble in these terms. It is simultaneously a place and outside of all places,
overturning the structures and assumptions of the culture from which he
is exiled.
The novel’s preface, written by Prendick’s nephew, frames the narra-
tive with careful ambiguity, making the island into “a liminal space at
the border between fiction and reality,” existing simultaneously within
and beyond the confines of current marine cartography.5 The date and
coordinates of Prendick’s rescue are precisely reported, a possible island
(Noble’s Isle) is suggested as the location of Moreau’s laboratory, and
the existence of the Ipecacuanha and its cargo is confirmed. Payal Taneja
makes the valuable point that although Moreau “isolates himself culturally
and intellectually from the scientists in London, he maintains an economic
connection” with the British Empire and its trade network which supplies
his animals.6 Neither island nor story are entirely divorced from social
and geographic realities, but exist on their fringes. Despite these circum-
stances, however, empirical evidence is missing; no creatures resembling
Beast People are found on the island to support Prendick’s story. The bot-
tom line is, as Prendick’s nephew puts it, simply that “my uncle passed
out of human knowledge […] and reappeared in the same part of the
ocean after a space of eleven months” (2). Prendick’s story is received as
“demented” (1), and, afterwards, he claims memory loss, undermining
the sense of veracity the Preface at first appears to construct.
Hodgson’s sea stories use islands and ships in similar ways. For Fou-
cault, a ship is a “heterotopia par excellence […] a floating piece of space,
a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at
the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea.”7 Ships at sea exist
between known places, and Hodgson’s and Wells’s ships and dinghies
convey their protagonists into liminal spaces. In “The Derelict,” a storm
drives the ship whose crew discovers the metamorphosed hulk into an
unknown area of the ocean; the story takes place off the known charts
and the discovery could never, except by another chance encounter, be
verified. In “The Voice in the Night,” an unidentified island is the space
in which two castaways encounter a tempting monstrous fungus. Fog con-
ceals the fungus-man castaway and his rowing boat from the shipboard
narrator and his companions, sustaining the story’s suspense and ambigu-
ity. Hodgson’s choice of fungus as his material for monster manufacture,
as we will see, has its own particular liminality.
162 E. ALDER
As well as being heterotopic in geographic and narrative terms, these

ships, boats, and islands are also spaces in which scientific theories, prin-
ciples, and practices, including in their extreme or most contested forms,
can be reconsidered and reinvented. Moreau’s endeavours to find the lim-
its of bodily plasticity are conducted within two late nineteenth-century
scientific borderlands: the margins of the controversial practice of vivisec-
tion and the unresolved debates over mechanisms of evolutionary inher-
itance. Hodgson’s two short stories play in other biological borderlands,
recombining discarded theories of spontaneous generation and early cryp-
togamy with fin-de-siècle speculations about the classification of different
organisms, the relationships between them, and their evolutionary poten-
tial. All three stories theorise science strangely, generating weird encoun-
ters from a reconfigured blend of science and imaginative speculation.
The field of nineteenth-century biology itself was marked by some
strange theories that made natural history look weirder than it used to,
for example in the ways that species distinctions blurred when viewed
through an evolutionary lens. In 1837, Charles Darwin wrote in his note-
book:
If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren
in pain, disease, death, suffering and famine – our slaves in the most labo-
rious works, our companions in our amusements – they may partake [of?]
our origin in one common ancestor – we may be all melted together.8
A key insight of evolutionary theory was the possibility of a shared origin

for humans and other animals, a “melted” state in which no species dif-
ferentiation existed. Evolutionary theory, by rewriting the story of species
origin, created an abhistory, of the kind discussed in Chapter 2, for life
on earth; it offered a new explanatory narrative of existence that contin-
ued to run in the contemporary world alongside the traditional story of
creation. Further, this new history was populated by strange, long-gone
creatures, only partially knowable through fossils or through modern sur-
viving types. Human identity was rewritten, “melted” into unimaginable
forms in its ancient past. Wells and Hodgson make use of this melting, of
an essential biological kinship at the level of body (Wells) and cell (Hodg-
son), while their monsters, like Helen Vaughan, are also weird glimpses
ahead to possible evolutionary futures for which the contemporary world
is not ready.
The notion of a “common ancestor” suggested both a continuing kin-

ship between different animals, and an overall instability in the form of
species. Christine Kenyon-Jones identifies a growing “sense of kinship”
between humans and animals during the nineteenth century, and mam-
mals especially held an important place in Victorian culture, both cher-
ished and symbolically worrisome.9 Recognition of humans as part of the
biological world rather than its divinely created masters produced ten-
sions between a heightened respect for animal being and unease, even
horror, at their biological closeness. Although Darwin did not include
human ancestry in On the Origin of Species (1859), the implications of
his work were clear: if humans had evolved from the same lower organ-
isms as other animals, and if evolution was a perpetual, gradual process,
then it was impossible to say whether evolution away from lower organ-
isms was complete, or indeed possible. In the quoted example, Darwin’s
attention is on animals. However, as he and other natural scientists con-
tinued to develop their field, distinctions not only between humans and
non-human animals but between all living kingdoms looked increasingly
hazy.10 “[E]ven the two pedigrees of the animal and vegetable kingdom
are connected at their lowest roots,” wrote Ernst Haeckel in The History
of Creation.11
Such ideas were rich with troubling potential in a Victorian society
that, broadly speaking, was proud of its sophistication and infused with
Christian beliefs in humanity’s divine separation from animals.12 Resis-
tance to the theory of natural selection was significant, especially after
Origin of Species appeared, and especially from the Christian church.
The fierce debates between Darwin’s supporters and detractors are
well-known, mythologised by public clashes such as the Oxford debate
between T. H. Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce in 1860.13 At root, the
problem was that Darwinian evolutionary theory “brought into question
the special place that humans believed they occupied on the earth, at the
top of a great chain of being – a chain that now threatened to become, in
Darwin’s metaphor, a tree on which humans occupied merely one branch
among many.”14 Evolutionary theory had the potential to overturn the
authority of a long-standing (and still persistent now) anthropocentric
worldview positioning human beings as natural masters of the earth, qual-
itatively superior to non-human life. Hodgson’s and Wells’s stories level
that anthropocentric hierarchy: Doctor Moreau demonstrates the shared
physicality of humans and other animals; Hodgson’s short stories go even
further, displacing the primacy not only of the human but of any animal.
164 E. ALDER
His weird tales posit a fundamental similarity between all forms of life and
elevate humble cryptogams to the complexity of mammals.
Darwin’s work, as previous scholars have established, infused
nineteenth-century culture, “feeding an extraordinary range of disciplines
beyond its own original biological field,” including literature.15 The
image of animal shapes melted together suggests a collapse of the limits
of not only human but all species identity. Creatures’ bodies possessed an
“essential mutability”; evolution by natural selection suggested that “any
morphic transmutation was possible, given time, chance, and species vari-
ability.”16 Species’ instability and the theoretical potential for any shape of
living creature to evolve opened new conceptual spaces which speculative
writers like Wells and Hodgson could populate with monsters and other
strange life forms.
The project of exploring shared physicality between species belonged
to more areas of biology than evolutionary theory alone. Wells’s own
anatomical Textbook of Biology (1892) demonstrates observable similari-
ties of groups of animals such as mammals through dissection of a rabbit.
Other fields, including Louis Pasteur’s work in microbiology and Anton
de Bary’s studies in mycology, along with cell biology, physiology, and
anatomy, suggested the same situation. In his 1905 biography of Haeckel,
Wilhelm Bölsche recalls how the cell-state theory of German biologist
Rudolf Virchow transformed understanding of the organisation of living
organisms in the 1870s. If the life of the human body was “merely the
sum of the vital processes and functions of [its] millions of individual
cells,” Bölsche reflects, there was “nothing to prevent us from thinking
that in the combination of these various cells into communities each of
them brought with it its little psychic individuality”; in short, “is not what
we call ‘the soul’ really the product of the millions upon millions of sep-
arate souls of these cells?”17 If human souls existed and had a biological
basis, it must be in cells and therefore be shared with any cellular organ-
ism. If not, what’s left is an eerie failure of presence: no soul, and the
barren prospect of a wholly material existence.
To recognise biological closeness between, rather than only within,
the Linnean kingdoms of life was to question the security of human
superiority within the animal kingdom, as well as the primacy of ani-
mals more generally amongst species. The baffling interstitial existence
of slime moulds, fungi, and lichen—cryptogams—cast doubts on the rest
of the implied hierarchy of the tree of life, too. The radically destabilising
potential of biology in the nineteenth century ran wide and deep. But so
did resistance to the ontological implications of scientific advances. Not

only did these developments threaten to overturn human superiority, but
they also offered to unpick the sacred or sublime mysteries of the world—
and therefore, like some branches of physics, to undermine some of the
theological foundations on which much of the moral and social order in
Britain and Europe was based.18 Species that defied the natural order,
may, like the singing flowers and walking furniture described by Ambrose
in Machen’s The White People, be inherently sinful, inherently weird.19
The weird fictions of this chapter have an ambivalent relationship with
mainstream science and create, within their heterotopic storyworlds, their
own versions of scientific knowledge.
Pumas and Rabbits: The Horrors and Hopes

of The Island of Doctor Moreau
The weird’s fascination with the fringes of scientific knowledge and what
lies beyond lingers around the edges of The Island of Doctor Moreau.
“Science,” Wells wrote in 1891, “is a match that man has just got alight”
and which offers “just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on
[…] and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he
anticipated – darkness still.”20 In a scientific, materialist worldview, for
Wells, the scope for wonder and terror in the universe does not con-
tract but unfolds. Wells’s second scientific romance, Doctor Moreau, did
not diminish but “intensif[ied] that sense of darkness just beyond the
human limit of perception.”21 By pushing questions of the relationship
between humans and non-human animals against, and even beyond, limits
of empirical biological knowledge, theory, and practice, Doctor Moreau,
without ceasing to be satire, gothic or evolutionary fable, also occupies
the realm of the weird.
With its physiological emphasis, Doctor Moreau was not seen by its
first readers as a “Borderland” tale in the sense of the word’s reference
to spiritualism and psychical research. Rather, it was received by some as
anti-vivisectionist, arguably doing “more to render vivisection unpopular”
than the societies attempting to do so.22 For others, the story was “intrin-
sically horrible” and “spoil[ed] a fine conception by greed of cheap hor-
rors.”23 These horrors derive from Moreau’s engagement in vivisection,
itself an almost borderland practice: vivisectors understood themselves to
be at the forefront of innovative science, as “[p]ioneers in a new realm of
166 E. ALDER
knowledge.”24 Vivisection demonstrated modern scientists’ commitment

to the advancement of medical and physiological knowledge.
The horrors of Doctor Moreau, however, contrast to those generated in
other borderland tales—The Great God Pan, for example. Where Dr. Ray-
mond uses surgical techniques to extend human consciousness into the
more-than-visible world, Moreau’s goal is to create a conscious human
out of the visible, earthly flesh and bone of animal bodies, thus proving
the material basis of rational thought and self-awareness. In this sense,
Doctor Moreau directly opposes occult discourse. Discussing Wells’s “The
Plattner Story” and “The Crystal Egg,” Genie Babb argues that Wells
critiques spiritualism and psychical research by modelling the scientific
method within these stories.25 Doctor Moreau can, similarly, be under-
stood as a critique of “Borderland” thinking through its materialist asser-
tion of the physical basis for language, consciousness, and anything else
thought to distinguish humans from animals. There is no room in More-
au’s universe for spiritual souls, whether they are the sort that survive
after death or not, only “souls of beasts,” which, if they exist, are based
in matter and no different from those of humans (107).
Instead, The Island of Doctor Moreau occupies a scientific borderland at
the other extreme, in which embodiment can explain all the mysteries of
existence. Moreau’s exile to imperial and cartographic fringes means that
his island laboratory functions as a heterotopia, a cultural counter-site.
In such a space, conventional theoretical, practical, and moral parameters
of scientific experimentation can be reordered. As a vivisector, Moreau
already uses controversial methods. But his aim to “burn out all the ani-
mal” and create “a rational creature” (106) lends his project “a psycho-
logical goal far more ambitious than the usual objects of physiological
research.”26 Consequently, he adopts practices that marginalise him even
among his fellow scientists. In particular, he eschews the use of anaes-
thetics, under which most vivisection took place, in part to defend it
against the charge of causing unnecessary pain, forbidden by the 1876
Cruelty to Animals Act.27 Moreau was driven out of London, Prendick
recalls, because of the “Moreau Horrors” scandal, in which the escape
of a flayed dog attracted public attention to Moreau’s experiments. Mar-
tin Willis argues that Moreau’s exile is determined not so much by his
engagement in vivisection, nor even by his failure to follow the common
practice of anaesthetising his subjects, but in his failure to keep his exper-
iments concealed.
Moreau draws the disapprobation not only of the public but also of the
scientific community, which “turns its back on Moreau for tarnishing the
reputation of scientific investigation.”28 Willis sees The Island of Doctor
Moreau neither as anti-vivisectionist nor as unequivocally supporting the
state of institutionalised science in the 1890s, but as a critical narrative
that promotes publicly accountable advancement of scientific knowledge.
The novel shows Moreau
as the victim more of a powerful political body than as the perpetrator of

moral crime. In fact, in blaming the institutionalised methods of scientific
discovery, Wells suggests that vivisection is not the horrific practice that
is appears to be. Horror, indeed, comes from power unchecked by public
liability.29
By marginalising Moreau and pushing his activities out of sight, the public
and scientific communities are implicated in their terrible results. More-
au’s experiments are displaced from their original urban context and freed
from the public reactions that impede scientific investigation, but also reg-
ulate them. In the counter-site of his island heterotopia, everything about
his experiments intensifies—their horror as well as their success, the pos-
sibilities of vivisection as well as its drawbacks, the decrease in Moreau’s
accountability and the rise of his power.
For Moreau, the possibilities of his experiments are tremendously sig-
nificant and exciting. As early reviews of Doctor Moreau showed, as critical
studies locating the novel within the gothic tradition have explored, and
as Prendick often experiences, the Beast People generate a sense of mon-
strous terror through their violations and blendings of normative human
and animal forms and behaviours.30 However, the Beast People are not,
as Prendick first thinks, degenerated humans, but artificially developed
animals with the potential to be something more than either. A sense of
Moreau’s excitement surfaces in Wells’s speculative essay “The Limits of
Individual Plasticity” (1895). This essay shares both words and underlying
ideas with his 1896 novel. In it, Wells sets out the physiological princi-
ples that Moreau fictionally puts into action: “a living being may,” Wells
wrote, “be regarded as raw material, as something plastic, something that
may be shaped and altered […] and the organism as a whole developed
far beyond its apparent possibilities.”31 There are no essential differences
between the “raw materials” of living forms, only in the organisation of
that matter. As T. H. Huxley, too, suggested in “On the Physical Basis
168 E. ALDER
of Life,” a basic “protoplasm […] is the clay of the potter; which, bake
it and paint it as he will, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by
nature, from the commonest brick.”32
For Wells, likewise, the direction of material plasticity need not be left
to the blind chance of natural selection, for, “[i]f we concede the justi-
fications of vivisection, we may imagine as possible in the future, oper-
ators, armed with an antiseptic surgery and a growing perfection in the
knowledge of the laws of growth, taking living creatures and moulding
them into the most amazing forms.”33 Like Moreau, Wells emphasises
the potential of vivisection as a path towards “perfection” of organisms
that are not terrible but “amazing.” David Hughes and Robert Philmus
see Wells’s essay as an expression of his commitment to the capacity of
human science to take ethical control of evolution, while Doctor Moreau
“satirically balance(s) the ‘plastic’ possibilities of the organism against the
limitations inherent by nature in it.”34 The novel does function as a gothic
evolutionary satire through Moreau’s ultimate failure and the regressions
of the Beast People and the human characters. But it also does more.
Moreau’s ambitions look towards progression and advancement, align-
ing him with the other scientists of weird fiction and the weird’s progen-
erate impulses. He too is set apart from ordinary scientists not only by
his techniques but also by the scope of his vision and ambition. Before
his exile, Moreau was a “prominent and masterful physiologist […] well
known in scientific circles for his extraordinary imagination” (42). Pain,
as Moreau later explains to Prendick, is a vital component of his creative
project. The “bath of burning pain” that is vivisection will “burn out all
the animal,” creating not just a human but a perfected human: a “rational
creature” (106). As Martin Danahay argues, Moreau’s project is essen-
tially eugenic; he aims not to humanise animals but “to erase ‘animal’
altogether through the instruments of pain and death […] the ‘coming
man’ evolves beyond the body and the animal.”35 Moreau’s experiments
are no ordinary explorations in vivisection; their controversial qualities
consist in their challenge to humanity’s relationship to its fleshly existence
rather than in animal suffering. The “rational creature” Moreau hopes to
produce would have none of the animal traits borne by human beings,
and yet this being of pure reason would be made entirely of animal flesh,
and therefore be contaminated by no traces of soul or grace either.
Occult discourse sought to collapse the distinction between spirit and
matter by constructing the more-than-visible world as a super-physical
extension of the known world. Doctor Moreau seeks the same end, but in
the direction of materialism. Rather than understanding spirit as a differ-

ent kind of matter, anything that resembles the spiritual is, in fact, pro-
duced by the known, visible physical body. Harris argues that Moreau, by
denying animal consciousness, “divide[s] flesh from spirit […] the animal
under vivisection becomes inert matter.”36 However, Moreau’s experi-
ment is far from being a “bodiless exercise of pure reason.”37 The point
is rather that reason and body are the one and the same: a reasoning
mind, here, is a material product of the organisation of the body, but
that does not stop it being a marvel. Moreau’s experiments expose bru-
tal realities about the biological similarities between mammalian species,
including humans. They also threaten (or promise, depending on one’s
perspective) to unravel the “mysteries” behind human consciousness.
The puma, the creature “not human, not animal, but hellish” glimpsed
by Prendick as it runs screaming from the laboratory, exemplifies Moreau
’s forays into the borderlands of physiology. Struggling against the contin-
ual return of the beast in his experimental subjects, as “[f]irst one animal
trait, then another, creeps to the surface and stares out at me,” Moreau
claims he is “drawing near the fastness. This puma of mine –” (106).
Moreau does not finish the sentence, in another weird lacuna where lan-
guage fails, but admits “some hope” of success with the puma: “I have
worked hard at her head and brain” (107). The physical reorganisation of
an animal’s mental organ may be the breakthrough to producing a supe-
rior, “rational creature” beyond both human and animal. Such a possi-
bility can exist as real in Moreau’s island heterotopia when it cannot in
mainstream science. The escaped puma indeed appears, like the trans-
formed Mrs. Black, as “not human, not animal.” To Prendick, carrier
of the culture to which Moreau’s island represents a counter-site, she is
“hellish”; to Moreau, she is “hope.”
In this way, the novel equivocates about how Moreau’s ambitions
and methods should be judged. Significantly, moral concerns of anti-
vivisectionists were “not primarily the ethics surrounding human treat-
ment of animals, but rather the consequences for the vivisector,” prin-
cipally the degradation of their moral character.38 Anne DeWitt points
out that “Wells links Moreau’s moral hardening to his motives for pur-
suing research: the novel emphasises that he is not driven by an altru-
istic desire to alleviate suffering, but rather by the ‘overmastering spell
of research’.”39 In Moreau’s counter-site, which evades such social con-
structs in their usual forms, the scientist can remain morally untouched
by his grim methods. Towards the end of their conversation about the
170 E. ALDER
puma, Moreau himself appears to Prendick not as a sadistic madman but

as a man “with calm eyes” and a touch of “serenity,” “beauty,” and “tran-
quility” (107). Thus are the “Moreau Horrors” revised into a seemingly
grand and noble scientific ambition. This illusion does not last, as More-
au’s counter-site gradually descends into chaos, and eventually Prendick
is left alone to settle into some sort of equilibrium with the former Beast
People. But while the illusion persists, the narrative remains ambivalent
about moral judgement of Moreau.
Moreau aims to create a perfected rational creature, in an anthropocen-
tric expression of the capacity of human science to take control over its
own biology and evolution, while his failure to fulfil his ambitions over-
turns that anthropocentricity. Prendick’s final experiences of himself, and
ultimately all Londoners, as fundamentally animal, close the novel with
a sense that humans and animals share equally in an embodied existence
that they cannot transcend, while revealing human morality as an illusion
exposes the blind indifference of the universe characteristic of the weird.
Moreau’s belief in a purely rational embodied existence, however, aligns
the novel with other weird narratives, seeking to transcend the quotidian
through the manipulations of matter newly made possible by science.
Accordingly, Moreau does produce some surprising successes, although
not in the ways he intended. The attention of critics of Doctor Moreau is,
like Prendick’s, predominantly on the Beast People and the representation
of their monstrous, recombinant bodies in which both human and animal
forms can be traced: “the human mark distorted but did not hide the
leopard, or the ox, or the sow, or other animal or animals, from which the
creature had been moulded” (113). In this way, the Beast People display
the physicality all mammals share, and Prendick’s response to them with
“shivering horror” (113) reflects anxieties over that kinship that accom-
panied changing constructions of the relationship between humans and
animals in the nineteenth century. The Beast People are “parodies of
humanity, grotesque doppelgängers,” and through the horror they gen-
erate the novel “maintains a relentless Gothic tension.”40 The colourful
gothic appeal of the Hyaena-Swine or the Wolf-Bear and the focalisation
of the narrative through Prendick’s eyes work together to draw the atten-
tion of readers to the Beast People. A side effect of this emphasis is that
the strangest of Moreau’s creations are left almost completely overlooked,
including by Prendick: his pink rabbits.
The weirdest products of Moreau’s experiments are “strange, pink,
hopping animals, about the size of cats” (85). Prendick first encounters
them briefly as he flees what he believes to be the prospect of his own vivi-
section at Moreau’s hands. They reappear a few chapters later, as Prendick
recounts:
Montgomery called my attention to certain little pink animals with long

hind legs, that went leaping through the undergrowth. He told me they
were creatures made of the offspring of the Beast People, that Moreau had
invented. He had fancied they might serve for meat, but a rabbit-like habit
of devouring their young had defeated this intention. (117)
Unlike the Beast People, these creatures do not inspire horror, revulsion,
or uncanny feelings of recognition in Prendick. Instead, Prendick exam-
ines “rather a pretty little creature; and, as Montgomery stated that it
never destroyed the turf by burrowing, and was very cleanly in its habits,
I should imagine it might provide a convenient substitute for the com-
mon rabbit in gentlemen’s parks” (118). These creatures are twice man-
ufactured. They are “made of the offspring of the Beast People,” but are
presented without a trace of horror. Instead, Prendick compares them to
cats and rabbits and wishes to appropriate them as commodities within
his culture’s domestic social and economic order.
These creatures cannot be readily assimilated into a gothic framework.
Although their bodies, like those of the Beast People, are monstrous in
that they violate normative animal shapes by resembling both rabbits and
cats, they pose no apparent threat to human identity. They appropriate
neither human body shape nor language and social behaviour in the way
that the Beast People in their outcast community do. However, in one
sense, Prendick should be worried, because more than any other of his
creations these animals prove Moreau right, in principle. They prove that
in this fictional heterotopia there is “some sanction for the belief that […]
the thread of life might be preserved unimpaired while shape and mental
superstructure were so extensively recast as even to justify our regarding
the result as a new variety of being.”41 Moreau’s desire to recreate a per-
fected human mentality may have failed, but he has succeeded in shaping
“a new variety of being” around a persisting “thread of life.” So, although
The Island of Doctor Moreau tempers the arguments of Wells’s essay by
suggesting there are limits to plasticity, it leaves open a small rip, just big
enough to glimpse another weird biological borderland.
The counter-site of Moreau’s island creates a space in which an alterna-
tive version of evolutionary inheritance can exist, to which the “creatures
172 E. ALDER
made of the offspring of the Beast People, that Moreau had invented,” are
key. The existence of Moreau’s pink rabbits signals Lamarckian theories
of evolution that Wells had largely rejected, if rather unwillingly. Philmus
and Hughes see The Island of Doctor Moreau as a fictional effort by Wells
to “harmoniz[e] his need to believe in some kind of Lamarckian inher-
itance with the scientific disproof of Lamarck by Weismann.”42 If they
are indeed “grafted hybrids” biologically, the Beast People should not be
able to breed.43 But they can breed and produce offspring apparently
resembling neither the Beast People nor their original animal forms (evi-
dently, the offspring are only suitable to be turned into small rabbit-like
creatures, rather than take their turn at being reshaped into people). This
next generation suggests that, on some level at least, some modifications
acquired during the organism’s lifetime are inheritable: a Lamarckian, not
Darwinian, process.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of inheritance of acquired characteris-
tics, set out in Philosophie Zoologique (1809), proposed that changes in
animal forms came about through changes in habits, thus causing the use
or disuse of organs, in response to their environment. These changes were
preserved and, if common to both reproducing individuals, inherited by
the next generation.44 Lamarck’s ideas were popular and influenced Dar-
win’s thinking in Origin of Species, but were overturned by later evolu-
tionists including German biologist August Weismann.45 Nevertheless, if
Lamarck’s theory was inadequate, a better one remained elusive. Dar-
win was not able to explain how variations within species appeared, nor
the mechanisms by which they were transmitted to future generations.46
Until the “rediscovery” in 1900 of Gregor Mendel’s pioneering work
in genetics, “Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden” (1866), these questions
remained unsatisfactorily answered.47
That said, both Darwin and Weismann did propose theories to explain
inheritance that revolved around information-carrying material passed on
from parent to offspring. Darwin’s “provisional hypothesis,” outlined in
The Variation of Plants and Animals Under Domestication (1868), was
called “pangenesis”48 ; here “gemmules” in the blood carried informa-
tion about bodily adaptations to the reproductive cells. Weismann, who
favoured Lamarck’s theory at first, explicitly refuted it in 1883 and pro-
posed that continuity of a “germ plasm” was the means of inheritance.
Only changes here would transmit variations to future generations—
which turned out broadly correct in principle, if not in details.49 Weis-
mann explained new characteristics by identifying sexual reproduction as
“an inexhaustible source of ever new combinations of individual varia-

tion.”50 The appearance of new variations not inherited from the parents
derived from “germinal selection” taking place within the germ plasm (a
sort of struggle for nutrients), alongside natural selection between organ-
isms.
Wells entered directly into this conversation. In “The Biological Prob-
lem of Today” (1894), he dismissed Weismann’s theories as “charming”
but resting on a missupposition about the workings of cells.51 By 1895,
in “Bio-optimism,” he had accepted Weismann’s refutation of Lamarck
“[o]f necessity.”52 After 1900, Mendelian genetics quickly explained the
appearance and inheritance of variations, but when Wells was writing in
the 1890s, Weismann’s theories were still part of a live debate.
The Island of Doctor Moreau participates in this wider conversation
about variation and inheritance, particularly through the breeding of the
Beast People. In Lamarck’s theory, changes in habit and behaviour lead
to modification of the organism’s structure. The changes from animal
to Beast Person, however, are effected by Moreau’s actions. Modifica-
tion of structure, therefore, leads to changes in the creatures’ habits and
behaviour (as they learn to communicate and live in a social group, for
example), rather than the other way around. In “Individual Plasticity,”
Wells assures his readers that, contra Lamarck, “[i]t is not asserted that
the change effected would change in anyway the offspring of such a crea-
ture, but only that the creature itself as an individual is capable of such
recasting.”53 But in the same essay Wells goes on to argue that not only
body shape, but “[t]he physiology, the chemical rhythm of the creature,
may also be made to undergo an enduring modification.”54 These words
are repeated verbatim by Moreau to Prendick (96). On some level, this
means, fundamental and lasting changes to the basic chemistry of an ani-
mal may indeed be induced. In this sense, The Island of Doctor Moreau
resonates more closely with Weismann’s theories than with Lamarck’s:
Moreau has, in these terms, succeeded in modifying the germ plasm, so
that changes in the “chemical rhythm” of his creatures are fundamental
enough to be passed on.
However, Wells objected to Weismann’s position that the germ plasm
is passed on perfectly from parents to offspring, because that did not
account for the appearance of variations.55 Perfect transmission of the
germ plasm suggested “infinitude,” but also implied a nihilistic “discard-
ability of individual bodies for the force of life.”56 Doctor Moreau’s ver-
sion of evolution allows more space for changes between individuals. The
174 E. ALDER
offspring of the Beast People, which vary from their parents, undermine a
solidly Weismannian reading of Doctor Moreau; they take a new, if undis-
closed, form that is neither a copy of one of the parent Beast People nor a
copy of one of the original animals. Doctor Moreau both uses and under-
mines existing available evolutionary theories in order to explore a system
of its own that hovers somewhere between Lamarckism and Weismann’s
neo-Darwinism. Somehow, Moreau has succeeded in inventing a brand
new species, which even, as Montgomery explains, can itself breed.57
Since they can breed, the pink hopping creatures are arguably the
most successful of Moreau’s inventions. They are an “invented” species
of generic, unnamed animals, in contrast to the specialised recombinants
identified as Leopard-Man or Hyena-Swine. Yet even they may not be
successful enough; their “rabbit-like habit of devouring their young” dis-
appoints Montgomery’s hopes for a sustainable source of meat on the
island. The ultimate fate of the evolutionary experiments of Moreau’s
island is rather bleak, suggesting the failure of ethical human direction
of evolution in favour of the survival of only the lowliest, most generic,
and most adaptable species. In the novel’s Prologue, Prendick’s nephew
lists “certain curious white moths, some hogs and rabbits, and some
rather peculiar rats” as the animals found on Noble’s Isle by the crew of
H. M. S. Scorpion. If the allusions to creatures with “curious” or “pe-
culiar” traits may be taken as an indication that these sailors did indeed
land on Moreau’s island, then the surviving remnants of the Beast People
and their descendants have completed their evolution into some simpler
animal types better fitted to survive: insects and rodents. In this way, the
pink hopping creatures prove that Moreau’s experiments at inducing per-
manent and heritable variations in animal form have a limited success, but
also reveal his inevitable failure, because the processes of natural selec-
tion are ultimately more powerful than artificial modification by human
hand. At the same time, to maintain the unknowability of the heterotopic
counter-site, the empirical evidence of the weird slides out of reach and
is left suggestive rather than definite.
In The Island of Doctor Moreau, the weird mode creates a narrative
space in which marginal regions of evolutionary science and physiology
can be explored. Here, strange new bodily forms can exist, and the prin-
ciple of a shared physicality between humans and other animals can be
pursued to its logical extremes. By doing so, Wells can fictionally stage
the anatomical speculations theorised in his essays, especially “Individual
Plasticity,” and reinvent, to a degree, the terms of evolutionary inheri-

tance. In the next section, the weird heterotopias of Hodgson’s fiction
also provide spaces in which the mutual biological basis of life can be
tested, leading to strange transformations embodying both the marvels
and the terrors of the scientific borderlands.
The “Boundary Kingdom”: William Hope Hodgson’s

Cryptogamy
Like The Island of Doctor Moreau, Hodgson’s stories assume a shared
physiological basis underpinning the life of all biological kingdoms and
use the heterotopic qualities of islands and ocean to create spaces in which
weird forms can flourish and normative relationships between groups of
organisms can be reconstructed. In the two short stories discussed here,
the malleable and liminal forms of cryptogams are used to produce mon-
sters that blur the boundaries of animal and plant and of alive and not-
alive. “The Voice in the Night” combines human with fungus to suggest
a new, composite form of life, while “The Derelict” transforms even inan-
imate matter to inaugurate a new slime mould type.
There is no particular evidence that Hodgson was directly aware of
fin-de-siècle botanical debates about cryptogams in the way there is for
Wells through his anatomy and physiology publications. Hodgson’s writ-
ing, arguably, is as much influenced by the fiction of Wells and other
popular authors such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Arthur Conan Doyle
as by the cultural circulations of popular science. Nevertheless, the sto-
ries exhibit a clear attraction to the fictional possibilities of that puzzling
group of organisms—cryptogams—suggesting that their interstitial nature
was part of general knowledge. “Cryptogam” is the best-fitting contem-
porary term, current in the late nineteenth century.58 It was a practical
botanical grouping rather than a taxonomical category, a receptacle for
rather disparate types like fungi, lichen, and slime moulds that presented
similarly and were taken as sort-of plants without seeds or flowers (fungi
and slime moulds now belong to different kingdoms). Debates about dis-
tinctions between kingdoms, especially animals and plants, had a long
history in natural science. In the second edition of History of Creation
(1892), Ernst Haeckel used the suggestive phrase “doubtful beings” to
describe protists, the taxonomical kingdom that included slime moulds59 ;
the uncertainties of the previous century, during which John Hunter
176 E. ALDER
recorded that general opinion was “not determined on where the animal
ends and where the vegetable begins,” remained unresolved.60
Alternatively, perhaps, nineteenth-century biology had only increased
the questions rather than the answers by elaborating the puzzles of
cryptogams, for example, or carnivorous plants. In Insectivorous Plants
(1875), Darwin draws parallels between the carnivorous plant Drosera
(sundew) and animals, including the composition of digestive fluids and
responses to stimuli. Drosera, he observes, “may be said to feed like an
animal,” while in an experiment:
Nothing could be more striking than the appearance of the above four
leaves, each with their tentacles pointing truly to the two little masses of
the phosphate on their discs. We might imagine that we were looking at a
lowly organised animal seizing prey with its arms.61
Plants like Drosera showed that distinctions between the two kingdoms
of animals and plants were not always adequate, and that intriguingly lim-
inal organisms could exist, albeit at the more “lowly” end of the evolu-
tionary scale. Darwin’s work on Drosera also, for one modern biologist,
reveals a tendency in the history of biology to privilege animal existence
over plants, fungi, and other cryptogams.62 This description of Drosera
relegates the “organisation” of the plant to a “lowly” status, rather recog-
nising the sophistication of a plant with a surprising combination of char-
acteristics.
This representation sits close to how popular fiction of the time reg-
istered carnivorous plants. Hodgson’s 1907 novel The Boats of the “Glen
Carrig” features anthropophagous trees as well as invented recombined
animal forms populating remote and isolated islands. As I have examined
elsewhere, Boats creates remote marine spaces in which new forms of ani-
mal life can exist, according to alternative evolutionary paths, in environ-
ments in which they, rather than human beings, have a right to exist as
successful species.63 Boats also follows a tradition of carnivorous tree sto-
ries including Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The American’s Tale” (1879), Phil
Robinson’s “The Man-Eating Tree” (1881), and Frank Aubrey’s “The
Devil Tree of Eldorado” (1897).64
Hodgson’s novel, however, adds a fungal twist to the anthropophagous
tree premise. The stranded sailors venture among what look like trees on
the banks of a strange island creek, only to discover human faces within
the branches. Narrator Winterstraw observes that a “brown, human face
peering at us from between the wrapped branches […] was of a part with
the trunk of the tree; for I could not tell where it ended and the tree
began.”65 Boundaries between the original human and the apparent plant
that absorbed it have dissolved. This monster bleeds when stabbed, like
a “live creature,” and its “cabbage-like” appendages move like “an evil
serpent.”66 Tree and human and reptile are melted together, not only
combining animal classes but also blending the animal and vegetable king-
doms. Yet the tree-monsters of Boats are not simply overgrown carnivo-
rous plants; Hodgson’s innovation is something even more transgressive.
Winterstraw touches the tree-monster to find that “its trunk was as soft
as pulp under my fingers, much after the fashion of a mushroom.”67 The
fungal analogy indicates morphic potential as well as positioning it as an
organism neither animal nor plant: more like a cryptogam.
In a number of ways, cryptogams have an obvious appeal to a writer of
weird tales. Their malleability means they can easily be imagined to look
like a human, or a tree, or a ship, emphasising monsters’ transgressive
plasticity and their resistance of classification. The creatures created out
of substances like fungus, mould, or lichen in Hodgson’s stories are not
hybrids of animals and plants, but something else altogether. They cannot
be mapped onto the rules for either kingdom: too mobile for plants, for
example, yet too resilient under tearing and cutting to be animals. The
monster, says Jeffrey Weinstock, “undoes our understanding of the way
things are and violates our sense of how they are supposed to be. […]
The ‘unnaturalness’ of the monster inheres in its violation of established
conceptual categories.”68 Cryptogams do precisely that. Upsetting estab-
lished categories of animals and plants, they caused fractures in which
weird inventions of life could flourish, “doubtful beings” could become
certain, and notions of natural and unnatural, alive and not alive, or ani-
mate and inanimate, may be redefined.
Fungi had long been deeply implicated in questions of distinctions
between Linnean kingdoms, with Linnaeus reporting having observed,
he thought, a relationship between “seeds” of fungi and animalcula infu-
soria in 1767, while entomogenous fungi, which grow on insects, were
at first taken by some biologists for a kind of “vegetable fly.”69 A con-
ception of fungi as interstitial organisms, that potentially could change
between being plants and being animals, persisted in biology until around
the 1860s.70 Like animals and plants, fungi are eukaryotes, so classified
for their level of complex cellular organisation. All three diverged from the
same “primitive, almost proto-fungal stem” and thus share “the eukaryote
178 E. ALDER
last common ancestor.”71 This is how fungi are known to modern biol-
ogy. Haeckel speculated similarly in The Wonders of Life (1905), but until
the middle of the twentieth century the consensus was to classify fungi
with plants, albeit as a distinct group.72 The classification was problem-
atic because in some ways, cryptogams also resembled animals. Haeckel
found fungi to “inhale oxygen and give out carbonic acid like animals,”73
and Anton de Bary observed that some Myxomycete (slime mould) spores
moved with “a hopping and an amoeboid creeping movement.”74
For these kinds of reasons, in 1866 Haeckel proposed an “intermedi-
ate” kingdom of life, called “Protista”: “a ‘boundary kingdom interme-
diate between the animal and vegetable kingdoms’ containing organisms
‘neither animals nor plants’.”75 Protista were understood to be something
else; biologist C. Clifford Dobell pinpointed their “great importance” as
“a group of living beings which are organised upon quite a different prin-
ciple from that of other organisms.”76 The evident insufficiency of plant
and animal categories for explaining the natural world had led to the
important step of recognising that life might exist based on alternative
principles, perhaps not yet fully understood.
Both de Bary and Haeckel distinguished Myxomycetes from fungi.
Haeckel included Myxomycetes in kingdom Protista, but, despite some
pondering, decided to leave fungi “among plants, though many natural-
ists have separated them altogether from the vegetable kingdom.”77 In
later work, though, he retreated from the idea of a third kingdom, divid-
ing plants and animals into two kingdoms stemming from simpler single
and multi-cellular organisms. For some biologists, fungi were failed plants.
Henri Bergson suggested that fungi, despite their global profusion, “have
not been able to evolve” and “might be called the abortive children of
the vegetable world.”78 Fungi suggest decay and decline. Critic Anthony
Camara suggests that “the dysmorphic fungal body” threatens “human
devolution and a degrading return to a less organised primordial state
of being,” but he also notes its contradictory, ambivalent biological sta-
tus was something “unreal” and “undead.”79 Feeding on dead matter, a
fungus transforms old material into new living shapes; it is also a greedy,
excessive form of life.
In earlier natural history, fungi were implicated in theories of spon-
taneous generation of life, because they appeared to grow unexpectedly
on dead matter apparently without parents.80 Italian Lazzaro Spallanzani
proved the existence of spores in 1776, however, and Louis Pasteur’s
mid-nineteenth century observations of ferments and air-borne germs
also challenged spontaneous generation theory.81 By the 1880s, it was

a marginalised theory, unsupported by reasonable evidence, although at
least one British biologist, Henry Charlton Bastian, believed that evo-
lution “required the possibility of a transition from inanimate to living
matter,” and continued to publish on the topic until 1915.82 This transi-
tion occurs in “The Derelict”: spontaneous generation authenticates the
sudden existence of a complex monster lacking an evolutionary history of
natural selection over time. As Ben Woodard elaborates, Hodgson “in-
troduces the truly horrifying aspect of biology as endlessly spatial and
naturally mutated, as growth unbound. […] The stench of death is also
the stench of fertilization, of a turning over in the churning teeth of
nature.”83 Hodgson’s weird mouldy creatures are paradoxically fecund
and creative, growing rather than decaying; they challenge assumptions
about cryptogams as lowly backsliders by presenting as new, progenerate
natural forms.
The stories promote a shared physical basis for life between organisms
of different kingdoms and create spaces in which cryptogams can evolve,
elevated to a status in the natural world equal to that of animals and
plants. There is, then, something almost intrinsically weird about fungi
and other cryptogams as they were understood (or not understood) at
the fin de siècle. Hodgson’s monstrous biological transgressions exist in
heterotopic spaces of ships and islands, in which the principles on which
complex organisms are based can be reimagined. They belong to a bound-
ary kingdom that allows for the existence of liminal organisms, extending
the notion of common ancestry beyond animals alone to propose a shared
physical basis for all life (however “life” might be defined). As an inspi-
ration for fiction, the boundary kingdom encapsulates the weird world-
view this book has been exploring: that a resolutely material universe is
nonetheless textured with wonders and terrors just beyond the limits of
normal experience and comprehension.
Doubtful Beings: “The Voice in the Night”

and “The Derelict”
Through its representation of a new, unnameable identity, “The Voice
in the Night” unsettles not only the borders of normative human shape,
but also the distinctions between animate and inanimate life. The story is
narrated by a sailor, hailed on a becalmed night by an unseen rower who
begs food but refuses to come within sight or lamplight. This castaway
180 E. ALDER
recounts a strange tale of shipwreck, and the gradual assimilation of his

and his fiancée’s bodies by a grey lichen or fungus that abounds on the
remote island and nearby derelict ship on which they take refuge. The
story ends as follows:
Indistinctly I saw something nodding between the oars. I thought of a

sponge – a great, grey nodding sponge – The oars continued to ply. They
were grey – as was the boat – and my eyes searched a moment vainly for
the conjunction of hand and oar. […] Then the oars were dipped, the boat
shot out of the patch of light, and the – the thing went nodding into the
mist.84
The halting progress of these sentences demonstrates the narrator’s inabil-

ity to find appropriate language to describe what he sees. This “thing”
defies existing linguistic schema; in Weinstock’s terms, it “undoes” and
“violates” the narrator’s current ontological expectations. Hurley, simi-
larly, identifies the broken syntax as “a rupture of conceptual systems […]
Within this rupture, where lies an abhuman identity for which there is as
yet no language, is inserted the word ‘Thing’.”85 In Hodgson’s stories,
as in The Island of Doctor Moreau, the fear of losing bodily integrity (or
becoming “abhuman,” a term Hurley draws from Hodgson’s The Night
Land), often causes unspeakable, unidentifiable bodies to be labelled
“things.” The “thing” is the uncategorisable monster, the new kind of
life that has formed in the gap between known kingdoms.
What has formed in the gap? The fungus of “The Voice in the Night”
at first lacks a particular shape or form, appearing as “patches of growth,”
“nodules,” or “grey masses” (116–7). Although an inanimate fungal
growth, its monstrous life is signalled by its excessive vitality. On the
island, it is “growing riot”; on the ship, it grows “persistently” (117,
118). This weird fungus feeds not only on dead matter but also on living:
it accumulates on the castaways’ bodies “with monstrous rapidity” (120)
and increasingly appears alive:
it rose into horrible, fantastic mounds, which seemed almost to quiver, as

if with a quiet life, when the wind below across them. Here and there it
took on the forms of vast fingers, and in others it just spread out flat and
smooth and treacherous. (117)
Possessing a new kind of “quiet” life, this skilful organism adopts human
shapes (converting, we understand, the bodies of previous castaways) and
is anthropomorphised through the attribution of the sentient trait of

treachery.
Even before it claims human bodies, though, the fungus thrives to the
extent of having agency of its own. The castaway, having “seized” a rope
to ascend onto the derelict ship in the lagoon, immediately observes that
a “grey, lichenous fungus” has also “seized” “upon the rope and blotched
the side of the ship lividly” (116). The activity of the fungus mimics
human activity, and vice versa. Later, the fungus is described as having
“seized upon our bodies,” shortly before the castaways, stricken with “in-
human desire […] seized a mass of the fungus” to eat (119, 120). Their
actions are mirrored; both fungus and human grasp and consume the
body of the other. Where the tree-monsters of Boats consume humans,
here the humans are equally implicated in consuming the monster. In this
union, they become something new—neither human nor simply fungus.
Their transformation leads the castaways to question the nature of their
existence. First, the castaway hesitates over identifying himself as a man:
“I am only an old – man” he tells the narrator (111). The hesitation sug-
gests a decision between man and “thing”: “the word chosen each time is
the properly human one; the pause indicates that it is no longer relevant,
no longer adequate.”86 Later, he hesitates over speaking of “the terror
which has come into our – lives” (115). Not only is a human identity
inadequate, but the fact of being alive, of having a life, is now question-
able. He has become a doubtful being.
The castaways’ bodies are assimilated from within and without, as the
boundaries of human shape dissolve and they are transformed into “in-
human” monsters—in their form, and in their behaviour (their unnatural
appetite for the monstrous subject). When the pair first find patches of
fungus on their hands and face, they are “all at once, afraid of something
worse than death” (118). That threat may be a dissolution of human iden-
tity, “a degrading return to a less organised primordial state of being.”87
However, human superiority is not a given in a post-Darwinian world, nor
in a heterotopia where cultural and scientific norms are inverted. From
the perspective of the fungus, organisational complexity is increasing. The
feared “something” also represents a continuation of life beyond the loss
of human identity.
As the story progresses, the relationship between the fungus and
human life thus emerges as exceedingly close. We later gather that the
“nodules several feet in height,” first observed on the derelict ship, are
the remains, or transformation, of a former crew (116). Near the story’s
182 E. ALDER
end, the castaway encounters “an extraordinarily shaped mass of fungus

[…] swaying uneasily as though it possessed life of its own” (120). At first
appearing to be a growth of fungus come to life, the castaway notices “the
thing had a grotesque resemblance to the figure of a distorted human
creature.” It is “the end of one of these men who had come to the island
in the ship in the lagoon; and in that monstrous ending I had seen our
own” (120). The “ending” of his life, from the perspective of the cast-
away, is the ending of his human identity, yet the vitality of the fungus
belies an equation of “ending” with “death.”
Together fungus and human become, inexorably, a new form of life.
What that is remains uncertain and there is no language to describe it:
“and so – and so – we who had been human became – Well, it mat-
ters less each day” (120). Yet given the anxiety over the loss of human
identity attending most of the story, why should it cease to matter? It
may be a reflection of altering brain functions as he ceases to care, but
it may indicate a relinquishing of the idea of human shape as significant.
Whatever else this transformation does, it does away with anthropocen-
tricity, restoring a sense of human embeddedness or entanglement in a
Darwinian nature.88 The castaway may be learning to accept his new fun-
gal self, recognising that souls, bodies, and even thought itself can be
non-, or more-than, human.89
The idea of “becoming” points to continuation: not as human, but, as
a “distorted human,” not purely fungal either. “The Voice in the Night”
captures both the repulsive horror of this loss of human identity and the
inevitability of the continuation of life in what seems like an unimag-
inably monstrous “thing-like” form. But in evolutionary terms “what
seems the monster may [be] a new type ‘waiting’ for the right condi-
tions to thrive.”90 Although, or rather because the nodding “thing” is
beyond direct linguistic representation, a “monstrous ending” may also
be a beginning. Response to the “thing” is “a function of lack of recog-
nition, rather than any uncanny resurgence.”91 The “beginning” con-
structed in “The Voice in the Night” is too unfamiliar for conventional
human schema of language, identity, or a divinely arranged natural order
to assimilate. The narrator first refers to the “voice in the night” as the
“Invisible,” a label suggesting the castaway’s marginality and estrange-
ment from a human reality, and “some unintelligible dread” keeps the
castaway from coming too close to the narrator’s ship. The narrator point-
edly asserts his belief that the Invisible “was not mad, but sanely facing
some intolerable horror,” further emphasising the castaway’s position at
a strange existential interface between the human and some other state
of materiality (114). The castaway describes himself and his compan-
ion as “outcast souls,” beyond the reach of God or the natural order
of the world associated with divine ordinance; sure enough, at the end
the nodding mould-man vanishes into a “ghostly and mournful” other-
worldly mist (121). The castaway’s struggle to identify suitable nouns and
verbs—“man,” “lady,” “lives”—is not only a struggle to name terrestrial
strangeness or the emergence of a new type, but also marks an encounter
with something as far beyond language as it is beyond intelligibility and
tolerance.
“The Derelict,” too, presents a strange new species. With a scientifically
rationalised and theorised premise, in its expression of enigmatic horror
it also invokes the weird’s sense of vast cosmic awe. The narrating doc-
tor’s speculations on the material conditions producing this new organism
include his Carnacki-like understanding of the “Life-Force” as one of “the
Outer Forces – Monsters of the Void”92 : the adventure with the mould-
ship is not only an encounter with an alien life but also a glimpse into the
awesome secrets of the universe and finding them terrible. Originally pub-
lished in the Red Magazine in 1912, “The Derelict” encapsulates Hodg-
son’s efforts to imagine new and alien forms of life through the weird
environment of the sea. A group of sailors, investigating what appears to
be a derelict hulk, find themselves aboard a living ship formed out of a
voracious grey-white mould and barely escape with their lives. Where the
fungus of “The Voice in the Night” combines with living human forms
to create a new type of life, here the dead wood of the ship has provided
material and structure.
The story explicitly debates the conditions that might originate life.
The tale of the living Derelict is recounted by the ship’s doctor, now an
old man, to a younger framing narrator. Hodgson’s story therefore starts
and finishes with their conversations about the cause of the phenomenon:
What has transformed a wooden hulk into a living monster? Discussions
of spores or air-borne germs are absent, however, and instead the doctor
ruminates on the “Life-Force,” arguing that life is possible in any sort of
matter:
So potent is the share of the Material in the production of that thing

which we name Life, and so eager the Life-force to express itself, that I
am convinced it would, given the right conditions, make itself manifest
even through so hopeless-seeming a medium as a simple block of sawn
184 E. ALDER
wood; for I tell you, gentlemen, the Life-Force is both as fiercely urgent
and as indiscriminate as Fire – the Destructor; yet which some are now
growing to consider the very essence of Life rampant. (33)
The doctor’s language poses “life” as a vigorous energy, powerful enough

to generate life even in “hopeless-seeming,” “simple block[s]” of matter,
echoing Huxley’s comparison of protoplasm to “clay” and “commonest
brick[s]” cited earlier. The doctor’s account of the “Life-Force” recalls
early nineteenth-century debates such as those between John Abernethy
and William Lawrence over vitalism—whether life required a superadded
substance or was merely an effect of material parts.93
The doctor’s ruminations also resonate with the élan vital , or vital
impetus, posited by Bergson in L’Évolution Créatrice (1907) (translated
as Creative Evolution). The élan vital is the force which can transform a
food store as if it were “a kind of explosive, which needs only the spark
to discharge the energy it stores.”94 For Bergson, all life resembles “an
effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow into flexible channels,
changeable in shape, at the end of which it will accomplish infinitely varied
kinds of work. That is what the vital impetus, passing through matter,
would fain do all at once.”95 In these terms, the organisation of a living
thing resembles an engine, requiring an igniting “spark” to transform
stored energy and control it to produce “work,” anchoring the mystery
of life in rational, mechanical explanation. The impulse of the élan vital
is to produce rapid changes, but could only do so, as an engine depends
on fuel, if “its power were unlimited, or if some reinforcement could
come to it from without.” For Bergson, the “impetus is finite, and it has
been given once for all” already, in the early history of life on earth.96 The
counter-site of Hodgson’s story, however, is a space in which a resurgence
of a Life-Force and its swift-acting “flexible,” “changeable” effects on
living forms can be imagined.
In “The Derelict,” an energetic force as “eager” as the élan vital
has apparently stimulated the rapid development of a complex organism,
which may reveal some of the hidden secrets of the “essence of Life.”
The doctor longs to know what the ship’s original cargo was, speculat-
ing that its content “plus the heat and time she had endured, plus one
or two other only guessable quantities” was the right combination for
“the chemistry of the Life-Force,” a mystery to which this monster might
hold the clue (34). The old doctor laughs off the young narrator’s sug-
gestion that a “life’s a kind of spiritual mystery” rather than a natural force
like electricity or fire (34). He allows that there is a third “something,”

required to produce life, but insists there is nothing spiritual about it.
Like William Lawrence eliminating difference between a human and an
oyster, the doctor mocks the possibility: “Easy, my boy! […] or I may be
asking you to demonstrate the spiritual mystery of life of the limpet, or
the crab” (34).97 The doctor argues that physical conditions must be as
much the basis of human life as that of invertebrates, and, therefore, life
could be formed of any kind of matter. The premise of the story thus asks
why mammals or even invertebrates should have a monopoly on life, and
consequently why any material should not have life. Numerous strands of
nineteenth-century biology, as we have seen, challenged the notion that
humans had a special spirit or soul, but the young narrator embodies a
persisting sense that life is something immaterial. However, if humanity’s
heritage from lower organisms is valid, and if the soul actually is a product
of millions of souls of millions of cells, then a “spiritual mystery” cannot
be true for us but not be true for limpets.98 Hodgson’s vision suggests
that either all life has meaning, or none of it does.
The debate between the doctor and the narrator about material and
spiritual explanations of life mirror some of the debates explored in The
Island of Doctor Moreau. Moreau, despite his claims to be a “religious
man” uncovering “the ways of this world’s Maker” (41), seeks to prove
the physiological basis of consciousness and rationality without metaphys-
ical vitalism. For Hodgson’s doctor, the Derelict provides evidence that
life itself is a product of the organisation of matter under physical forces.
While recognising that living organisms can be “melted together,” as Dar-
win put it, however, “The Derelict” also suggests that energies and princi-
ples of the organisation of life can exist in ways that are far beyond human
association or comprehension.
Like “The Voice in the Night,” “The Derelict” emphasises the vital-
ity and adaptability of monstrous forms and reconceives the organising
principles of life. Although the story does not go as far as reimagining
life along the mineral principles of Wells’s speculations in “Another basis
for life” (1894) or the “ferromagnetics” of J.-H. Rosny aîné’s The Death
of the Earth (1910), it does challenge animal bias.99 The story forms a
fictional parallel to Dobell’s insight that new forms of being could exist
on different principles of organisation, as well as of chemistry. Like Doctor
Moreau, “The Derelict” suggests that simply reorganising familiar organic
structures might produce new living forms and inform fresh understand-
ings of the nature of organic life.
186 E. ALDER
The Derelict itself both occupies and exceeds the boundary kingdom.
As a mould-like being, it may be aligned with Myxomycetes; Hurley,
indeed, identifies it as a “slime-mold entity.”100 Slime moulds are colonies
of prokaryote organisms, capable of collective movement. The text con-
tains only one reference to “slimy,” however, and forty-seven uses of the
word “mould” (without specifying what kind—words like “dough,” for
example, are also used and suggest yeast). The Derelict is neither clearly
fungus nor slime mould, but either way, its sophisticated structure posi-
tions it with the “higher” animals: “a ‘lower’ organism, mold, has attained
the morphic organization of a properly higher one,” including mobility
and a beating heart.101 The Derelict no longer has a deck and hull but a
“skin,” and, surrounded by a “curious scum” and with “great clump-
ings of strange-looking sea-fungi under the bows,” this new life-form
may, perhaps, be starting to reproduce (37). By collapsing distinctions
between so-called “higher” and “lower” organisms, the Derelict suggests
their basic similarities.
Signs of the Derelict’s biologically transgressive life accumulate exu-
berantly as the sailors approach and board it. Up close, the vessel’s side is
covered in thick, spongy mould with “a reg’lar skin to it,” suggesting the
surface of a living form (40). A hole made by the captain’s foot gives a
blood-like “gush of a purplish fluid” (43). Finally, the ship needs to feed.
The “stuff” is soon, like a slime mould, “in active movement,” and before
the sailors can escape to the boat, one man is consumed:
His feet had sunk out of sight. The stuff appeared to be lapping at his legs;
and abruptly his bare flesh showed. The hideous stuff had rent his trouser-
legs away, as if they were paper. He gave out a simply sickening scream,
and, with a vast effort, wrenched one leg free. It was partly destroyed. The
next instant he pitched face downward, and the stuff heaped itself upon
him, as if it were actually alive, with a dreadful savage life. (46)
Meanwhile, they hear a thudding like a giant heartbeat from within the
ship, and the hull develops “ugly purple veinings […] like you will see
the veins stand out on the body of a powerful full-blooded horse” (48).
Finally, the captain yells out the truth: “She’s alive!” (51). The semblance
of “dreadful savage life” is finally recognised as the reality. The production
of this life from all three kingdoms is registered: through the Derelict’s
mould and slime, its “spongy” texture, its animalian blood, heart, and
skin, and its original vegetable material.
By collapsing supposed distinctions between sophisticated and prim-

itive organisms as well as between kingdoms, the Derelict suggests the
basic similarities of all kinds of life. Like the fungus-man of “The Voice in
the Night,” this entity is something new, not an evolutionary dead end
but a spontaneous beginning, and evidently better suited to the ocean
environment than are human sailors. The organisational complexity of
the living Derelict cannot be easily explained by biological classification,
natural selection, or current knowledge of the “chemistry” of life. The
story attempts to represent something beyond conventional materiality.
Miéville points to the weird’s “interest in the implacably alien”102 : weird
fiction makes the attempt to create monsters, like the Derelict and the
fungus-man, that are foreign and unknowable as far as narratively possi-
ble. Can anyone, the doctor wonders, in a moment of crisis where the
fracture of his rational world-view is marked by ellipses in the text and
his struggle to choose suitable words, “possibly understand our feelings
in that moment… The immitigable horror of it, and the incredibleness ?”
(51). How shall I make the thing more known to you? In Hodgson’s
weird tales, a material universe can still contain wonders and “horrors
beyond human ken and experience.”103 Exploring questions about the
basis of life and humanity’s receding position within the natural order,
Hodgson’s fictions of weird science take place at the extremes of scien-
tific rationality—or just over its edge.
Conclusion
The Island of Doctor Moreau, “The Voice in the Night” and “The
Derelict” all exploit the heterotopic qualities of remote islands and
uncharted ocean spaces to explore a weird worldview informed by border-
lands of nineteenth-century biology. These liminal spaces form counter-
sites in relation to the conventional known world; in them, discredited
scientific ideas can be revived and marginalised theories or practices can
occupy a central position.
The principle that living forms are mutable underpins Hodgson’s
repeated fictional imaginings of strange or monstrous creatures emerging
in remote or unknown places and times, as well as Moreau’s belief that
there is no reason why a human being should not be surgically created out
of animals, nor why consciousness should not be produced through a pro-
cess of physical transformation. Closer examination of their fiction, how-
ever, reveals that these imaginary products of scientific conjecture owe
188 E. ALDER
as much to contested or rejected strands of biological discourse, such as

spontaneous generation or Lamarckian inheritance, as to those that were
becoming mainstream, such as Weismann’s germ plasm or the gradual
acceptance of the inadequacy of a two-kingdom taxonomy.
In The Island of Doctor Moreau, humans occupy no special place in the
universe and every higher function has a physiological explanation. More-
au’s vivisection project is sufficiently marginalised to require removal to
his remote island, and it goes beyond the mere physical construction of
humans out of animals. Through vivisection, “the bath of burning pain,”
Moreau hopes to “burn out all the animal” and tap the origin of con-
scious, rational life which should, in theory, be dependent only on the
successful reorganisation of fleshly matter. However, the ability of science
to explain and control the complexity of bodily plasticity (be it mental or
fleshly) is limited; even a material world is weird and can sustain incom-
prehensible mysteries.
In “The Voice in the Night” and “The Derelict,” boundaries collapse
across kingdoms of matter, not just of species, and are reconstructed into
new, interstitial forms. The “boundary kingdom” of organisms proposed
by nineteenth-century biologists in addition to animals and plants, and
the debates these organisms engendered about the origins of life, open
up a productive space for the imagining of alternative forms of life. In
these counter-sites, fungus, popularly “vilified for its damage to man-
made [structures] in particular,” can also stimulate development, even if
that might appear grotesque.104 Hodgson’s fictions are particularly signif-
icant for their willingness to transgress biological kingdoms; where Wells
focusses on the animal, Hodgson is fascinated by the organic liminality
and morphic potential of cryptogams. Both writers install their tales with
the sense of limitless living plasticity. The three stories imagine progener-
ate evolutionary possibilities, finding the weird within a materialist world-
view which is prepared to acknowledge and even welcome the limits of
scientific capacity and human comprehension.
Notes
1. Robert M. Philmus, “The Satiric Ambivalence of ‘The Island of Doc-
tor Moreau’ (l’Ambivalence Satirique Dans ‘l’Ile Du Docteur Moreau’),”
Science Fiction Studies 8, no. 1 (1981). Philmus discusses the significance
of Jekyll and Hyde for Moreau, particularly in Wells’s 1895 draft, which
shares “method and meaning” as “an exercise in detecting the bestial
nature of man” with Stevenson’s novel (3). See also Anne Stiles, “Lit-
erature in Mind: H. G. Wells and the Evolution of the Mad Scientist,”
Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 2 (2009).
2. Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration
at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 37.
3. H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (London: Gollancz, 2010),
41. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers
are given in brackets in the text.
4. Michael Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Archi-
tecture/Mouvement/Continuite (1984), 3–4; see also Sarah C. Alexander,
Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable (London: Pick-
ering and Chatto, 2015), 132–33, for relevant discussion of heterotopia.
5. Nick Redfern, “Abjection and Evolution in the Island of Doctor
Moreau,” The Wellsian 27 (2004), 39.
6. Payal Taneja, “The Tropical Empire: Exotic Animals and Beastly Men in
the Island of Doctor Moreau,” ESC: English Studies in Canada 39, no.
2 (2013), 141.
7. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 9.
8. Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin: Including an
Autobiographical Chapter, Vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1888), 6. In
Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1987), 229. Barrett et al. transcribe as “netted” the word
Life and Letters interprets as “melted”; however, I have chosen “melted”
since it seems more consistent with the sense of the whole quotation.
9. Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic Period
Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 183; see Deborah Denenholz
Morse and Martin A. Danahay, eds., Victorian Animal Dreams: Rep-
resentations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2007).
10. Joseph M. Scamardella, “Not Plants or Animals: A Brief History of the
Origin of Kingdoms Protozoa, Protista and Protoctista,” International
Microbiology 2, no. 4 (1999).
11. Ernst Haeckel, History of Creation, Vol. 2, 2nd edition, trans. E. Ray
Lankester (London: Kegan Paul, 1892), 45.
12. Virginia Richter, Literature After Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fic-
tion 1859–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
13. Ian Hesketh, Of Apes and Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the
Oxford Debate (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
14. Hesketh, Of Apes and Ancestors, 4.
15. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George
Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Boston: Ark Paperbacks, 1985),
13.
190 E. ALDER
16. Kelly Hurley, “The Modernist Abominations of William Hope Hodg-

son,” in Gothic Modernisms, ed. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace (Bas-
ingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 133.
17. Wilhelm Bölsche, Haeckel: His Life and Work, trans. Joseph McCabe
(London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), 160.
18. Hesketh, Of Apes and Ancestors; Richard Noakes, “The ‘Bridge Which
Is Between Physical and Psychical Research’: William Fletcher Barrett,
Sensitive Flames, and Spiritualism,” History of Science (2004), xliii.
19. Arthur Machen, “The White People,” in The White People and Other
Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin, 2011), 117.
20. H. G. Wells, “The Rediscovery of the Unique,” quoted in Frank D.
McConnell, The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells (New York: Oxford Uni-
21. McConnell, The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells, 88.
22. R. H. Hutton, “Untitled Review of the Island of Doctor Moreau. Spec-
tator lxxvi, 519–20,” in The Island of Doctor Moreau, ed. Mason Harris
(Toronto, ON: Broadview, 2009).
23. “Books of the Week,” Manchester Guardian (1896), 4; P. Chalmers
Mitchell, “Mr. Wells’s ‘Dr. Moreau’,” The Saturday Review of Politics,
Literature, Science and Art (1896), 369.
24. Harris, “Vivisection, the Culture of Science, and Intellectual Uncer-
tainty,” 100.
25. Genie Babb, “H. G. Wells in the Borderlands: ‘The Plattner Story’ and
‘The Crystal Egg’ as Experiments in Psychical Research,” The Wellsian
35 (2012).
tainty,” 105.
27. Anne DeWitt, Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
28. Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and
the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century (Kent, OH: Kent State
29. Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines, 229.
30. See Michael Parrish Lee, “Reading Meat in H. G. Wells,” Studies in the
Novel 42, no. 3 (2010); Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary
Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003).
31. H. G. Wells, “The Limits of Individual Plasticity,” in H. G. Wells: Early
Writings in Science and Science Fiction, ed. David Y. Hughes and Robert
M. Philmus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 36.
32. Quoted in John Farley, “The Spontaneous Generation Controversy
(1859–1880): British and German Reactions to the Problem of Abio-
genesis,” Journal of the History of Biology 5, no. 2 (1972), 288.
33. Wells, “Individual Plasticity,” 38–39.

34. David Y. Hughes and Robert M. Philmus, H. G. Wells: Early Writings
in Science and Science Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1975), 18.
35. Martin Danahay, “Wells, Galton and Biopower: Breeding Human Ani-
mals,” Journal of Victorian Culture 17, no. 4 (2012), 474.
tainty,” 104.
tainty,” 104.
38. DeWitt, Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel, 131.
39. DeWitt, Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel, 179.
40. Dryden, The Modern Gothic, 163, 164.
41. Wells, “Individual Plasticity,” 36.
42. Hughes and Philmus, H. G. Wells: Early Writings, 184.
43. See Anne Stiles, “Literature in Mind: H. G. Wells and the Evolution of
the Mad Scientist,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 2 (2009), 333;
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996). The term hybrid is also used by Lee, “Reading Meat in H.
G. Wells”; Laura Otis, “Monkey in the Mirror: The Science of Professor
Higgins and Doctor Moreau,” Twentieth Century Literature 55, no. 4
(2009).
44. For translation and discussion of Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique; see
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy, trans. Hugh Elliot (Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1914); Alpheus S. Packard, Lamarck, the Founder of
Evolution: His Life and Work. With Translations of His Writings on
Organic Evolution (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1901).
45. For full discussion of Weismann’s theories, see Ernst Mayr, “Weismann
and Evolution,” Journal of the History of Biology 18, no. 3 (1985).
For Lamarck’s influence on Darwin, see, e.g., Eva Jablonka and Marion
J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2014).
46. Simon Mawer, Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics (New York:
Abrams, 2006); Jablonka and Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions.
47. Mawer, Gregor Mendel; Jonathan C. Howard, “Why Didn’t Darwin Dis-
cover Mendel’s Laws?” Journal of Biology 8 (2009).
48. Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestica-
tion (London: John Murray, 1868).
49. Mayr, “Weismann and Evolution.”
50. Quoted in Mayr, “Weismann and Evolution,” 316.
51. H. G. Wells, “The Biological Problem of Today,” in H. G. Wells: Early
Writings in Science and Science Fiction, ed. David Y. Hughes and Robert
M. Philmus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 126.
192 E. ALDER
52. H. G. Wells: Early Writings, 184; see also John Glendening, “‘Green
Confusion’: Evolution and Entanglement in H. G. Wells’s The Island of
Dr Moreau,” Victorian Literature and Culture 30, no. 2 (2002).
53. Wells, “Individual Plasticity,” 36–37.
54. Wells, “Individual Plasticity,” 38.
55. H. G. Wells: Early Writings, 107.
56. Ben Woodard, Slime Dynamics (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012), 23.
57. For discussion of the significance to Wells’s fiction of T. H. Huxley’s
arguments for “ethical evolution,” see, e.g., Glendening, “‘Green Con-
fusion’”; Steven McLean, The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of
Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
58. See, for example [Anon.], “A Tunnel of Mushrooms,” Pearson’s Maga-
zine 5 (1865).
59. Ernst Haeckel, History of Creation, Vol. 2, 2nd edition, trans. E. Ray
Lankester (London: Kegan Paul, 1892), 48.
60. John Hunter, Essays and Observations on Natural History, Anatomy,
Physiology, Psychology, and Geology (London: J. Van Voorst, 1969), 16.
61. Charles Darwin, Insectivorous Plants (Wigtown: Langford, 2002), 18,
246.
62. David Moore, Fungal Biology in the Origin and Emergence of Life (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
63. Emily Alder, “(Re)encountering Monsters: Animals in Early-Twentieth-
Century Weird Fiction,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017).
64. Cheryl Blake Price, “Vegetable Monsters: Man-Eating Trees in Fin-de-
Siècle Fiction,” Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 2 (2013).
65. William Hope Hodgson, “The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’,” in The House
on the Borderland and Other Novels (London: Gollancz, 2002), 19.
66. Hodgson, “Boats,” 19.
67. Hodgson, “Boats,” 19.
68. Jeffrey Weinstock, “Introduction: Monsters Are the Most Interesting
People,” in Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 2.
69. G. C. Ainsworth, Introduction to the History of Mycology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976), 24, 25.
70. Ainsworth, History of Mycology.
71. Moore, Fungal Biology, 6, 189.
72. Ainsworth, History of Mycology; Anton De Bary, Comparative Morphology
and Biology of the Fungi, Mycetozoa and Bacteria, trans. Henry E. F.
Garnsey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1887).
73. Haeckel, History of Creation, Vol. 2, trans. E. Ray Lankester (London:
Henry S. King, 1876), 115.
74. De Bary, Comparative Morphology, 423.
75. Haeckel, General Morphology of Organisms, quoted in Scamardella, “Not

Plants or Animals,” 209.
76. Dobell, “The Principles of Protistology,” quoted in Scamardella, “Not
Plants or Animals,” 210.
77. Ernst Haeckel, History of Creation, Vol. 2, 49.
78. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York:
Henry Holt, 1911), 107.
79. Anthony Camara, “Abominable Transformations: Becoming-Fungus in
Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams,” Gothic Studies 16, no. 1 (2014),
10.
80. Ainsworth, History of Mycology. For discussions of debates over spon-
taneous generation, see also James E. Strick, Sparks of Life: Darwin-
ism and the Victorian Debates Over Spontaneous Generation (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); John Farley, “The Spontaneous
Generation Controversy (1700–1860): The Origin of Parasitic Worms,”
Journal of the History of Biology 5, no. 1 (1972).
81. Ainsworth, History of Mycology; Louis Pasteur, “On the Organized Bodies
Which Exist in the Atmosphere,” in Literature and Science in the Nine-
teenth Century: An Anthology, ed. Laura Otis (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2009); and Maxime Schwartz, “The Life and Works of Louis
Pasteur,” Journal of Applied Microbiology 91, no. 4 (2001).
82. Strick, Sparks of Life, 202.
83. Woodard, Slime Dynamics, 33, 36.
84. William Hope Hodgson, “The Voice in the Night,” in Men of the Deep
Waters (Aegypan Press, 2006), 121. All subsequent quotations are from
85. Hurley, Gothic Body, 30.
87. Camara, “Abominable Transformations,” 10.
88. On Darwin’s entangled bank, see Beer, Darwin’s Plots; Glendening,
“‘Green Confusion’.” On embeddedness in nature lost under rational
modernity, see Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological
Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002), 97–100.
2011), 8.
90. Gillian Beer, “Has Nature a Future?” in The Third Culture: Literature
and Science, ed. Elinor S. Shaffer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 23.
91. China Miéville, “Weird Fiction,” in The Routledge Companion to Science
Fiction, ed. Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sheryll
Vint (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 512.
92. William Hope Hodgson, “The Derelict,” in Men of the Deep Waters
(Aegypan Press, 2006), 34. All subsequent quotations are from this edi-
tion and are given in brackets in the text.
194 E. ALDER
93. See, for example, Maurice Hindle, “‘Vital Matters’: Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein and Romantic Science,” Critical Survey 2, no. 1 (1990);
Laura E. Crouch, “Davy’s A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lec-
tures on Chemistry: A Possible Scientific Source of Frankenstein,” Keats-
Shelley Journal 27 (1978); C. U. M. Smith, “A Strand of Vermicelli:
Dr Darwin’s Part in the Creation of Frankenstein’s Monster,” Interdis-
ciplinary Science Reviews 32, no. 1 (2007); and Frankenstein’s Science:
Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830 (Alder-
shot: Ashgate, 2008).
94. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 253.
97. Hermiona De Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (Oxford:
98. Bölsche, Haeckel: His Life and Work. F. W. H. Myers argued similarly
in Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (London: Long-
mans, Green and Co., 1903), 34–38.
99. H. G. Wells, “Another Basis for Life,” in H. G. Wells: Early Writings;
J.-H. Rosny aîné, “The Death of the Earth. Trans. George Slusser,” in
The Xipehuz and the Death of the Earth (New York: Arno Press, 1978).
102. Miéville, “Weird Fiction,” 513.
103. Leigh Blackmore, “Things Invisible: Human and Ab-Human in Two
of Hodgson’s Carnacki Stories,” Sargasso: The Journal of William Hope
Hodgson Studies 1, no. 1 (2013), 184.
104. Woodard, Slime Dynamics, 27.
CHAPTER 6
Weird Energies: Physics, Futures,

and the Secrets of the Universe
in Hodgson and Blackwood
I turn now to my final set of weird scientific borderlands: those around

energy physics. The weird tales I discuss by Blackwood and Hodgson
are, on the one hand, meditations on energy and on fin-de-siècle con-
cerns about the long-term implications of its transformations under the
laws of classic thermodynamics and, on the other, explorations of emer-
gent new ideas around rejuvenated energy arising through radioactivity
and the unseen inner world of the atom. Describing an invisible con-
cept or force that could only be known through its effects rather than
directly, “energy” provided a language for conjuring non-living agency
and power, a discourse for talking about interactions with the more-than-
visible world. Energy offered a way of expressing “the intuition that there
is an activity, a ‘force,’ in things beyond matter in motion, that some-
thing real makes nature go.”1 The idea of energy lies behind the weird’s
secular, anti-anthropocentric ontology—that the cosmos is powered by
something beyond human ken and to which humans are irrelevant, and
which might manifest in forms that can, at best, be only partially known
on a normal sensory empirical level. The transformation of energy is a
process rather than a result, happening over time on the cosmic scale as
well as the local. The vastness of geological deep time extend before and
after human time, and, in these tales, these are weird times, epochs in
which strange new agencies flourish when humans no longer can, on the
conserved energy that lies beyond the use of conventional mechanics.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4_6
196 E. ALDER
This chapter begins by exploring how thermodynamics provided a

discourse for articulating interactions with weird others through the
exchange, transformation, and rejuvenations of energy forms. Hodgson’s
The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912) nar-
rate these ideas over extensive future timelines, or abfutures; Blackwood’s
“A Psychical Invasion” (1908) and “The Willows” (1907) present short-
term incidents, but all four texts evoke contemporary anxieties over heat-
death, whether on a cosmic or local level, which manifest as the ascen-
dance of weird horrors against which human agency is vital but limited.
I end by examining three stories from Blackwood’s 1907 The Listener
and Other Stories —“The Willows,” “May Day Eve,” and “The Woman’s
Ghost Story”—as quantum fiction, arguing that weird tales were prob-
ing some of the same strange questions about the nature of reality that
later led to the emergence of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth
century.
New Worlds a-quiver: Energetic Realms

The first John Silence story deftly illustrates how energy physics, specifi-
cally the laws of classic thermodynamics, could be deployed in the weird
tale. In “A Psychical Invasion,” Silence proposes to “make an experiment
with a view of drawing out this evil, coaxing it from its lair, so to speak,
in order that it may exhaust itself through me and become dissipated for
ever.”2 In other words, the psychic doctor will become an engine and use
the second law of thermodynamics to defeat the weird invader.
Efficient engines are valuable. Under the first law of thermodynamics,
energy in a closed system is conserved, never lost. Under the second law,
the transformations of that energy tend towards disorder or uselessness
(entropy); useable energy dissipates until a state of equilibrium is reached
(heat-death).3 Despite its narrative of decline, the second law was not a
bad thing: it was (and is) useful. The desire to produce work from energy
on its way to entropy more and more efficiently was a major driver in
Victorian culture, producing what Barri Gold sees as a “qualified thermo-
dynamic optimism” in literature as well as in science and industry.4
No matter how efficient the machine, however, it can never (actually)
be perfect and entropy will always increase. Since productive energy was
strongly associated with the sun (as well as with engines), concerns about
energy dissipation often manifested as concerns about solar heat-death,
6 WEIRD ENERGIES: PHYSICS, FUTURES, AND THE SECRETS … 197
incited particularly by William Thomson’s calculations that the remain-

ing life of the sun could be numbered in mere millions of years.5 In the
nineteenth-century imagination, long-term implications of the second law
of thermodynamics were often expressed in vivid images of a dying sun,
a frozen earth, and the extinguished stars that would ultimately comprise
the universe, particularly famously in the end stages of H. G. Wells’s The
Time Machine (1895). As Gillian Beer summarises, “conversation among
articulate Victorians about solar physics and the prospects for life on earth
in a cooling solar system worked, as half-formulated anxieties will, to gen-
erate much imaginative thought and production,” while “ideas of ‘force’
and ‘energy,’ [and …] arguments concerning the age of the earth and the
cooling of the sun, passed rapidly into an uncontrolled and mythologized
form.”6 Weird tales, I argue, represent a particular set of interventions
in this conversation, using their unique narrative mode to develop the
non-human agency implied in ideas of energy and force to respond to the
future prospect of heat-death as well as entropy in the present.
Silence’s ability to turn his mind into an efficient psychical engine bol-
sters him as a reassuring, capable figure, especially compared to his evil
adversary, because the instability and transformability of energy filled it
with troubling possibilities. Since energy is conserved, it can only move
between one form and another; a lack in one part of the system means an
increase in another, as in the way Hyde, for example, increases in vitality
as Jekyll decreases.7 Conservation of energy in some ways looked con-
soling and positive, Tina Choi observes, suggesting “a universe whose
operations, while sometimes invisible, were yet always present and mean-
ingful.”8 Energy, however, “could exist in both dynamic and potential
states – it could be at times visible and active and, at others, invisible and
latent and might at any moment convert from one state to another”.9
As Anna Maria Jones argues of Richard Marsh’s “The Beetle” (1897),
conservation could be as frightening as dissipation when energy becomes
excessive, uncontrollable, or threatening.10
The battle for survival between Silence and the psychical invader, char-
acterised by energy transformations, demonstrates such concerns. After a
first tentative incursion, or feint, the invader withdraws because Silence’s
“sudden action and exhibition of energy had served to disperse it tem-
porarily” (52). All the same, he is sure it “remained near to him, condi-
tionally if not spatially, and was, as it were, gathering force for a second
attack” (52). In its next attack, the invader generates “confused and con-
fusing” glamours (a host of cats appears, the room’s dimensions alter),
198 E. ALDER
and now it is Silence’s energy that disperses: “a mist lay over his mind
and memory; he felt dazed and his forces scattered” (62). The monster’s
effects are characterised by increasing entropy and as the psychic battle
wears on, the invader reveals itself in chaotic, “discarnate” form as “the
wreck of a vast dark Countenance,” “ruined” and with “broken features”
(63). It embodies disorder like a destroyed mechanism.
Silence, on the other hand, is that impossible ideal, an engine not only
of perfect efficiency through whom nothing is wasted, but able to make
dissipated energy produce work. The energy itself is not evil—its qualities
are dictated by the engine, or soul, using it, and thus Silence, “the soul
with the good, unselfish motive, held his own against the dark discarnate
woman whose motive was pure evil, and whose soul was on the side of
the Dark Powers” (64). Order is associated with moral goodness, disorder
with evil. Silence is so pure and efficient that he is “immune” (34) to evil
intentions, which cannot harm him. Further, the invader’s energies are
available for Silence to “turn them to his own account. […] he used the
very power supplied by his adversary and thus enormously increased his
own” (64). The invader belongs to a state of heat-death, associated with
a “glacial atmosphere” and “[s]omething from the region of utter cold”
(63). This energy should be unusable, yet Silence can “absorb these evil
radiations into himself and change them magically into his own good
purposes” (64). Silence, while establishing the credibility of an expanded
understanding of the world where matter and spirit are not divided, also
shows its practical usefulness; his defeat of the invader restores order and
harmony by reversing the entropic process.
The source of the conserved energy accessed by Silence can be con-
sidered as the more-than-visible world. This was the reasoning behind
Guthrie Tait and Balfour Stewart’s The Unseen Universe.11 Never mind,
they argued, that the “visible universe must, certainly in transformable
energy and probably in matter, come to an end,” because given “the prin-
ciple of Continuity upon which all such arguments are based still demand-
ing a continuance of the universe, we are forced to believe that there is
something beyond that which is visible.”12 Energy passed from the visi-
ble universe to the more-than-visible, but was not lost; rather, the Unseen
Universe “recovers at another, metaphysical level all that was squandered
in the ‘seen’ or material world.”13 Religion and science could thus be
reconciled; considered theologically, if energy derived from the Creator,
then its dissipation and conservation have purpose and nature remains
under divine control.14 The idea of the Unseen Universe was received
very critically by mainstream science, but it demonstrated how the law of

conservation could reopen an ontological space for the unknown, invisi-
ble, spiritist dimensions of existence, based on making conserved energy
available.
Allowing for energies and forces to exist beyond the reality currently
visible to us, the two laws make possible some of the most menac-
ing and least knowable scenarios in fin-de-siècle weird fiction. But this
was also an era in which classical physics was increasingly being chal-
lenged. Nineteenth-century science may generally have been prevailingly
empiricist, but the theoretical emphasis of physics was already different.15
Physics dealt with particles too small to be seen and with new con-
cepts and terminology such as forces and atoms, while the concept of
the medium of the ether permeated everything.16 Psychical research’s use
of ideas about unseen transformations and transmissions of energy made
it hard to distinguish one sort of unobservable force from another.17
“Surely the concept of a nerve-force is no more difficult than that ‘of the
inner mechanism of the atom’,” William Crookes complained in 1871,
since both were invisible and hypothetical.18 The new physics redefined
the relationship between energy and matter as perhaps one and the same
thing, a possibility compounded by the discovery of X-rays in the 1890s
and further experiments with radioactive elements such as radium.
On the borderlands of familiar science, the discoveries and uncertain-
ties of fin-de-siècle physics produced a new space for the weird, partic-
ularly since the possibilities were changing and unfolding quite rapidly.
By the 1900s, assumptions that conserved energy could never be turned
to any use were being overturned by discoveries such as those made in
radioactivity by the research of Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy.
Understanding the sun’s power as a process of nuclear fusion, rather than
the burning of a coal fire, radically altered the narrative and length of
the sun’s future. Soddy explained in an 1908 lecture that “[r]adium has
taught us that there is no limit to the amount of energy in the world
available to support life, save only the limit imposed by the boundaries of
knowledge.”19 For Soddy, nature was full of untapped sources of energy.
Not for nothing does Joshua Glenn describe speculative fiction of 1904–
1933 as “the radium age.”20
The early twentieth century saw what is often described as a revolution
in physics, and a turn towards Einsteinian physics and quantum theory,
relating to long-standing puzzles such as the nature of light. Established
200 E. ALDER
as wave-like, light was also shown to behave like particles—an unexplain-

able paradox under classical physics, even by the ether. Max Planck’s pro-
posal that energy was released in the form of discrete packets (quanta) in
1900 and Einstein’s 1905 paper on photoelectric effect began to address
the problem.21 By the mid-1920s, the work of Heisenberg, Bohr, and
others suggested a quantum world which possessed no continuity with
the everyday world.22
Quantum theory and the weird share parallels in their description and
representation. The quantum world is counter-intuitive compared to our
experience of the everyday world, difficult to grasp and impossible to visu-
alise in the normal way. John Polkinghorne, for example, uses the words
“cloudy” and “fitful” to describe quantum reality, language reminiscent
of the irreducible, unknowable state of the weird.23 Internally, atoms’
structure and behaviour could not be explained in the conventional ways.
If a quantum description of the atom is “radically unimaginable,”24 the
step from it to weird unspeakability is small. Newtonian physics under-
stood the world as determinable, certain, and uniform, but Planck’s dis-
covery of the “quantum of action,” Niels Bohr wrote in 1929, “brought
about a complete revision of the foundations underlying our description
of natural phenomena.”25 That revision included a departure from abso-
lute determinacy towards probability.26 The quantum world is statistically
describable, but not causally predictable; as Bohr summarised,
we have been forced step by step to forgo a causal description of the

behaviour of individual atoms in space and time, and to reckon with a free
choice on the part of nature between various possibilities to which only
probability considerations can be applied.27
In a quantum state, particles potentially exist in multiple locations, only

resolving into an answer when you go looking for it (and depending on
what answer you look for). Such superposition “permits the mixing of
states that classically would be mutually exclusive of each other.”28 The
realities of the weird, too, as we have seen, often depend on accepting
radical new versions of physical laws as well as their multiplicities or uncer-
tainties.
As I have been arguing, weird tales develop, and could only have devel-
oped, from the 1880s and 1890s onwards and concurrently with changing
conditions in scientific theory, practice, and philosophy. Rachel Crossland
and Susan Strehle have shown how works of writers from Woolf to Pyn-
chon engage with these early to mid-twentieth-century transformations
of physical science and philosophy, while Christina Scholz traces direct
affinities between the notion of “quantum fiction” arising in the 1990s
and weird fiction itself.29 My objects of discussion here, however, are early
twentieth-century stories. While they post-date Röntgen rays and Planck’s
theory of quanta, they significantly pre-date the wider acceptance and the-
orisations of quantum theory of the 1920s. But all arise out of nineteenth-
century physics.30 Egil Asprem makes the point that “attempts to under-
stand matter in terms of ether or even electromagnetism resulted from
physical models based on mathematical formalisations, theory-building,
and the challenge of puzzling experimental data” for decades preceding
the establishment of quantum theory,31 and Gold argues that Victorian
texts anticipate twentieth-century physics through their “creative use of
entropy” (as, too, does, “A Psychical Invasion”).32
Weird tales work with ideas that had undergone widespread special-
ist and popular discussion through the century as well as new discoveries
and propositions which, like X-rays, quickly gripped the imagination. As a
result, what weird tales sometimes end up describing is something resem-
bling a quantum world as much as it does a thermodynamic one. The
very fact they cannot (as physicists and Theosophists and others gener-
ally could not) reconcile the potentials of the new ideas with established
classical conventions encapsulates the historical moment of transition and
overlap between one way of understanding the nature of the universe and
another: the classical, Newtonian, quotidian, empirical experience of the
world, and the new, quantum, weird, hidden theoretical reality of it. The
juxtaposition is not easy or comfortable in either the science or the fiction
of the period; the two states don’t intuitively sit together and yet they are
mixed.
Weird fictions like “The Willows” and The Night Land don’t sort their
science either, but instead present storyworlds that are weird because they
are woven tapestries of science, metaphysics, occultism, imagination, and
genre tropes. I explore how Blackwood and Hodgson present their sto-
ries’ strange, monstrous encounters and phenomena thermodynamically,
like energy movements, intersecting with metaphysical and occult extrap-
olations of thermodynamics to explain unseen dimensions and weird enti-
ties. Since the ideas of these forces and currents are modern—depending
on nineteenth-century discourses of electricity and energy and atoms and
202 E. ALDER
forces—they aren’t assimilable to past traditions of supernatural or myth-

ical monstrosity. A number of Blackwood’s stories present weird story-
worlds that are strikingly similar to how quantum realities are described
later. These realities are (still) so strange compared to everyday experience
that arguably, in this period, they could only happen in weird fiction. Or,
to put it the other way around, the describing of realities in quantum-like
ways is what makes this fiction weird in the first place.
Energetic Abfutures: The House

on the Borderland and The Night Land
The House on the Borderland and The Night Land present weird multi-
dimensional universes in which dreadful powers lurk outside the normal
world and in abfutures beyond normal human time scales. Both are tales
of solar heat-death combined with a romance of eternal love that ponder
what a meaningful human existence might be against a vast cosmolog-
ical timeline. Like Blackwood’s stories discussed later, as well as power-
ing the weird with nineteenth-century thermodynamic discourses, these
Edwardian-era tales are also marked by transformative theoretical con-
cepts not available in the 1890s. Mark Blacklock contends that “Hodg-
son’s work could not come before the n-dimensional turn and accordingly
‘other’ dimensional spaces recur in his work, signifying the cosmological
immensity of space and represented as a source of terror.”33 Between their
conjuring of incomprehensible weird terrors and their depictions of dark
entropic futures, the novels associate, like “The Willows,” weird affect
with transformations of time, space, and matter.
The novels play with borderland science—ideas about other planes of
existence drawn from the occult revival and mathematics, the psychic
forces that could explain telepathy and spiritual communication, radioac-
tivity and the possibility of energy’s rejuvenation. Darryl Jones describes
The House on the Borderland as
a compendium of occult and spiritualist themes and ideas, from the two-
worlds hypothesis and astral journeys of the spiritualists, to the Theosoph-
ical “Esoteric Buddhism” of Madame Blavatsky and Alfred Percy Sinnet,
to the Occult Celtism of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.34
A similar claim can be made for The Night Land, in which telepathy and
reincarnation play a large part in the story’s central romance. To this com-
pendium I add energy physics.
The interplay between physics and occultism allows construction of
weird ontological visions of remarkable scope across time, space, and
other dimensions. Both novels, especially The Night Land, are notori-
ous for what critics often call “flaws” of writing style, sentimentality, and
genre collision. As Gary Wolfe explains, some see the astral journey in The
House on the Borderland as “an almost fatal flaw in an excellent horror
novel, while others have viewed it as a passage of visionary genius weak-
ened by the tawdry Gothic tale that surrounds it.”35 Hodgson, however,
“conceived of his novel as a unity” and “sought to provide […] a cosmo-
logical superstructure for the obsessive horror” of his work.36 Reading the
novels as weird offers a way, perhaps the only way, to understand them as
unities.
The House on the Borderland

In both novels, the death of the sun propels Hodgson’s characters into
dark abfutures not intended for humans to inhabit. The two novels are
among a number of fin-de-siècle eschatological fictions about the death
of the sun, which, if not already a black cinder, is almost always depicted
as red like a fading fire or a sunset. In George Wallis’s “The Last Days
of Earth” (1901), the last humans, Celia and Alwyn, survey a range of
locations around the globe, and in “every daylight scene, the pale ghost
of a dim, red sun hung in a clear sky.”37 In Camille Flammarion’s Omega
(1894), “[t]he sun will become a dark red ball, then a black one, and
night will be perpetual”; in The Time Machine, “the sun, red and very
large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a
dull heat”; and The Night Land’s stilling sun “made a red gloom for a
thousand miles,” heralding “the utter twilight of the world.”38 Black-
wood’s “The Willows,” too, contains a number of images of a setting or
vanishing sun.
The sun is associated with human life and flourishing, its loss with
extinction. Thermodynamic calculations essentially treated it like a fire
burning up its fuel, which, along with sunsets, explains the invariable red-
ness of dying suns. According to William Thomson in 1887, it was “ex-
ceedingly rash to assume as probable anything more than twenty million
years of the sun’s light in the past history of the earth, or to reckon on
204 E. ALDER
any more than five or six million years of sunlight for time to come.”39
Time might be infinite but the sun, at least in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, was demonstrably not. Nineteenth-century physicist Ludwig Boltz-
mann observed that the “general struggle for existence of animate beings”
was really a struggle for energy’s useable transformations: “a struggle for
entropy, which becomes available through the transition of energy from
the hot sun to the cold earth.”40 When that process ceases, so does the
world’s hospitability to animate beings (though not necessarily to weird
ones).
In the night-time following solar heat-death, there is no prospect of
a saving sunrise as there is in “The Willows.” The difference between x
millions of years and the infinity of time dictates that the coming night
not only lasts for ever, but also is all there is and ever has been (since
infinity minus x million is still arithmetically infinite). In “The Garden of
Proserpine” (1866), Algernon Charles Swinburne imagined the entropic
world as dark and motionless:
Then star nor sun shall waken,

Nor any change of light
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
In an eternal night.41
Swinburne’s cold, still, dark world is temporally alien and empirically

unknowable, definable, like other weird conditions, only by what it is not.
That is, except for the “eternal night,” a refrain that echoes through tales
of solar heat-death and encapsulates its dread. “Light!” cries the Recluse
in The House on the Borderland, “One must spend an eternity wrapped
in soundless night, to understand the full horror of being without it”
(177).42 “The future was eternal night,” writes Flammarion in Omega,
while in The Night Land, as “Eternal Night lengthened itself upon the
world, the power of terror grew and strengthened” (329). In these tales,
“last man” figures face eternal night and have the opportunity to find
out and report on what the extinction of human consciousness might
mean. The vision of an eternity of darkness expresses the horror of stasis
and equilibrium along with the horror of an infinite universe—in other
words, the horror of energy unusable to humans in a time and space they
cannot belong to, which form ideal conditions for the weird.
The darkness following solar heat-death—if there was really nothing
else to hope for—had troubling epistemological implications: How is a
motionless, energy-less world to be known or understood? This was not
a question anyone needed to worry about pragmatically, but it ties the
imagined eternal night of the future to the epistemological concerns of
the present. George Levine, discussing responses to the changing episte-
mological bases of nineteenth-century science, notes that “like their most
obvious antagonists, Huxley and the naturalists shared the terror of ‘dark-
ness,’ ‘madness,’ and ‘moral chaos’ that would come if no foundation
for knowledge were found.”43 The fear of the heat-dead universe is a
moral fear and one that the weird taps, generating worlds that cannot be
explained on any known foundation, and in which weird things on the
unknowable dark edges of human reality draw closer.
Weird tales, however, don’t succumb to gloom entirely, but also look
for new possibilities or formulations of energy, from the sun, or at least
a sun, or from the more-than-visible world, again taking their cue from
physics and its occult versions. William Thomson, unwilling to condemn
the universe to eternal night, left open the loophole of whether “sources
now unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation,”
and, as we have seen, The Unseen Universe offered another way to account
for where the energy “goes” that might leave hope.44 Bruce Clarke traces
a line of ideas through James Clerk Maxwell and The Unseen Universe to
Isis Unveiled (1877), in which Madame Blavatsky “appropriated the recu-
perative side of Tait and Stewart’s arguments at the point that the invis-
ible world recovers the spilt energy of the material world and so stocks
its celestial coffers with eternal potency.”45 Blavatsky brought alternative
myths of the sun into dialogue with Western science to offer new forms
of energetic salvation. The “Occultists of the East,” Blavatsky explained,
posited a “Central Sun” as “the centre of Universal life-Electricity […] the
one attracting, as also the ever-emitting, life Centre.”46 In this formula-
tion, the Central Sun is a sort of perpetual motion machine, an eternal
source of the energy of life.
Weird and sf tales of this period embrace solar perpetuity as much as its
heat-death. In The House on the Borderland and in Frank Lillie Pollock’s
“Finis” (1906), the mythical “Central Sun” of the universe is shown to
exist. In Pollock’s story, that sun is “so inconceivably remote that perhaps
hundreds, perhaps thousands of years would elapse before its light should
206 E. ALDER
burst upon the solar system.”47 When it does, life on earth is consumed
by the immense heat. In The House on the Borderland, the Recluse’s
lengthy passage through time takes him well beyond the death of our
sun and onwards towards the Central Sun, a journey that produces new
revelations, both consoling and terrifying. In this way, the novel nego-
tiates weird cosmological alternatives to the philosophically unacceptable
prospect of eternal night.
The novel purports to be a manuscript discovered by two young men
on holiday in rural Ireland, whose own story is further framed by an
“editor”: Hodgson. The main story is that of a long-dead man known
only as the Recluse. The framing, as well as clues within the text to how
the events might seem different to the Recluse’s sister and housekeeper
Mary, encourages doubts about the story’s authenticity and the Recluse’s
sanity.48 All the same, the manuscript, found near the site of the epony-
mous house which has long since collapsed into a ravine, tells the story of
events befalling its resident: the house apparently sat on the borderland
between this world and some other, horrifying dimension. The Recluse
writes of his battles with green pig-like monsters attempting to invade
his home, while between these struggles, he experiences dream-like astral
journeys that take him firstly to an analogue of his house in a vast arena
surrounded by monstrous pantheistic gods, including Set and Kali, and
secondly through aeons of time and space to the end of the universe and
the Central Sun.
Before the Recluse can enter this weird abfuture, the known present
must fall away. Time speeds up, as he sits reading in his study; the hands
on his clock buzz and the sun and moon whip around the world ever
faster into streams of day and night. The sequence bears more than a
passing resemblance to what Wells’s Time Traveller views from his time
machine, but the Recluse travels much further.49 His sleeping dog crum-
bles to dust, and he himself ages before awakening to discover his own
“ages-dead” corpse under a shroud of “grave-powder” (170). Dust, sug-
gests Oliver Tearle, “is a far-reaching thing,” used in The House on the
Borderland to signal “the passing of time, and the death that will come to
all living beings.”50 The Recluse is conveniently left as “a bodyless thing,”
an etheric body or immortal spirit watching as “time winged on through
eternity” (170–1) and the sun wanes to “a vast dead disk, rimmed with a
thin circle of bronze-red light” (175) before finally going out.
Yet this is not the end of time. Through the technique of the dream-
vision, the Recluse is in a position to witness what “no living man can
ever have known” (175): the eternal night after the death of the sun,
tantamount to entering a weird outer dimension. He feels all the exis-
tential distress that would cause, realising, “despairingly, that the world
might wander forever, through that enormous night. For awhile, the
unwholesome idea filled me, with a sensation of overbearing desolation”
(176). Light never wholly vanishes from the sky, though, and, gradually,
a flaming green star emerges and consumes the dead sun. From here, the
Recluse’s experience grows less astronomical and more mystical, shifting
from an account of entropic decay into a search for ultimate meaning.
His soul passes over a “boundless river of softly shimmering globes,” and
he grows “conscious of a new mystery about me, telling me that I had,
indeed, penetrated within the borderland of some unthought of region –
some subtle, intangible place, or form, of existence” (183). The Recluse
is reunited with the soul of his dead love in the “silent, spacious void”
and the “quiet waters of the Sea of Sleep” (184). Here (as also in The
Night Land, in which the “Country of Silence” is the lowest level of the
pyramid and where the civilisation’s dead are disposed), silence and sleep
resonate closely with death, trances, and the possibility of access to bor-
derland realms. The spirit of the mesmerised subject, Blavatsky claims,
“quits its paralyzed earthly casket,” and
the gates of the portal which marks the entrance to the “silent land” are
now but partially ajar; they will fly wide open before the soul of the
entranced somnambulist only on that day when, united with its higher
immortal essence, it will have quitted forever its mortal frame.51
The clairvoyant’s spirit can obtain a glimpse of the “silent land,” but only
the souls of the dead may enter. The Recluse meets his lost beloved, but
the reunion is transient; he is not a dead soul but a “bodyless thing,”
temporarily existing on the cusp of life and death.
Like Machen’s Mary and Nesbit’s Roger, the Recluse glimpses secrets
of the cosmos beyond the limitations of conventional conceptions of time
and existence. They are mainly along Theosophic lines: “Intra-Cosmic
motion is eternal and ceaseless,” Blavatsky declared, “cosmic motion (the
visible, or that which is subject to perception) is finite and periodical.”52
The Recluse has watched normal cosmic motion cease, and now what
the eternal cosmos is really like is revealed. He notices a “countless pro-
fusion” of “moving sparks” he thinks are “messengers from the Central
Sun” (186). The Central Sun indeed emits energy, like a stream of atomic
208 E. ALDER
particles, and he wonders if he has “come upon the dwelling place of

the Eternal” (186). These truths are beyond what the Recluse can cope
with—as he tries to decipher what it all means, his ability to describe his
experience breaks down:
Huge, vague thoughts had birth within me. I felt, suddenly, terribly naked.
And an awful Nearness, shook me.
And Heaven! … Was that an illusion?
My thoughts came and went, erratically. (186)
The secrets of time and the universe are partially unlocked for the Recluse,
but at crucial moments he cannot make sense of or process what he is
experiencing, nor even describe it. The failure of text and language to
represent the other reality keeps it veiled in shadows, refracted through
gaps and silences.
The Recluse enters a weird dimension of wondrous answers to spiritual
and physical mysteries, but they are only partially comprehensible and his
experiences remain tied to the real, contemporary world and the horror of
the invading Swine-creatures. His return to his own time takes him once
more past the House in the Arena, revealing that his own house is key to
everything he has (or thinks he has) experienced. Darryl Jones identifies
the House, or rather the Pit over which it is built, as an omphalos, the
“divine navel” or “geomantic centre point, locus of the convergence of
occult forces, a singularity of spiritual creation or force” (the ancient forts
and Celtic temples of Arthur Machen represent others).53 The ompha-
los is a variety of rip in the world-weave, through which things peer—in
this case, the Swine-creatures, always “searching for an ingress into the
House” (123).
At the omphalos of the House distinctions between realities collapse,
the Recluse battles the Swine-creatures around the real house, or at least
that much of it that is still (mostly) in his world. He also sees them from
the other side during his journey past the House in the Arena, analogue
for his own: “over its walls crawled a legion of unholy things, almost cov-
ering the old building […] they were the Swine-creatures” (180). These
views of the Swine-creatures from the other side of the boundary iden-
tify the Pit and the House as the links between dimensions. He realises
that the two houses are “en rapport,” and that when he fought off the
pigs from the terrestrial house, he had also protected the other house
(189). Actions in the terrestrial here and now, it seems, have correspond-
ing effects in the abfuture time and place and therefore may not be not
futile after all.54
The Recluse’s visionary sequences bring him close to barely gras-
pable truths about the nature of the universe. Between these revelations,
reunion with his love, and the horror of the Swine-creatures, the cosmos
of The House on the Borderland is a weird ontological expression of won-
der and terror. The astral journeys and the invasions from the Pit together
constitute a search for the meaning that lies beyond the physical world,
which take the ambivalent weird form of both inexplicable horror and
spiritual consolation. Energy is not lost in Hodgson’s vision; the energy
of the universe is far greater than what is visible in the solar system and
contains, in the Central Sun, a perpetual source.
The Night Land

The Night Land is a fantasy of eternal love despite the entropic trajectory
of the arrow of time. It shares some impulses with The House on the Bor-
derland, but builds an entire world in its sun-dead abfuture, populated
by a full weird complement of corporeal monsters and immaterial entities.
Millions of years after the death of the sun, the remnants of humanity live
in an eight-mile-high pyramid, the Great Redoubt, protected from the
darkness of the surrounding Night Land and the horrors it contains. The
novel begins as a medieval love story, but in the second chapter moves
to the future world and the narrator’s quest across the Night Land to
save his beloved Naani (they are both reincarnations) from the destruc-
tion of her own Lesser Redoubt. The Night Land itself is an intensely
weird environment of strange evolutionary paths, weakened dimensional
boundaries, incomprehensible terrors, and wondrous powers.
To attain this vision, The Night Land creates an impossible abfuture
out of the incompatible projections set out by evolutionary theory and
thermodynamics. To play out the survival of the human race alongside the
mortality of the solar system, it has to negotiate a discrepancy between the
age of the earth as calculated by Thomson in the 1880s and as defined by
geologists and evolutionists like Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin earlier
in the century. The gradual process of evolution required not millions but
hundreds of millions years for the changes observed in species and rocks
to take place. However, as Fiona Stafford remarks, even “if Darwin and
Thomson regarded their theories as mutually incompatible, imaginative
210 E. ALDER
writers were able to draw on both in the creation of nightmarish visions

of the future” and compound the anxieties they generated into a single
myth.55 The Time Machine, for example, stretches Thomsonian time to
enable Darwinian evolution to take place and in doing so “renders a thirty
million-year future thinkable.”56 Hodgson deals with it by killing off the
sun relatively early on and setting most of the geological, astronomic, and
evolutionary action afterwards. By using a reasonably Thomsonsian time
frame, the prospect of what it means to exist after the death of the sun is
brought imaginatively closer. The usual existential buffer between us and
“eternal night” wears thin, and we can hear the scratching on the other
side as the weird things of the Night Land press through.
The Great Redoubt protects humans from hostile species as well as
a hostile environment. The Night Land outside the pyramid is not the
planet’s frozen surface, but somewhere deep in the earth’s crust nearer its
remaining volcanic activity. Here, the Great Redoubt taps a telluric power
called the Earth-Current. This augments the fortress by powering an Elec-
tric Circle around the pyramid that stops abominable monsters getting
too close, fuelling weapons, and lighting the Underground Fields: “All of
the Underground Land was lit, where needed, by the Earth-Current, and
that same life-stream fructified the soil, and gave life and blood to the
plants and to the trees, and to every busy and natural thing” (335). The
Earth-Current is not only a substitute for sunlight, but is in many ways
superior to it—it directly energises living creatures and maintains the peo-
ple’s psychic and moral health. The reincarnation of X into a future man
whose physical, spiritual, and psychical condition is far superior to that of
people of the ordinary fin-de-siècle world is a working out of Blavatsky’s
notions that “[t]he whole order of nature evinces a progression towards
a higher life” and that “every ‘Spirit’ so-called is either a disembodied or a
future man.”57 Hodgson’s enweirded version is tied not just to spiritual
betterment but to a tangible physical cause, so that human evolution fol-
lows adaptation to a change in environment—in this case close proximity
to the earth’s core and thus to the Earth-Current.
The Earth-Current is evidently a version of Vril from Bulwer-Lytton’s
1871 The Coming Race, a tale of a superior underground civilisation.58
Vril is itself a kind of electrical, magnetic, mesmeric fluid that unites
the various “natural energetic agencies.”59 From this all-purpose power
source, the Vril-ya “extract the light which supplies their lamps, find-
ing it steadier, softer, and healthier than the other inflammable materi-
als” (65). Vril “can replenish or invigorate life, heal, and preserve” and
also promotes telepathic communication (65). Hodgson’s Earth-Current

fulfils the same functions (enhancing X’s capacity to interact psychically
with Naani, for example) while its source is more explicitly physical. The
concept of telluric currents—currents of electricity flowing through the
earth’s core, for which “earth current” was a common alternative term—
was well established by the 1890s, and they were understood to relate
to the earth’s geomagnetic fields.60 “[T]he globe of the earth is consid-
ered to be traversed by electric currents parallel to the magnetic equator”
notes an 1858 Handbook of Natural Philosophy among a list of theories of
magnetism, and the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London contain
several discussions of earth-currents and their effect on telegraph wires
and needles.61
The physics and applications of magnetism and electricity were far from
fully understood, but were invoked, as we have seen, in a number of bor-
derland scientific capacities. In The Night Land, the capacity to use and
control the Earth-Current’s energy is what ensures humanity’s survival,
in an answer to the way Vril supports the Vril-ya’s destiny as the Com-
ing Race to take humanity’s place. Presenting “a conception of evolu-
tion more vitalist than mechanical,” Susan Stone-Blackburn argues, “both
supports Lytton’s conception of magic (or psi) as natural and gives the
human will a part to play in the direction of evolution.”62 Human agency
was a key element in secular resistance of the bleak implications of a mate-
rialist universe. T. H. Huxley called the relentless mechanisms of the uni-
verse, such as entropy and evolution, the “cosmic process.” He argued
that “the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cos-
mic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it” in
a process of “ethical evolution.”63 Huxley saw “no limit to the extent
to which intelligence and will, guided by sound principles of investiga-
tion, and organized in the common effort, may modify the conditions of
existence for a period longer than that now covered by history.”64 To an
extent, the Great Redoubt’s people have operated this Huxleian model,
controlling their physical, moral, and psychical development through use
of the Earth-Current and circumventing the degeneration into simpler
forms that would represent “adaptation to an universal winter” after solar
heat-death.65 Essential to ethical evolution would be social order: “Laws
and moral precepts are directed to the end of curbing the cosmic pro-
cess and reminding the individual of his duty to the community.”66 Only
shared effort and commitment to the common good would produce the
necessary organisation and efficiency—and “the doctrine of efficiency had
212 E. ALDER
become the new century’s version of a spiritual and moral regeneration”

by the 1900s.67
In The Night Land, society itself becomes an efficient machine, a realm
of order in contrast to the monstrous chaos outside. As X observes,
reflecting on the strictures of his home, “each must to his duty to the
security and well-being of the Redoubt” (332), relinquishing certain free-
doms. The Great Redoubt is consequently a highly ordered society of
strict rules and severe punishments.68 Its psychical and ethical health is
maintained by the Earth-Current: adaptive rewards include the fact that
everyone is “advanced more in spiritual sight and hearing than the normal
Peoples of this [the earlier] Age” (365) and share a “unity of sympathy,”
transmitted through the ether, that supports X during his journey (383).
The people are also careful to avoid “wasting” the Earth-Current (only
using certain powerful weapons in direst need, for example).
Energy, social order, and efficiency are all inherently connected, asso-
ciated with the human world while chaos is associated with the weird.
Accordingly, the example of the Lesser Redoubt shows the consequences
of the failure of the boundary between the two. There, when the Earth-
Current supply fails, the people degenerate and weaken:
an Evil Force had made action upon the Peoples within the Lesser
Redoubt; so that some being utter weak by reason of the failing of the
Earth-Current, had opened the Great Door, and gone forth into the night.
And immediately there had come into the Lesser Pyramid, great and horrid
monsters, and had made a great and brutish chase. (466)
Without the Earth-Current, entropic disorder ensues and rationality is

disrupted. Naani later describes her failure to draw any other survivors
together: “they ran, with no heed to their callings that she did be human,
even as they; and by this it is plain the sore and dreadful panic that was
upon the hearts of such” (467). Fear is a powerful entropic force in the
Night Land, generating increased disorder that enables weird terrors to
flourish and human being to dissipate.
The Night Land is replete with species and entities that flourish in
this entropic world while humanity wanes. Despite the darkness, there is
enough volcanic heat and water to support a remarkable range of organic
life: bushes and trees, giant Slug-Beasts, aggressive Humped Men,
“Things and Beast-Monsters” (372) and even the occasional harmless
herbivore. Some of these species are received as abominable products of
the world’s decay, and some are naturally evolved to suit the new envi-
ronmental conditions.69 Both sets of creatures contrast to the humans
who know their days are numbered and spend their time in “quiet watch-
ing for the day when the Earth-Current shall become exhausted.” The
Night Land is also populated by even stranger things, “fresh and greater
monsters” that are “attracted” like “Infernal sharks” to the pyramid, yet
repelled by its light (329). There are many such terrors in the Night
Land—the House of Silence that lures unwary humans inside to their
destruction and shines with its own malevolent light, the mountain-sized
Watchers encircling the pyramid. A few equally inexplicable Powers
of Goodness occasionally intercede to protect human wanderers, but
most entities are hostile. Andy Robertson dubs these monsters “pneu-
mavores”—soul-eaters—emphasising that even if they have come from
another dimension or cosmos, they are natural entities, not demonic or
supernatural, in other words, the epitome of a weird monster.70
Some pneumavores have their origin in scientific meddling, which has
exposed a weird, multidimensional reality. “Olden sciences,” the narrator,
X, tells us,
which, disturbing the unmeasurable Outward Powers, had allowed to pass

the Barrier of Life some of those Monsters and Ab-human creatures, which
are so wondrously cushioned from us at this normal present. And thus
there had materialised, and in some cases developed, grotesque and hor-
rible Creatures, which now beset the humans of this world. And where
there was no power to take on material form, there had been allowed to
certain dreadful Forces [the] power to affect the life of the human spirit.
(328)
Revealed is not a benign spirit world or transcendental astral plane, but

etheric realms from which strange things look in and sometimes pass
through, drawn to human spiritual energies. Among the legends X reports
are the “secret and horrid Doorways In The Night” I mentioned in
Chapter 1, concluded to represent “ruptures of the Æther” visible to the
spirit but “hid to the eyes of the flesh” (398). He encounters such a door-
way himself: “a door […] opened upward there; for the noise did grow
in such a wise as you shall hear a distant sound come through […] out-
ward from some far lost and foreign Eternity” (400). The Sound, “ever
more loud,” makes him “sicken to an utter weakness of body and heart”
and “near totter to my face thrice, so weak gone was I” (400). Through
214 E. ALDER
ruptures detectable only by the spirit, weird energies increase while X’s
weakens.
Watched by outside forces, the people of the Great Redoubt are, in
their turn, fascinated by the “black monstrosity” of the Night Land and
watch it continually: “on none did it ever come with weariness to look
out upon all the hideous mysteries” (324). They face Eugene Thacker’s
“world-without-us,” a “zone that is at once impersonal and horrific” and
confronts us with our own limits.71 The weird things look in, people look
back, horrified, yet compelled. The natural barrier is thin, and relative
safety lies only behind the double fortress of Great Pyramid and Electric
Circle. Those who cross the limits and venture into the Night Land risk
their souls as well as their physical lives. In The Night Land, soul or spirit
itself becomes an energy source to compete for. Spiritual eternity is central
to The Night Land’s story, as it is to The House on the Borderland. In both,
eternal love is as possible as eternal night. Hodgson’s abfutures suggest
that human agency is cosmologically small but not futile, even while it
must recognise its limits and ultimately yield the lost energetic world to
weird others.
“Heat from a Magical Source”: Blackwood, Energy,

and Quantum Weird
Algernon Blackwood’s writings also deal with frightening and destruc-
tive, awesome and transcendental, and unruly and energetic powers. The
potentialities of energy—physically, creatively, and spiritually—are closely
aligned with the power of Nature, conceived in his philosophy almost as
a being with its own agency. In his autobiography Episodes Before Thirty
(1923), Blackwood explained that
It is difficult to put into intelligible, convincing words the irresistible char-

acter of this Nature-spell that invades heart and brain like a drenching sea,
and produces a sense of rapture, of ecstasy, compared to which the highest
conceivable worldly joy becomes merely insipid […]. Heat from this mag-
ical source was always more or less present in my mind from a very early
age.72
The Nature-spell, crucially, is energetic. It invariably, whether destruc-

tively or transcendentally, infuses Blackwood’s characters with the power
of “this magical source” of “heat.” In some stories, weird energies are
literally hot and fiery; Defago in “The Wendigo” is afflicted by “burn-

ing feet of fire” and O’Hara in “The Heath Fire” becomes one with the
flames.73 Michelle Poland, discussing Blackwood’s 1912 short story col-
lection Pan’s Garden, argues that these storyworlds operate according to
a “chaos ecology,” presenting, following Philippe Borgeaud, as a “Panic
landscape.”74 “Pan-ic” also describes the state reached by Blackwood’s
characters as they become immersed in a chaotic landscape and a trans-
formed psyche.75
Thermodynamically, “chaos” and “disorder” have the slightly different
meanings already explained, describing energy that has become unavail-
able. Unavailable, that is, for human use, which may help explain why a
weird flood of uncontrollable energy is so alarming, or “Panic.” If energy
unusable by humans is available, and increasingly so, for use by other
entities somewhere else in the system, that can only mean human power
and control in the world is diminishing—unless the need for it is relin-
quished as Bittacy, Defago, and O’Malley do. “The Willows” negotiates
the same dilemma: Can human limits in knowledge and mastery be recog-
nised without resulting in existential destruction, a symbolic heat-death?
The answer may be yes, but only just.
“The Willows”
In “The Willows,” based on a trip Blackwood took with a friend in sum-
mer 1900, the narrator and his Swedish companion journey the Danube
in a Canadian canoe.76 Stuck for two nights in their camp on a shrink-
ing island between the willows and a flooding river, they are terrorised
overnight by inhuman forces, and only narrowly escape.
“The Willows” exemplifies Blackwood’s philosophy of expanded
awareness of the world writ weird. The normal elements of water, sun,
and wind grow powerful and threatening, and, if that wasn’t bad enough,
the pair have strayed into a place
where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a
spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence
they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil
between had worn a little thin.77
If the Swede’s speculations here are right, weird entities veiled by the
willows look in from somewhere outside the system. They bring with
216 E. ALDER
them, and seem to relish, chaos and disorder, and disrupt normal energy
transformations. In the text, the energetic hostility of the environment is
linked to that of the “willows,” as is the final hour escape from both.
The Danube is presented as excessively energised, a living entity, and
resistant to human domination. The river is a “huge fluid being” that “im-
pressed us from the very beginning with its aliveness ” (131). It resembles
“some living creature. Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires
as it became conscious of its deep soul” (131). It possesses agency of its
own as it “slips beyond the control of stern banks” and “wanders about at
will among the intricate network of channels” (128). Officially, this living
landscape is designated “a deserted area” (127), a blank blue area on the
map “growing fainter in colour as it leaves the banks,” labelled “in large
straggling letters [with] the word Sümpfe, meaning marshes” (127). The
entropy and lassitude of the riverland’s anthropocentric construction as
a “desolation” and a “desert” (and the narrator later calls it a “waste”),
however, contrasts with its evident energy. Symbolic cartographic gover-
nance “straggles” and “grows faint” in the effort to fix and define the
changeable waterscape.
Nothing stays still in this swampy region; the willows are “so continu-
ally shifting that they somehow give the impression that the entire plain
is moving and alive” (127, italics original). On this stretch, the waters
“spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel” (127). The effect
of this dissipation, however, is to increase rather than diminish the work
produced; the river waters
pour with a shouting sound; making whirlpools, eddies, and foaming

rapids; tearing at the sandy banks […] and forming new islands innumer-
able which shift daily in size and shape and possess at best an impermanent
life since the flood-time obliterates their very existence. (128)
The delta-like river plain spills over with proliferating energy that contin-
ually creates and destroys. The two travellers move at the whim of the
water; their canoe is “twisted like a cork,” “leap[s] like a spirited horse,”
and “plunges on yellow foam” (129) until they are all but thrown up on
the banks of the willow-grown island where they will spend two terrible
nights. The narrator quickly feels a sense of unease and distress that he
connects with both the “unrestrained power of the elements” (specifically
the water, the “shouting hurricane” of the wind, and the sun’s heat) and
with the “dense array” of willows that seem to be “watching, waiting,

listening” (137).
In counterpoint to the energy and agency of the willows, the river, and
the elements is the lassitude of the men and their struggle to act produc-
tively. After landing, the two men lie on hot sand “in the full blaze of
a scorching sun,” while the willow bushes are “dancing, shouting, […]
shining with spray and clapping their thousand little hands” (130). The
Swede promptly falls asleep, while the narrator “wander[s] about in a
desultory examination” of the island, impeded by the dense bushes (135).
The shouts of a passing boatman are “drowned” by the wind (25). Dis-
cussing what they suppose had been a superstitious warning, the Swede’s
conviction is “lacking” while the narrator struggles to cover his discom-
fort by “trying to make as much noise as I could” (142). Meanwhile,
the wind strikes the island with explosive sounds and “great flat blows
of immense power” (143); sparks from the fire “flew overhead like fire-
works,” while the “scarcity of wood made it a business to keep the fire
going” even as the wind’s draught accelerates the speed of the burning
(144). Ultimately, the narrator concedes that “[t]he long day’s battle with
wind and water – such wind and such water! – had tired us both,” yet nei-
ther of them can really be bothered to move to go to bed (144–5).
These are just a few examples of how the two men’s useable energy is
shown as depleted or depleting at this point, while the wind increases, the
fuel burns, and the water rises. More worrying, however, is the increase
of mental entropy that follows the physical, brought about by their fear.
Overnight, the narrator is awed by glimpses of moving, fluid shapes in
the darkness, which gives way to fear and a realisation of “how helpless
I was to achieve anything really effective” (155). In the morning, the
narrator observes the willows have moved closer to the tent, “[c]reeping
with silent feet over the shifting sands. […] There was a suggestion here
of personal agency, of deliberate intention, of aggressive hostility, and it
terrified me into a sort of rigidity” (160). The willows’ movements are
mirrored by his paralysis. Later, his fear is a “dead weight” (177) and
“icy” (194). Terror equates to energy loss, marked by its gain elsewhere
in the system, in this case by the willows, which have their own ways of
using energy, giving them “a sort of independent movement of their own,
rustling among themselves when no wind stirred” (173).
The willow bushes are a relatively identifiable source of concern, but
they cannot explain other frights: neat funnels in the sand, a missing pad-
dle and food, a tear in the canoe, and, most oddly, that the blade of the
218 E. ALDER
remaining paddle is “beautifully scraped […] so thin that the first vigor-
ous stroke must have snapped it off” (166). The narrator attempts rational
explanation:
“One of us walked in his sleep and did this thing,” I said feebly, “or – or
it has been filed by the constant stream of sand particles blown against it
by the wind.” (166)
Neither of them believes it, although the narrator is not ready to admit
it. He clings “feebly” to what he knows are untenable theories “with that
diminishing portion of my intelligence which I called my ‘reason’” (168).
Later, these “explanations made in the sunshine […] came to haunt
me with their foolish and wholly unsatisfactory nature” (179). Reason
and rationality, associated with the sun and therefore productive energy,
are themselves subject to entropy as the narrator’s fear and confusion
translates, after dark, into chaotic, unproductive, “diminished” thinking.
“There are things about us,” remarks the Swede, “that make for disorder,
disintegration, destruction, our destruction” (48).
The “willows” (as I will continue to call these “things,” though they
are not, of course, the willow plants ) are increasingly evidently weird
entities capable of using energies that lie out of human reach. They are
inherently entropic and promote the same conditions in their human vic-
tims. The “exhaustion” of the narrator’s first disrupted night, for example,
“only served apparently to render me more susceptible than before to the
obsessive spell of the haunting” (173–4). Vulnerability is associated with
disorder and diminishing useable energy; the more frightened the narra-
tor gets, the more erratic become his thoughts and behaviour. Even when
he admits his fears, talking about them “set me shaking a little all over. I
found it impossible to control my movements” (187). The Swede’s view
is that the willows seek a sacrificial victim and “[o]ur only chance is to
keep perfectly still […] We must keep them out of our minds at all costs”
(185, 188). But the narrator finds it difficult to control his mental state,
becoming prone to nervous outbursts that put them in danger. On the
second night, when the narrator madly decides to laugh away their fears,
the Swede “turn[s] ashen white” and speaks in a “helpless, frantic way”
(191).
The dissolution of the barrier between the safe, real world and the
weird, more-than-visible one is now close, and the narrator’s last rally to
take “control of our forces” by making “one more blaze” is not enough.
He sees, in the willows, an “impression of being as large as several animals

grouped together, like horses, two or three, moving slowly,”78 leading to
an “enveloping sensation of icy fear” before the pain of a fall narrowly
saves him from destruction (195). Released from the immediate threat,
their energy returns with “great healing gusts of shaking laughter” (195).
So does their capacity to act: they “put the wood on [the fire] so that it
blazed at once” (195). The back-and-forth struggle between the willows
and the men is always a struggle for control of energy. The willows pull
towards entropy and chaos, the humans towards action and rationality.
Yet the chaotic impact of the willows is also what stimulates the narra-
tor to rescue the Swede from their final attack. Finding his companion
missing from the tent, the narrator enters his most panicked state yet:
I dashed out in a mad run, seized by a dreadful agitation. And the moment
I was out I plunged into a sort of torrent of humming […] that same
familiar humming – gone mad! […] The sound seemed to thicken the
very atmosphere, and I felt that my lungs worked with difficulty. (198)
He searches haphazardly, running “frantically to and fro about the island”

(198), before discovering his friend at the water’s edge and restraining
him from drowning himself. Panic, this time, reenergises the narrator’s
system and enables him to act.
Since willows and humans use energy differently, however, there is no
clean one-way transformation from one form to another, and the final
outcome is a stalemate. At first inexplicably, there is an “abrupt cessation
of the humming and pattering” (199) and in the morning, “The sun-
light lay in hot patches on the sand. There was no wind. The willows
were motionless” (201). Energy is behaving normally again. The sun has
returned to warm the sand; the willows no longer move by themselves.
As we have seen, the two men and the willows compete for supremacy
and survival by struggling over energy transformations. The outcome is
ambivalent: neither men nor willows, in the end, colonise or destroy the
other. The willows get their sacrifice elsewhere; the men get their escape;
and equilibrium is achieved by each mode of being, weird and human,
resuming their usual separate existences.
Unfortunately, this equitable balance is achieved at the expense of the
life of a less important “other.” The two men discover “the victim that
made our escape possible!” (201): a body at the water’s edge. Touching
it releases a telling swarm of humming, and its skin bears “[t]heir awful
220 E. ALDER
mark!” in the form of neat funnel-shaped indents (203). As fin-de-siècle

imperialists often saw it, Patrick Brantlinger outlines, “empires result from
the struggle for survival of the fittest among nations and races. The British
nation and Anglo-Saxon race are the fittest to survive.”79 Unsurprisingly,
then, the drowned body is “the corpse of a peasant,” possibly that of the
boatman who tried to warn them (201). A local resident, therefore, has
borne the brunt of a northern European intrusion into this liminal region.
White imperialism gets a shock, but survives.
While the Danube journey is not literally a colonial exercise, the story
counts among “cultural expressions of that ideology which also goes by
the name of imperialism.”80 For Brantlinger, much of the significance
of late-Victorian imperialism lies less in its holdings than in its ideology,
as a state of mind and set of values. The travellers’ journey is a colonis-
ing move; without at first questioning their right to venture there, they
have “trespassed here upon the borders of an alien world, a world where
we were intruders, a world where we are not wanted” (138). The mul-
tidimensional struggle in “The Willows” exposes a colonial relationship.
The impulses of the two travellers: to travel, to explore, to use land and
resources at will, to comprehend and master the new world, are shown to
be misguided. David Punter characterises the story in terms of “a momen-
tary defeat for the forces of ceaseless imperialistic exploration”: because
the Danube is an “uncontaminated, pure,” scarily blank space, it is there-
fore “completely unintelligible.”81 Symbolic, linguistic colonisation fails;
to the characters, their human voices feel “illegitimate” (145). “To name
is to reveal,” says the Swede (188); the project of identifying and explain-
ing the phenomena around them will unleash rather than contain them,
and, as we have seen, to know a weird phenomenon as successfully as
that is to be overwhelmed by it. To the extent to which the expansion of
scientific knowledge is colonising, it too is defeated. Not only do normal
reason and rationality become chaotic rather than productive, they are
inadequate and not up to the task of knowing this world.
What, then, are the “willows”? One possible answer lies in the close
association forged in the narrative between the willows and the sun. The
island, as well as being covered in willows, is covered in “hot yellow sand”
(130), like a sandy analogue of the sun itself, and there are several refer-
ences to the intense heat of the scorching sun. The willows themselves
gleam, “showing their silver leaves to the sunshine” (127).
Some decades previously, in 1860, engineer and astronomer James
Nasmyth had observed puzzling shapes in the sun’s photosphere, shapes
he described as “willow-leaves.” In a letter to Rev. Josiah Crampton in

1861, Nasmyth referred to “peculiar features […] which I have termed
the willow-leaf-shaped objects, of which the entire luminous surface of
the sun is formed […] The external envelope that yields us the true light
of the sun is entirely made up of these same willow leaf-shaped objects.”82
Nasmyth produced an illustration of what he saw, showing fringes of the
shapes around dark sun spots while “bridges of willow-leaves lie across the
vast opening.”83 As Robert Hunt elaborated in 1865, these shapes (which
some scientists preferred to describe as rice grains or granules) collected
around dark spots on the sun and sometimes produced outbursts of light,
at which times “those willow-leaves […] arrange themselves symmetrically
around a dark spot, and front inwards, like sedgy grasses streaming out
into the waters of a pond.”84 The energy given off in such sunbursts
could be felt on earth: “Every magnetic bar in our observatories trem-
bled, Aurora quivered in the skies.”85 The willow-leaves left a puzzle
whose solution might explain a great deal about the sun’s energy and led
to some significant metaphysical speculations—could the willow-leaves be
organisms? Were they the source of the sun’s energy?
Crampton wondered whether the discovery would prove that light had
been created separately from the normal astronomical process, latent “as
the spark within the flint until called forth by the Divine word” and
thus reconcile Biblical and astronomical accounts of creation.86 In Hunt’s
more secular terms, the willow-leaves might prove “the pulsings of vital
matter in the central Sun of our system [to] be the source of all that
life which crowds the earth.”87 The willow-leaves could present a link
between solar energy and the mysterious élan vital —perhaps the link,
showing the sun to be the single source of life and proving the unity of
nature’s vitality.
Is it possible that Blackwood knew about Nasmyth’s willow-leaves and
had them in mind when he conceived a hot yellow island covered in shin-
ing willow bushes? Could he have been thinking of Nasmyth’s dark and
spectral painting of sun spots when he wrote about shifting inhuman fig-
ures, “huge bodies melting in and out of each other, […] nude, fluid
shapes, passing up the bushes, within the leaves almost” (153)? If he did,
his route may have been (as mine was) through Blavatsky’s The Secret Doc-
trine, which Blackwood had read.88 Here, Blavatsky cites Hunt’s article
and gives her own gloss on
222 E. ALDER
Sir W. Herschel’s view that those “objects,” as he called the “willow

leaves,” are the immediate sources of the solar light and heat. And though
the esoteric teaching does not regard these as he did – namely, organisms
as “partaking of the nature of life,” for the Solar “Beings” will hardly place
themselves within telescopic focus – yet it asserts that the whole Universe is
full of such “organisms,” conscious and active according to the proximity
or distance of their planes to, or from, our plane of consciousness […]89
In a segue characteristic of Blavatsky’s compositional technique, a piece of

scientific authority flows neatly into Theosophic assertion. On the basis of
the willow-leaves, the sun, then, perhaps contained organism-like beings,
that eluded clear observation and existed on another “plane of conscious-
ness,” occasionally reaching out into ours.
Whether or not Blackwood’s willow-leaves are related to Nasmyth’s,
however, his willows belong neither to a Biblical nor to a Theosophic
scheme but to something beyond both. Blavatsky argued what were called
“forces” were “but the phenomenal manifestations of realities we know
nothing about, – but which were known to the ancients and – by them
worshipped.”90 At first, Blackwood’s narrator indeed feels compelled to
worship the “fluid shapes” he sees and thinks of them, in terms that
wouldn’t be out of place in a Theosophic text, as “hosts of beings from
another plane of life, another evolution altogether” (146). But crucially
the Swede rejects the notion that the willows belong to any human spir-
itual schemes; for him, what terrorises them are not elemental spirits
or ancient gods because those “would be comprehensible entities […]
whereas these beings who are about us now have absolutely nothing to
do with mankind, and it is mere chance that their space happens just at
this spot to touch our own” (187).
In this sense, the “willows” have no motivation against humanity in
particular, and they don’t yield to human explanation, folkloric, scien-
tific, occult, or otherwise. They are incomprehensible and unknowable; if
they can be seen at all, it is only because, like Nasmyth’s sun spots, the
willow bushes give them an outline. The funnel-shaped hollows have no
natural cause (they clearly can’t be normal animal prints), and the sound
the “willows” generate has no detectable source: “It is unknown […] a
sound outside humanity” (181). For the Swede, their humming sound is
“precisely how a fourth dimensional sound might be supposed to make
itself heard” (180). The fourth dimension, as it is in “A Victim of Higher
Space,” is here a powerful signifier of the unknowableness of other ways of
existing. Mark Blacklock argues that “the ideas spawned by n-dimensional

geometry” offered a challenge to Euclidean geometry that was shocking,
but also “provided a rich imaginative framework for recasting physical
space.”91 Impossible as higher dimensions might be to fully imaginatively
enter, even recognising that they could exist was a significant step towards
a new understanding.92
The weird frontier region breached in “The Willows” is at the very lim-
its of comprehensibility and makes full use of such concepts that radically
revise what reality consists in. Consequently, the narrator tries to cling to
explanations that are less scientific but yet more comforting. On the first
night, he is still operating in the relatively comfortable zone of believing
he is witnessing “personified elemental forces of this haunted and primeval
region” (153). Nevertheless, “I understood quite well that the standard
of reality had changed. For the longer I looked the more certain I became
that these figures were real and living, though perhaps not according to
the standards that the camera and the biologist would insist upon” (153).
As we have seen, the narrative explicitly sets aside predictable evolution-
ary, occult, and psychological explanations to leave only a weird, outer
dimension. It may indeed be a fourth dimension, but it also resembles an
atomic world: unobservable empirically (to recognised standards), inexpli-
cable by conventional mechanics, shifting and indeterminate, subjectively
dependent on the questions asked about it, and, intellectually, requiring
acceptance of an entirely different conception of time, space, and matter.
Blackwood’s Quantum Weird

Weird fiction and the quantum world, Christina Scholz argues, are
related: in both, multiple possibilities exist potentially, and both posit a
“universe [that] doesn’t make sense” but which really exists behind the
reality we experience on an everyday level.93 In “The Willows,” the nar-
rator’s remark about a changed “standard of reality” is telling: quantum
theory is “not supposed to make sense by any standard of how we have
previously perceived the physical world.”94 For it to make sense, we must
change our standard of reality.
In “The Willows,” observable reality becomes revealed as something
different to what it had been. The narrator reflects on the distortion of
his interpretation of their situation:
224 E. ALDER
The very atmosphere had proved itself a magnifying medium to distort

every indication: the otter rolling in the current, the hurrying boatman
making signs, the shifting willows, one and all had been robbed of its nat-
ural character, and revealed in something of its other aspect – as it existed
across the border. […] The whole experience whose verge we touched was
unknown to humanity at all. (183)
The details described here, mundane on one level, have become strange
and less real to the narrator. What was present is now absent, “robbed”—
while “something” else, something indefinable and marked by an empty
dash, is now present. Time, too, is distorted. It compresses to moments
and stretches to aeons. The narrator experiences the island as a “primeval
region” and the willows as “sponge-like growths” or “antediluvian crea-
tures,” only to later feel “utterly alone on an empty planet” like a future
last man, and to fear the death of the sun: “I never longed for the sun
as I longed for it then in the awful blackness of that summer night”
(188). The otter glimpsed in the water returns in story’s final line as the
peasant’s body washes away, “turning over and over on the waves like an
otter” (203). The peasant’s body may be the boatman’s, the otter may
have been the body, the boatman (argues the Swede) may not have been
a man: the object may have been each and all of these. The narrative never
fixes this point; instead, the possibilities remain mixed in a kind of quan-
tum state of superposition: as far as we can tell, the object was everything
it was observed to be.
In the context of “The Willows,” this is not a comfortable situation but
a dangerous one. According to one account of quantum theory, from a
condition of superposition, once detected the particle collapses into one
of the possible states: “the act of measuring or observing an object often
profoundly alters its state” and “the possible properties of the object may
depend on what is actually being measured.”95 When Blackwood’s narra-
tor looks at “swaying,” “interlaced,” “melting” shapes and wants to see
elemental forces, that is what they become for him, inspiring wonder and
worship rather than the chaotic terror of the second night (152). Later
the first night, a second glimpse terrifies him, and in the morning, he
resists admitting his fears: “Provided my experiences were not corrob-
orated, I could find strength somehow to deny them” (161) and later
he “postpone[s] […] plain talk” for “[a]s long as possible” (179). As
we have seen, the more they describe and articulate their experiences,
the more real and deadly they become: “Above all,” cautions the Swede,
“don’t think, for what you think happens!” (190). Where in a thermody-
namic reading of “The Willows,” the role of human thought and will is
to guide and direct energy and action, in a quantum reading such efforts
risk stabilising the version of reality that will lead to their destruction.
“The Willows” is not the only one of Blackwood’s stories to exhibit
quantum fictional traits. Some of Poland’s words about Blackwood’s
Pan’s Garden, for example, suggest a mixed, indeterminate state underly-
ing these stories, too: “to walk in Pan’s garden is to experience a collusion
of boundaries, human and nonhuman, inner and outer, and balance and
chaos, that falls poignantly in an alternative state between celebration and
suffering.”96 In “May Day Eve,” from the same earlier collection as “The
Willows,” the narrator experiences a sort of quantum awakening when he
makes the mistake of crossing a certain moor alone on the eponymous
night. The wind and fog are full of shifting shadows and forms:
the world about me had somehow stirred into life; oddly, I say, because
Nature to me had always been merely a more or less definite arrangement
of measurement, weight, and colour, and this new presentation of it was
utterly foreign to my temperament. […] I recall my singular fancy that
veils were lifting off the surface of the hills and fields […] such a thing
had never been possible to my practical intelligence.97
Like the world revealed on May Day Eve, the quantum world is not a
definite, intuitive, practical world either, and does require a completely
new way of understanding physical reality.
Even more than in “The Willows,” the narrator of “May Day Eve”
becomes immersed in a quantum condition as his rational sense of self
abandons him: “I called in vain. No answer came. Anxiously, hurriedly,
confusedly too, I searched for my normal self, but could not find it”
(284). In this process of communion with an expanded world, again stan-
dards of reality, moral and physical, alter: “New values rushed upon me
from all sides. […] a fundamental attitude of mind in me had changed”
(292). He realises that anything that now happens to him “must seem not
abnormal, but quite simple and inevitable, and of course utterly true” yet
“my dim awareness that unknown possibilities were about me in the night
puzzled and distressed me” (293). The new normality or reality is no less
true for being hard to grasp intellectually.
The climax of the story is an encounter and a merging with projec-
tions of the narrator’s lower and higher selves, or material and etheric
226 E. ALDER
bodies, in the forms of a gross caged man and an angelic female figure
(306).98 Memory of the details (the “glamour” cast by the “elementals”
he encountered) fades, but he remains changed: “The new world I had
awakened to seemed still a-quiver about me” (311). Not only is the new
reality an uncertain, “quivering” one, but both expanded consciousness
and quantum theory, it seems, require and produce a fundamentally new
and altered set of conceptual relations with reality, a threshold moment
that can never be un-learned.
In weird tales, where ontological distinctions collapse and the irrational
or unreal can be treated as real, fictional literalisations speak back to and
elaborate explanatory metaphors, often playfully. Egil Asprem identifies a
“tendency among esoteric writers to start from the scientists’ metaphori-
cal descriptions of, for instance, the energy, momentum and movement
of atoms, and then to wander off into speculative realms where these
descriptions are taken to literally imply vitality, teleology or even con-
sciousness.”99 A ludic quality like this is evident in the way Blackwood’s
“The Woman’s Ghost Story,” introduced in Chapter 4, presents physical
concepts in the form of a spectre. The ghost haunting the house explains
to the female narrator that
I’m in different space, for one thing, and you’ll find me in any room
you went into; for according to your way of measuring, I’m all over the
house. Space is a bodily condition, but I am out of the body, and am not
affected by space. It’s my condition that keeps me here. I want something
to change my condition for me, for then I could get away.100
Like Mr. Mudge in “A Victim of Higher Space” who moves in and out
of a fourth dimension and at times experiences being in several places at
once, the ghost belongs to a “different space” that can’t be measured in
the normal way. While Mr. Mudge travels physically through the fourth
dimension (emerging, at the story’s end, in Bombay), this ghost is “out of
the body,” transcending matter and also behaving like an electron. Spread
“all over the house,” he is everywhere and nowhere, undetermined in
time and space until a “change of condition” (which, it turns out, is his
emotional recognition by the narrator as a loveable being) enables him to
escape his current state.
Her observation is key. Just before this speech, she tried to escape him
by fleeing one room, only to run into another on the floor above and see a
vague figure “between me and the windows, where the street lamps gave
just enough light to outline his shape against the glass” (342). The shock
of finding him here too overwhelms her: “I lay in a collapsed heap upon
the floor. So there were two men in the house with me, I reflected. Per-
haps other rooms were occupied too! What could it all mean?” (343).
What it means, the story’s ending reveals, is that the uncle who sent
her lied about the haunting so that she wouldn’t simply find what she
expected to find. Accordingly, the ghost’s state remains unfixed until she
asks herself the right questions about who and what he is:
as I stared something changed in the room, or in me – hard to say which –

and I realised my mistake, so that my fear, which had so far been physical,
at once altered its character and became psychical. I became afraid in my
soul instead of my heart, and I knew immediately who this man was (343).
Here, knowledge, feeling, and changes in states of reality are closely

woven. The ghost is everywhere at once only until she finds and identifies
him, at which point the quantum state resolves into stability and they are
able to communicate and understand each other. Again, a “changed” or
“altered” standard of reality needs to be accepted, and in typical Black-
wood style, the new standard is an expanded, soulful, psychical set of
relations between self and other, a weird state made natural by the weird
science of quantum mechanics.
Conclusion
In Blackwood’s and Hodgson’s tales, weird entities are energetic entities,
whose interactions with the humanly knowable works are represented in
terms of energy flows and transformations. Fin-de-siècle energy discourses
provide for the weird tale a way of expressing weird otherness, fear, and
even forms of communication, not previously possible. Where the sec-
ond law of thermodynamics connoted the prospect of the decline of pro-
ductive energy into universal heat-death, the first law raised possibilities
for the consequences of energy conservation elsewhere in the system and
the excesses of its build-up. Weird terrors, as natural entities operating
on entirely different physical systems from those of normal terrestrial life
and in abfuture times, are unpredictable, uncontrollable, and never fully
knowable. They bestow the same traits on energy transformations.
228 E. ALDER
The House on the Borderland, The Night Land, and “The Willows”
emphasise the “outsideness” of the entities faced by the protagonists, dis-
tinctly weird because they are not human, not revenant, not of this time,
and not of this world. In “The Wendigo,” too, for example, Simpson
feels “the touch somewhere of a great Outer Horror.”101 Alien otherness
is salient and depictions of its touch express concerns about what might
lie outside the closed system as well as within it. The notion of causes
outside the system is an aesthetic violation that conflicts with the natural
human or social Victorian desire for unity.102 Confronting a physical real-
ity redefined by radioactivity, relativity, and quantum mechanics is also an
aesthetic violation conflicting with the traditional desire for unity. Weird
tales negotiates this uncertain borderland between classical and “new”
physics.
The discourse of quanta had not yet become widely available in the
way that the language of thermodynamics had by the fin de siècle. While
I don’t mean to argue that Blackwood was aware of Planck’s quanta or
Einstein’s work, nor that weird tales are anticipating quantum theory of
the 1920s, I do suggest that weird tales offered one way of exploring,
often playfully, the kinds of questions about the nature of reality (or the
reality of nature) that physics also investigated. In other words, similar
nineteenth-century cultural conditions (in science, in spirituality, in phi-
losophy, in literature) that in physics led to quantum theory also led to
weird tales.
Notes
1. Charles Coulton Gillespie, quoted in Greg Myers, “Nineteenth-
Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics and the Rhetoric of Social
Prophecy,” in Energy and Entropy: Science and Culture in Victorian
Britain, ed. Patrick Brantlinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1989), 310.
2. Algernon Blackwood, “A Psychical Invasion,” in John Silence: Physician
Extraordinary (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1910), 34, italics original. All
subsequent quotations are taken from this edition and page numbers are
given in brackets in the text.
3. See, e.g., R[udolf] Clausius, The Mechanical Theory of Heat with Its
Applications to the Steam-Engine and to the Physical Properties of Bod-
ies (London: John Van Voorst, 1867), 357; Myers, “Popularizations of
Thermodynamics.”
4. Barri Gold, Thermopoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 11. I am indebted throughout to
Gold’s rich and thorough account of concepts in nineteenth-century
energy physics and their relations with Victorian literature. See also
Michael Whitworth, “Inspector Heat Inspected: The Secret Agent and
the Meanings of Entropy,” The Review of English Studies 49, no. 193
(1998); Tina Young Choi, “Forms of Closure: The First Law of Ther-
modynamics and Victorian Narrative,” ELH 74, no. 2 (2007); Jessica
Kuskey, “Our Mutual Engine: The Economics of Victorian Thermo-
dynamics,” Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 1 (2013); Allen
Macduffie, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Sarah C. Alexan-
der, Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable (London:
Pickering and Chatto, 2015).
5. William Thomson, “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat (1862),” in Popu-
lar Lectures and Addresses, Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1891); William
Thomson, “On the Sun’s Heat (1887),” in Popular Lectures and
Addresses, Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1891).
6. Gillian Beer, “‘The Death of the Sun’: Victorian Solar Physics and Solar
Myth,” in The Sun Is God: Painting, Literature, and Mythology in the
Nineteenth Century, ed. J. B. Bullen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),
168, 164.
7. Gold, Thermopoetics, 227–28. See also Donald Lawler, “Reframing Jekyll
and Hyde: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Strange Case of Gothic Sci-
ence Fiction,” in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years,
ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1988), 255.
8. Choi, “Forms of Closure,” 304.
10. Anna Maria Jones, “Conservation of Energy, Individual Agency, and
Gothic Terror in Richard Marsh’s the Beetle, or, What’s Scarier Than
an Ancient, Evil, Shape-Shifting Bug?” Victorian Literature and Culture
39, no. 1 (2011).
11. Gold, Thermopoetics, 91.
12. Guthrie Tait and Balfour Stewart, The Unseen Universe or Speculations
on a Future State (London: Macmillan, 1875), 64, italics original. For
related discussion of The Unseen Universe, see, e.g., Michael Whitworth,
Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001), 60–61; Bruce Clarke, “Allegories of Vic-
torian Thermodynamics,” Configurations 4, no. 1 (1996), 84–85; and
Myers, “Popularizations of Thermodynamics,” 327.
13. Clarke, “Allegories of Victorian Thermodynamics,” 85.
230 E. ALDER
14. Myers, “Popularizations of Thermodynamics,” 317–18; and for a dis-

cussion of the varied stances of physicists towards religion, see David B.
Wilson, “A Physicist’s Alternative to Materialism: The Religious Thought
of George Gabriel Stokes,” in Energy and Entropy: Science and Culture
in Victorian Britain, ed. Patrick Brantlinger (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1989).
15. Alexander, Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable, 7–8.
16. Egil Asprem, “Pondering Imponderables: Occultism in the Mirror of
Late Classical Physics,” Aries 11, no. 2 (2011).
17. Richard Noakes, “The ‘World of the Infinitely Little’: Connecting Physi-
cal and Psychical Realities Circa 1900,” Studies in History and Philosophy
of Science Part A 39, no. 3 (2008).
18. William Crookes, “Some Further Experiments on Psychic Force: 1871,”
in Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (Manchester: Two Worlds
Publishing Company, 1926), 43.
19. Frederick Soddy, The Interpretation of Radium: Being the Substance of Six
Free Popular Experimental Lectures Delivered at the University of Glas-
gow, 1908 (London: John Murray, 1912), 252, and on Soddy’s career
and achievements, see Linda Merricks, The World Made New (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996).
20. Joshua Glenn, “Science Fiction: The Radium Age,” Nature 489,
no. 7415 (2012).
21. For discussions, see Alastair I. M. Rae, Quantum Physics: Illusion or
Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); John Polk-
inghorne, Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002); Niels Bohr, Atomic Theory and the Description
of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934); and P[aul]
A. M. Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1958).
22. John Henry, A Short History of Scientific Thought (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012), 290.
23. Polkinghorne, Quantum Theory, 21, 85.
24. Srdjan Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists Theories of Vision
Press, 2010), 146; see also Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritu-
alism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1985), 327.
25. Bohr, Atomic Theory, 92.
26. Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, 11.
27. Bohr, Atomic Theory, 4.
28. Polkinghorne, Quantum Theory, 21; see also Dirac, The Principles of
Quantum Mechanics, 12.
29. Rachel Crossland, Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in

the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2018); Susan Strehle, Fiction in the Quantum Universe
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); and Christina
Scholz, “Quantum Fiction!—M. John Harrison’s Empty Space Trilogy
and Weird Theory,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017). Arthur Machen’s
interest in parallel worlds and other dimensions is shown in his 1936
story “N,” for example, see Aaron Worth, “Introduction,” in The Great
God Pan and Other Horror Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2018), xxix–xxx.
30. See Michael Whitworth, “Inspector Heat Inspected,” 50; Bohr, Atomic
Theory.
31. Asprem, “Pondering Imponderables,” 132.
32. Gold, Thermopoetics, 31.
33. Mark Blacklock, “Higher Spatial Form in Weird Fiction,” Textual Prac-
tice 31, no. 6 (2017), 1106; see also Jacob Huntley, “Deleuzian Folds
in Hodgson’s the Ghost Pirates,” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerg-
ing Knowledge 21 (2010), on folds of reality in Hodgson’s The Ghost
Pirates (1909).
34. Darryl Jones, “Borderlands: Spiritualism and the Occult in Fin-de-Siècle
and Edwardian Welsh and Irish Horror,” Irish Studies Review 17, no. 1
(2009), 40.
35. Gary K. Wolfe, “The House on the Borderland,” in Survey of Mod-
ern Fantasy Literature, Vol. 3, ed. Frank Magill (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Salem Press, 1983), 744.
36. Wolfe, “The House on the Borderland,” 744.
37. George C. Wallis, “The Last Days of Earth,” in The Mammoth Book of
Science Fiction, ed. Michael Ashley (London: Robinson, 2002), 260.
38. Camille Flammarion, Omega: The Last Days of the World (Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 109–10; H. G. Wells, The Time
Machine (London: Penguin, 2006), 81–82; and William Hope Hodgson,
“The Night Land,” in The House on the Borderland and Other Novels
(London: Gollancz, 2002), 133. All subsequent quotations are taken
from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text.
39. Thomson, “On the Sun’s Heat (1887),” 397; see also Thomson, “On
the Age of the Sun’s Heat (1862).”
40. Ludwig Boltzmann, “The Second Law of Thermodynamics,” in Theo-
retical Physics and Philosophical Problems [1886], ed. Brian McGuinness
(Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974), 24.
41. Algernon Charles Swinburne, “The Garden of Proserpine,” in Major
Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), l.89–96.
42. Hodgson, “House on the Borderland,” 177.
232 E. ALDER
43. George Levine, Realism, Ethics and Secularism (Cambridge: Cambridge

44. Thomson, “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat (1862),” 393.
45. Clarke, “Allegories of Victorian Thermodynamics,” 99.
1888), 240.
47. Frank Lillie Pollock, “Finis,” in The Mammoth Book of Science Fiction,
ed. Michael Ashley (London: Robinson, 2002), 245.
48. Amanda Boulter, “The House on the Borderland: The Sexual Politics of
Fear,” in Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century,
ed. Clive Bloom (Boulder, CO: Pluto Press, 1993). Blackwood’s “The
Listener,” involving an unreliable misanthropic narrator and a house
haunted by the ghost of leper may be an influence for The House on the
Borderland. See Donald Burleson, “Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Listen-
er’: A Hearing,” Studies in Weird Fiction 5 (1989); Terry W. Thompson,
“‘He Used to Wear a Veil’: Pursuing the Other in Algernon Blackwood’s
‘The Listener,’” Papers on Language and Literature 42, no. 1 (2006),
103.
49. Wells, The Time Machine, 81. Wells is one of the few authors whose
work Hodgson is definitely known to have read; R. Alain Everts, William
Hope Hodgson: Night Pirate, Vol. 2 (Toronto: Soft Books, 1987), 7; on
Hodgson’s reading, see also Jane Frank, The Wandering Soul: Glimpses
of a Life: A Compendium of Rare and Unpublished Works (Hornsea;
Leyburn: PS; Tartarus, 2005), 80; and Sam Moskowitz, “William Hope
Hodgson: The Early Years,” in Out of the Storm: Uncollected Fantasies
(West Kingston, RI: D.M. Grant, 1975), 23.
50. Oliver Tearle, “Dustopian Fictions: William Hope Hodgson and the
Thing to Do,” Interdisciplinary Humanities 27, no. 2 (2010), 126, 128.
51. H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled (New York: J. W. Bouton, 1877), 159.
1888), 3.
53. Jones, “Borderlands,” 32.
54. See Richard Noakes, “The ‘Bridge Which Is Between Physical and Psy-
chical Research’: William Fletcher Barrett, Sensitive Flames, and Spir-
itualism,” History of Science xliii (2004) on action at a distance; and
Rae, Quantum Physics, and Polkinghorne, Quantum Theory, on quan-
tum simultaneity.
55. Fiona Stafford, The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth From Milton
to Darwin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 305.
56. Patrick Parrinder, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and
Prophecy (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1995), 40.
57. Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1, 277.

58. See Andy Sawyer, “Time Machines Go Both Ways: Past and Future in
H. G. Wells and W. H. Hodgson,” (1995), accessed 27 October 2008,
http://www.thenightland.co.uk/nightwells.html.
59. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (Edinburgh: Blackwood,
1871), 53. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page
numbers are given in brackets in the text. For discussion, see Susan
Stone-Blackburn, “Consciousness Evolution and Early Telepathic Tales,”
Science Fiction Studies (1993), 246–47.
60. Louis J. Lanzerotti and Giovanni P. Gregori, “Telluric Currents: The
Natural Environment and Interactions with Man-Made Systems,” in The
Earth’s Electrical Environment (Washington, DC: National Academy
Press, 1986), 232.
61. Dionysius Lardner, Handbook of Natural Philosophy (London: Walton
and Maberly, 1858), 205; Henry Mance, “Method of Measuring the
Resistance of a Conductor or of a Battery, or of a Telegraph-Line Influ-
enced by Unknown Earth-Currents, from a Single Deflection of a Gal-
vanometer of Unknown Resistance,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of
London 19 (1870–1): 248–252.
62. Stone-Blackburn, “Consciousness Evolution and Early Telepathic Tales,”
247.
63. Thomas Henry Huxley, “Evolution & Ethics,” in Evolution & Ethics and
Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1894), 81–83.
64. Huxley, “Evolution & Ethics,” 85.
65. Thomas Henry Huxley, “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society,”
in Evolution & Ethics and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1894), 199.
66. Huxley, “Evolution & Ethics,” 82.
67. William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880–1940
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 194.
68. See Kelly Hurley, “The Modernist Abominations of William Hope
Hodgson,” in Gothic Modernisms, ed. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
69. See Hurley, “Modernist Abominations.”
70. Andy Robertson, “Sharks of the Ether: Immortality, Reincarnation, and
Psychic Predation Within a Science-Fictional Framework in Hodgson’s
Fiction” (2007), accessed 22 October 2008, http://www.thenightland.
co.uk/nightsoul.html, para. 14.
2011), 5–6.
72. Algernon Blackwood, Episodes Before Thirty (London: Cassell and Com-
pany, 1923), 36.
73. Algernon Blackwood, “The Wendigo,” in Ancient Sorceries and Other
Weird Stories (London: Penguin, 2002), 185. The Wendigo is based
234 E. ALDER
loosely on an Algonquin legend as “the wind-walker of the Earth spirit”;

Mike Ashley, Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Black-
wood (London: Constable, 2001), 97.
74. Poland, “Walking with the Goat-God: Gothic Ecology in Algernon
Blackwood’s Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories,” Critical Sur-
vey 29, no. 1 (2017), 65. Poland quotes from Philippe Borgeaud, The
Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece, trans. Kathleen Atlass and James Redfield
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 59.
75. Michelle Poland, “Walking with the Goat-God.”
76. Ashley, Starlight Man, 106–9.
77. Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows,” in The Listener and Other Stories
(London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), 181–82. All subsequent quotations are
taken from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the
text.
78. Compare Algernon Blackwood, The Centaur (London: Macmillan,
1911), 254–55, 258.
79. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism,
1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 228.
80. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 14.
81. David Punter, “Algernon Blackwood: Nature and Spirit,” in Ecogothic,
ed. William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Manchester: Manchester Uni-
versity Press, 2013), 48–49.
82. Rev. Josiah Crampton, Solar Willow-Leaves: Or, an Account of the Great
Spot in the Sun, as Observed By Mr. Nasmyth, in July 1860 (Dublin:
George Herbert, 1861), 3–4.
83. Crampton, Solar Willow-Leaves, 6. Nasmyth’s illustration can be viewed
here in the Science Museum’s online collection http://collection.
sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects/co56984/solar-spot-oil-painting, last
accessed 30 August 2018.
84. Hunt, “Source of Heat in the Sun,” 153.
85. Hunt, “Source of Heat in the Sun,” 153.
86. Crampton, Solar Willow-Leaves, 15.
87. Hunt, “The Source of Heat in the Sun.”
91. Blacklock, “Higher Spatial Form in Weird Fiction,” 1104.
93. Scholz, “Quantum Fiction!” 1152.
94. Kev Alistair, quoted in Scholz, “Quantum Fiction!” 1152.
95. Rae, Quantum Physics, 3; see also Dirac, The Principles of Quantum
Mechanics, 12.
96. Poland, “Walking with the Goat-God,” 59.
97. Algernon Blackwood, “May Day Eve,” in The Listener and Other Stories
(London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), 283–84. All subsequent quotations are
taken from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the
text.
98. On gross and etheric bodies in Theosophy, see Asprem, “Pondering
Imponderables,” 157.
99. Asprem, “Pondering Imponderables,” 133.
100. Algernon Blackwood, “The Woman’s Ghost Story,” in The Listener and
Other Stories (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), 343. All subsequent quo-
tations are taken from this edition and page numbers are given in brack-
ets in the text.
101. Blackwood, “The Wendigo,” 167.
Afterword
This book has explored the place of British weird fiction in contexts of fin-
de-siècle sciences. I have tried to show that the weird tale became what it is
as a direct result of the conditions of Western scientific culture in the late-
nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Weird fictions are stimulated not
just by new and startling scientific discoveries—although these are clearly
significant inspirations—but also by a new awareness of the limitations of
scientific knowing, particularly of any single form of scientific knowing.
That awareness is inseparable from genre. Nominally, science and popular
fiction are considered different genres. But as I have been exploring, in
the mode of weird, the overlap is considerable; the ideas and discourses
of many of the scientific fields I chose to investigate were already weird to
start with. That weirdness is only really visible with hindsight, after more
than a hundred and thirty years of the weird tale, and so the history of the
weird tale itself becomes a kind of Möbius strip, abhistorical, pseudobib-
liac, a failure of absence, leaving a visible trail that nevertheless at many
points has been elided in criticism, if not among readers. Something sim-
ilar is revealed about the world’s natural physical phenomena; the world
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science thought it knew turned out
to be something else, something much less stable and knowable. Like nat-
ural selection, abhistories, and outer monstrosities, the more-than-visible
quantum world has been there all along, we just didn’t know it. The
occult revival in this fin-de-siècle context is as logical as the emergence of
the weird tale.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 237

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4
238 AFTERWORD
Writers of weird tales, like occultists, scientists, and scientist characters,

shared a sense of the world’s multiple dimensions of wonder, and the
urge to show how close they lay to the quotidian world and how easily
a change of perspective could open them up. One Blackwood protago-
nist realises “in how simple a fashion the frontiers of consciousness could
shift this way and that, or with what touch of genuine awe the certainty
might come that one stood on the borderland of new, untried, perhaps
dangerous experiences.”1 To be certain of being poised on the edge of
such a borderland is arguably always a condition of modernity, but it cer-
tainly describes my experience of my current moment, as I write in early
2019 on the brink of Brexit, in the midst of Trump’s (first?) post-truth
presidency, and in the expanding wake of climate change and ocean plas-
tic. To me, questions of what we know, how we know it, how we act
accordingly, and how to break out of the systemic circumscriptions of our
everyday concerns have never been more pertinent, nor, probably, more
difficult to answer.
Can weird tales help? In the way I have tried to present them in this
book, they can offer critical ways to think about knowledge, agency, and
possibility, about the meaningfulness of action in a world where action can
feel meaningless. Meaningful agency may depend on recognising its lim-
its, that we should not act as if we know how everything in reality works,
but welcome the fact that we don’t, recognising that a more responsible
ethical position can’t depend on certain knowledge, because certainty is
an impossible state. It’s not for us to make assumptions about either our
own efficacy or about what is and isn’t possible, particularly within our
limited human sense of time. Weird tales depend on deep time, future and
past, on a sense of what existence is that transcends the individual or the
nation as well as the human, on escaping the numerous binary structures
that govern most of our modernity.
Fin-de-siècle weird writers shared, write Ann and Jeff VanderMeer,
some element of the visionary in their writing, some impulse or worldview

that catapulted them beyond the everyday. In some, it is expressed in their
writing as just a glimmer or a glint from a deep well. In others it is a great,
raging fire at the centre of their work.2
That glimmer or fire may be the light of ecstatic revelation, or it may be

the glint in the eye-analogue of whatever is lurking just out of perception.
The transformative moment may be wondrous or terrible, but the point
AFTERWORD 239
is perhaps the moment rather than the outcome. As the protagonist of

Blackwood’s “May Day Eve” notices, “[m]y consciousness was expanding
and I had caught it in the very act.”3
Notes
1. Algernon Blackwood, “May Day Eve,” in The Listener and Other Stories
(London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), 292.
2. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, “Introduction,” in The Weird: A Compendium of
Strange and Dark Stories, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (London: Corvus,
2011), xvii.
3. Blackwood, “May Day Eve,” 293.
Index
A hierarchy, 163
Abcanny, 11, 27, 59, 61 non-anthropocentric, 12
Abfuture, 196, 202, 203, 206, 209, ontology, 195
214, 227 worldview, 163
Abhistory, 11, 16, 60, 61, 65, 69, Astral journey, 18
142, 162, 237 Atom, 24, 84, 195, 199–201
Abhumans, 36, 61, 76, 156, 180 Authority, 16, 20, 29, 92, 116, 124,
Agency, 13, 16, 31, 59, 90, 102, 134, 132, 144, 146, 163, 222
139, 143, 159, 181, 195–197,
211, 214, 216, 217, 238
Alchemy, 63, 68 B
Alterity, 11, 14 Beast People, 31, 161, 167, 168,
Anatomy, 97, 164, 174, 175 170–174
Animal, 14, 19, 25, 26, 31, 96, 101– Bergson, Henri, 47–49, 178, 184
103, 107, 160–179, 185–188, Besant, Annie, 20, 21, 47, 87, 153
222 Binary(ies), 7, 12, 24, 49–52, 94, 97,
bodies, 166 108, 238
consciousness, 169 Biological borderland, 31, 160, 162,
evolutions of, 160 171
kingdom, 164, 176, 177 Biology, 14, 23, 25–27, 31, 47, 69,
monster, 31 82, 92, 159, 160, 162–164, 169,
Anthropocentricity, 61, 170, 182 170, 172, 175–178, 185, 187,
construction, 216 188
expression, 170 history of, 176
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 241

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4
242 INDEX
Blackwood, Algernon, 3, 13, 27, and soul, 93

29–32, 55, 117, 128, 132–136, and spirit, 51, 54, 57, 65, 70, 83,
195, 196, 201, 202, 214, 215, 84, 88–90, 93, 94, 96, 108,
221, 222, 225, 227, 228, 238 121, 206
“Ancient Sorceries,” 133, 141 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 204
“The Camp of the Dog,” 133, 138, Borderland, 3, 8, 11, 16–20, 25, 26,
141 28, 30–32, 48, 49, 54, 58, 61,
The Centaur, 75, 135 79, 159, 160, 162, 165, 166,
John Silence, 7, 18, 29, 30, 175, 187, 195, 199, 206, 207,
115–118, 121, 122, 128, 211, 228, 238
133–142, 149, 196–198 science, 2, 4, 17, 26, 29, 80, 103,
“The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” 117, 150, 202
13, 117, 135 scientists, 2
“May Day Eve,” 75, 196, 225, 239 spaces, 159
“The Nemesis of Fire,” 125, 128, Boundaries, 2, 27, 31, 53, 69, 141,
133, 137, 138, 141 175, 177, 181, 209
Pan’s Garden, 215, 225 Brain, 18, 47, 62, 63, 83, 92, 93, 96,
“A Psychical Invasion,” 133–138, 97, 99, 182
140, 196 and spirit, 94
“Secret Worship,” 133, 141 surgery, 17
“A Victim of Higher Space,” 133, Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 2, 9, 18, 37,
137, 138, 140, 141, 222, 226 118, 150, 175, 210
“The Wendigo,” 117, 135, 215, The Coming Race, 18, 210, 211
228 A Strange Story, 2, 9, 18, 118
“The Willows,” 30, 31, 117, 196, Vril, 212
201–204, 215–220, 222–225, Zanoni, 18
228
“The Woman’s Ghost Story,” 132,
196, 226 C
Blavatsky, Helena, 20, 24, 84, 205, Carnivorous plant, 25, 176, 177
207, 210, 221, 222 Carnivorous tree, 176
Isis Unveiled, 205 Cells, 164, 172, 173, 185
The Secret Doctrine, 20, 24, 84, Chaos, 170, 198, 215. See also
221–222 Disorder
Body, 19, 47, 80, 83, 84, 91–93, Chemistry, 46, 52, 63, 79, 88, 89,
95–97, 99, 102, 103, 109, 116, 103, 128, 173, 185
123, 129, 138, 139, 149, 162, Christianity, 22–23, 29, 59, 163
164, 169–171, 173, 180–182, Collins, Wilkie, 9
226 Colonial, 220. See also Imperialism
and brain, 98, 102 Communication, 17, 22, 24, 85, 118,
and mind, 19, 66, 70, 79, 83, 86, 148, 211, 227
93, 102, 169 technologies, 83
INDEX 243
Conan Doyle, Arthur, 18, 25, 120, Doctor, 18, 28, 66, 88, 92, 95–102,
175, 176 116, 123, 136, 139, 145,
“The American’s Tale,” 176 183–185
“The Horror of the Heights,” 25 Dracula, 16
Sherlock Holmes, 29, 115, 117, Dr Hesselius, 18, 29
119–121 Drug, 18, 88, 90, 93, 98–104, 106,
Consciousness, 31, 46–49, 54, 63, 107, 138
65, 70, 92, 96, 98, 99, 102, 134, Dualism/dualities, 50, 52, 94
159, 166, 169, 185, 187, 204,
226
E
Corelli, Marie, 9 Ecology, 13
A Romance of Two Worlds , 9, 18 Ecstasy, 30, 57–59, 61, 69, 70, 94,
Cosmos, 12, 15, 21, 23, 195, 207, 102
209, 213 Eerie, 13, 59, 62, 69, 164
Creatures, 14, 31, 160, 162, 164, Einstein, Albert, 200, 228
171–174, 177, 179 élan vital , 184, 221
Crookes, William, 21, 106, 121, 148, Electrical fluid. See Mesmerism
199 Electricity, 2, 17, 18, 118, 123, 148,
Cryptogams, 31, 162, 164, 175–179, 185, 201, 211, 214
188 Electric Pentacle, 142–144, 148, 149
Cumberland, Stuart, 9 Emotion, 52, 71, 91, 93, 102–104,
107, 133, 138, 226
Empire, 140. See also Colonial;
Imperialism
D
Empiricism, 15, 20–22, 24, 25, 32,
Darwin, Charles, 25, 162–164, 172, 47, 52, 68, 79–81, 83–87, 89,
176, 185, 193, 209 90, 93, 95–97, 100, 103–105,
On the Origin of Species , 25, 26 108, 131, 132, 140, 146, 147,
Darwinism, 26, 163, 172, 174, 161, 165, 174, 195
181, 182, 210. See also Natural Energy, 23, 24, 31, 84, 184, 195–
Selection 202, 204, 205, 207, 209, 211,
Detective, 115–117, 119, 120, 212, 214–219, 221, 225, 227
123–125, 132, 145 conservation, 197–199, 227
stories, 29, 115 physics, 30, 195, 196, 203
Determinism, 19, 47 Entropy, 31, 196, 198, 211, 216–219
Dimensions, 4, 11, 26, 31, 45, 54, 80, Epistemology, 4, 22, 28, 47, 54, 61,
84, 98, 137, 202–203, 206–209, 71, 79–83, 87, 88, 91, 93, 96,
238 103, 121, 123, 124, 205
fourth dimension, 140–141, Eschatology, 31
222–223, 231 Ether, 24, 130, 199, 200, 212
Disorder, 196, 198, 212, 215, 216, Evil, 12, 51, 58–59, 61, 65, 69, 70,
218 97, 138–139, 196–198
244 INDEX
Evolution, 1, 25, 31, 46, 67, 162– Ghost story, 3, 6–10, 18, 34, 120,
165, 168, 170–176, 179, 182, 125, 132, 133, 146, 152
187, 188, 209–211, 223 Golden Dawn, Hermetic Order of,
control of, 168 21, 29, 42, 55, 87, 124, 134,
Evolutionary theory, 23, 27, 209 136, 137, 144, 153
Experiment(s), 17, 28, 29, 52–54, 62, Gothic, 3, 10, 11, 30, 32, 127
65, 71, 79–86, 88–95, 98–108, Gothic fiction, 2, 4, 10, 14, 18, 25
166–170, 174
experimental science, 22
Expert, 29, 30, 116, 117, 120, H
122–124, 126, 138, 140, 141, Haeckel, Ernst, 163, 164, 175, 178
149 Haunted house, 232
Haunting, 115, 117–119, 122, 123,
127, 131–133, 143, 145, 149,
F
227
Faith, 19, 21, 86–87
Heat-death, 31, 196–198, 202, 204,
Fantasy, 2, 11, 14, 45, 209
205, 211, 215, 227. See also
Feminine/femininity, 116, 122, 124,
Energy
133
Heron, E., and H., 7, 29, 117, 122,
Fin-de-siècle, 3, 4, 6–8, 14, 16, 22,
127
23, 26, 32, 46–49, 52, 65, 70,
Flaxman Low, 18, 29, 115, 116,
87, 103, 118, 124, 141, 160,
120, 124, 125, 127, 129
162, 175, 179, 195, 199, 210,
220, 227, 228, 237, 238 “The Story of Baelbrow,” 126–128,
occult, 22 131
science, 4, 5, 23, 237 “The Story of Crowsedge,” 129
Flammarion, Camille, 203, 204 “The Story of Flaxman Low,”
Force(s), 10, 12, 16, 24, 26, 31, 32, 129–130
84, 118, 119, 127, 136, 138, “The Story of Konnor Old House,”
139, 143, 144, 146, 185, 195, 117
197, 199, 201, 202, 214, 215, “The Story of Moor Road,” 128
222, 224 “The Story of Saddler’s Croft,”
Fungi/fungus, 25, 31, 117, 161, 164, 126, 128
175–183, 186, 188 “The Story of the Grey House,”
130
“The Story of ‘The Spaniards’,
G Hammersmith,” 124, 126,
Gender, 14, 18, 113, 118, 123, 124 128, 131
Genre, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 16 “The Story of Yand Manor House,”
Geometry, 27, 223 117, 130, 131
Ghost, 1, 6, 118, 127, 134, 143–145, Heterotopia, 31, 160, 162, 165, 166,
226, 227, 232 171, 174, 175, 179, 181, 187
haunting, 226 History, 11, 175
INDEX 245
Hodgson, William Hope, 2, 3, 5, 139, 163, 165–167, 170, 171,

12, 14, 30, 31, 61, 115, 142, 182, 183, 187, 196, 204, 205,
159–164, 175, 177, 179, 180, 208, 209
183, 185, 187, 188, 195, 201, Hunter, John, 175
203, 206, 209, 210, 214, 227 Huxley, T. H., 81–84, 93, 163, 167,
The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ , 14, 192, 211
25, 176
Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, 30, 117,
142 I
“The Derelict,” 31, 159–161, 173, Immaterial, 17, 21, 82, 85, 87, 91,
179, 183–185, 187, 188 97, 130, 143, 185, 209
Life-Force in, 184 Imperialism, 135, 140, 143, 166, 220
“The Gateway of the Monster,” Instrument(s), 2, 21, 64, 65, 79, 80,
142, 143, 146, 148, 149 82–84, 92, 93, 99, 105, 123,
“The Hog,” 142, 148, 149 128, 129, 138, 139, 148, 149
“The Horse of the Invisible,” 142, electric instruments, 119
147 passive instruments, 149
“The House Among the Laurels,” Irrationality, 1, 14, 19, 107, 119,
142 127, 140, 226
The House on the Borderland, 1, Island, 160–162, 174, 176, 179, 180,
11, 26, 30, 31, 196, 202–206, 187, 215, 216, 220, 221, 224
209, 214, 228 as heterotopia, 169, 171, 177
The Night Land, 5, 6, 13, 30, 31, heterotopic qualities of, 175
147, 180, 196, 201–204, 207,
laboratory, 166
209–214, 228
Earth-Current in, 210, 211
Electricity in, 214
“The Searcher of the End House,” J
142 James, M. R., 6, 130
“The Thing Invisible,” 142, James, William, 68, 99, 100
145–147, 149
Thomas Carnacki, 5, 18, 29,
115–117, 121, 122, 142–149 K
“The Voice in the Night,” 31, 159, Kingdom, 25, 163, 164, 175,
161, 175, 179, 183–188 177–180, 186–188
“The Whistling Room,” 142, 143, Knowledge, 3–8, 15–16, 19–23, 27,
146, 147 29–31, 45, 54–66, 69–71, 79–95,
Hoffman, E. T. A., 9 98–100, 102–106, 108–109,
Home, Daniel Dunglas, 85 115–116, 119–122, 124–128,
Horror, 2, 3, 7, 9, 11–13, 15, 17, 29, 130, 132, 134–142, 144, 149,
30, 45, 51–55, 58, 65, 67–70, 165–168, 199, 205, 220, 227,
97, 101, 102, 107–109, 136, 238
246 INDEX
L Magnetism, 24, 119, 148, 211

Laboratory, 79, 83, 88, 89, 92, 95, Masculine/masculinity, 116, 123–125,
161, 169 128, 133, 135, 138, 141
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 172, 173 Mastery, 4, 16, 23, 52, 104, 106,
Lamarckism, 172, 174, 188 107, 129, 140, 215
Le Fanu, Sheridan, 9, 18, 29, 118 Materialism, 6, 18, 20, 22, 27, 55–57,
Light , 20, 86 61, 63, 69, 70, 80, 82, 85, 87,
Liminal spaces, 161, 187 88, 95, 97, 108, 109, 127, 131,
Linnaeus, Carl, 177 143, 149, 159, 160, 166, 168,
Literature, 25–27, 164, 196, 228 169, 183, 187, 211
Literature and science, 3, 4 Mathematics, 6, 27, 91, 135, 202
London, 49, 58–59, 62, 65–66, 75, Matter, 127, 149, 159, 170, 175,
140, 170 178, 183–185, 188, 199, 226
Lovecraft, H. P., 1, 6, 7, 9–12, 15,
kingdoms of, 188
16, 28, 30, 52, 116, 117
and spirit, 141, 198
“The Call of Cthulhu,” 6, 11, 14,
16 Medical/medicine, 46, 96, 103, 135,
“The Dunwich Horror,” 55 136, 139
Lovecraftian, 1, 6, 12, 67 knowledge, 166
studies, 49
Medium, 21, 116, 123, 125, 129,
M 134, 138, 140, 149
Machen, Arthur, 2, 7, 11, 13, 17, 22, Men, 122–124
28, 45, 54–61, 63, 68–71, 76, Mendel, Gregor, 172, 173
93, 94, 97, 108, 134, 165, 207, Mesmerism, 18, 210
208, 231
Mind, 14, 19, 47, 48, 69, 81, 82, 91,
Far Off Things , 54, 58, 60, 68
92, 100, 105, 106, 108, 109,
“A Fragment of Life,” 58
116, 122, 134, 143, 197
The Great God Pan, 2, 3, 7, 12, 14,
and body, 81, 137
16, 17, 28, 45, 51, 54–56, 59,
61–71, 80, 92–95, 98, 101, human mind, 21, 102
159, 166 and spirit, 63, 108
The Three Impostors , 55–60, 65, 92, Modernism, 16
97 Monster, 11, 12, 14, 15, 19, 28, 31,
“The Inmost Light,” 12, 28, 56, 45, 52, 59, 97, 107, 139, 143,
61, 62, 79, 92–98 144, 148, 149, 160–162, 164,
“The Red Hand,” 58, 59 175, 177, 179–181, 183, 184,
“The Shining Pyramid,” 59, 60, 65 187, 198, 206, 209, 210, 213
“The White People,” 58, 63 Monstrosity, 14, 15, 32, 49, 53, 128,
Mach, Ernst, 25, 81, 97 202, 214, 237
Magic, 18, 19, 54, 58, 83, 103–106, Morality, 12, 13, 23, 50–52, 56, 64,
120, 121, 124, 142, 145, 148, 69, 95, 97, 165, 166, 169–170,
214 205, 210–212, 225
INDEX 247
More-than-visible, 5, 20, 21, 24, 25, knowledge, 30

82, 102, 125, 134, 135, 140, science, 24, 115, 120, 135
141, 166, 168, 195, 198, 205, scientist, 95, 136, 145
218 technologies, 147
Mould, 31, 177, 183, 186 Occultism, 18, 20, 22–24, 28, 29, 39,
Mycology, 164 42, 88, 94, 119, 121, 124, 125,
Myers, F. W. H., 24, 27, 47–49, 51, 128, 132, 134–136, 143, 159,
53, 89, 118, 126 201, 203
Mystic, 18, 28, 87, 94, 139, 140, 207 Occultists, 20, 29, 84, 97, 121, 124,
experience, 55, 58, 68, 69, 93, 98, 125, 205, 238
99 Ocean, 25, 160, 161, 187
knowing, 100 heterotopic qualities of, 175
state, 99–101 Ontology, 4, 7, 10, 54, 61, 69, 87,
worldview, 28 91, 108, 130, 144, 149, 160,
Myxomycetes, 178, 186 165, 180, 199, 209, 226
N P
Nasmyth, James, 220–222 Passivity, 93, 100, 102, 116, 123,
Natural history, 162, 178 124, 128, 129, 134, 139
Natural selection, 25, 163, 164, 168, Philosophy, 4, 19, 23, 32, 51, 69, 89,
173, 174, 179, 187, 237 200, 201, 206, 214, 215, 228
Nature, 13, 15, 23, 25, 107–109, Physicists, 24–25, 106, 201
128, 182, 198–199, 214, 221 Physics, 23–25, 27, 119, 121, 165,
Nerves, 63, 98, 99, 123 199–201, 203, 205, 211, 228
Nervous system, 96 new physics, 27, 32, 199, 228
Nesbit, Edith, 3, 28, 54, 79, 98, 108, Physiology, 31, 47, 63, 69, 94, 96,
207 108, 164, 165, 166, 167, 174,
“The Five Senses,” 28, 29, 79, 82, 175, 185, 188
89, 103–109 borderlands of, 169
“The Three Drugs,” 28, 29, 79–80, Planck, Max, 200, 201, 228
89, 98–102 Plant(s), 25, 130, 175–179, 188
Neurology, 62, 92, 96 evolution of, 160
New Weird, 3, 33 kingdom of, 176
Numinous, 57, 58, 61, 62, 70, 95 Plasticity, 159, 162, 171, 177, 188
Poe, Edgar Allan, 2, 9, 17, 37
Pollock, Frank Lillie, 205
O Positivism, 21, 23, 47, 49, 80, 110
Occult, 7, 9, 17, 18, 24, 27, 29, 55, Positivist, 18, 24, 27, 32, 56, 63, 65,
64, 120, 122, 124, 127, 129, 70, 80, 83, 86, 87, 93, 94, 101,
140, 142, 145, 202, 205, 237 102, 104, 106, 109, 116
detectives, 116. See also Weirdfinder science, 7, 19, 61, 80, 86, 87, 150
forces, 146 worldview, 45
248 INDEX
Pratchett, Terry, 1, 2, 14, 41 Q

Prichard, Kate and Hesketh, 29, 125. Quantum, 105, 237
See also Heron, E., and H. mechanics, 23, 27, 32, 196, 227,
Profession, 66, 116, 117, 120 228
Professional, 116, 120–126, 128, 141, physics, 1
145 reality(ies), 200, 202
authority, 125 state, 224, 227
detective, 132 theory, 27, 199–201, 223, 224,
expert, 126, 135 226, 228
Professionalisation, 29, 151 world, 200, 201, 223, 225, 237
Progenerate, 168, 179, 188
Pseudoscience, 22, 147 R
Psychic, 29, 84, 101, 116, 127, 130, Rabbit, 164, 170–172, 174
149, 198 Radioactivity, 195, 199, 202, 228
capacities, 88 Rationalism, 97
force, 143, 148, 202 Rationality, 15, 19, 21, 22, 32, 46,
health, 210 61, 66, 80, 87, 100, 108, 117,
planes, 149 119, 122, 128, 133, 147, 160,
sensitivity, 17 166, 168, 170, 183–185, 187,
Psychic detective, 117, 124. See also 188, 212, 218–220, 225
Weirdfinder Realism, 40
Psychic doctor, 30, 116, 133, 136, Reality(ies), 1, 13, 15, 19, 21, 23,
196. See also Weirdfinder 28, 31, 32, 46, 80–82, 84,
Psychical phenomena, 21, 39, 84 85, 87, 98, 102, 103, 105,
Psychical research, 16, 17, 20, 22, 24, 107–109, 120, 121, 128, 132,
27, 28, 30, 84, 118–121, 123, 134, 140–142, 147, 160, 161,
132, 133, 135, 159, 165, 166, 182, 186, 196, 199–202, 205,
199 223, 225, 227, 228
Psychology, 23, 24, 26–28, 46–49, Religion, 21, 22, 94, 198
54, 69, 70, 89, 123, 126, 127, Riddell, Charlotte, 8
223 Röntgen rays, 201
experience, 98 Rosny aîné, J.-H., 185
explorations, 49
goal, 166 S
ideas, 48 Science, 5, 7, 13, 16, 19–21, 24, 27,
marker, 100 29, 32, 45, 46, 57, 68, 70, 71,
mystery, 140 85, 87, 94, 97, 118–121, 134,
pathology, 51 136, 148, 159, 162, 165, 167,
state, 99 168, 170, 198, 201, 228, 237
theories, 48, 54 history of, 61
unity, 65 materialist, 63
INDEX 249
positivist, 61 Spirit, 23, 65, 84–86, 88, 91–93, 95,

Science fiction, 2–4, 7, 9–11, 14, 17, 127–129, 131, 139, 148, 149,
61 207, 213
Scientific borderlands, 3, 4, 28, 46 and matter, 168
Scientific method, 20, 63–65, 80, communications, 145
86–87, 90, 104, 109, 126, 166 world, 15, 16, 21, 24, 93, 119,
Scientist, 6, 12, 17, 20, 21, 28, 61, 127, 213
64, 79, 80, 83, 88, 90, 92–95, Spiritual, 9, 18, 21, 30, 83, 90–92,
104–109, 116, 120–122, 125, 125, 127, 128, 160, 185, 209,
126, 132, 151, 163, 166, 168, 222
169, 238 spiritual energies, 213
Sea. See Ocean spiritual phenomena, 128
Séance, 17, 24, 84–87, 89, 90, 111, spiritual sensitivity, 149
143 Spiritualism, 7, 15, 17–20, 22, 24, 28,
Self-control, 125, 130, 139. See also 46, 55, 85–87, 121, 123, 124,
Willpower 128, 143, 160, 165, 166, 228
Self-experiment, 95, 102, 103 Spiritualist(s), 17, 20, 22, 83, 84, 86,
Sensations, 99 87, 123
Senses, 25, 28, 66, 67, 80–84, 90–92, The Spiritualist , 20, 89, 123
98, 99, 102, 103, 105–108 Spontaneous generation, 162, 178,
Sensory experience, 29, 81, 82, 92, 179, 188, 193
103, 108 SPR. See Society for Psychical Research
Sf. See Science fiction Stead, W. T., 16, 17, 53, 125
Shelley, Mary, 2 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 2, 16, 17,
Frankenstein, 2, 3 27, 45, 46, 48, 49, 70
Victor Frankenstein, 104, 122 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde, 3, 7, 17, 27–28, 45–57,
Ship, 183
62, 63, 70, 71, 79, 80, 88–92,
Sixth sense, 84
98, 160
Sleuth, 29, 115, 116. See also
Stewart, Balfour, 21, 24, 198, 205
Weirdfinder
Submission, 98, 100–102, 139
Slime mould, 164, 175, 178, 186
Supernatural, 7, 8, 10, 11, 15, 18, 19,
Society for Psychical Research, 20, 21,
30, 60, 82, 127, 135, 136, 213
29, 47, 63, 83, 86, 118, 121,
fantasies, 28
126, 136
horror, 12
Soddy, Frederick, 199
mystery, 140
Soul, 17, 21, 26, 70, 87, 92–95, 116,
Surgery, 79
134, 143, 164, 166, 168, 182,
surgical techniques, 166
185, 198, 207, 214, 227
Suvin, Darko, 7, 61
Space(s), 92, 99, 124, 133, 140, 162,
166, 171, 174–176, 179, 188,
199, 203, 220, 226 T
and matter, 223 Tait, Guthrie. See Stewart, Balfour
250 INDEX
Technology, 29, 30, 115, 123, 142, weird forms, 31, 175
148, 149 weird realities, 6, 29, 71, 80, 82,
Theosophical Society, 134 92, 104, 108, 109, 116, 141,
Theosophists, 20, 22, 47, 83, 84, 201 142
Theosophy, 20–22, 24, 38, 47, 83, weird science, 4, 6, 27, 97, 187,
84, 87, 144, 201 227
Thermodynamics, 23, 27, 31, Weirdfinder/weirdfinding, 29, 115–
195–197, 201, 209, 227, 228 122, 124–126, 141, 142, 144,
Thing(s), 1, 12, 60, 70, 95, 180–182, 145, 149, 150
205, 208, 210, 212–214 Weird Tales , 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 26, 28,
Thomson, William, 197, 203, 205, 29, 32, 37, 49, 196, 200, 201,
209, 210 205, 226
Time, 107, 195, 202–204, 206, 238 Weismann, August, 172–174, 188
and space, 26, 205, 206, 226 Wells, H. G., 3, 9, 14, 27, 31, 46,
Tree, 13, 176, 177, 212 159–168, 171–175, 185, 188,
206
“Another Basis for Life,” 185
U
Uncanny, 171 “The Biological Problem of Today,”
The Unseen Universe. See Stewart, 173
Balfour The Island of Doctor Moreau, 3,
Urban spaces, 58 27, 31, 104, 122, 159–163,
165–175, 180, 185, 187–188
“The Limits of Individual Plasticity,”
V 27, 167, 173–175
Vibration, 17, 81, 118, 148 “The Sea Raiders,” 25
Vivisection, 64, 101–104, 108, 160, The Time Machine, 31, 197, 203,
162, 165–169, 171, 188 206, 210
Willow bushes, 221, 222
Willpower, 124, 129
W
Women, 95, 122–124
Ways of knowing, 4, 8, 18, 28, 29,
Worldview, 4, 13, 19, 22, 28, 32, 54,
49, 54, 61, 71, 80, 91, 96, 98,
55, 61, 103, 143, 163, 165, 179,
99, 108, 109, 136
187
Weird, 5, 8–10, 12, 14, 25, 28, 32,
scientific, 45, 108
51, 102, 103, 116, 119, 135,
136, 145, 174, 183, 187, 200, spiritual, 18
203, 205, 213, 214, 220 weird, 181, 189
weird entities, 12, 26, 130, 215,
218
weird fiction, 3, 6, 8, 10, 14, 17, X
23, 26, 27, 29, 32, 97 X-rays, 24, 147, 199, 201

Weird Fiction and Science at The: Fin de Siècle

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Weird Fiction and Science at The: Fin de Siècle

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE,

SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

This book began not in my doctoral research but in my viva, in the

Edinburgh Emily Alder

1 Weird Tales and Scientific Borderlands at the Fin de Siècle 1

Part I Borderlands of Mind, Body, and Spirit

2 Weird Selves, Weird Worlds: Psychology, Ontology,

3 Weird Knowledge: Experiments, Senses, and

“The Three Drugs” 98

4 Weirdfinders: Reality, Mastery, and the Occult

Part II Borderlands of Time, Place, and Matter

5 Meat and Mould: The Weird Creatures of William Hope

6 Weird Energies: Physics, Futures, and the Secrets

Weird Tales and Scientific Borderlands

© The Author(s) 2020 1

As Pratchett’s reflections suggest, Hodgson’s tales mark an important

less encompassing weird) can function philosophically as a way to meet

Knowing the Weird

culture” to a radical contemporary fantastic mode spawning theoretical

E. T. A. Hoffman’s “Der Sandmann” (1817) reappeared in a newly trans-

Terrible ontological dread, inexplicable forces beyond human knowing—

if knowledge is associated with rational procedures of enquiry and under-

Plausibly a “gothic style,” weird also troubles the “borders of knowing.”

is simply this – whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound

Land) is explicitly blamed for unleashing it; or rather, a certain version of

Approaching fin-de-siècle weird fictions as tales of possibility and

renounces all folkloric or traditional antecedents […]. [T]heir constituent

temporarily contained, evaded, or held off; it is possible to kill Dracula

the place of spirituality and religious faith, the relative determinacy of

enquiry against what one member described as the “barbed-wire entan-

The new truths of fin-de-siècle science included material and temporal

Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle

The “supernatural” was not something magical or unnatural, in the super-

Ashley’s quotation marks indicate the unsuitability I have noted about

context of borderlands of biological science represented by nineteenth-

Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Heredity, and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writ-

125. Frederic W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily

141. Worth, “Introduction,” x.

Borderlands of Mind, Body, and Spirit

Weird Selves, Weird Worlds: Psychology,

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

© The Author(s) 2020 45

“Ripples Over the Threshold”: The Weird Case

other.”12 David Lindenfeld explains that for Bergson, psychological atom-

To theorise a fluid melding of the mind’s pathways and the unanalysable

only co-operations ” but also “upheavals and alterations of personality of

or homosexuality) only to demolish them later.22 The text occludes the

conceptual archetypes” in its binary divisions that follow a nineteenth-

and Lanyon’s incomprehension as much as it is about Jekyll’s new under-

Jekyll’s effort to express such extremities of horror presents a Hyde who

outer monstrosity. Of twenty-first-century weird fiction, Timothy Jarvis

themes and tropes no longer orientated outward, or only outward, at a

discovery has nonetheless revised what must be accepted as reality in this

Enchanted Student: Arthur Machen’s Borderlands

unspeakable horror confronted by so many of his 1890s characters, for

Here and elsewhere, Machen suggests that changes in attitudes to wonder

Our stupid ancestors taught us that we could become wise by studying

Substitute, if you like, rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery,

Through writing, Machen “intertwines the spiritual experience with artis-

Edinburgh Emily Alder