And the radio's a-beaming from the stars that are coughing up the change in his pockets
I am home and among my own cats. I had an irrational fear that Autolycus would be indifferent or hostile to me after four days with other cats; he is purring on my shoulder as we speak. He is soft and black and he has key-lime eyes and he smells like himself. Lydia and Selwyn each had their own clean feline smell, but neither of them was my cat.
William Sloane's To Walk the Night (1937) and The Edge of Running Water (1939), collected under the title The Rim of Morning in 1964 and reissued in 2015 by the New York Review of Books, now look like cutting-edge fusions of noir fiction and cosmic horror, but I wonder instead if their existence only tells me how interrelated the two genres were at the time. To be fair, I'd like it to be true because I've thought of it before, but writing like Sloane's suggests it's not just wishful thinking. I read the first novel last night and the second this afternoon on the commuter train back from Providence; I have a slight preference for the former because it's plotted with cinematic prescience and my kind of alienation, but the latter goes deep into the kind of parapsychological fringe science that I didn't think would become common currency of horror until the 1970's. (It was adapted for film in 1941 as the low-budget, less cosmic and more ghastly The Devil Commands, starring Boris Karloff and directed by Edward Dmytryk, but![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks correctly identified Val Lewton as the ideal producer for this material. I understand he would have missed out on The Edge of Running Water if Columbia got there first, but Cat People (1942) proves to me that he'd have handled To Walk the Night well.) Both feel to me like very early treatments of ideas that became much more common in later horror and science fiction and neither can be discussed without spoilers: both novels are structured as slow burns toward terrifying revelations, incredibly logical and even guessable by the reader ahead of time, but knowing what must fit the missing space in the plot is not the same as the thing itself when you get to it. They're beautifully written, too. Stephen King in his introduction compares Sloane's style favorably to Raymond Chandler's and I can see it. He is extremely good at the kind of first-person narrator who is not simply a lens.
Hestia is talking to me now, I assume about her weekend. Or the fact that I have not fed her since I got home, which means she has never been fed, not once, ever. Excuse me.
William Sloane's To Walk the Night (1937) and The Edge of Running Water (1939), collected under the title The Rim of Morning in 1964 and reissued in 2015 by the New York Review of Books, now look like cutting-edge fusions of noir fiction and cosmic horror, but I wonder instead if their existence only tells me how interrelated the two genres were at the time. To be fair, I'd like it to be true because I've thought of it before, but writing like Sloane's suggests it's not just wishful thinking. I read the first novel last night and the second this afternoon on the commuter train back from Providence; I have a slight preference for the former because it's plotted with cinematic prescience and my kind of alienation, but the latter goes deep into the kind of parapsychological fringe science that I didn't think would become common currency of horror until the 1970's. (It was adapted for film in 1941 as the low-budget, less cosmic and more ghastly The Devil Commands, starring Boris Karloff and directed by Edward Dmytryk, but
rushthatspeaks correctly identified Val Lewton as the ideal producer for this material. I understand he would have missed out on The Edge of Running Water if Columbia got there first, but Cat People (1942) proves to me that he'd have handled To Walk the Night well.) Both feel to me like very early treatments of ideas that became much more common in later horror and science fiction and neither can be discussed without spoilers: both novels are structured as slow burns toward terrifying revelations, incredibly logical and even guessable by the reader ahead of time, but knowing what must fit the missing space in the plot is not the same as the thing itself when you get to it. They're beautifully written, too. Stephen King in his introduction compares Sloane's style favorably to Raymond Chandler's and I can see it. He is extremely good at the kind of first-person narrator who is not simply a lens.Hestia is talking to me now, I assume about her weekend. Or the fact that I have not fed her since I got home, which means she has never been fed, not once, ever. Excuse me.
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Hi there, Autolycus the wonderful purry house panther. *pets him*
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At the moment he's trying to nose his way into my goat brie, but I have told him you say hi. He is a very fine cat.
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I think you would really like them. He seems to have edited two influential science fiction anthologies in the '50's, but never written any other novels, which is shocking to me considering how good these are. As it is, I wonder if he's buried in the DNA of more well-known writers, like Hope Mirrlees or the Velvet Underground. He certainly seems to have left a strong imprint on King.
I feel like I've seen a zillion Karloff films, but somehow I've never seen The Devil Commands.
I'd never even heard of it before now! It does not look . . . good, exactly, but if you see it, please report back?
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I didn't know either had been filmed! Any idea if the results were any good?
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Yes! And the way that To Walk the Night works as a valid retelling of the Andersen story (and an especially tragic variation on Mélusine) while The Edge of Running Water ends honest-to-God with a mad scientist's house burning down in the face of an angry mob and yet never once feels as tropetastic as that sentence sounds.
I didn't know either had been filmed! Any idea if the results were any good?
So The Devil Commands seems to be one of a cycle of horror films Boris Karloff made for Columbia in the late '30's and early '40's that are now referred to as his "mad doctor" pictures: they look very fast and very cheap and there are certainly people on the internet who are fond of this one (cf. Erich Kuersten), but there are also people who think it's just kind of stupid (cf. She Blogged by Night). From the reviews, it looks like it introduced much more conventional horror elements than Sloane was working with—a corpse séance is a great image, but it's actually not as unnerving as Sloane's "Black Mass in a futurist play"—and simplified a lot of the story in ways that I think Sloane very carefully avoids. I imagine Karloff and Anne Revere were good; I can see why both of them would have been cast. The rest looks kind of like it turned to slush. [edit] If the novel was obscure and the movie a quickie, I understand why it was never remade, but I'm still almost surprised Nigel Kneale never tried it. It's very much the sort of thing he would write for the BBC, two to three decades later.
I can't find any evidence that anyone tried to film To Walk the Night, which does puzzle me. It has the screenplay structure—complete with cutaways and the frame story that wraps around until it bites you—built right in.
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Also, yes, it already has the screenplay structure complete with, like, actual tracking shots, I have no idea why this never happened.
The Karloff movie sounds like something that might be fun if one went into it with no expectations. Maybe it'll show up at a Halloween marathon or something. And yeah, corpse seance sounds creepy, but nowhere near as creepy as the kind of Surrealist/Futurist assemblage that one knows damn well is how the one in the novel turned out, and it would only be less frightening in an art museum because the artist would have been trying to frighten you, whereas part of the effect in the book is that no consideration has been given to aesthetics or anybody's feelings at all...
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"Did you suppose . . . that you were alone in the enormous spaces of the universe? Do you believe that you are the ultimate product of creation? There is nothing unique about you."
The Karloff movie sounds like something that might be fun if one went into it with no expectations. Maybe it'll show up at a Halloween marathon or something.
I would watch it under those circumstances. I'm not sure I would otherwise seek it out right now, when the novel is so vivid in my mind.
And yeah, corpse seance sounds creepy, but nowhere near as creepy as the kind of Surrealist/Futurist assemblage that one knows damn well is how the one in the novel turned out, and it would only be less frightening in an art museum because the artist would have been trying to frighten you, whereas part of the effect in the book is that no consideration has been given to aesthetics or anybody's feelings at all...
I love both how much sense it makes as a séance machine (of a kind I have never seen written or staged before) and how absolutely horrifying that impersonality is. That's the linchpin of cosmic horror, the indifference of the universe, the un-uniqueness of humans and their squishy electrical brains, but it is usually applied to philosophical concepts, not scientific creations. And I love how this has nothing to do with what goes wrong. It would have been so easy and reassuring to say: see, this is what you get when you make a soulless machine to do the work of the human spirit. Instead it's as simple as: if you tear a hole in the gulf between here and elsewhere, don't be surprised when the pressure drops.
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A journey bookended by cats is a good one. Welcome back!
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Oh, cool. Is it available to read online?
I just checked it out and the novel sounds wonderful. Thanks for the recommendation.
You're welcome. I think you'd really like both of Sloane's novels. I'm so glad the NYRB decided he should be less obscure.
A journey bookended by cats is a good one. Welcome back!
Thank you!
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I took a look and alas, no.
I should at least be able to track down this edition!
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This is so true, and being able to create a situation where readers can guess a thing, yet make getting there a compelling journey and the thing itself different enough in its manifestation to forbid any possible "yeah, called it" is the mark of a really good storyteller.
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I think it helps in both cases that the emotional/narrative effect of the revelation when it arrives is not necessarily what the audience was braced for, but it's also just beautifully done. I don't know why Sloane never wrote more than the two novels (and one short story I don't think I've read). He's so good!
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But if he didn't write more, then yes ...