Weird Tales #348

Weird Tales #348 begins with W.H. Pugmire and M.K. Snyder’s “The House of Idiot Children,” a rather solemn but effective story. Samuel Shammua is a Hebrew teacher who has a very special student, an autistic child who can manipulate language as if it were a virus. The solemnity comes from the obsessive, almost religious attitude with which Samuel meets this mystery:

“The boy beside him was a vessel, a ferry to a spiritual plane that Samuel could not comprehend.”

Samuel wants to be a part of it; he’s not content with just watching. And obsession with what’s normal versus pathological, unraveling the mystery, may well be his undoing—unraveling is undoing, after a fashion. It’s an interesting, Burroughsian premise mixed with a somewhat surly, somber style, without abandoning a well thought out graphic element—visible in the strange new letters and symbols that little Moshe writes which emit a beautiful if ghostly glow. It’s a visually interesting tactic and gives us hints as to the authors’ creative influences, as does a scene when the protagonist’s sister thinks of a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

The second story, “Landscape, With Fish” by Karen Heuler, is a short, surrealistic study on suspension of disbelief. You can order these fishes by mail, but they may be a little bit dangerous. They can, among other things, fly and bite other animals as well as people. But, as is customary with surrealist stories (André Breton’s Soluble Fish comes to mind), these fish are perceived as natural, quotidian neighborhood. Add to this flocks of birds walking around in tree branches and meeting in groups, talking among themselves and worrying the owner of the fishes and his neighbor, and you can almost envision the early James Cameron movie—Piranha II—with a script written by Breton or Alfred Jarry. It’s no wonder that Heuler received an O. Henry Award. A fine story.

Cat Rambo’s “Events at Fort Plentitude” seems, at first, to take place in a traditional fantasy setting—a fort protected by soldiers between the 11th and 12th years of Duke Theo’s reign, besieged by magic creatures, such as fox women, who seek to kill every adult inside and steal the babies for their own obscure purposes. Told in the form of a journal written by a member of the Sorcerer Corps who has to cope with some pretty hard magic (conjuring demons to bring him food from outside) in order to survive. Reminiscent of an old alternate Earth story by Larry Niven (from The Magic Goes Away universe) where magic and science coexist, this trope is one of my favorites in fantasy; I greatly enjoyed it.

The real creeper in this issue is “The Stone and Bone Boy” by Calvin Mills. It presents some difficulties experienced in rearing a child with strange quirks—nothing, in the beginning, that one can’t see on the reality medical shows on the Discovery Channel. A baby cries without stopping until Mom calls the doctor, who discovers a shard of bone in the baby’s gums. A rare occurrence, but nothing extraordinary…that is, until it is revealed that the baby has expelled no fewer than sixteen bone shards and thirteen stones, similar to kidney stones, but differing in color and in the manner in which they were produced, all within six months:

“Some came from his nose, others from his throat and at least one from his ear.”

The real weirdness, though, comes from the boy’s parents, especially the mother, who start treating him not as a medical case but as a freak, and are quite happy to let things remain as they are. So starts a slow but steady decline into insanity, worsened when it becomes apparent that the boy is gradually recovering from his “illness.” Alas, that’s not the end, at least not if his mother can have her way. Creepy because the tragedy rings all too true.

The last story of this issue is also a first sale. Matthew Pridham’s “Renovations” features a haunted house which resents being haunted, a condition it views as akin to having a disease, and desperately craves to have humans inside it once again. A crew of four people enter it (the purpose of their visit isn’t revealed; they may be members of a kind of Extreme Makeover show or perhaps ghostbusters, but it’s not really important), and the house does everything it can to make them feel comfortable. And it can do a lot. Gradually, it rids itself of rodents, spiders, and even ghosts, until the coast becomes all-clear—except for a little blue room, where once something so horrible happened that the house has tried to forget it:

That tiny, nasty blue room has been excised as neatly from our comprehension as it would have had it never existed in the first place. We dwell on it far too often now, worrying ourself over this piece of our body rendered alien and experiencing unknown mutations.

The viewpoint of the house is not holistic or all-encompassing but almost cinema-like, a kind of cinema-verité focus, picking one human at a time, and, when dealing with the strange events that dwell behind the blue room’s door, it cannot see what’s going on in the rest of its innards. A Bizarro-version of a reality show.

The narrative is punctuated by the rhythm of the house, by the long now in which it lives, resulting in long descriptions and musings upon states of being—marvelous descriptions which leave nothing out while keeping undiminished our sense of wonder. The level of intricacy of this story in particular requires a slow and careful appreciation. It’s a beautiful first story and, in my opinion, by far the best of this issue. Weird Tales is getting better and better.