The Modern Weird Tale by S. T. Joshi

Author:S. T. Joshi [Joshi, S. T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, General
ISBN: 9780786409860
Google: XLYnAwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 078640986X
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2001-03-07T22:00:00+00:00

DREAM AND REALITY

What makes many of the Demons by Daylight stories so successful is the dreamlike—or nightmarish—atmosphere they evoke through an almost Proustian focusing upon the shifting thoughts and emotions of the protagonists. This quasi–stream of consciousness helps to blur the distinction between dream, hallucination, memory, and reality in such a way that the supernatural phenomena—which might otherwise appear highly implausible or ludicrous if narrated with the objective realism of a Lovecraft—seem both strangely natural and chillingly intense. “The End of a Summer’s Day” is prototypical. In this story a couple, Maria and Tony, enter a cave as part of a tour group. Tony gets lost in the cave, but no one believes Maria when she pleads that he is still inside when all the others have emerged. This simple scenario raises a host of unanswerable queries: is there a conspiracy against Maria to deprive her of her lover; did Tony ever exist at all outside of her imagination; and who is the blind man whom all the others in the tour group insist is her companion?

“Concussion” is, to my mind, the finest tale in Demons by Daylight, and it again displays Campbell’s ability to mingle pathos and horror seamlessly. The premise of the story seems grotesquely unlikely—an old man finds that a young woman he meets on a bus is the same woman he once loved as a youth, as in some strange fashion she has gone back in time to reenact the same scenario 50 years ago. But the heart-rending poignancy of the tale rests not only in Campbell’s insight into the emotions of young lovers but in the highly disturbing way in which he flits back and forth between the present and the past, to the point that we scarcely know which is which. (A much later story, “Just Waiting” [1983; WN], employs this same device.)

It would be futile to attempt to analyze the other stories in Demons by Daylight: they are as elusive as a dream or a memory, and yet they haunt us as only dreams or memories can. “The Guy,” “Potential,” “The Sentinels”—all are masterpieces of atmosphere and indirection. They still rank as some of Campbell’s finest tales. The greatness of Demons by Daylight stems both from the intrinsic excellence of its contents—there is not a single weak story here, and several are among the best in Campbell’s work in particular and in modern weird fiction in general—and from its historical importance. In this volume—with its uncompromising realism of character and setting, its evocatively dreamlike prose style, its sexual frankness, its extremely oblique narration—Campbell has almost single-handedly ushered in the dominant mode of modern weird fiction. The influence of Robert Aickman, whose own work embodies many of these same characteristics, is evident in the volume, but Aickman’s work has not had nearly the impact of Campbell’s. Although most of the tales in Demons by Daylight were completed by 1968, only four years after the publication of The Inhabitant of the Lake, they have completely abandoned the pulpish and derivative tone of that volume.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.