Penumbrae: An Occult Fiction Anthology

by Richard Gavin (Editor), Patricia Cram (Editor), Daniel A. Schulke (Editor)

THREE HANDS PRESS is proud to announce Penumbrae, a collection of thirteen works of Occult Fiction by some of that genre's great luminaries. The locus of this anthology lies in tales that embody a metaphysical position, as opposed to fiction that merely employs metaphysical trappings to enforce a materialist worldview. Occult fiction, by contrast, strives to evoke the energies that inform such symbols, and create a vital experience for the reader. Far beyond mere description, this is work that proves its value through its capacity to seduce, captivate, and incept states of magical consciousness. Like the practice of magic itself, the finest works of occult fiction will be distinguished by their power to evoke an embodied experience, and to tangibly compel shifts in consciousness while arousing the uncommon. It intoxicates the rite of reading as much as it permeates the spaces between readings.

Marriage between the objective and the imaginative often results in an enrichment of existence. All spiritual traditions stand upon a foundation of both worldly Act and transcendent Idea. Idea becomes Image, Image becomes Symbol, Symbol becomes Portal. Through the Act of passing through it, one is thereby transformed. It thus stands to reason that the annals of occultism are lush with fable, poetry, mythology, and tales. A delicate but highly potent quality of this work is the creation of a spirit-trap wherein the words and images themselves act as hosts to the experience itself. Under auspicious conditions, a reader may encounter a tale that hews so closely with their own interior universe that a Key is thereby given.

Penumbrae features tales from the following authors:

Kenneth Grant
Richard Gavin
Andrew D. Chumbley
Daniel A. Schulke
Sun Yung Shin
Hanns Heinz Ewers
Lee Morgan
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Don Webb
Patricia Cram
Michael Cisco
Dale Pendell
Brian Evenson

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Occult, Anthologies, Fantasy, Fiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2015

About the author

A resident of Ontario, Canada, Richard Gavin is the author of many acclaimed works of horror and the occult, including Charnel Wine, Omens, and Primeval Wood. His non-fiction appears frequently in the pages of Rue Morgue magazine and other journals. Richard’s latest collection, The Darkly Splendid Realm, will be released by Dark Regions Press in autumn 2009.

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a rather disappointing anthology but only because it promised far more than it could deliver in its publicity and after a poorly written and rather pompous short introduction. It claimed to offer some sort of literary pathway into the actuality of the occult and did little of the kind.

What it is, however, is a standard anthology of occult-related horror with, as in all such anthologies, some good and some not so good with some poor writing and a little bit of editorial laziness along the way - pretty standard for this sort of thing.

My only regret is that, seduced by the claim, I shelled out full paperback price. I would have been much happier (indeed, perfectly happy) to have bought a paperback at lower price and perhaps been less irritated. But let's get the peeves out of the way to write about what was good.

There are 13 stories. It is lazy to have one good but already anthologised pre-war German bit of mildly misogynistic horror. The more poetic attempts at evoking the occult may please some but strike me as over the top and, with one exception, not hitting the mark out of ritual context.

Kenneth Grant's story confuses confusion with meaning but is a serviceable bit of Blackwood meets Machen and Lovecraft. Dale Pendell's uses an occult idea for a political purpose that should really be in a Penguin Book of Contemporary American Protest literature.

The exception is half-baked. Lee Morgan's 'On the Fetish Road to Otherwise' was almost painful to read in its first half, a dogged adolescent third party narrative of exceptional tiresomeness, that suddenly blossomed into a remarkably good evocation of how witchery and faerie might collude.

This leaves us with seven stories that make the collection worthwhile with one or two minor masterpieces. 50% being good is actually not a bad strike right in a contemporary anthology and the collection only lost a star on its presumptuous claims.

The usual suspects drive the inspiration - Lovecraft, Blackwood, Machen, - to which we can add Greek myth (two good examples), Robert E. Howard and Borges, this last providing one of the two best stories in the book, but none are quite breaking literary boundaries here.

Richard Gavin's 'Wormwood Votaries' comes closest to the original brief and, given that he was one of the three Editors, perhaps shows that it is he who is most trying to break new ground and finding it hard to uncover others. His story leaves you with vague questioning as it should.

This is precisely what was required - solid narrative building on a tradition that leaves an uneasiness about reality which remains unresolved. The story is not a masterpiece but it is a solid start which comes crashing down to earth in its near-hysterical successor.

Five stories later, Michael Cisco does something similar with 'Altar, Altar!' even if this is more conventionally Lovecraftian. Nevertheless, we have the same sense of unease and unresolved questions with some effective evocation of altered realities.

One of the two most effective stories is Sun Yung Shin's Borgesian take on the story of the Minotaur and Theseus, 'The Other Asterion', which, in my opinion, shows a serious literary talent. This is one of the most imaginative re-tellings of a Greek myth I have come across in a long time.

Brian Evenson's 'Any Corpse' struck me as something closer to dark science fiction than occult though it is evidently a tale of necromancy. The 'furnishers' have the quality of part-sentient machines ill-programmed in a post-apocalyptic society reduced to magic and cave-dwelling.

The second direct response to myth is Caitlin Kiernan's 'Andromeda Amongst the Stones' which, though marred a little by an attempt to be over-literary in form, is essentially a Lovecraftian take on the monstrous beast to whom sacrifice must be given. It is evocative and mostly well written.

Don Webb's 'The Red Rite' was perhaps an old-fashioned tale of magical reincarnation but written in a contemporary idiom with a solid psychological approach. This is the story I would recommend to someone just wanting a good tale to which they could relate as a general reader.

Finally, Daniel A. Schulke's 'Verger' sits alongside Sung Yung Shin as the best of the show. She wins on sophistication and subtlety but he wins on evocation of horror and narrative. Both are excellent. Schulke evokes a dark fantasy world with enormous skill that makes me want to read more.

All in all, a good introduction to some dark fantasy and horror writers (which is perhaps the purpose beyond the ostensible one) but only two writers and not the two best come close to teasing out the hopes of whoever wrote the blurb on the back of the book.

The art is surely not to make the fantastic real (as the best writers do here) but to make the real fantastic and unstable. Cisco and Gavin do this quite effectively as does Webb and Morgan in the last half of her story but the rest tend to the fantastic made plausible.

The occult is mostly presented to us as an excuse for the imagination rather than as an omnipresent reality lurking behind what is experienced and seen. We need the shiver in the spine that makes us believe that things are not quite as they seem.

This used to be a function of ghost stories but ghosts are taken less seriously now than a hundred years ago. Tales of other worlds are not easy to make real either - science has disposed in turn of lost continents, hidden lands, the hollow earth and planets we can reach.

The shiver factor now has to depend on just three things - dimensions enfolded into our own, the inner recesses of our minds and perhaps the mysteries of time. This is more than just imagining worlds. This is about ambiguities in the relationship between the world and our perceptions.

The occult is what is behind the world that we cannot see. It is either there or it is imagined. It is easy for us humans to imagine fantastic things. It is much harder to believe in new things that were not taught us by priests and elders. To believe in what is behind the veil because we have seen it.

One school of new belief is to take our imaginings for cultic reality - Christianity is the model for this. Another is to pretend that the altered states of drugs or other means are reality despite science knocking these out of the game as much as it has done green men on Mars or Hyperborea.

Occult literature ought to be able to use the imagination in a different way - simply to destabilise our sense of reality through exploring possibilities but also evoking the uncanny (which most of us experience) and then developing it into an intrusion into what is behind our perception of things.

This is a tall order. I see what Gavin in particular may want to do. But it is going to require more work and less compromise and, in effect, a dumping of conventional imaginative literature including the best two writers in the anthology!

[Gaze Santos · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was billed as an "Occult Fiction" Anthology, and according to the introduction by Richard Gavin these are stories that are supposed to lead one "towards a deeper understanding and nuanced appreciation. " He refers to these stories as "spirit-traps" that become a source for an occult experience. That's a very tall order for any form of writing, and unfortunately not all of the stories in this collection are able to deliver. That is not to say it is an awful collection. Not at all. What it ends up being is a solid collection of weird fiction with occult overtones. Magic, rituals, and occult symbols do abound in all the stories, but in most cases they are used as justification for the more surrealistic aspects of the story. However, there were a couple of stories that were indeed succesful in evoking a feeling of unease, that made me question my own sense of reality. And by this I do not mean in the general esacapist fashion of most fantastical literature. Rather, certain stories spooked me out of my everyday habits, and got me to re-examine them from a newfound perspective. These stories were "Wormwood Votaries" by Richard Gavin, "The Spider" by Hanns Heinz Ewers, and "Altar, Altar!" by Michael Cisco. I think the strength behind these stories lay with the seemingly mundane surroundings that were steadily subverted by the occult imagery that seemed to bloom along with the story. Even by the end of the story, there was some doubt as to how much we should trust the narrative itself. How much of it was psychoses as apposed to magic. But it was this particular quality that made them truly occult, as it helps to make them more believable to me. They unsettled my sense of reality. There were also very gorgeously written stories, that although not as successful as the ones mentioned above in adhering to the stated goal of the anthology, were still a pleasure to read. I really enjoyed "The Other Asterion" by Sun Yung Shin, which was a very interesting take on the Minotaur and rearranges the traditional symbols in an interesting way, almost becoming a Jungian parable. I also enjoyed "Anromeda Amoung the Stones" by Caitlin R. Kiernan, and this story would very easily be the among the best in any Lovecraft themed anthology. "Verger" by Daniel Schulke, the final story of the collection, was breathtaking. I loved the descriptions of the locations. There was a deep sense of alien sacredness. The symbols evoked in this particular story will resonate with anyone familiar with the Cultus Sabbati. I hope Daniel Schulke continues to write more stories in this vein. All in all, not a bad collection as such, but one that perhaps promised more than it could give.

[Adriane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had such high expectations for this book that I was ready to disagree with the only other review available. As it stands, after finishing this collection, I mostly agree with what the other reviewer said. The highlights are "Wormwood Votaries"; "Altar! Altar!", and "The Other Asterion and Verger", with "The Red Rite", and "Andromeda Amongst the Stones" following close behind.