#sgsc

There is no kingdom like the forests.

There was a little pause; and Yarrow asked, watching the harrekki climb back to its perch, “Tell me just this, if it is not a secret: what other great powers are there besides the light?”

The centrality of doors, thresholds and portals means that the notion of the between is crucial to the weird. It is clear that if Wells’ story [The door in the wall] had taken place only in the garden behind the wall, then no weird charge would have been produced. (This is why a feeling of the weird attaches to the lamppost at the edge of Narnia in C.S. Lewis’ stories, but not to Narnia proper.) If the story were set entirely beyond the door, we would be in the realm of the fantasy genre. This mode of fantasy naturalises other worlds. But the weird de-naturalises all worlds, by exposing their instability, their openness to the outside.

There is no kingdom like the forests. It is time I went there, went in silence, went alone. And maybe there I would learn at last what no act or art or power can teach me, what I have never learned.”

It might be better to say that the myth has been re-instantiated, with the myth being understood as a kind of structure that can be implemented whenever the conditions are right. But the myth doesn’t repeat so much as it abducts individuals out of linear time and into its “own” time, in which each iteration of the myth is in some sense always the first time.

Accordingly, it is not horror but fascination — albeit a fascination usually mixed with a certain trepidation — that is integral to Lovecraft’s rendition of the weird. But I would say this is also integral to the concept of the weird itself — the weird cannot only repel, it must also compel our attention.