The scope of Klein's 1984 novel The Ceremonies, its stately pace and sensual physicality, rewards the diligent reader. The buzzing summer heat of rural Hunterdon County, NJ and the broiling sweat of a stifling New York City are perfectly conveyed.
There are plenty of nuggets along the way for weird fiction readers. For a change, though, Machen is placed higher than Lovecraft in weighting narrative allusions. (No shoggoths or gill-men here to break the reader's teeth or sap the willing suspension of disbelief).
From Book Six: The Green Ceremony
....he walks to the bookcase in the living room and stoops before a set of drab brown Victorian volumes gathering dust on the second shelf from the bottom.
How amusing, he thinks, as he withdraws one of them - amusing that a key to dark and ancient rites should survive in such innocuous-looking form.
A young fool like Freirs would probably refuse to believe it. Like the rest of his doomed kind, he'd probably expect such lore to be found only in ancient leather-bound tomes with gothic lettering and portentously sinister tides. He'd search for it in mysterious old trunks and private vaults, in the 'restricted' sections of libraries, in intricately carved wood chests with secret compartments.
But there are no real secrets, the Old One knows. Secrets are ultimately too hard to conceal. The keys to the rites that will transform the world are neither hidden nor rare nor expensive. They are available to anyone. You can find them on the paperback racks or in any second-hand bookshop.
You just have to know where to look - and how to put the pieces together.
There are pieces in an out-of-print religious tract by one Nicholas Keize. And in a certain language textbook which, in its appendix, transcribes nursery rhymes in an obsolete Malaysian dialect surprisingly like Celtic. And in a story, supposedly fiction - but not when read at the right time - by an obscure Welsh visionary who barely suspected why he'd written it, and who regretted it in later years and died a fervent churchman. And in the pictures on a cheap pack of novelty cards based on images from unguessed-of antiquity. And in a Tuscan folk dance included in a certain staid old dance book which, along with plies and pirouettes, has the dancer make a pattern called 'the changes.'
The pieces are there, simply waiting to be fitted together into what, from the start, they were meant to be: a set of instructions for the Ceremonies....
Book Six: The Green Ceremony actually begins with this excerpt from Machen's "The White People."
....And my heart was full of wicked songs that they put into it; and I wanted to make faces and twist myself about in the way they did ... So I did the charm over again, and touched my eyes and my lips and my hair in a peculiar manner, and said the old words . . . and I was so glad I could do it quite well, and I danced and danced along, and sang extraordinary songs that came into my head . . . songs full of words that must not be spoken or written down. Then I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones.
Jay
13 July 2020
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