Free from the vaults
Fifty years of The Night Ghouls and Other Grisly Tales
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Saturday, February 14, 2026
Monday, February 9, 2026
Thursday, September 11, 2025
Monday, July 14, 2025
Friday, July 11, 2025
Monday, May 5, 2025
Friday, May 2, 2025
Thursday, April 24, 2025
Monday, April 21, 2025
Monday, April 14, 2025
Monday, April 7, 2025
Tuesday, April 1, 2025
Monday, March 17, 2025
Interlacing: an aesthetic
Ackroyd spells out his aesthetic thesis in Albion: the origins of the English imagination (2002):
[….] The association with the weaving of tapestry is apposite here, and the poetic technique has become known as that of “interlace.” The “interlace structure” has thus been defined as expressing “the meaning of coincidence,” the recurrence of human behaviour, and the circularity of time5 as the thread of words crosses and recrosses itself in endless weaves and knots.
It is not simply a technique, therefore, but a vision of the world. The great stone crosses of Northumberland and Cumberland, hewn in the early eighth century, are carved with abstract interlace patterns in which bands or threads or vines turn back upon themselves to form woven intersections or knots. They may be symbols of eternity, like the spirals upon even more ancient stone, but they seem also to display a delight in intricacy or ornament for its own sake. Ivory caskets, sword-hilts, brooches and rings are emblazoned with the same labyrinthine device; a large gold buckle, discovered during the excavations at Sutton Hoo and dated to the early seventh century, has an interlacing of snakes and birds’ heads wrought upon it. It was what the Beowulf poet described as “hring-boga ,” ring-coiled. The manuscript illuminations from the seventh and eighth centuries are irradiated by interlace; the initial pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels are peculiarly rich in this art, with one page bearing several thousand “intersections” while in another only two threads or bands are employed to create an entire and effortlessly detailed “carpet-page.” The pattern occurs at a later date. When one Middle English poem, known as The Owl and the Nightingale, is depicted in terms of “chain-stitch”6 the relation to the “carpet-page” of the illuminated gospels is reinforced. If it is indeed a vision of the world, it is one which has no beginning and no end; there is no sequence and no progress, only the endless recapitulation of patterns and the constant interplay of opposing forces. Thus “interlace” has variously described Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Langland’s Piers the Plowman and the penitential lyrics of the thirteenth century. The term has been used to define the novels of Charles Dickens….
https://jayrothermel.substack.com/p/hawksmoor-1985-by-peter-ackroyd?r=1vg2di
Sunday, March 16, 2025
THE PERSON FROM PORLOCK
"The Person from Porlock," Reg mused, half aloud. "Wouldn't it be funny if it turned out that they were deliberately and purposely upsetting the works of other men. Suppose it were their whole object in life–”
Reg’s matter-transfer project is cancelled as unworkable. That night, as he and his wife discuss Coleridge’s “Kublai Khan” misfortune, Reg connects it to the countless human errors that wrecked his work on the Bots-Wellton theory.
Next day Reg lays out this theory to his immediate supervisor. Borge is concerned, but not about practical errors made by Reg's team.
“For six years you've been turning out miracles. I hate like the devil to see you come up with something like this, Reg. Surely you must realize it's all the result of overwork and fatigue. No one is going around interfering with your work. Your mind refuses to admit defeat so it's automatically throwing it off on someone else. I'm no psychologist, but I'll bet that's close to the right answer. I want you to have Walker at the Clinic examine you. I'm willing to bet he recommends a long rest. give you six months with pay if necessary. But I can't let you back in the lab unless you do this. A repetition of yesterday's performance and the whole place would be shot up. You've got to get rid of this Person from Porlock business.”
Reg peels the corporate onion until, higher up the food chain:
Millen leaned forward, his almost ominous seriousness returning. "You've done a good job, Reg. Better than we hoped for a while. It looked for a time as if you weren't going to get it.”
Raymond F. Jones does an outstanding job letting his protagonist balance between collapse and explosion. Reg's petty bourgeois social position as an engineer is well-observed. And the poetry recitations with Mrs. Reg are acutely humanizing.
“The Person from Porlock” has had a healthy lifespan in anthologies, from Groff Conklin to Hartwell & Cramer.
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Sunday, March 2, 2025
Reading notes: H.P. Lovecraft, an evaluation (1955) by Joseph Payne Brennan (1918 - 1990)
https://substack.com/profile/113283846-jay-rothermel/note/c-97463697?r=1vg2di
Thursday, February 27, 2025
On “The Thing From Outside” (1923) by George Allan England
"The Thing From Outside" (1923) by George Allan England braids together several familiar story elements.
There is the empty Canadian forest, against which five individuals confront an unknown entity.
✓"The Wendigo" by Blackwood
There is the invisible entity itself, only an enemy perhaps because of its undecidable character.
✓"The Damned Thing" by Ambrose Bierce
England does an outstanding job depicting human collapse before the unknown. In the paragraphs below, a desperate and articulate argument jump-cuts sharply in time, as characters and their circumstances (and the reader) are wrong-footed by a well-executed narrative slingshot.
"But," added the Professor, "I can't imagine a Thing callously destroying human beings. And yet—"He stopped short, with surging memories of his dead wife. "What was it," Jandron asked, "that destroyed all those people in Valladolid, Spain, that time so many of 'em died in a few minutes after having been touched by an invisible Something that left a slight red mark on each? The newspapers were full of it.""Piffle!" yawned Marr."I tell you," insisted Jandron, "there are forms of life as superior to us as we are to ants. We can't see 'em. No ant ever saw a man. And did any ant ever form the least conception of a man? These Things have left thousands of traces, all over the world. If I had my reference-books—""Tell that to the marines!""Charles Fort, the greatest authority in the world on unexplained phenomena," persisted Jandron, "gives innumerable cases of happenings that science can't explain, in his Book of the Damned. He claims this earth was once a No-Man's Land where all kinds of Things explored and colonized and fought for possession. And he says that now everybody's warned off, except the Owners. I happen to remember a few sentences of his: 'In the past, inhabitants of a host of worlds have dropped here, hopped here, wafted, sailed, flown, motored, walked here; have come singly, have come in enormous numbers; have visited for hunting, trading, mining. They have been unable to stay here, have made colonies here, have been lost here.' ""Poor fish, to believe that!" mocked the journalist, while the Professor blinked and rubbed his bulging forehead."I do believe it!" insisted Jandron. "The world is covered with relics of dead civilizations, that have mysteriously vanished, leaving nothing but their temples and monuments.""Rubbish!""How about Easter Island? How about all the gigantic works there and in a thousand other places—Peru, Yucatan and so on—which certainly no primitive race ever built?""That's thousands of years ago," said Marr, "and I'm sleepy. For heaven's sake, can it!""Oh, all right. But how explain things, then!""What the devil could one of those Things want of our brains?" suddenly put in the Professor. "After all, what?""Well, what do we want of lower forms of life? Sometimes food. Again, some product or other. Or just information. Maybe It is just experimenting with us, the way we poke an ant-hill. There's always this to remember, that the human brain-tissue is the most highly organized form of matter in this world.""Yes," admitted the Professor, "but what—?""It might want brain-tissue for food, for experimental purposes, for lubricant—how do I know?"Jandron fancied he was still explaining things; but all at once he found himself waking up in one of the bunks. He felt terribly cold, stiff, sore. A sift of snow lay here and there on the camp floor, where it had fallen through holes in the roof….
From: Strange Ports of Call (1948) edited by August Derleth
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