THE DEEP ONES: "Smoke Ghost" by Fritz Leiber

Discussion starts November 16.
In the meanwhile pointers to sources are welcome.

I'll be reading it in the Peter Straub-edited second volume of American Fantastic Tales published by the Library of America. That book and its predecessor/companion would be excellent sources for further reading in this group. (And it includes "The Events at Poroth Farm.") "Smoke Ghost" is also in Smoke Ghost and Other Apparitions (of course), Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories, and The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories.

I haven't found any digital versions in a quick (admittedly superficial) search.

ETA: It's also in Night's Black Agents.

EATA: Touchstones are hosed, dammit.

EYATA: Touchstones look like they're back. I guess the problem was while Tim was reintroducing the "forced touchstone" feature.

In print, it's also in The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy and The Dark Descent.

I'm not having luck finding an online version, either, paradoxosalpha - not a free one, anyway.

(BTW, I just read this back in September so will probably not be re-reading it before the discussion.)

I have my friends over at the S.T. Joshi Enthusiasts Facebook group (http://www.facebook.com/groups/8503713578/) looking for an online version of the story, but the consensus seems to be that since Leiber passed away in the 90s, the story's probably still in copyright which diminishes the chances of finding an online copy significantly. :/

I've been laid low by a virus for the past few days, but I'm slowly coming around. In the future, should we disallow nominated stories that don't have at least one online source, or just say go with it and hope at least a few of us have it?

>1 paradoxosalpha:

I agree with your comments on American Fantastic Tales. It's very difficult to put out a collection like this and make it have any kind of relevancy, not to mention avoiding the mistake of simply rehashing what's already available in any number of other collections. Straub succeeds in spades. This is indeed an excellent companion volume for this group.

>2 artturnerjr:

I just read this recently, too, but I'll still re-read. Probably in the Night Shade Books volume Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories.

>4 semdetenebre:

Sorry you haven't been feeling well, Kenton; at least you have an excuse to lay in bed & read massive volumes of weird fiction. :D

Re: stories with no online sources, I say we go ahead & still do them, but for future nominations we should be mindful that if you pick a story that's not online, you may only have one or two other people discussing it with you. :O

>1 paradoxosalpha:&4

Yeah, I would say that American Fantastic Tales won the World Fantasy Award (which, fittingly, is a bust of Lovecraft) pretty much on merit. It's pretty hard to hit a good balance between the obvious genre masterpieces and more obscure but still deserving tales - I'd say Peter Straub did an excellent job at that.

I prefer to read stories on paper anyhow. So far, "Nethescurial" was the only one I've read online. As long as the stories have been anthologized -- so we're not talking about having to get our hands on an original magazine publication or something -- I think it's fine that they aren't in digital editions, let alone free online.

Some thoughts on "Smoke Ghost":

I connected easily with the setting. Chicagoan Leiber played nicely to my own experiences as an el-riding commuter. At the same time, I found the story to be very much a product of its time: a quintessentially mid-century modern horror tale, more anchored to its period than, say, the pulp-era productions of HPL that court the senses of nostalgia and temporal disorientation.

The intellectual exposition was all neatly handled at the very start in the monologue from Wran to Millick. After that, the story consisted of extending the dramatic context, and intensifying the involvement with the object of horror.

To contrast it with "Owls Hoot in the Daytime," there was no sense of return to the status quo ante. At the end of a pretty brief text, the central character's relationship to his world had been radically transformed.

In his introduction to American Fantastic Tales, Peter Straub characterizes the meat of "Smoke Ghost" as "the different anxieties of becoming a nation dominated by giant factories and heavy industries" (xi), but I disagree. I actually find Straub's general remark that "the fantastic is a way of seeing" more apposite for this tale, which hinges on perception. Wran wants badly to believe that what he is perceiving is not real, and his visit with the shrink is all constructed to cultivate and then destroy that hope.

On a not-unrelated note, I can't help thinking that there's something critically key about Wran's role as an ad man. On the one hand, advertising serves as a quintessential white-collar urban industry. On the other hand, it is the concerted enterprise to construct perceptions, and to manipulate the desires and fears of its target audiences: the black magic par excellence of the twentieth century. (In this connection, see the final section of Couliano's Eros and Magic in the Renaissance and the video documentary The Century of the Self.)

Finally, Wran's personal history can be taken as a metaphor for Western culture, first becoming disillusioned and cutting itself loose from the Christian matrix represented by the Spiritualist mother and her old ghosts, through the disenchanting experiences of laboratory science, in favor of a robust secularism figured by Wran's father, only to find itself confronted by a reinvigorated "ghost world" rooted in "all the tangled sordid, vicious things. All the loose ends."

Nice post, paradoxosalpha. You were obviously able to connect to this story on a more fundamental level than I was. For me, this was more like a story by someone like, say, Henry James - something that I recognize as important and well-crafted without really responding to it viscerally. I have to get that little shudder of fright from a story in order to fully embrace it as a successful weird tale and I just didn't get that here.

Here is the pulp cover for the original publication of "Smoke Ghost":

I've always found Leiber's "paramental entities" and haunted urban zones to be among the most plausible, memorable, and disturbing in all of weird fiction's oeuvre. The gradually encroaching eponymous entity, amorphous yet somehow menacing in both form and intent, is pitch-perfect and is an obvious literary harbinger of the the thing with the triangular-shaped head that dances on Cornona Heights in Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness - one of my all-time favorite images in horror fiction. Leiber's entities often remind me of life forms that you might find in a painting by Miro or Tanguy.

>7 paradoxosalpha:

Good point on the ad-man being the Evil Sorceror of our age. You could even extrapolate that from ad-men to the "evil spells" cast by corporate media in general. Really like the point you make in your last paragraph, too.

I also quite enjoyed the possession/transformation of the "vacuous" Miss Millick at the end. There is something of an Invasion of the Body Snatchers chill to this sequence, in which Wran finally meets the Other in person. The line "Why, Mr. Wran, you mustn't run away. I'm coming after you" is perfectly deadpan-scary and is pure Leiber.

>9 paradoxosalpha:

Drool. I want that.

Wrt the "metaphor for Western culture" notion I raised above, it occurs to me that there is some congruence with the scheme proposed by Nietzsche in section 32 of Beyond Good and Evil. From the (relatively inferior) Helen Zimmern translation:

Is it not possible, however, that the necessity may now have arisen of again making up our minds with regard to the reversing and fundamental shifting of values, owing to a new self-consciousness and acuteness in man—is it not possible that we may be standing on the threshold of a period which to begin with, would be distinguished negatively as ULTRA-MORAL: nowadays when, at least among us immoralists, the suspicion arises that the decisive value of an action lies precisely in that which is NOT INTENTIONAL, and that all its intentionalness, all that is seen, sensible, or "sensed" in it, belongs to its surface or skin—which, like every skin, betrays something, but CONCEALS still more? In short, we believe that the intention is only a sign or symptom, which first requires an explanation—a sign, moreover, which has too many interpretations, and consequently hardly any meaning in itself alone: that morality, in the sense in which it has been understood hitherto, as intention-morality, has been a prejudice, perhaps a prematureness or preliminariness, probably something of the same rank as astrology and alchemy, but in any case something which must be surmounted.

>12 paradoxosalpha:

I like it. "Is it not possible, however, that the necessity may now have arisen of again making up our minds with regard to the reversing and fundamental shifting of values, owing to a new self-consciousness and acuteness in man" could easily apply to the overall arc of what happens to Wran in "Smoke Ghost", while "the suspicion arises that the decisive value of an action lies precisely in that which is NOT INTENTIONAL, and that all its intentionalness, all that is seen, sensible, or "sensed" in it, belongs to its surface or skin—which, like every skin, betrays something, but CONCEALS still more?" could easily apply to Leiber's icon-smashing view of the supernatural, including extra-dimensional, "paramental" entities and scrying the future - if not raising the recently dead past - through megapolisomancy.

I'll add that in many of his horror stories, Leiber explores the idea that if mankind creates its own ghosts, then what kind of horrors would arise from the atrocity-jammed industrial age? Now expand that to include the global insanity that we've experienced since Leiber's death in 1992. I wonder what he would have made of the idea of the utterly deranged Supreme Court decision that essentially granted corporations personhood? If a ravenous, amoral, perception-bending corporation was to "die", then, what kind of awful entity would come back to haunt us, and in what manner?

>13 semdetenebre:

"I wonder what he would have made of the idea of the utterly deranged Supreme Court decision that essentially granted corporations personhood? If a ravenous, amoral, perception-bending corporation was to "die", then, what kind of awful entity would come back to haunt us, and in what manner?"

A horrifying thought indeed, Kenton. I can picture it being akin to Mick Jagger in the nightmarish "Memo From Turner" sequence in Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's PERFORMANCE:

http://youtu.be/T3qgmVb4-kU

>14 artturnerjr:

Maybe Mick in PERFORMANCE if he were run through some kind of surrealist blender. Great film, by the way.

That is not dead, etc.

I didn't read this one back in '11, not having access to a copy. A mention of it in another place jolted me to read it out of The Weird (which is indubitably the best investment this group has inspired me to).

I was surprised at the young Wran's supposed paranormal powers being essentially a red herring - both the doctor and Wran's son can see the creature, so apparently no special sensitivity is needed.

I wondered about the title. In the story, the creature is primarily associated with soot rather than smoke. The Encyclopaedia of Fantasy characterizes it as a "City elemental", which strikes me as off the mark too: it'd surely be perfectly at home in a rural coal mine.