Weird Fiction and the Landscape of the Soul

Thoughts on the relationship between surface narrative and understory

A quick note before proceeding to this week’s main offering:

Last week saw the publication of my latest book, Matt Cardin, Journals, Volume 1: 1993-2001. This is the first of two volumes collecting thirty years of my private journals entries. The publisher is Sarnath Press (S. T. Joshi’s micro-imprint). Kindle, trade paperback, and hardcover editions are available. The second and final volume, encompassing 2002 to 2022, is currently in the works.

Here is the ’s back cover copy:

For more than two decades, Matt Cardin has been one of the most dynamic writers of contemporary weird fiction. In addition, he has been a perspicacious commentator on weird literature, horror films, and related subjects. Now he presents the first of two volumes of his journals, which he began keeping years before he contemplated a career as a writer. In these journals Cardin wrestles with profound philosophical and religious issues, absorbing the work of thinkers ranging from Plato to Nietzsche to Alan Watts; at the same time, he speaks of his fascination with such writers as H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Thomas Ligotti, whom he has made a special subject of study. Throughout these compelling journal entries, Cardin reveals his own shifting philosophical and psychological state, presents early drafts or synopses of his weird tales—including many partial drafts and plot germs for stories that he never went on to complete—and speaks with affecting candor of his personal relationships. Cumulatively, this journal reveals Matt Cardin to be one of the most intellectually challenging authors associated with horror literature.

In next week’s installment of Living into the Dark, I’ll share the full introduction and index to Volume 1. But for now it’s on to the business at hand, which is to meditate on a certain striking quality of weird fiction as its own distinct form of storytelling.

Recently Steven Pressfield, writing at his blog, made a compelling observation about the nature of narrative understory and its relationship to surface story. What he said got me to reflecting on the special case of weird fiction, where I think a unique dynamic is in play.

In “Does Your Novel/Movie Have an Understory?”¹ Pressfield defines understory as “the unspoken story-beneath-the-story” and acknowledges the fiction maker’s maxim, commonly taught in MFA programs and creative writing classes, that understory is actually more important than surface story. Since understory is the tale of the protagonist’s inner journey, which gives meaning to the outer one, understory is “what REALLY pulls the reader/viewer through the drama.”

By way of example, Pressfield points to the famous case of Huckleberry Finn, in which the novel’s surface story of Huck and Jim’s journey down the Mississippi River rests atop an understory in which the real villain is not the people who pursue them but Huck’s culturally inculcated belief in White racial superiority, along with the accompanying belief in a divine mandate that Blacks should be enslaved by Whites. In other words, as Pressfield puts it, “the deeper villain, the Understory Villain, is inside Huck’s heart.”

Pressfield’s deep point is that in this or any other narrative, “the Understory plays out on the landscape of the soul” (his emphasis). In Huckleberry Finn, this means

the beats of the Understory are the moments in real time when Soul Reality, i.e. Jim’s trueness of heart, his kindness, his integrity, and his love for Huck give the lie to this notion that is embedded in Huck’s very cells.

The dramatic climax of the novel’s understory comes, of course, in the iconic scene where Huck, instead of sending the letter he has written to Miss Watson turning Jim in as an escaped slave, tears it up and decides that if helping Jim means he will burn in a fiery hell for all eternity, “All right then, I’ll go to hell.”

As I read Pressfield’s post and really grooved to it, it occurred to me that in my own favorite type of fiction — namely, weird fiction — there’s a very special relationship going on between understory and surface story. At first I thought I wanted to say that understory is more important in weird fiction than in other types. But no, that’s not really it, as understory is crucial to pretty much all narrative fiction. Instead, what’s special about weird fiction is simply this:

In weird fiction, understory is surface story. The two are identical. The distinction is collapsed. It is not just on a submerged or subliminal level that there is a story playing out on the landscape of the soul. In weird fiction, the very surface of the narrative is the landscape of the soul.

From Weird Tales, May 1925. Artwork by Andrew Brosnatch (1896-1965). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A couple of classic examples illustrate the point. One is Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann.” The surface story is about the destabilizing of the narrator’s sense of reality when he rents a room in a house located on a mysterious street that he later cannot find. While living there, he experiences an encounter with a terrifying cosmic or extra-cosmic darkness,

the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to anything on earth.

And the understory? It’s the same thing. The understory of “The Music of Erich Zann” is the story of the narrator’s sense of reality being destabilized when he encounters that terrifying darkness. The surface story’s antagonist is identical to the understory’s antagonist.

Another example is Blackwood’s “The Willows.” The surface story is about two seeking safety on a sandy island when they get caught in summer flooding as they travel down the Danube by canoe. While trapped there, they discover they are in the presence of awesome transcendental forces that inspire dread with their absolute incomprehensibility. As “the Swede,” the narrator’s companion, says at one point, these forces or powers seem to be

from another region — not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind — where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance.

And the understory? Again, it’s the same thing. In “The Willows” the understory is the story of these two men having the walls of their familiar world, their personal cosmic orders, knocked down as they are introduced to the reality and presence of those “terrible personalities” with their mysterious “vast purposes.” Again, the “villain” of the understory, and the attendant engine of its inner dramatic conflict and narrative development, is precisely identical to that of the surface story.

In the case of “The Willows,” the Swede actually gives the game away, as it were, by directly stating Pressfield’s point about the understory unfolding on the landscape of the soul. His quoted words above about the “vast purposes” of those invisible powers end with this:

vast purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with mere expressions of the soul.

This states the matter as directly as it can be stated. “The Willows,” which Lovecraft and others, including me, have long regarded as a veritable archetype of the weird tale,² states its understory directly and explicitly, right there in the text. The landscape of the surface story with its sandy island in the middle of the flood-stage Danube where the two protagonists encounter the terrifying primal forces or entities of a transcendental reality is simply and literally the landscape of the soul. The two levels are merged.

To repeat: In narratives like these, understory is surface story. The surface story is a direct, literal instantiation of the understory. I could multiply examples indefinitely. I’ll be you could, too.

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In weird fiction, understory is surface story. The distinction is collapsed. The very surface of the narrative is the landscape of the soul.

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I find this recognition to be neat. It feels a bit like an epiphany, not least because it accounts in large part for the attraction I have always felt to weird and supernatural fiction, both as a reader and a writer. And I think it might behoove writers of the form in general to be aware of it.

Not incidentally, this same idea plays into Pressfield’s final point, which is that conscious awareness of this principle can be beneficial to a writer:

I’m working on a new novel right now, I’m asking myself, as I wrestle with its structure and concept, “What’s the Understory? Where does it play out? Is it happening on the landscape of the soul?”

I’ve never really applied these criteria to any story as part of the process of working on it. It’s a helluva deep exercise. I highly recommend it to all of us.

I think I second his recommendation, though I’ve never actually written anything myself from such an awareness. Right now I’m just finding it fascinating to go back through my favorite works of weird fiction, and also my own stories, and apply this insight. In doing so I’m noticing for the first time how these stories all, to one degree or another, present the understory right on the surface, since their common core theme is the weirding of conventional reality, with the encounter between the protagonist and the source of the weirdness standing as the convergence point where the two narrative levels become one.

I also note, in parting, that this is why all such tales can be read in one way or another as tales of awakening or enlightenment. In fact, they can also be used or regarded as tools for enlightenment. The collapsing together of one’s egoic life narrative and sense of personal identity with the underlying spiritual/metaphysical/deep ontological reality is what awakening is all about. It is also what weird fictional narratives, read in this way, are about. There is much food for reflection here.

On deck for next week:

Introduction and Index to Matt Cardin, Journals, Volume 1: 1993-2001

1. Steven Pressfield, “Does Your Novel/Movie Have an Understory?” September 27, 2022.

2. Though of course the field is actually wider than the Blackwoodian and Lovecraftian stream, as Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, among others, have importantly observed in recent years. See the introduction to their necessary anthology The Weird, available online at https://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/05/the-weird-an-introduction.