Weird Fiction and the Secret Landscape of the Soul

Waking up at the uncanny convergence of surface narrative and understory

Dear Living Dark reader,

Today’s post is a very slight revision of one that I published under a similar title two years ago. Given the direction this newsletter has moved since then, along with other things like the writing course that I’m currently teaching online to seventy-plus students, it seems like a good time to revisit this piece and its focal topic.

That topic is the distinction between surface story and understory in works of fiction, and the way stories of the weird and supernatural—which was my dark playground for some two decades—are singular in the way they collapse this distinction, resulting in an uncanny type of fiction where the surface narrative and the deeper “inner” narrative are actually one and the same.

It’s also because of this unique approach that stories of the weird are able to speak in a unique way to the phenomenon of spiritual awakening, and even more, to generate an intimation of the thing itself for those who read with sensitivity and care.

A couple of years ago, Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art, The Legend of Bagger Vance, and many others, 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 and supernatural fiction, where I think a unique dynamic is in play.

In his blog post “Does Your Novel/Movie Have an Understory?” Pressfield defined understory as “the unspoken story-beneath-the-story” and acknowledged 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 a 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 pointed 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. As Pressfield put 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). He says that 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.¹

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 to turn in Jim as an escaped slave, tears it up and decides that if helping Jim means he will burn in hell for all eternity, “All right then, I’ll go to hell.”

As I was reading Pressfield’s post and finding it deeply grokkable, it occurred to me that in my own favorite type of fiction—namely, weird horror fiction—there’s a very special relationship between understory and surface story. As I tried to articulate this to myself, 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’s not just that on a submerged or subliminal level there is a story playing out on the landscape of the soul. Rather, in weird fiction, the very surface of the narrative is the landscape of the soul.

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 unnamed 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, through his interactions with another tenant, the titular Erich Zann, 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, and the literal journey of the surface story’s protagonist is identical to his journey on the metaphorical, thematic, and/or symbolic level of understory.

If you explain to someone that “The Music of Erich Zann” is about a man’s sense of metaphysical security being shaken by an encounter with a terrifying extra-cosmic darkness, and this person turns out to be wise in the ways of storytelling and thus inquires, “Yes, but what’s it really about?” the only accurate answer you can give is to repeat what you’ve already said. There is no distinction between what this story is about in its surface narrative and what it’s “really about” on that deeper, implicit level.

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

Another classic example is Blackwood’s “The Willows.” The surface story is about two men who seek safety on a sandy island when they get caught in summer flooding as they travel down the Danube by canoe. While trapped there, they find that they are in the presence of awesome transcendental forces that inspire dread with their absolute incomprehensibility. Here’s one memorable description of how these forces appear to the human sensibility:

They first became properly visible, these huge figures, just within the tops of the bushes—immense, bronze-colored, moving, and wholly independent of the swaying of the branches. I saw them plainly and noted, now I came to examine them more calmly, that they were very much larger than human, and indeed that something in their appearance proclaimed them to be not human at all. Certainly they were not merely the moving tracery of the branches against the moonlight. They shifted independently. They rose upwards in a continuous stream from earth to sky, vanishing utterly as soon as they reached the dark of the sky. They were interlaced one with another, making a great column, and I saw their limbs and huge bodies melting in and out of each other, forming this serpentine line that bent and swayed and twisted spirally with the contortions of the wind-tossed trees. They were nude, fluid shapes, passing up the bushes, within the leaves almost—rising up in a living column into the heavens. Their faces I never could see. Unceasingly they poured upwards, swaying in great bending curves, with a hue of dull bronze upon their skins.

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 fact, in “The Willows” the Swede gives the game away, so to speak, by directly stating Pressfield’s point about the understory unfolding on the landscape of the soul. The passage quoted above that bears his words about the “vast purposes” of those invisible powers ends 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 other observers, including me, have long regarded as a veritable archetype of the weird tale, 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, the physical with the spiritual, the literal with the liminal, resulting in an uncanny transformation when the veil of the natural becomes transparent to the numinous glow of the supernatural.

To repeat: In narratives like these, understory is surface story. They are the same. The surface story is a direct, literal instantiation of the understory. I could multiply examples from other weird tales almost ad infinitum. I’ll bet you could, too.

I find this realization to be not a little riveting. It feels like an epiphany, not least because it accounts in large part for the simultaneous attraction that I have always felt personally, as a reader and writer, to both supernatural horror and themes of the spiritual and metaphysical. And I think it might behoove all writers of the form to maintain an awareness of this quality, fact, or phenomenon at work in such stories.

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

Not incidentally, this same idea plays into Pressfield’s final point in his blog post, which is that writers and their work can benefit from a conscious awareness and deployment of this principle :

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 this recommendation, though I have never actually written anything myself from such a direct awareness of the case. Right now I’m simply 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—returning to what I said at the start—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 opportunity for fruitful reflection here. To experience the deep and true sense of being moved by a tale of supernatural horror and weird, warping realities is to experience a simulation of enlightenment, at least in one of its forms or frequencies. It is to experience both cognitively and affectively what it’s like to undergo the collapse of surface ego into deep self, the apocalyptic fusion of the physical, literal, objective/external world and its objects, processes, and relationships into the underlying field of its sustaining or, as the case may be, undermining metaphysical powers and principles.

As I am sometimes moved to say when I contemplate these things: Caveat lector. Let the reader beware. Only those who are ready to have their illusions exposed and overturned need apply.

Warm regards,

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