Kenneth Grant Part 1: Outside the Circles of Time.

“If you hold it up against the light,” he suggested, “an altogether different picture will emerge.”

Against the Light, by Kenneth Grant.

I first encountered the miasmal prose and strange mindscape of Kenneth Grant a few years back, when I was an undergraduate. Though I had virtually no interest in the occult at the time, I often found myself drifting up to the rather small Occult and Paranormal section on the top floor of my university library. The selection of books on ESP and witchcraft rekindled dim memories from my childhood: things like Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World on television; a selection of issues of The Unexplained which I had acquired at a small family auction; the faded Corgi paperbacks on UFOs and Forteana that lingered in second-hand stores long after the bong fumes of the 70’s esoterica-binge had vanished into the cultural ether. The images in The Unexplained remain permanently etched in my mind: Billy Meier’s absurd and numinous flying saucers hovering over gorgeous, sunlit Swiss meadows, contrasted with that grim, iconic shot of John Irving Bentley’s lower leg, the rest of him having burnt, apparently by spontaneous and inexplicable means, into a cinder on the floor of his bathroom.

Most of the books I leafed through on those time-wasting excursions were reasonably forgettable. However, I discovered one book which had an otherworldly ambience quite unlike anything I had ever encountered before: Outside the Circles of Time by Kenneth Grant. Ambience is almost an insufficient word; this book had about it a veritable stench of high strangeness and borderline insanity. It had lost its dusk jacket, so I was approaching the text cold, with no solid grasp of what kind of book it purported to be. It contained a series of illustrated black and white plates, all of a markedly decadent and eerie character. These images included a shrine to the Egyptian deity Set, a brawny hermaphrodite of classically heroic proportions, and various depictions of cosmic entities derived from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. The effect of the illustrations varied from the unsettling to the comic; some resembled discarded sketches that might have adorned the cover of a Hawkwind record.

The text itself offered fewer clues. It seemed to be written in an entirely unfamiliar language: a stream of mythological, Kabbalistic, and numerical correspondences whose underlying system remained as obscure as their overriding argument. It was extremely difficult to get a handle on whether the book was intended to be fact or fiction, or whether its author was being serious or slyly camping it up. His writing style is entirely in the baroque idiom of weird fiction, suggesting in its quieter and more prosaic moments the scholarly fantastique and archaic phrasing of Lovecraft or Borges:

“There exists at the present time a secret coterie of Chinese Adepts, the members of which yet practise the ancient rites connected with the Tunnel of Niantiel. I have visited a sanctuary of this sodality hidden the heart of London. It uses the magical formula of Pe after the manner of Cults which arouse the Fire Snake by methods similar to those described in the previous chapter.”

Most outrageously, Outside the Circles of Time makes no bones about suggesting that Lovecraft’s whole dark cosmic mythology, including its notorious fictional grimoire the Necronomicon, is actually quite real:

“Certain fugitive elements appear occasionally in the works of poets, painters, mystics, and occultists which may be regarded as genuine magical manifestations in that they demonstrate the power and ability of the artist to evoke elements of an extra-dimensional and alien universe that may be captured only by the most sensitive and delicately adjusted antennae of human consciousness…..it is evident from Lovecraft’s many allusions to the Necronomicon that it contains knowledge derived from sources that antedate vastly the present evolutionary life-wave on this planet….”

I honestly didn’t know what to make of that bombshell. Was Grant some fantasist who had indulged far too voluptuously in purple prose, finally hitting the rock bottom, the outer limit, of wild credulity? Or was this rather some kind of heroic feat of postmodern occultism, an explosive Molotov cocktail primed in the service of what Robert Anton Wilson labelled ontological terrorism? Were these the ravings of a certifiable head-case, or the sardonic tricks of giddy literary parodist? Or….is the Cthulhu Mythos actually real? (Comic book legend and hirsute, affable magician Alan Moore has observed of Grant that the “atmosphere of his peculiar mind hung in a churning fogbank over every page” of his writing, and the question which has surely haunted every reader of his work is “just how much of this is supposed to be…you know…real?”)

Well, naturally I wanted some answers to those pressing questions. Following the immortal dictum of Abbie Hoffman, I stole Outside the Circles of Times shortly thereafter…..and that infernal grimoire has been in my possession ever since…

Art by Steffi Grant.

I’m writing about Grant now owing to a strange sequence of events that would not be entirely out of place in the Magus’s own weird writings. About two weeks ago, I felt a peculiar presentiment to return to Grant’s work, ostensibly to derive some inspiration for a horror novel I was trying to write concerning Neolithic stone circles and timeless Lovecraftian horrors. I had a real hankering to read another one of his books, so last Sunday I downloaded Against the Light, and for the next three days I thoroughly absorbed myself in Kenneth Grant’s spectral headspace. I intended to write up a post about those occultic researches here. Then on Wednesday morning, I went to check my blog-roll and discovered the cover of Grant’s The Occult Revival at the head of a couple of blogs. Starfire Publishing, who specialize in authors and artists whose work is “of relevance to the Typhonian gnosis”, made official the announcement that Kenneth Grant had died after a prolonged illness on January 15^th. My project, unbeknownst, had been an obituary all along.

This Weird Wake will continue shortly.

Thomas Ligotti - Nobody is Anybody.

The Nowhere People Episode 2.

Well, that old show, whatever the hell it was, got stuck in my head. I really should have been thinking about other things. I needed something to sell, and I needed it badly. A couple of decades of steady marijuana use does wonders for your creativity – but precious little for your ability to focus on one thing at a time. I was in dire straits. Things were so serious that my agent Pete Bishop and I spent an afternoon discussing the possibility of faking my own death in order to increase book sales. Pete figured that the only parapolitical authors who sold books in any substantial quantity were the ones who’d died under mysterious circumstances. “Like who?” I says.

“Like Richard Alcroft. Copies of Fear Of Unearthly Disclosure are selling for like 300 bucks on Amazon.”

“Wait a minute. Wait a minute now. What was mysterious about that? He had a heart attack, right?

“Well, that’s what the coroner said….but Richard was in the prime of his life…”

“Wasn’t he nicknamed the “Walking Heart Attack” by his buddies for about ten years? And “Cholesterol Canyon”?

“Well, as far as the Alcroft readership is concerned, he died because he got too close to the truth.”

“He died because he got too close to the cheesecake, more like.”

Anyway, we got into a whole routine about how I was going to fake my death. Pete would set it up on his blog. He’d start dropping hints about how I was “onto something big.” He’d say some of my old buddies from the AFOSI were crawling out the woodwork, calling me frantically at all hours of the night. We’d get a buzz of anticipation going among the online freak community, and then BANG! I’d be found dead, apparently a suicide.

“You somehow manage to “shot yourself” three times in the head!” Pete says.

“Yeah, and a relative discovers a receipt in my pocket for a gym membership that I’d renewed that very day.”

“Then all you’d have to do is lie low for awhile. All the original printings of your books would skyrocket in value, become like collector’s items. Then Grassy Knolledge Press would print off a bunch of new editions. You’d be able to buy the boat, man, and just slide off the map…”

Then we fell silent for a while.

“You know” I says “just because Fear Of Unearthly Disclosure is retailing at 300 bucks a pop, doesn’t mean anyone’s actually buying the fucker…”

It was getting bright out. I cleaned up all the roaches and cans, and grabbed a sleeping bag for Pete. This was an old routine with me and Pete – we’d sit up half the night hatching some plan, half-serious, half putting ourselves on. Then it would be morning, and we’d be no nearer to getting anything done. Sometimes I wish I’d been more practical in my youth, so I could afford to be as impractical as I am today. But so it goes.

Anyway, that show was stuck in my head, so a day or too later I dropped Lucas at school, and took a trip out to Whitley Heights to visit an old acquaintance of mine called Merrill Trentwood. Now most people I know have some interest or hobby that becomes a kind of obsession, an all-consuming passion. Merrill’s happened to be men in rubber suits. Let me clarify that before anybody gets alarmed. Merrill Trentwood is probably the country’s biggest expert in the history and culture of vintage fantastic cinema. He is a historian, archivist, and monomaniacal champion of the Golden Age of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy pictures – which in his view extended from the thirties up the middle of the sixties, when the rot finally started to set in.

Now Merrill was quite obviously a well-to do fella, and nobody really knew where his money came from. I heard he’d done a couple of tours in Vietnam, and spent a while in advertising during the Nixon years, but that was about all anybody really knew about him. His whole life seemed to have been sublimated to the goal of preserving the gods and monsters of a by-gone era, to maintaining the receding magic of his own boyhood, and a time when the country itself felt palpably younger. His only family seemed to consist of the small clique of fellow connoisseurs who shared his obsession, and the steadily declining pantheon of still extant directors, actors, make-up artists, model-makers, and matte painters who had participated in the initial creation of those flickering celluloid visions.

Merrill had written more extensively, and more poignantly, about the men who had elected to become our monsters than anyone else in the country. He had documented the hours they spent at the hands of make-up and costume people, becoming strange hybrids of the everyday and the otherworldly, slowly morphing blue-collar theriantropes smoking cigarettes and waiting for their final disappearance behind masks that would become either iconic or utterly forgotten. “Nobody remembers the human faces of the actors” Merrill wrote “or even knew them to begin with. Theirs was the paradoxical destiny of being anonymous stars in the heyday of the moving image.” Merrill must have seen some reflection of himself in the Gillman and all those other creatures: some mythic projection of defeated men like himself who had sought to retreat from the American dream of aggressive predominance, and only wanted to be left alone in the security of their watery lairs to watch and dream away the wider world around them.

Ultimately though, the real nature of his passion was a retreat from the passage of time, a process which he associated with the erosion of belief. The unabashedly artificial characteristics of old Hollywood pictures, including the heightened, dreamlike lustre of Technicolor, the melodramatic and declamatory dialogue, the haunted backlots and matte landscapes, all reflected a culture with a massive capacity for belief. It was a culture for whom a belief in all kinds of things came naturally – they believed all the booming voices that were emerging ghostlike out of the spectral grid of antennas and receivers which seemed to have sprouted overnight like an exotic vegetation across the nation. The voices of preachers, matinee actors, news anchors, and ardent proselytisers of detergents were beaming across space and time through strange new etheric mediums, being magically disintegrated and resembled like Jim Kirk and his crew in the later years of the sixties, into homes and minds with the power of a vast incantation. And in the bounteous energy and naivety of a young nation, they believed them, just as they believed in their own voices. “They only started making realistic pictures when people began to lose the capacity to believe” Merrill said to me once, in one of his typically morose and nostalgic rants.

As an extension of this desire to arrest the passage of time, his house, 6623 Whitley Terrace, was itself a piece of history, whose tomblike ambience Merrill had preserved and augmented. It was a place of profound legendry and ill-repute in the gossip-ridden annuals of Old Hollywood. In the thirties, the property had belonged to Gertha Von Stroinheim, a former Weimar Goddess and star of several noir-themed B-pictures in America. Kenneth Anger devotes several chapters of Hollywood Babylon to detailing the crowded, sybaritic orgies and strange séances that took place under Von Stroinheim’s tutelage. The comedian Buster Lambchops was a regular, apparently indulging his penchant for dressing prostitutes of both genders in castoffs from Egyptian pictures, and arranging them in tableaus inspired by the funerary steles of the Fourth Dynasty. The British character actor George Zucco was alleged to have spent a weekend in the mansion, immediately prior to surfacing in a mental hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, raving that he was being stalked by the “Great God Cthulhu”. The morbid extravagances of 6623 all came to an infamous conclusion in ’41, when an aspiring young actor was found dead; according to the legend, with an exquisitely crafted Art-Deco dildo, a gift from Valentino, stuffed down his throat.

Merrill acquired the place in the early eighties, and had gradually filled it with his own trove of fading memories and artefacts: every wall had a poster depicting some lurid Caliban crawling out of the Atomic imagination; standees stood in alcoves like suits of one-dimensional cardboard armour; glass display cases housed miniature flying saucers and Greek monsters from old Harryhausen pictures. To be honest, I didn’t always like being in the place.

I knew Merrill from back in the magazine days. I used to write stuff, mostly obits, for The Monsters of Movieland!, a sawdust and superglue rag he ran back in the eighties. It just about kept afloat for a while, but its customers had a bad habit of frequently dying in mid-subscription. That thought always kinda weirded me out: a couple of months’ worth of a magazine subscription falling into a dead man’s house. Anyway, Merrill once told me that he know the identity of the guy wearing the Sasquatch rig-out in the Patterson/Gimlin movie. I used to hound him about it, because that book would have been the big one. I could have bought the boat off that one, if only he’d tell me. But he used to say that he was sworn to secrecy, and that if he ever told, a bunch of stuntmen would take him for a ride out to Mulholland Drive, and he’d never be seen again. Maybe he was just putting me on.

So anyway I went out to see Merrill that day because I figured if anybody would know the show I was trying to remember, it would be him. He answers the door dressed like he usually does, in a red silk dressing gown over pyjamas, with a gin and tonic in one hand, and one of those exotic thin cigarettes that odd-balls and perverts smoke in the other. He is tall, slender, bald as a coot, and has one of those weirdly functional faces, you know the type? Like almost everybody’s face has a certain degree of character, be it endearing or otherwise, but then there is another variety of face altogether, whereby the eyes, nose, mouth and what have you are just there, making up the numbers, serving their function. That’s the kind of face Merrill had.

After listening to him go for a while, about creature cons, and how everybody was dying, and how everything was cruddy now, and how we’d been lied to about 9 11 and how the footage of Bush in the school wasn’t even real, and so on, I finally got around to asking him. Sure enough, his eyes lit up, and he ran off to fetch a book. The book was called Science Fiction Serials of the Sixties and Seventies. Merrill leafed through it for a moment, and handed it to me open at a page. I felt one of those amazing rushes you get when you’re reunited with something from a very long time ago, something that seemed almost utterly vanquished and forgotten, but then there then there it is, just as it was; a curious reminder that the past was real, after all, and events, like places, are sometimes retraceable. The heading read The Nowhere People (ABC, 1968.) Underneath, there was a photograph of the blonde from the café; the caption read Candice Hilligoss Was The Girl From Nowhere in the Strangest Serial of Them All!

Continued shortly.

The Nowhere People.

I’m what they used to call a magazine writer. Back in the seventies and eighties, you could earn a decent living, because there was a hell of lot magazines back then. It was a good lifestyle. You just had to keep moving, and you’d always find something to sell. Travel up and down the length and breadth of these United States, just following your nose, and you’d find something. You see, back then, there was a magazine for just about every variety of story you could possibly imagine, so anywhere you might be, at any given time, some kind of story was more or less bound to be in progress. In theory, at any rate. When things dried up, you could always take a holiday to South America; there was always something political happening down there. That was the ideology back then. Everything that happened in South America was political; whereas up here nothing was political. We lived the life that nature and God intended, and only ever had to resort to politics in order to insure that things stayed that way. And people believed that, too.

Anyway, I don’t know if a magazine exists today for the story I’m about to tell. It started when I was hanging out with my nephew Lucas, kind of house- and baby-sitting for my brother and his wife Teresa. We were talking about television, and he was saying how television was better today than it ever was before. And I said “Yeah, maybe so, but the problem with television today is that people don’t believe in it anymore.” Now that’s a statement that requires some qualification. I’m not saying that there was ever a time when people believed everything they saw on television was literally true. There was a time, however, when television was so new, and so vital, that people just didn’t have a vocabulary to describe the experience. You believed in the sense of being overwhelmed, of being mesmerized, because you didn’t know the precise angles of what was happening, and neither did the people who were making the shows. That’s when something is vital, when it’s alive, when people haven’t quite figured out the angles yet. Nowadays, people use the television mostly as a punch bag for their intellects; something to second-guess, to poke fun at, like an opponent in chess whose strategies are transparent from a mile away.

Anyway, my nephew asked me what TV show had the biggest impact on me when I was growing up, and something came back to me that I hadn’t thought about for a long time. I remembered sitting in our den with his father back when we kids, watching some show that just scared the living daylights out of both of us. But I couldn’t put a name on it, no matter how hard I tried. I remembered the first episode: some handsome young guy, some drifter, arrives in a small town. He’s on route to New York City, and he has to wait a couple of hours for the next Greyhound out of town. So he wanders into the local diner and orders a coffee and a steak sandwich. The guy behind the counter is an overweight, droll, likable everyman type. There is one other person in the diner: an ethereal, pretty blonde woman in her mid-twenties. The blonde girl is stirring her coffee with a peculiar intensity, and glancing furtively out the window. Her skin is preternaturally pale, and her manner oddly distant, detached, and uncomfortable. She wears a tight mackintosh buttoned all the way up, and her hair in a severe bun, which gives her the look of an alien detective. The slob behind the counter is cooking the hero’s steak, and reading a magazine with the headline: ARE THE FLYING SAUCERS REAL? He says “Boy, I sure wish those flying disks would take my little missus on trip into Outer Space!”

So the young guy goes over and tries to make some chat with the girl, but she just blanks him out, completely ignores him. Eventually the guy puts on a mock-indignant routine, the way they always do in these old pictures. The girl gets up abruptly, and exits the diner in a hurry, pausing at the door to look back with a puzzled, deer in the headlights kind of expression. The good-natured slob behind the counter laughs merrily: “You’re barking up the wrong tree there, son. She’s a strange one, yessir. She’s been around town these past few days, and if you asked me where she was from, I would have to say Mars. She came in on Wednesday first, I think. Pointed at a blue-berry muffin. So I gave it to her, and she hands me a big wad of notes. So anyway I asked a couple of questions, you know, just bein’ polite and suchlike. She just looks at me like I’m speaking Dutch, so I leave her to it. And she just kinda prods the muffin, and looks at it for about ten minutes, and then walks out of the place, just like she did right there: LIKE SOME VOICE IN HER HEAD HAD COMMANDED HER TO LEAVE. I tell ya, son, that one came down on the Sputnik, no doubt about it”

Anyway, owing to some inevitable complication, the hero winds up missing his bus, and has to spend a night in the town. We see him checking into a motel, one of those eerie Psycho/Touch of Evil numbers on the outskirts of the town. The guy at the counter is a typical squirming, paranoid puritan. “You’re not one of those strange ones, are you?” “Excuse me?” our boy says. “There’s a lot of strange ones passing through these past few days. We run a business here, you know? We cater to all sorts, long as they’re decent coming in, and polite going out. But there are some strange ones abroad these days, people I can’t rightly place in any category. Like last Wednesday, I had a couple of gentlemen come in, very severe, very serious looking gentleman in immaculately pressed suits, with big, shiny brown suitcases. It seemed as though they were foreigners, you understand, but didn’t want to give that impression. They were talking well enough, but it didn’t seem to come natural to them. They were putting a lot of effort into appearing effortless, you know that way? Like some drunks act sometimes. So I asked them what they did, and the first gentleman says “We’re Bible salesmen” and the second feller says “That’s what we are.” Well, on Thursday night, those two gentlemen left very suddenly, as though some voice had popped into their heads and told ‘em to get out of dodge. They ran off in such a hurry that they left their suitcases after them; I saw them striding off in the direction of the woods. Well, I opened up them suitcases, and let me tell you confidentially, it wasn’t any kind of bibles that was in them.”

“What was it?” our boy says. “It wasn’t any kind of bibles I ever saw. It was a bunch of them portable transistor radios, you know the kind? A bunch of them portable transistor radios, and strange plans for radio antennas. And when I turned on one of them trannies, it played the most godawful static sound I ever heard. I mean you just couldn’t listen to it. You’re not one of them strange ones, are you?” “Mister, I don’t own a transistor radio. I’m just looking to trouble you for a room until it gets light.”

Then we cut to a motel room, illuminated by a tall, flashing neon masthead outside the window. The hero paces around the room, seemingly unable to sleep. He pauses by the window, and we a get an evocative exterior shot, probably a studio lot. Beneath the window a narrow path runs out onto the main road. In the left of the shot we see a matte painting of the town off in the distance; to the right the road winds up into dark, densely wooded hills. We cut back to a close-up of the hero, with the neon illuminating his face like a flashing metronome. His brain is replaying pieces of dialogue from earlier in the programme: “AND she just kinda prods the muffin, and looks at it for about ten minutes, and then walks out of the place, just like she did right there: LIKE SOME VOICE IN HER HEAD HAD COMMANDED HER TO LEAVE.” “A bunch of them portable transistor radios, AND STRANGE PLANS FOR RADIO ANTENNAS. “A bunch of them portable transistor radios, AND STRANGE PLANS FOR RADIO ANTENNAS. “A bunch of them portable transistor radios, AND STRANGE PLANS FOR RADIO ANTENNAS”.

Suddenly, we cut back to the driveway, where the blonde girl has appeared, walking towards the woods with the same distracted, otherworldly expression from earlier in the diner. The hero bounds out of the room. We see him walking briskly through the foyer. “I knew it”, says the guy at the counter “one of the strange ones.”

So the guy follows the girl at a distance, and she eventually cuts off the road, and goes into the woods. I recall that this part was where my brother and I started to get really spooked. The girl goes deeper and deeper into the woods, with the guy following her, hiding behind trees whenever she looks back. This sequence was very long, and very effectively done, very hypnotic. At first you could hear the sounds from the highway, but they gradually fade out, and it gets really quiet. You hear nothing except the muffled footfalls of the two characters, and maybe an owl hooting from time to time. I recall when I was young, I’d often look into an open field, or a patch of woodland, and wonder to myself where you’d end up if you went into the field and just kept walking in a straight line. Course, nowadays, I know that you’d wind up at the other end of the field, or the other end of a bunch of fields after it, and there’d just be cars and roads and houses like everywhere else. But when I was a kid, I half figured that if you kept walking long enough you’d wind up in this whole other country, a whole other strange world where the sun set in the sky backwards and everything was somehow different from here.

So I guess I figured that’s where the hero was going, past some invisible point where ordinary reality ceases, into the strange country on the other side of the horizon. Eventually the girl stops in a clearing in the middle of the woods. Nothing happens for a moment; she just stands there waiting. Then these figures begin to emerge from different parts of the wood, converging slowing on the clearing where the woman waits. They look pretty much like ordinary people, all immaculately dressed, very neat and tidy, but their movements are slow and eerily mechanical. They all take their places in the clearing, without once making eye-contact or showing a trace of emotion. Then they begin to communicate with one another, but it’s very weird. Without making eye-contact, their mouths begin to move very rapidly, as though talking silently to themselves. Gradually, a sound begins to develop: a steadily increasing chorus of guttural clicking sounds, a little like a buzzing colony of insects.

At this point our hero inadvertently snags a branch on the tree he’s hiding behind, and all holy hell breaks loose. The people in the clearing bristle and bolt like wild horses. We last see the hero tearing for dear life through the woods, the soundtrack laying some heavy, brooding chords over the show’s signature Theremin and guitar theme. Then it cuts to a drab looking kitchen, and we hear this booming voice: IS YOUR KITCHEN AN AIRPORT THAT CAN TRANSPORT YOU AND THE GANG TO ANY DESTINATION IN THE WORLD, IN THE BLINKING OF AN EYE? The kitchen dissolves in one of those magical old-fashioned wipes, WELL, WHY SHOULDN’T IT BE?, it’s atoms then reassembling themselves as a resplendent jewel of its former self, crowded to the rafters with smiling air hostesses, and heavily stereotyped representatives of various exotic locations, each standing to attention in their allotted portion of the kitchen-plan…..

“What?” Lucas snapped. “Oh, yeah, it went into a commercial break right there…” “And what happened then? Who were the people in the woods?” “Jeez, I can’t really remember.” “Well, what was the show called then?” No good. I just couldn’t place it. We tried a few key-words on the google, but it was no good. After that, we watched a bit of a True Blood box-set. Let me tell you, there are things in that show you wouldn’t have seen in a stag-picture, back when I was a kid. “Don’t worry, Lucas” I says, “it’s all made up, just like the vampire stuff.”

Continued shortly.