mewsings in March 2025

First published in 1984, The Ceremonies is an expansion of Klein’s 1972 novella “Events at Poroth Farm”. He worked on the novel for about five years (while also editing The Twilight Zone Magazine), and it came out in the midst of the 1980s horror boom. Lauded by Stephen King among others, it sold enough to go through a number of reprints, was nominated for the 1985 World Fantasy Award, and won the 1986 August Derleth Award. So far, it’s Klein’s only novel.

Despite being a massive book (608 pages in its recent PS Publishing edition), The Ceremonies has a small cast and a not-very-complicated plot but, once I’d got used to its steady pace (the supernatural elements build up nice and slowly), it didn’t feel padded—at least, not in terms of character and plot.

The main character is Jeremy Freirs, nearly thirty, divorced, and (in the words of the book’s main antagonist) an “insignificant little academic with no family and no prospects”, “a solitary soul, lonely and suggestible”, who decides to go off on a country retreat (despite the fact he’s never really been much outside New York) to get some reading done for his PhD on “The Gothic Imagination”. To this end, he responds to an ad offering accommodation for the summer at Poroth Farm in New Jersey. The Poroths, it turns out, are a young couple, recently returned to the husband’s birth-town of Gilead, seeking to make a go of this long-abandoned farm. They are also—as is the entire town of Gilead—members of a Amish-like sect, the Brethren of the Redeemer, who believe in doing without electricity and many other mod cons, “living the way the Lord wants us to, living just like the people in the Bible”. But the Poroths are in debt, and in need of Jeremy’s money, so they’re prepared to overlook the fact that he comes from decadent, heathen New York. Just before going away to Gilead, Jeremy meets Carol Conklin, a young woman working as a part-time librarian (and who only recently spent six months in a convent, intending to become a nun), and convinces her to visit him during his stay at Poroth Farm.

What none of them know is they’re being subtly manipulated by an old man, who calls himself Rosie, but whose name was originally Absolom Troet. Born on Poroth Farm in 1868, he encountered, in the woods, an alien creature that had crashed there more than five thousand years before. It had been waiting all that time for a fitting servant to bring it back properly to life, whereupon it will “transform” (or perhaps destroy) the world. One of young Absolom’s first actions as its servant is to murder his entire family and cover it up as an accidental fire. He then makes two attempts at the ceremonies that will bring his master back, both of which involve the grisly murder of a young woman—once in 1890, the other in 1939, both on the rare conjunction when there’s a full moon on Lammas Day. (He seems to have skipped 1901 and 1920.) Both attempts fail. Now—1985, which is the next full moon on Lammas Day—he’s determined to see the ritual all the way through.

One of the book’s real strengths is characterisation. We spend a lot of time with these few characters, and they never seem dull or unconvincing. Sarr Poroth, for instance, despite having strict religious ideas, is prepared to accept others for what they are and not be too judgemental—he himself partially left the Brethren when he sought to become a teacher. One of the high points of the novel is the story he tells of his one and only trip into New York, where he was robbed of the little money he had, and proceeded to walk through the massive city in search of the thieves, a journey that turned, increasingly, into a vision of Hell. His wife, Deborah, though she shares his views, is lively and fun (most of the Brethren view her as “frivolous, high-spirited”, which is, to them, a negative). Even the main antagonist, Rosie, presents himself as a spritely old man with a sense of humour (“Satan? Who’s he?”) and a wide-ranging generosity, while inside he’s seething with judgement and a desire to basically destroy the world. Carol comes across as somewhat naïve and easily manipulated, but mainly because she likes to see the best in people. (It’s also why Rosie chose her—he needs someone he can lead through a number of arcane ceremonies without her suspecting.) Jeremy, meanwhile, is something of a slob, a man whose attempt to get fit is beset with excuses, and whose main focus actually seems to be trying to get laid—either by Carol or, at times, Deborah, despite her being the wife of his host. Still, despite him being no hero, and certainly not admirable, it feels like a true portrait—he’s not exactly prepared to face the incursion of a cosmic-level horror, but who is?

Of the inspiration behind the novel, Klein said (in a 1985 interview with Douglas E Winter, in Faces of Fear):

“The Ceremonies is, in many ways, an attempt to update Arthur Machen… in that it’s about the same things that pleased me in Machen…”

In particular, he’s talking about Machen’s “The White People” (which he has Jeremy read by moonlight, leading him into a trance-like performance of the first of the ceremonies). And there is certainly that feeling of a magical reality hidden just behind the day-to-day world, accessible by obscure and traditional rites, songs, games, and rituals. (As Rosie knows: “The keys to the rites that will transform the world are neither hidden nor rare nor expensive. They are available to anyone.”) But whereas “The White People” is all about the horror of this other world of strange magic simply existing, The Ceremonies takes things in an apocalyptic direction which Machen never did. The novel is much more like Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror”, with its rural setting, black magic rituals, and the coming of a cosmic entity that intends to wipe humankind off the Earth.

But, whereas Lovecraft links his black magic rituals to advanced science, Klein never really questions why there’s a need for these ceremonies in order to resurrect his alien monster. If the creature is alien, why are the ceremonies linked to it so rooted in traditional world cultures? (It arrived five thousand years ago, yes, but in a remote part of the world.) Why does the magic work on it at all? But, really, it doesn’t matter—this novel isn’t about presenting a worldview in which magical ceremonies make some sort of modern sense. The ceremonies are just things you have to do. As Rosie ponders at one point:

“There are always steps to follow, rules to be observed. Funny, that he of all people should have to play by the rules.”

The Brethren have ceremonies, too. Most of them are obvious religious rituals (getting together to pray and sing, for instance), but some have a more folk-horror air to them, such as a planting ceremony that ends in the baking of a star-shaped loaf of bread, which everyone eats. This, it turns out, is a vestige of a far older ceremony where the loaf would have been man-shaped, and before that might well have been an actual human being who was consumed as part of a savage earth-fertility ritual. The feeling is, then, that the civilised world we all live in and know is underpinned by something far more savage and dark. Jeremy, with his New York ways, is clearly the most “civilised” in terms of his being divorced from nature and its life-cycles; but the Brethren, though they work with the land, are still not fully in touch with its genuine savageness. (As indicated by Deborah’s futile attempts to stop her many cats from killing tiny creatures.)

In a way, it’s nature that’s the real cosmic-level reality of The Ceremonies: its insects and snakes and tangled woods. The alien thing itself is described as “outside nature and alone”, and the random processes of nature play a role in the foiling of its plan, too—just as nature foils the Poroths’ plan to make the farm a working concern. Like the alien, Jeremy is “outside nature”—he hates the bugs that constantly invade his living space, and is allergic to cats. Both the alien and Jeremy are described as “alone”, and it could even be said that, in his sometimes singleminded attempts to bed Carol, he’s a little like the alien, which needs Carol as a virgin sacrifice in its final ritual. The difference is, Jeremy’s desire turns to love (maybe not entirely convincingly), which the alien’s would never do.

Despite its length, I didn’t think The Ceremonies really engaged with its own themes enough to make them stand out and be analysed too much. It also had a few loose ends (like, what happened to Sarr Poroth’s mother, the only character to be aware of what Rosie was trying to do?). But its strength lies in its characterisation, and the slow, subtle build of the supernatural horror element to a grand conclusion. I certainly enjoyed reading it, I just don’t know if it left me with anything that would make me return to it, as a novel.

The original novella, “The Events at Poroth Farm”, works better as weird fiction—and even better on a re-read, when you can spot the subtle early signs of things going wrong. The characterisation is still there, and the compression and unanswered questions make it work much better. Klein is certainly good at this longish short form (see also his collection of four novellas, Dark Gods), and it’s a pity he hasn’t written more.

Like Atlan, the previous volume in the saga of Cija’s constant imperilment, The City (1966) was published simultaneously with a realistic novel from Gaskell, this time All Neat in Black Stockings, the tale of an innocent young woman who falls for a womanising window-cleaner (filmed in 1969 as an Alfie-like comedy that left the darker aspects out). Cija’s adventures, on the other hand, are basically a continuation of the previous books. First, there’s that disparaging tone which always clamps onto something to complain about, as the book opens with Cija finding herself on “The dirtiest quay I’ve ever been on. And a scum of dirty ice over almost everything…” Almost immediately, she’s sold into a brothel, but escapes that for a life of domestic drudgery. It’s only then she realises where she is: back in the city of her birth, in the realm of her Dictatress mother and High Priest father, who are vying for control of the land. Her father, of course, wants Cija dead, because he’s supposed to be celibate, so can’t have a daughter walking around. If that weren’t imperilment enough, she’s kidnapped by a tribe of ape-men, who seem to be intent on fattening her up to feed to their children, until one of the tribe, Ung-g, becomes protective of her and is forced to flee with her into the surrounding jungles. The two witness a pair of Tyrannosaurs mating, concluding in the female eating the male. It’s a savage moment that could well be Gaskell’s ultimate vision of the relationship between the sexes, if it didn’t turn out that Ung-g, despite not being human, is the most ideal mate Cija has yet encountered:

“It has taken primaeval man, an animal of the forests, to show me how tender tenderness can be.”

But the idyll doesn’t last. Cija is found by her father’s men and taken to his volcano fortress where, she’s told, she is to be sacrificed. (Her father, it turns out, has got round the demand for celibacy by taking a bejewelled crocodile as a consort—a crocodile that, despite being a reptile, has breasts.) Needless to say, Cija is once again rescued from her peril, reunited with her mother, and, just as she realises she’s pregnant with Ung-g’s baby, is told her husband Zerd is due to arrive any moment…

Although this was the last volume in the Atlan saga for just over ten years, it doesn’t show any signs that this was meant to be a conclusion. (The story of the four books has, for me, shown no overall shape, despite this being the volume where Cija comes home.) All the same, there’s something of a thematic resolution in Cija being faced by two of the most extreme examples of maleness so far—and the series has, really, been all about Cija’s very difficult relationships with men. On the one hand we have Ung-g, an almost wordless semi-human who’s nevertheless protective of Cija and tender towards her; on the other, there’s her father, who wants to kill her. Mother-figures don’t fare much better, either. There’s the brothel-madam Rubila, then the woman who takes Cija in as a servant of sorts, whom Cija actually refers to as Mother (and whose actual daughters say they know she hates them), and then her Dictatress mother, right at the end, who we know has already used her quite coldly in her own plots. The Atlan saga is, frankly, a nightmare of personal relationships.

One of the things that’s kept me reading these books—apart from the difficulty I have in not finishing something I’ve started—is learning how this bizarre series (which must have seemed even more bizarre at the time it was published) was received, in the days before fantasy became a publishing phenomenon. How did the reviewers understand it? As literature or schlock? Well, there was this kind of review, from Patricia Hodgart in the Illustrated London News:

“The City, third in a series of horror-comic Gothic romances, has the same kind of sick jokiness as Pop art. Here be dragons, but her heroine, Cija, survives them all—alligators, octopuses, sadistic priests, the lot—only to become pregnant by an almost human ape who has rescued her. Crudely written indigestible stuff, for monster-lovers only.”

But also this kind, from Wendy Monk at the Birmingham Daily Post:

“The richness of the author’s imagination comes into its own when the outcast empress goes into the jungle with an ape… Miss Gaskell’s sleight-of-hand just manages to deceive until the end of the game; only it is not the end, for we shall meet Cija again.”

But overall, I’m more inclined to agree with Susan Hill (who I’m assuming is the same Susan Hill who wrote The Woman in Black), in the Coventry Evening Telegraph:

“Miss Gaskell writes with her imagination in full flood, but I’m beginning to find Cija rather a bore.”

Nevertheless, with only one volume left, I’ve got this feeling I’m going to end up finishing this saga anyway, if only to see what a gap of ten years might make of Gaskell’s fantasy world. The final volume, Some Summer Lands, came out in 1977.

I came to read this, David Eddings’ first novel, via a rather insalubrious route. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but around 2020 the revelation came out that, at the start of the 1970s, both David Eddings and his wife served a year in jail for the physical mistreatment of their 4-year-old adopted son. It seems they’d been keeping him in a cage in the basement, as well as administering physical punishment, seemingly because he was a fussy eater. (As a result, the couple had both the son and a more-recently adopted daughter permanently removed from their care, and weren’t allowed to adopt again.) As I’d read and re-read (several times) Eddings’ first fantasy series, The Belgariad, when I was 13, I found myself being drawn, car-crash-wise, into wanting to know more. A Reddit thread contained links to some of the newspaper articles of the day, but the most insightful piece was one by James Gifford, who’d actually done research in the Eddings archives. One of the things he said was that Eddings’ first novel, the non-fantasy High Hunt (published in 1973), was actually drafted in jail, and that it was “highly autobiographical”. I’m not the sort to demand the writers I read be paragons of virtue, but all the same, I felt the need for a little mental readjustment about Eddings, and ended up reading High Hunt. One thing to say about this case that sets it aside from, say, that of Marion Zimmer Bradley (whose Mists of Avalon I read around the same time), is that David Eddings and his wife were tried and sentenced, and served time for what they did—which is, in our society, supposed to give them a chance of rehabilitation. Perhaps, then, The Belgariad might have been informed by remorse and a greater self-knowledge.

The narrator of High Hunt is Dan Alders, who, at the start of the novel, is just getting out of his stint in the US army. (This is the era of the Vietnam war, but he was lucky in being posted to Germany.) Having no real home to go to (his father is dead, his mother is an alcoholic he’s pretty much cut himself off from, and his last steady girlfriend ended their relationship while he was abroad), he decides to look up his semi-estranged brother Jack. Jack, living in a trailer park with his (I can’t remember if it’s second, third, or what) wife and two kids, sets Dan up with a trailer for the few months before he goes to college, and Dan falls in with Jack’s friends, a collection of mostly dysfunctional males and their generally more functional wives (but also their very much dysfunctional mistresses), who spend their time in drinking and semi-casual womanising.

One of Jack’s friends suggests going on the High Hunt, an early-season deer hunt which takes place high up in the Cascade Mountains—in “some of the roughest, emptiest, steepest, highest country in the whole fuckin’ world”. (In contrast to The Belgariad, High Hunt contains a lot of swearing, drinking and sex. In the fantasy series, there are occasional jokey references to the sorcerer Belgarath’s dissolute ways. The first half of this novel, I think, gives the details of that sort of life.)

The group take a whole lot of baggage into the mountains with them: personal hang-ups, rivalries and resentments aplenty. One of their number, for instance, ex-Marine Lou McKlearey (who Dan describes as “a whole pile of bad trouble, just looking for someplace to happen”) is not only saddled with PTSD, but has been carrying on an affair with Jack’s wife, and has slept once with the wife of another member of the expedition—so, at least two of the group are pretty keen on turning their rifles on him, if he wasn’t already difficult, competitive, and obnoxious enough. Naturally, as well as rifles, they all take pistols, too.

Although High Hunt is mostly described as a thriller, and there’s a lot of tension throughout as the personal issues build up steam, it doesn’t deliver the thriller-type of ending that reviewers’ comparisons to Deliverance (filmed in 1972) might imply. Eddings’ novel isn’t about a shoot-out between supposedly civilised men, but the moral arc each character goes through. Jack, for instance, finally admits how scared of life he is; Lou doesn’t exactly turn his life around, but we at least get a glimpse of the kind of psychological pressure he’s under. Another member of the group, Stan, a somewhat henpecked academic, though he’s revolted by his killing of a deer, plays up the big hunter when he gets home and shifts the power balance with his formerly domineering wife (though Dan can see it’s all a bit fake—not all of the characters have entirely positive stories). Another, Cal, finally admits it’s time to grow up and drop all the drinking and womanising.

Dan’s turnaround, though the least dramatic, is the most explicit in what caused it. At the start of the novel, he has, as he describes it, a serious case of “plain, old-fashioned alienation”. Going up into the mountains—and, yes, killing a deer, poor thing—reconnects him with something authentic:

“There was no way to fake it… If you didn’t kill the damned deer, he wouldn’t fall down… He had too much integrity… He knew he was real. It was up to you to find out if you were.”

He gets almost poetic about it, though in a slightly Hemingway way:

“I slowly squeezed the trigger. When a shot is good and right on, you get a kind of feeling of connection between you and the animal—almost as if you were reaching out and touching him, very gently, kind of pushing on him with your finger. I don’t want to get mystic about it, but it’s a sort of three-way union—you, the gun, and the deer, all joined in a frozen instant. It’s so perfect that I’ve always kind of regretted the fact that the deer gets killed in the process. Does that make any sense?”

As well as interacting with (and shooting at) mother nature, Dan gets a dose of re-parenting, thanks to the two men who are their guides for the hunt: Miller, an impressive, white-bearded father-figure (who “looked a little bit like God himself”), and the older, smaller Clint, who, as he does all the camp’s cooking, comes across as something of a mother-figure. Both come to thoroughly approve of Dan, and Dan gets to feel a bit of self-respect in the process. He goes home, commits to his studies, and even manages to convert his hippie-ish girlfriend into a more conventional wife.

I couldn’t help noticing a few similarities with The Belgariad. The opening, with its reminiscence of a rural childhood, “on the bare upper edge of poverty”, in which Dan’s father tells a story, echoes the opening chapter of Pawn of Prophecy, with the boy Garion’s upbringing on a farm and the storyteller Belgarath’s visits. The narrator’s surname, Alders, immediately made me think of the main god, Aldur, in The Belgariad. And the section in the final Belgariad book where Garion, Belgarath and Silk—just the men, for the first time in the series—set out into country that feels very much like the gold-rush era US, has echoes with the world and characters of High Hunt, if I’m recalling it right.

High Hunt was better than I’d expected. I’d say it’s better written than The Belgariad, and that’s probably because Eddings was writing about people and places he knew, and felt something about. There’s definitely an air of authentic feeling towards the landscape he describes:

“The road out to Miller’s wasn’t the best, but we managed. The sun was up now, and the poplar leaves gleamed pure gold. The morning air was so clear that every rock and limb and leaf stood out. The fences were straight lines along the road and on out across the mowed hayfields. The mountains swelled up out of the poplar-gold bottoms. It was so pretty it made your throat ache. I felt good, really good, maybe for the first time in years.”

There’s also a lot of technicalities about guns and hunting that went over my head, but at least it left me feeling that the author knew his stuff. It’s the sort of novel where someone says “Why don’t you get the horses while I rig up a drag?”—and I have no idea what a drag is, but I’m pretty sure Eddings does.

A lot of drinking goes on. It’s full of scenes where two guys get together and decide to go out for a drink, but first have a few drinks at home to get in the mood, and stop off on the way to buy a bottle to keep things going. Then, once they’re at the drinking establishment, they go from beer to something stronger, then decide to go to someone’s house, and do some more drinking there. (It makes me wonder what Dan was really on about when he accused his mother of being an alcoholic.)

In this sense, it’s a novel about a particularly male sort of toxicity—a lot of the women are treated abominably by the men, and I can’t say the author is particularly sympathetic towards them—but ultimately it’s about rising above this Slough of Despond, connecting with something authentic, and getting on the right path once more.

Which may well be what Eddings himself was doing by writing the novel. I wouldn’t say I detect any regret about the treatment of the Eddings’ son—there’s pretty much nothing about children in the book, aside from references to the narrator’s own childhood, which clearly contained a certain amount of the sort of corporal punishment Eddings himself would have grown up with. (Jack’s kids get barely a mention, and neither adulterous Jack nor his equally adulterous wife seem to take much care of them, which can’t help feeling significant.) Instead, this is about Eddings backing himself out of a moral dead end and (presumably) deciding to live a more authentic, or upright, life from now on. It’s about Eddings himself, not what he did to someone else.

One strike that’s perhaps against it, is that there’s a certain amount of the sort of light but firm paternalistic moralising in High Hunt that I recognise from The Belgariad. Dan’s hippie girlfriend, who leaves off the political demonstrations, starts wearing a bra, and agrees to get married, as though she’s finally come to her senses, is one case in point: Eddings has always had something of the attitude that everyone will one day see the world as he thinks it should be and correct their wrong ways, and this makes me wonder a bit if he was fully capable of the moral self-evaluation you’d expect a year in prison to give him. High Hunt isn’t about regret for what he did, but a recognition of the bad path he was on, which isn’t quite the same thing, but is at least part of the way there.

In the piece linked to above, Gifford writes of how the revelation about Eddings’ crime cast a whole new light on The Belgariad, finding it to be “an impossible attempt at atonement, a desperately failed wish put to paper, and a tortuously painful digging out of his and his wife’s shame”. I hope that, ultimately, no atonement is impossible, but the sense I get is that the Eddings attempted to put what they did behind them (they certainly made sure to avoid the limelight once their fantasy novels were so successful, and perhaps part of that was fear of what might be dug up about them), and that any thoughts or feelings Eddings might have had about it would be deeply buried. But it would be interesting to give his break-through fantasy series a re-read, I have to say.