Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftianafrom its historical roots through its most recent branches.

This week, we cover Molly Tanzers Grave-Worms, first published in the Joseph Pulvers 2015 Cassildas Song anthology. Spoilers ahead!

To desire is to live, and to live is to desire.

Docia Calderan ambitious mogul with a penchant for making suits look wholly femininemeets Roy Irving at a mayoral fund-raiser where only they oppose a new courthouse statue. What do lions drinking with jackals have to do with Justice? They discuss joint business ventures over dinner at Delmonicos while the pheromones fly. Yet the restaurants emptiness disturbs her. Lately shes noticed a strange lethargy in New York, with few people braving the streets. The pall extends to her enjoyment of Delmonicos normally excellent fare. Does Roy sense the change?

Have you found the Yellow Sign? Roy responds with a shrug. Its a catchphrase on everyones lips. Nobody knows why people say it. To Docia, it feels like shutting the curtains, locking the doorgoing to sleep.

Outside, clouds obscure stars and moon. It strikes Docia that the city lights are stars, the skyscrapers galaxies. But human will made New York, and nothing can break the citys spirit. A little tipsy, she stumbles. Roy offers to drive her home. Whose home? is her careless reply. He laughs like a living god, and Docia falls into his arms without any fear at all.

So their affair and business partnership begins. Captains of industry, they both want more, always more. But shes not thrilled when he asks her to a cocktail party hosted by theater critic Fulvius Elbreth. Elbreth approved the justice statue, and has crazy ideas about how kings would be better for America than corporate-backed politicians. But Roy insists that the cost of doing business is association with disagreeable powerbrokers.

Party-bound, Docia feels the citys darker than usual. Roy notices nothing amiss. Elbreths apartments full of self-proclaimed intellectuals. The critic is in on every conversation, doling out pithy bons mots. Docia overhears him crowning abstraction as the only acceptable form of modern artistic expression. Representational art is pure arrogance, Elbreth explains, because nothing is knowable enough to represent. Docia argues. Elbreth glibly twists her words, and she escapes to the balcony. Another womans there, smoking. Docia politely nods, then stares at the oddly dim city and cloud-masked sky. When was the last time she saw stars?

Dont let them bother you, the woman says in a clipped, aristocratic accent. Her tailored suit and expression of intense determination impress Docia. Docia, the woman says, is a creator. Critics are destroyersno, less, for they lack will. Theyre grave-worms, feasting on whats already dead.

Though unnerved by the womans familiarity, Docia accepts the most delicious cigarette shes ever smoked. She asks the woman if she senses the gathering darkness. It is darker, the woman says, but as for why: Have you found the Yellow Sign?

The woman vanishes as Elbreth comes out to apologize. Though they differ, Docias opinions on art intrigue him, and hed like to invite her to attend a play, one with a blinkered history thats banned in Europe. Docia agrees to the not-dateElbreth knows shes seeing that meathead Irving.

Docia examines the perfect cigarette butt for a brandmark, and finds a strange golden insignia. She pockets the butt to show to a tobacconist. When Roy hears about Docias not-date, he angrily dumps her. She shrugs off the rejection, more interested in the insignia. Have you found the Yellow Sign?

The tobacconist cant identify the stub mark. Moreover, he doesnt want to find out what it means, and she should take it away! Docias not-date with Elbreth starts out pleasantly. The first act of the play isnt the diatribe Docia expected, but poetry and action more confounding than alarming. Elbreth, however, emerges for intermission pale and sweaty. Somethings wrong, he says. He has to go; Docias willingness to stay makes him flee without hat or coat.

She sits through the remaining acts riveted, entranced. The plays not one of Elbreths abstractions, but more real than anything shes experienced before. She seems to exit the theater alone. The city is silent and dark, but the clouds have dispersed, and the night sky greets her with black stars brighter than any artificial, earthly light and uncounted moons. The constellations are foreign, but Docia laughs. Shes lost her whole life, and finally found her way.

The balcony woman appears, leaning on a streetlight, her suit looking like priestly vestments. Did Docia like the play, she asks, the flash of her yellow eyes blinding. Docia thinks so.

Youre not someone who appreciates uncertainties, the woman says. Lets have a cigarette and talk about it. Docia accepts. Content with silence, she exhales smoke through which she sees that the strange gold insignia is even brighter than the ember.

Whats Cyclopean: Docias fond of straightforward similes: invitations like poisonous snakes, robes crumpled like flowers after a rainstorm, witticisms as light and frothy as egg white on a Ramos Gin Fizz. Her first exposure to the sign moves her to less marked metaphors: eyes as starless pools, starless skies as clotted. The play itself brings her to direct, effusive description: swirling constellations and radiance undreamed. And then to silence.

The Degenerate Dutch: Roy plays at sexism with Docia, or maybe hes not playing. Its all part of being businessmenforgive me, business-people.

Weirdbuilding: We all know the title on that theatrical handbill. And the sign on that cigarette.

Libronomicon: Critic Elbreth, despite his fondness for abstract art, also enjoys political and theatrical classics: he uses a review of Hamlet to advocate for American monarchy. There are probably easier contexts in which to do that, but you do you.

The King in Yellow, meanwhile, reminds Docia of Antigone.

Madness Takes Its Toll: Hearing about the yellow sign, at first, makes Docia feel like lying down shutting the curtains going to sleep. And it does, indeed, seem to spread a pall of apathy and depression over New York.

Ruthannas Commentary

Have you seen the yellow sign? And if youve seen it, do you have any clue what it means?

In Chamberss original, the play and the sign bring both madness and their own reality, the ambiguity never resolved. Laws comes down on the own reality side, with the plays readers immanentizing the future of Repairer of Reputation into (and then out of) existence. Walterss Black Stars on Canvas makes Carcosa a source of poetic madness and inspiration, while Geist does nothing so linear in translating it to gonzo rock opera. Its a force of destruction and change, creativity and illusionand where the emphasis falls among those four depends on the story.

My previous experience with Tanzer was the delightfully decadent Creatures of Will and Temper, so I went into this story expecting lush sensory detail and Walters-ish artistic sacrifices. I got the lush detail, for sure, as Docia appreciates both her appetites and the things that feed them. But shes no artist: she sees desire as fuel for the ultimate appetite of capitalism. Ironically, given her artistic preferences, those appetites remain abstract. She and Roy are captains of industry, better than kings, and thats all we learn of their business efforts. They share a love of good food and a preference for representational art. And at the storys outset, neither of them has seen the yellow sign.

Theyre growing unusual in that ignorance, though. Our first hint about the role of all things yellow is a disturbing change to the City That Never Sleeps. New York grown quieter, duller, starless even by comparison with its usual light pollution, is a worrisome imagethe moreso now, having seen how much and how little a pandemic lockdown does to the citys spirit.

Carcosa takes at least two forms here. First, theres the gold-sigiled cigarette that leaves all other cigarettes tasting ashen. This seems fully in keeping with the effect on the city: a force for sapping vitality. But maybe its more complicated than that. Because the signs second form is the play itself. And at least for Docia, the play pulls her into another reality entirely, one with all the passion and pleasure thats fading from her original world.

So is the sign replacing reality with delusion? Is it vampirizing our worlds energy and light to keep Carcosa alive, or to bring it into being? Is there only one world, experienced differently by those who have and havent encountered the transformative power of yellow?

Fulvius Elbreth recognizes the play as dangerousenough to flee in the teeth of a review deadline. But we already know hes dubious about realism, preferring abstraction to the lies of meaning. He speaks for the gospel of cosmic horror: that rationality is irrational and human-scale understanding an illusion. Maybe this inocculates him against the plays parasitic certaintyor maybe it keeps him from appreciating truth when he encounters it.

What about the unnamed harbinger of Carcosa? (Ill call her Cassilda.) Maybe shes priming people for the play with her perfect cigarettes. Or maybe shes spreading her worlds reality through a thousand different yellow-signed experiences, a thousand flavors of fairy food and drink and drug to leave users dissatisfied with everything but the flash of her yellow eyes.

And shes the one who drops the storys title. She accuses critics, Elbreth in particular, of being grave-worms who feast on that which is already dead. When you think about it, thats an awfully judgmental way to describe someone who evaluates art. Elbreth is no Pierce, living only to describe fault in the most vicious way possible. Indeed, Docias original issue is with the art he likes.

It seems to me that Cassildas accusation carries a sinister implication: that the art of this world is already dead. That Elbreth is stuck with beautiful things that are only growing dimmerthings that Cassilda herself is working to destroy.

Which means that Carcosa, too, is feasting on the dead. And that for all their pleasure and intensity, the cigarettes and the infamous play are the real grave-worms.

Annes Commentary

Any worthwhile afterlife must host a coffeehouse frequented by artists of every era and ilk. When the place gets overcrowded, the oddest couples may share tables. There, way in the back, between the rack of coffee-stained newspapers and the shelf of donated books, Im spotting Robert W. Chambers with

Ayn Rand?

Yes, Ayn Rand. Theres no mistaking that sensible, side-parted bob and those eyes expressive of intense determination, a single-mindedness of purpose. The ashtray in front of her is full of stubs, the brandmark of which I cant make out from the land of the living. And yes, the celestial coffeehouse allows smoking; all the patrons being dead, the management figures what harm can it do.

The ethereal vibrations of Chambers and Rands interaction must have reached Molly Tanzer, whose Grave-Worms resembles a collision between The King in Yellow and Atlas Shrugged. That is, what would have happened if Dagney Taggart found hearts home not in Galts Gulch but in Lost Carcosa?

I picked up Randian vibes in Tanzers first paragraph, which in describing Docia Calder echoes Rands descriptions of both Dagney and The Fountainheads Dominique Francon. Roy Irving comes along to represent business tycoon Hank Reardon; later we get Fountainheads architectural critic Ellsworth Toohey in theater critic Fulvius Elbreth. Fulvous refers to a range of colors from yellow-brown to tawny to dull orange a Fulvius cannot rival the real-gold yellow of Balcony-Womans cigarette insignia, any more than Ellsworth Toohey can rival Rands hypermasculine heroes.

Along with hints from fashion, hairstyles, and the pervasive cigarette puffing, Docia and Roys date at Delmonicos sets the period of the story in the mid-twentieth century, paralleling the felt period of Atlas Shrugged; the midcentury incarnation of Delmonicos was where the elite met to chow down on the signature steaks, Lobster Newberg and Baked Alaska. Thematically more important is the atmospheric similarity of Tanzer and Rands New Yorks, languishing in the grip of failing vitality and a general emotional/spiritual malaise. People express their foreboding with catchphrases of unknown origin, though their true meanings will be crucial to the story. Atlas opens with Who is John Galt? Roy carelessly throws out the question Docia detests: Have you found the Yellow Sign?

Maybe the Yellow Sign makes Docia think of the yellow peril, that Western fear that the barbarian hordes of Asia were poised to destroy the white mans superior culture. Not that all whites are dependable. In Atlas and Grave-Worms a major threat to our way of living is the spread of Socialism even in Europe. Docia assumes that Elbreths play is banned there for anti-Socialist sentiments that would offend the delicate sensibilities of those snooty soap-dodgers.

At the heart of Dagny Taggarts and Docias disgust with modern philosophy is its rejection of reason and its elevation of the subjective over the objective. To accept with Fulvius Elbreth that only in abstraction can we truly show reality is a moral as well as an intellectual sin. Maybe Elbreth can slither by (wormlike) by suggesting he applies his principles to Art, not reality. Balcony Woman doesnt buy it. To her, Docia is Rands epitome of humankind, the Creator, the independent thinker and doer for whom justice is fair exchange for value, with money as the most objective indicator of approval anyone can give another human. Whereas Elbreth the critic is a lower-case destroyer, a grave-worm able to feast only on whats dead.

Which implies that to feast on a living thing, Elbreth and kin must first kill it.

Tanzers most telling reference to Atlas Shrugged lies in how Docia receives the emblem of upper-case Reality in the form of a cigarette brandmark. Searching for John Galt, Dagny Taggart happens upon philosopher Hugh Akston, the last champion of Reason, whos left academia to run an obscure mountain diner. He gives Dagny the best cigarette shes ever tasted; later shell notice that the stub is branded with a golden dollar sign. Sadly, her tobacconist friend is unable to discover the cigarettes origin; his sincere opinion is that it comes from nowhere on this Earth! The golden dollar sign turns out to be the emblem of Galts Gulch and its inhabitants, the stalwarts of objectivism.

Docias mark turns out to be the Yellow Sign, emblem of Carcosa and the King in Yellow. The King in Grave-Worms takes the curious form of Balcony Woman who, when revealed under black stars and radiant moons, may be Docia idealized, a woman who wears her suit so well it resembles priests vestments or royal robes of state.

Whats it all mean, this fusion of Chambers and Rand into Tanzer? Whos John Galt, and how about that Yellow Signfound it yet? I guess Galt represents the Real on Earth, whereas the Sign leads beyond Earth into an Ultimate Reality in which Docia can finally feel really right and really content and smoke only the really best without health repercussions, forever.

So one of Cassildas happier endings?

Is it?

[ETA: This is what I get for avoiding Atlas Shrugged! But put our analyses together, and I think you get a really interesting critique of Randian objectivism. Or just capitalism. RE]

Next week, we continue N. K. Jemisins The City We Became with the 2nd Interruption and Chapter 4. Maybe Aislyn will meet someone more trustworthy? But probably not trust them

Ruthanna Emryss A Half-Built Garden comes out July 26th. She is also the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. You can find some of her fiction, weird and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently The Word of Flesh and Soul. Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic, multi-species household outside Washington DC.

Anne M. Pillsworths short story The Madonna of the Abattoir appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwens underground laboratory.

The rest is here:

Lions Drinking With Jackals: Molly Tanzer's Grave-Worms - tor.com