Goethe's "Erlkönig" (1782) is a classic of weird poetry. It tells a story about a father riding through the night with his child. The child believes he is being lured away by the supernatural Erlking. The poem has two obvious readings: on one, the child is seeing a real supernatural presence; on another, he may just be sick, fevered, frightened, and dying while the father keeps explaining everything away as fog, rustling leaves, and wind. The child is having a visionary exper

Dotty resolved to become the foremost Galveston-style piano player in the world. There are those who say that she became just that. She was good, very good, possibly the best. But that was some years after this first period of her return. — Dotty A twelve-year-old girl, a cripple, the daughter of the proprietor, was playing the piano. It was not for some time, due to the primacy of other matters, that Moysha realized that she was playing atrociously. Then he attempted to corr

We will not lie to you. This is a do-it-yourself thriller or nightmare. Its present order is only the way it comes in the box. Arrange it as you will. — "Promantia , " The Devil is Dead (1971) This post is meant as a shortcut into the heart of Lafferty's work if you are new to Lafferty. To begin, I want to distinguish between two very different things: canonical Lafferty and your Lafferty. Everyone who reads Lafferty has to assemble their own sense of him. Obviously, all wri

The world's a blast (Ka-whoosh! Ka-whish!) With healthy soul and belly, And all the skies are full of fish, And all the fish are smelly. Charles Fort’s Super-Sargasso Sea comes up on the blog from time to time. Judging by the number of variations Lafferty gave the idea, he loved it. Oceans, seas, rivers, springs, and other waterways are a major part of his corpus. He uses them to write about time, the unconscious, and the suprahistorical. Yet there are the twists. For instan

When the Abebaios Block (the Hesitation Block) had been removed from most human minds (usually by simple childhood metasurgery), people began to make decisions faster, and often better. The "Block" had been a mental stutter. When it was understood what it was, and that it had no useful function, it was done away with. And individuals sharpened up as if they had been gone over by a honing stone. Future readers are lucky that so much of Lafferty’s writing process survives, thou

For anyone else who enjoys this sort of thing, here are some of Lafferty’s original titles: "Pani People" became "Pani Planet." "Rangle Dang Kaloof" became "Rang Dang Kaloof" on republication “Glaciation” became “Day of the Glacier” "Is He a Wreck?" became “Adam Had Three Brothers” "And There Confuse" became "Special Condition in Summit Street" "Blood Off a Knife" became " Enfants Terribles " " Mater Inventorum " became "Eurema’s Dam" " Saecula Saeculorum " became "Been a Lon

“Monitors were set up, and their capacity calculated. It was very wide, but not infinite. All credible impressions, projections, motifs, sensories, theories, and cogitations were catalogued. They were revised over a long period, added to as early randoms appeared, and put into final clarified form. Then the door was closed and nothing else could be added.” Lafferty wrote the unpublished dystopian short story “Vestige” in 1963, between two of his strong stories, “Pani Planet”

“I am like that hard-luck guy in the funny-paper or Job in the Bible.” Advanced Lafferty today. I will first run through the plot so that those who want only that can stop. "Narrow Valley" has about three-quarters of a century in it. In 1893, after being assigned a 160-acre plot of land subject to taxation, there was a Pawnee Indian named Clarence Big-Saddle. Big-Saddle performs a makeshift spell using substituted ingredients and an incorrect magic word. Yet the ritual alters

“But on the third hand, and often to the exasperation of critics, the writer usually knows what is wrong or right with a story better than a critic does.” — Letter The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G. K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin. — P. G. Wodehouse To start a fight with someone who loves Chesterton, say that Chesterton was an alcoholic. Though it is in poor taste to mention, one of the qualities Lafferty

“Well, I started writing everything. I wrote a Saturday Evening Post story and an American Magazine story and a Collier’s story, and some sort of a western story, and science fiction and mystery stories. I sent them around. The science fiction story sold and the others didn’t, so after several repetitions then, I just wrote science fiction. It took me about a year before I was selling.” —1983 interview with Schweitzer Andrew Ferguson has already noted the most important fa

They wrote the story on a column, And on the Great Church Window painted The same, to make the world acquainted How their children were stolen away; And there it stands to this very day . . . So, Willy, let you and me be wipers Of scores out with all men — especially pipers: And, whether they pipe us from rats or from mice, If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise. — Robert Browning, The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1842) “It's Gabriel's horn!” John Michael Anwal

“The footfalls are those of Panther and his panthers. And who is Panther? Panther is Pan-Therion or Pan-Therium, the All-Animal, the prototypical animal. He is the cool-fever-flesh from which all others diverge. He is the composite (‘you should have seen some of the things and pieces of things that went into him’) and the generating force. He is the red-clay which is clay-flesh. He is also the Dream-Master.” — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny “The Panther or Pan-Th

A short post about something that does not seem to be recognized by most Lafferty fans, and that seems to me important: the place of the historical fiction in the Lafferty canon. Most people who love Lafferty love Okla Hannali , which was published by Doubleday in 1972, reprinted by Pocket Books in 1973, and later issued by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1991 as part of its American Indian Series. Lafferty was amused by this Oklahoma Press cover, writing, But the picture

Since acorn worms and the human lineage diverged 570 million years ago, pharyngeal slits for filtering food evolved into gills for extracting oxygen, and later into today’s human upper and lower jaw and pharynx, which encompasses the thyroid gland, tongue, larynx (voice box) and various glands and muscles between the mouth and the throat. Humans and other terrestrial vertebrates actually initiate vestigial gills while embryos, though they disappear quickly and rarely persist

But something, almost from the beginning, has been seeping in to diminish the good-humor of the stories of our Earth. I do not know whether the tales of the friendly nine hundred and ninety-nine monstrous and alien species are subject to the same spoiling as are the tales of our own world. Everything in the world, in every world, is either good-humored or bad-humored. So all the bad-humored things were once locked up in an iron cavern and the iron doors made firm with bolts a

Lafferty wrote the unpublished “Pomponia” in 1958, when he was trying to break into different markets, and, like some of the stories he wrote for that purpose, it is both unmistakably Lafferty and somewhat askew from the Lafferty we know. One of the handful of places to which he sent the draft before giving up on it was Seventeen magazine. It reads like the kind of piece he imagined Seventeen might like. It takes the form of an exchange between a flighty girl and a mid-cent

“The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar.” — Niccolò Machiavelli Castlereagh served on many committees and national forums. His heading-up of any body guaranteed its integrity and success. No president felt properly inaugurated unless Castlereagh stood by his side. His was the most sought-after endorsement in the country. He was Respectability. “The Man With Aura” was first written in 1961, went through several iterations,

Maybe Jones is on my mind, so a short note on something fun. Early on, when Lafferty was considering how he would use the Watkin material that would eventually find its home in the Men Who Knew Everything sequence, he seems to have considered using Watkin as the basis for a Maybe Jones novel. There is a note that reads, “The Color-Chapter Sequence from Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds ,” followed by some additional sketching and then a portrait of Jones. Jones was somehow goin

And there was a small bureau set up for that smallgroup of folks who may perhaps have slight flaws in theircharacters — the golden flaw, as Maybe Jones once called it.This small bureau was to plan the future for the good-timecrowd who could not be reformed into the sanctioned mold. My favorite work by Jonathan Swift is his 1704 A Tale of a Tub , a work about which readers disagree in fundamental ways and about which there will never be agreement. That readers arrive at differ

“. . . the greater and more unexpected [. . .] this incongruity is, the more violent will be his laughter.” —Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1818), vol. I, §13 There was something futile in all this gushing blood and smashed transistors. The calculating Programmed remained comfortably ahead of the Jokers, but not too far ahead. They disassembled and put themselves to death when the odds showed themselves too long. How can you have a proper battle w