September 27, 2025

 Greetings Everyone!

Ray Bradbury, the well-known science fiction and horror writer, describes autumn in his book The October Country  as:

“That country where it is always turning late in the year.  That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay.  That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun.  That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts.  Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain....”

In another book, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury warns us against the autumn people, whom he claims are soulless, evil things that seek to ensnare humans.  

But Bradbury is wrong about that.

For there are autumn people who have souls and are not evil; they love autumn and celebrate the death of the year and the renewal that always follows.

JLS

September 21, 2025

Greetings Everyone!

It is September, and autumn continues.

Washington Irving, American writer and author of “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Adventure of the German Student,” wrote a classic autumn tale, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

The main character, Icabod Crane, is riding alone at midnight through a spooky forest.  Previously, Crane had attended a party near Sleepy Hollow; he was wooing a young, beautiful heiress, but she rejected his marriage proposal. As he returns home, he is understandably dejected.  But he is also fearful that he might encounter the Headless Horseman, the ghost of a dead soldier who rides the dark roads at night.

 As Irving describes it: “It was the very witching time of night...the hour was as dismal as himself...All the stories of ghosts and goblins that he had heard in the afternoon now came crowding upon his recollection.  The night grew darker and darker; the stars seemed to sink deeper in the sky, and driving clouds occasionally hid them from his sight....”

Predictably, Crane does, indeed, encounter the horseman: “In the dark shadow of the grove, on the margin of the brook, he beheld something huge, misshapen, black, and towering.  It stirred not, but seemed gathered up in the gloom, like some gigantic monster ready to spring upon the traveller.” When this shape emerges from the shadows, Crane sees that it is headless and immediately, he sets spurs to his horse and flees as fast as he can.

The Headless Horseman chases Crane, riding even faster, and finally throws its head at him, knocking him off his horse. The next day, Crane's horse is found wandering by itself and the saddle is discovered in the dusty road; nearby are the remains of a shattered pumpkin.  But there is no trace of Crane.

Among the townspeople, there is a suspicion that a rival for the affections of the beautiful heiress, a man named Brom Bones, was responsible for the attack on Crane—the theory is that Bones masqueraded as the Headless Horseman and threw a pumpkin at Crane which knocked him out.  Furthermore, or so the theory goes, when Crane woke up the next morning, he was mortified by losing the heiress and by his encounter with the horseman and so, he fled from Sleepy Hollow.

The majority of the townspeople, however, do not hold this theory.   Instead, they assume that Crane encountered the actual Headless Horseman and that the latter spirited him away to hell.  Thus, Crane is dead.  This view ends up being confirmed later when  a number of people hear the voice of Crane’s ghost at twilight, singing “a melancholy psalm-tune” among the “tranquil solitudes of Sleepy Hollow.”

JLS 

September 15, 2025

Greetings Everyone!

It is September.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, American writer and author of The Scarlet Letter, wrote “Young Goodman Brown,” a weird tale that has become identified with autumn. 

At sunset, Goodman Brown leaves his pretty young wife Faith in Salem Village to attend a Witches Sabbath in the forest.  Just before midnight, Brown emerges into  a clearing, where the Sabbath is just starting to take place. Hawthorne describes what happens next.

“In the interval of silence, he stole forward until the light glared full upon his eyes.  At one extremity of an open space, hemmed in by the dark wall of the forest, arose a rock, bearing some rude, natural resemblance either to an altar or pulpit, and surrounded by four blazing pines, their tops aflame, their stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting.  The mass of foliage that had overgrown the summit of the rock was all on fire, blazing high into the night and fitfully illuminating the whole field.  Each pendant twig and leafy festoon was in a blaze.  As the red light arose and fell, a numerous congregation alternately shone forth, then disappeared into shadow, and again grew, as it were, out of the darkness, peopling the heart of the solitary woods at once.”

The devil appears at the pulpit, welcoming Goodman Brown and the other new initiates into the satanic community.  Brown is horrified to see his wife Faith among them and he calls out for her to look up to God and resist the devil.  He doesn’t know if she has heard him or not, but suddenly, the Witches Sabbath disappears and Brown is standing alone.  The celebrants are gone.  The forest is chill and damp; there is no evidence that any of the trees or foliage had been on fire. 

The next day, at the break of dawn, Brown returns to Salem Village.  He finds Faith happily waiting for him.  Although the Sabbath seems to have been merely an illusion, Brown isn’t sure.  At the end of the tale, he has become a “stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man” and after a long life,  when he dies, the townspeople carve no hopeful biblical verse on his tombstone, for “his dying hour was gloom.” 

Goodman Brown has been traumatized by his experience into believing that evil is more powerful than good; that evil is the nature of humankind.

JLS 

September 7, 2025

Greetings Everyone!

 It is September, the first month of autumn—my favorite season!

John Keats, the great English poet, wrote a poem “To Autumn” where he celebrates the season, picturing autumn personified as a beautiful, witch-like woman with her hair lifted by the wind, drowsy with the “fume of poppies” as she watches the ripening orchards, the harvesting of corn and the operation of a cider press.

The final stanza takes us up into the skies, away from the woman and her earthly concerns:

 

Where are the songs of  Spring?  Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then, in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind  lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourne;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

The movement is from the stubble-plains lit by the rosy light of sunset to the river and then to the hills and finally to the emptiness of the autumn sky.  The music of autumn speaks of death and nothingness—i.e. the “soft-dying day,” the “wailful choir,” the gnats mourning, the sinking of the  wind that “dies.”

 JLS

September 1, 2025

Greetings Everyone!

I hope all of you will check out my three books; you can get them at Amazon and other on-line book sellers. They are also available in book stores throughout the US and across the world.  In these books, I study H. P. Lovecraft  and his works, focusing on his extra-terrestrial, terrestrial and trans-dimensional alien entities. These aliens share much in common with the alien entities of other great science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and William Gibson: they are malevolent and thoroughly incommensurable. 

Lovecraft’s aliens have had a profound influence on  contemporary magical practitioners and have become a legitimate basis for working magical systems, particularly the black magical systems. The images, the power and the effectiveness of these alien entities, also, are fueled by Lovecraft’s racism: a violently, vitriolic racism, in fact, which argued that western civilization is in decline and slavery is justifiable among “superior” civilizations, including the Great Race, the Elder Things and the Mi-Go.    

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/horror-as-racism-in-h-p-lovecraft-9798765107706/

https://www.amazon.com/Virtual-Reality-Science-Fiction-Lovecraft/dp/178904510X

https://www.amazon.com/Lovecraft-Black-Magickal-Tradition-Influence/dp/157863587X  

JLS    

August 19, 2025

 Greetings Everyone!

My new book, Horror as Racism in H. P. Lovecraft: White Fragility in the Weird Tales, was recently published by Bloomsbury!  I hope that all of you will pick up a copy!

In a previous posting, I have described Lovecraft’s first racist narrative: the miscegenation narrative.  In his later fiction, Lovecraft develops a second racist narrative—the slave master/slave narrative, which is drawn from Lovecraft’s knowledge of the Atlantic slave trade in colonial times. 

Lovecraft  uses this narrative to  promote the practice of slavery.  He holds up the alien astronaut civilizations, the Mi-Go, the Elder Things and the Great Race, all of whom enslaved weaker races, as ideal civilizations — the highest, most advanced civilizations in the cosmos, in fact.  Since these civilizations kept slaves, or so the argument goes, the Anglo Saxon race should feel no compunctions about doing likewise.  

Check out my book for analysis of how Lovecraft uses his slave master/slave narrative in his great, science fiction masterpieces: “The Whisperer in Darkness,” “The Shadow Out of Time,” and  At the Mountains of Madness!

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/horror-as-racism-in-h-p-lovecraft-9798765107706/

JLS

August 10, 2025

 Greetings Everyone!

Check out my second  book: Aliens, Robots & Virtual Reality Idols in the Science Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov and William Gibson.   You can get it in book stores, and on Amazon and other online sites throughout the US and the world.  I hope all of you will pick up a copy!

David Simmons, Lovecraft scholar, writes: “Steadman’s comprehensive guide wrestles with the concept of the ‘alien’, applying cutting edge theoretical and philosophical ideas to the work of some of the greats of Science Fiction to arrive at the set of exciting, new discoveries about what the genre says it means to be ‘human’.  Reading Aliens, Robots and Virtual Reality Idols guarantees that you will never look at the writing of Lovecraft, Asimov or Gibson in the same way again.”

Perhaps, you will look at the works of these writers differently after reading my book! 

https://www.amazon.com/Virtual-Reality-Science-Fiction-Lovecraft/dp/178904510X

John L. Steadman