The Xothic Legend Cycle

SURELY the must outrageous absurdity in the history of weird fiction (and let’s hope it is history by now) is the story which ends with the narrator writing his last words as he is being dragged away by a monster. I don’t know which ending is more stupidly hilarious, that of Lovecraft’s "The Diary of Alonzo Typer", Frank Belknap Long’s “The Hounds of Tindalos”, or Robert Bloch’s "Notebook Found in a Deserted House." All commit the same mortal sin: When the narrator finds himself abruptly overtaken by the horror, his last act is to continue to write, even if he finds himself so petrified as to be unable to flee. Had the doomed narrator actually been writing down the tale up to that point, surely the narrative would have broken earlier, and we would be left to guess why. Since the author (e.g., Lovecraft, not Alonzo Typer) fears that would not allow for sufficiently definitive closure, “the sense of an ending” (Frank Kermode), he must venture some way of letting the reader hear the other shoe drop. There are better ways. Hence the kindred device of a subjoined note from the authorities: "The foregoing narrative was found rightly rolled and scuffed up the rear of the late occultist Poindexter P. Poe."

A genuine effort to maintain the suspension of reader disbelief would leave the jagged edge of the “unfinished” account, thus keeping open the vital ambiguity of “the fantastic” (Tzvetan Todorov), whereby we are left forever suspended between the mundane possibility and a suggested but unverified supernatural explanation. For an example of a Lovecraftian tale that does dare to go the way Todorov has marked out, see Jorge Luis Borges’ "There Are More Things" in his collection The Book of Sand or in my forthcoming anthology Acolytes of Cthulhu (Fedogan & Bremer). The general reluctance to leave the loose ends dangling strikes me as yet another confirmation of Käte Hamburger’s contention that first-person narrative fiction is essentially a deceptive attempt (formally if not intentionally, of course) to hijack the literary form proper to autobiographical nonfiction. The fictive character of the work finally betrays itself by insistence upon a resolution within the text, something characteristic of fiction and notoriously absent from reality, which is why we love to take refuge in fiction and try to model our lives on this or that particular story (Don Cupitt, What is a Story?).

It is this same anxiety for a finale that has led many writers to try their hand at supplying an ending for a fragment left unfinished by an author. Why did Lin Carter leave “The Strange Doom of Enos Harker” dangling? Perhaps he just never got around to finishing it. Perhaps he felt he had come to a dead end. Nonetheless, proverbially, the author’s own judgment is often the last we should accept about his work, and reading the substantial fragment, I can see a number of arteries severed that may be sewn back together, so that the story may live again. So now let us see if we can rescue “Enos Harker" from a premature burial and keep him going long enough to meet with the doom appointed him. For those purists among you, Lin’s fragment ends with section 5, and my continuation picks up with section 6.

The fragment in its unfinished state was first published in Crypt of Cthulhu #69, Yuletide, 1989.