H. F. Arnold (1902–1963)

Possibly one of the most interesting and yet flawed pulp horror stories in the canon (published in Weird Tales in 1926). It is notable for switching mood quite suddenly more than once, for its ambiguities and for its combining of pulp horror tropes.

The late night news room that frames the story gives a sense of global immediacy much as live broadcasts and the internet are now used in horror films and TV to indicate much the same. The question of whether we are dealing with truth or 'fake show more news' gives it contemporary resonance.

The final twist will not be revealed here nor what it may mean in terms of American religiosity but the central section makes me wonder if it was a partial and perhaps forgotten source for two 1980 works - John Carpenter's 'The Fog' and Stephen King's novella 'The Mist'.

The ending has been criticised as obscure and unsatisfactory in terms of the expectations raised by the grim central section and there is some justification in that. It loses a star for that reason alone but I think it stands some scrutiny precisely because of a possible spiritualist cultural context.

Back in the mid-1920s, spiritualist thought was still credible and what we may want to be written as a zombie tale today may have been understood by its readers then as a story about 'the unknown' after death. The obscurity helps to represent the mystery of the afterlife.

From the first newswire describing a miasma arising from a church graveyard through the now common American horror trope of citizens seeking sanctuary in churches through to the multi-hued celestial light, the story is a half-poetic merging of weirdness and religiosity.

The book even starts with the sentence - "There is something ungodly about these night wire jobs". And to this religiosity is added scepticism - "Could I be mistaken, or far down in the canyons of the city beneath me did I see a faint trace of fog? Pshaw! It was all imagination."

The fact that the story ends without resolution is undoubtedly frustrating but Arnold would, if he was to be honest, have nothing scientific or factual to say about death and the afterlife or alien invasion or the end times or a zombie apocalypse. Or belief, invention or imagination.

To have resolved the story would have removed so many possibilities that, while we might be satisfied and move on to another story, I suspect it might have been relegated to just another pulp horror. Our frustration makes us puzzle at it which is why it is so anthologised.

Is what is happening local or global? Did it happen in reality at all? How reliable is our narrator? How reliable were the dispatches? Did they come from this world or another? Or from the future? Are they a description, a fantasy or a warning? Was it a just a hoax or a sign of madness?

Although flawed, as a weird tale, 'The Night Wire' stands up both as a creative concatenation of many different suggestive pulp horror tropes and as a slightly unnerving play on the boundaries between reality and fantasy, belief and scepticism, life and death.

You can read the story for yourself for free here. show less

Terse, but flawlessly paced and exceptionally weird story set in the early days of global news communication. Can‰ÃƒÂ›Ã‚ªt recommend it enough to fans of weird fiction and quiet(er) horror