Heavy Weather: Tempestuous Tales of Stranger Climes – edited by Kevan Manwaring – review by Anthony Nanson

This volume in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series gathers stories mainly about extreme weather, but includes also some other ecological subjects: a tidal whirlpool (Poe’s ‘A Descent into the Maelström); swarming locusts (Doris Lessing’s ‘A Mild Attack of Locusts’); earthquakes (Margaret St Clair’s ‘The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes); aggressive birds (Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’). In all the selected stories the phenomena in question are in some sense ‘weird’. This usually entails a supernaturalisation of the natural: Du Maurier’s birds are familiar species, her protagonist grasps for some natural explanation of their behaviour in terms of weather and tides, but they’re clearly behaving in a very weird way that transgresses ornithological understanding; the snowstorms frequenting an Alpine mountain in E.F. Benson’s ‘The Horror Horn’ are natural enough, the primitive hominids encountered amidst them give us pause for thought, but the extreme horror the sight of them inspires has a supernatural charge. However, in ‘A Mild Attack of Locusts’ and William Hope Hodgson’s ‘Through the Vortex of a Cyclone’ the phenomena encountered are presented as purely natural; the ‘weirdness’ resides in the sheer extremity of what’s experienced in comparison with more everyday experiences of insects and bad weather. Gerald Vance’s ‘Monsoons of Death’ is the one explicitly science fiction story in the anthology, involving explorers on Mars, but the terrifying alien beings brought by the Martian storm take the narrative into similar weird territory to ‘The Horror Horn’.

Hodgson is better known for his apocalyptic horror novels The House on the Borderland and The Night Land. Richard Jefferies the author of After London, Herman Melville the author of Moby Dick, and Mary Shelley the author of Frankenstein ­– three major novels relevant to Heavy Weather’s theme – are similarly represented by more minor works: Jefferies by a powerful unfinished tale, ‘The Great Snow’; Melville by ‘The Lightning-Rod Man’; and Shelley by an extract from her travel memoir History of a Six Weeks’ Tour. The classic British writers of ‘weird tales’ are represented by Algernon Blackwood (‘May Day Eve’), W.F. Harvey (‘August Heat’), and an extract from M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901) – about an Arctic journey that appears to have been inspired by Fridtjof Nansen’s attempt to reach the North Pole a few years before. Vance’s and Adam Chase’s (‘Summer Snow Storm’) contributions belong, by contrast, to the American pulp tradition.

Kevan Manwaring’s introduction and notes seize the moment to comment on the lessons humankind must learn in order to grapple with our present quandary of ecological crisis, including its climatic dimension. The authors represented were generally writing too early to be aware of anthropogenic climate change – although Jefferies had a strongly felt instinct of how climatic change could precipitate the collapse of modern civilisation. Heavy Weather makes available a varied set of stories – many of them little known today – that provide traction between ecological phenomena and the aesthetic of ‘weird’ anxiety.