Tag: Maryanne K. Snyder

“The House of Idiot Children” (2008) by W. H. Pugmire & Maryanne K. Snyder

Tell my sad little life story? I was a weird kid. Believed I was a Witch when very young, as did my older sister. She and I used to practice what we thought was magick. Grew up knowing I was a sissy (loved playing house with the neighborhood girls, but always dressed LIKE them, wearing play dresses &c) and being tormented for it by grown-ups, kids at school, and thus I became an introvert and created my own realms of reality where I could be safe. My best friend in high school was Jewish, and that began a Jewish identification. Later I learned that I AM Jewish on my mom’s side of the family.
—W. H. Pugmire, “An Interview with W. H. PUGMIRE” (28 Feb 2009) by Jeffrey Thomas

There is a fine distinction between Jewish weird fiction and weird fiction that takes Jews or Judaism as its subject. Jewish weird fiction should be, ideally, written from a Jewish point of view; that may or may not involve aspects of Jewish religion or culture, but it should definitely have that viewpoint—and ideally, it should be written by someone who has lived experience to lend verisimilitude and authenticity to the story, who can approach the story as someone other than an outsider looking in. A good example might be “My Mother Was A Witch” (1966) by William Tenn.

A story doesn’t have to have a Jewish point-of-view to be about Jews or Judaism. Innumerable examples of Christian supernatural fiction reach back to Jewish religion and folklore to tell a story that is still focused, primarily, on a Christian point of view. The Wandering Jew in legend and literature may be Jewish in name, but their characterization follows the narratives conceived by predominantly Christian writers.

“The House of Idiot Children” (2008) by W. H. Pugmire & Maryanne K. Snider is, I suspect, their attempt at Jewish weird fiction. It follows Rav Samuel Shammua, a teacher in a small Jewish community who works at a school for autistic students. The description of the students reflects common depictions of autistic savants, formerly and derogatorily known as idiot savants:

They sat there, some very still some moving slightly back and forth, all staring into the air before them. Samuel shocked himself to feeling suddenly jealous. What did they see as they looked into nothingness. What did they listen to with an inner ear? The world saw these children as idiots who would always have difficulty functioning with the normal ear; and yet these children each contained a singular degree of genius. One was a mathematical genius. Another had memorized huge portions of Torah and Talmud in both English and Hebrew. And Moshe, who sat awaiting him, had excelled in the art of gematria […]
—W. H. Pugmire & Maryanne K. Sinder, “The House of Idiot Children” in Weird Tales #308 (26)

As in many of his stories, Pugmire slightly reworked the language in subsequent publications, so for example in An Imp of Aether (2019) he wrote:

[…] saw some students who, sitting at various tables awaiting instructors, watched his entrance, some very still, some moving slightly to and fro. Samuel shocked himself with feelings of sudden jealousy. What did they see with their autistic senses, what could they hear with an inner ear? The world saw these children as idiots who would always have difficulty functioning in the “normal” world; and yet these children each contained a singular degree of genius. One excelled in mathematics, another had memorized weighty portions of Torah and Talmudic lore, in both English and Hebrew. And mOshe, who sat awaiting him, had excelled in the art of gematria […] (44)

Autistic savants have their in supernatural literature, like the young girl Tiffany in Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) who uses her knack for puzzle solving to solve the Lament configuration. Such peculiar aptitudes can interact oddly with certain aspects of Jewish culture. The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters, each of which can also represent an associated number, a practice called gematria. This overlap of linguistic and mathematical concepts has significant interest with topics like cryptography, the interpretation of certain Jewish and Christian religious texts, as well as Kabbalah and other occult systems. The intersection of these different areas of interest has been a fruitful area for creatives, such as the film Pi (1998) where a genius Jewish mathematician’s investigations into the nature of π reveal a number which might be the secret name of God.

Pugmire and Snider play with this idea:

“A twenty-third Hebrew letter, a letter of fire.” The elder man raised his hand so as to thoughtfully stroke his beard. “An angelic letter. A letter out of which nothing is formed.”

Samuel’s face felt odd, and he ran his hands over it, trying not to shudder. “You know of this?” His voice was laced with fear, for never had he experienced such a conversation. The mysteries of cabalistic lore were something with which he had never trafficked. He had seen certain friends of his become utterly obsessed with studying the Zohar and other such books, to the detriment of everything else. It was a lure in which he had no wish to find himself entangled.
—W. H. Pugmire & Maryanne K. Sinder, “The House of Idiot Children” in Weird Tales #308 (26)

Unlike “The Chabad of Innsmouth” (2014) by Marsha Morman or Dreidel of Dread: The Very Cthulhu Hanukkah (2024) by Alex Shvartsman and Tomeu Riera, this story has nothing to do with the Lovecraft Mythos. Yet there is something indelibly Lovecraftian in how Samuel Shammua is drawn into this esoteric study—an idea that madness and genius as linked, even as savanthood and autism are linked in Shammua’s mind.

“They’re not like others, that’s the point!” Samuel suddenly shouted, his face flushed with anger. “They are special creatures, for whom we especially care. What the hell is normal, Avram? Were you a normal kid? Our religious and ethnic heritage makes us outsiders in the normal world, that’s why we’re hated, that’s why madmen seek to destroy us.”
—W. H. Pugmire & Maryanne K. Sinder, “The House of Idiot Children” in Weird Tales #308 (29)

All of these elements come together in this story in an ending that is expected, and yet powerful. We the readers never learn the final mystery, which Moshe and the autistic children know and which Samuel Shammua learns. It is a literally ineffable truth, a knowledge beyond the scope of human experience. Whatever flaws the story might have in its depiction of autistic children, this was a deliberate and researched effort to weave together these disparate threads into a story that tried to express a weird tale from a Jewish point of view.

“The House of Idiot Children” was first published in Weird Tales #308 (Jan/Feb 2008). It was slightly revised and republished in The Tangled Muse (2008, Centipede Press), and then slightly revised again for An Imp of Aether (2019), which appears to be the authors’ final version.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

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“This Weave of Witchery” (2019) by W. H. Pugmire & Maryanne K. Snyder

I’ve been working with Maryanne K. Snyder on a book of collaborative work, and she has proved an absolute delight to work with.  I prefer to write alone, collaborating is a lot more work for me; but often writing with someone else can take you to places you would never otherwise discover writing on your own. 
—W. H. Pugmire, “New Story Sale” (6 Oct 2010)

On the surface, “This Weave of Witchery” feels almost unfinished. Bits of pieces of Sesqua Valley and Lovecraft Country, dovetailed together into a kind of prose poem, capturing echoes of old moods: “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Silver Key,” “Born in Strange Shadow” and “Some Distant Baying Sound.” Imagine treading old, familiar territory, only to look back and suddenly see it from an angle you’ve never seen it before. Familiar, yet strange. That’s the prevailing attitude of “This Weave of Witchery.”

The plot feels like a deliberate reworking of “The Silver Key,” but from a different angle. Many writers have worked around the theme of losing the ability to dream—either literally, or in the sense of losing some creative urge or muse. Lord Dunsany wrote a bit about that in the end of “Idle Days on the Yann”:

Long we regarded one another, knowing that we should meet no more, for my fancy is weakening as the years slip by, and I go ever more seldom into the Lands of Dream. Then we clasped hands, uncouthly on his part, for it is not the method of greeting in his country, and he commended my soul to the care of his own gods, to his little lesser gods, the humble ones, to the gods that bless Belzoond.

Dunsany had followed this up in “The Shop In Go-By Street,” where the protagonist seeks once more to return to the Lands of Dream, only to find:

I would have waited three more days, but on the third day I had gone in my loneliness to see the very spot where first I met Bird of the River at her anchorage with her bearded captain sitting on the deck. And as I looked at the black mud of the harbour and pictured in my mind that band of sailors whom I had not seen for two years, I saw an old hulk peeping from the mud. The lapse of centuries seemed partly to have rotted and partly to have buried in the mud all but the prow of the boat and on the prow I faintly saw a name. I read it slowly— it was Bird of the River. And then I knew that, while in Ireland and London two years had barely passed over my head, ages had gone over the region of Yann and wrecked and rotted that once familiar ship, and buried years ago the bones of the youngest of my friends, who so often sang to me of Durl and Duz or told the dragon-legends of Belzoond.

There is something of this in Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key,” and perhaps in Pugmire & Snyder’s story something of Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams:

He strove to rise from his chair, to cry out, but he could not. Deep, deep the darkness closed upon him, and the storm sounded far away. The Roman fort surged up, terrific, and he saw the writhing boughs in a ring, and behind them a glow and heat of fire. There were hideous shapes that swarmed in the thicket of the oaks; they called and beckoned to him, and rose into the air, into the flame that was smitten from heaven about the walls. And amongst them was the form of the beloved, but jets of flame issued from her breasts, and beside her was a horrible old woman, naked; and they, too, summoned him to mount the hill.

He heard Dr. Burrows whispering of the strange things that had been found in old Mrs. Gibbon’s cottage, obscene figures, and unknown contrivances. She was a witch, he said, and the mistress of witches.

He fought against the nightmare, against the illusion that bewildered him. All his life, he thought, had been an evil dream, and for the common world he had fashioned an unreal red garment, that burned in his eyes. Truth and the dream were so mingled that now he could not divide one from the other. He had let Annie drink his soul beneath the hill, on the night when the moonfire shone, but he had not surely seen her exalted in the flame, the Queen of the Sabbath. Dimly he remembered Dr. Burrows coming to see him in London, but had he not imagined all the rest?

Compare with:

It came as a wall of liquid blackness, an inky abyss in which he felt he would be drowned. There was something almost beguiling in its churning sentience, and he felt the need to speak to it, to name himself. Parting lips, he moaned his name as the blackness spilled into his mouth and shook him awake. […] Early sunset washed the sky over Sesqua Valley with muted color, and Thorley stood for a little while to appreciate the orange and pink effects that tainted the white stone of the titanic twin-peaked mountain. He had never thought to see that mountain again, and did not remember its effect on him, how it captivated one part of his mind and troubled another. He gazed at it until he felt himself grow faint, and then he remembered his mother’s words of caution, “It’s not wise to stare at Mount Selta for too long a time. Turn your eyes away.”
—W. H. Pugmire & Maryanne K. Synder, “This Weave of Witchery” in An Imp of Aether 211

These are old themes, paths well-trod, familiar territory for weird fiction aficionados. Donald Wandrei touched on such confusions of dreams and reality in the obscure Mythos story “The Lady in Gray”; and maybe there’s something of that in this weave of witchery as well.

If Pugmire & Snyder had done no more than write a prose poem in that tradition, one more bridge between the waking world and the Dreamlands, “The Weave of Witchery” would be an unremarkable yet solid entry. Yet they did manage to find a new perspective, one which Dunsany, Machen, Lovecraft, & Wandrei had not played with. Think back to “The Silver Key,” and Randolph Carter’s lament of what he had lost—and think of how it would change the story if he was wrong.

“This Weave of Witchery” is the fourth published collaboration between W. H. Pugmire & Maryanne K. Snyder, the others being “The House of Idiot Children” (2008), “The Hidden Realm” (2011), and “The Seventh Eikon” (2012). “This Weave of Witchery” was first published in An Imp of Aether (2019).

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).