Sticks Karl Edward Wagner Pdf

'Sticks' by Karl Edward Wagner
Discussion begins June 19th.
First published in the March 1974 issue of Whispers.
ONLINE VERSIONS
http://tinyurl.com/kpxj3ef
BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?43721
SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS
The Dark Descent
The Mammoth Book of Zombies
The Best of Whispers
The Century's Best Horror Fiction Volume 2
Where the Summer Ends
MISCELLANY
http://www.darkecho.com/darkecho/features/kew.html
http://library.morrisville.edu/coye.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Brown_Coye
http://www.thecimmerian.com/the-terror-of-the-absurd-karl-edward-wagners-sticks/ (spoilers!)
http://tinyurl.com/mx6kpnw

That's a nice Lee Brown Coye cover. In honor of this week's discussion, I think I'll read it from that very issue.

>2 KentonSem:
That's a nice Lee Brown Coye cover.
Very creepy!
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos for me.

A I recall, the story was inspired by the cover.
Anyway, I'll be reading it out of The Book of Cthulhu II.

Where the Summer Ends for me.

I'm looking forward to this one (in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos); 'The River of Night's Dreaming' was one of my favorite Deep Ones reads to date.

I enjoy this story every time I read it. I knew it was based on artist Lee Brown Coye's real-life discovery of the stick-sculptures and creepy old house, but since reading Coye's correspondence on the subject from the early 1960's (included in the recent Centipede Press Coye edition), I didn't realize just how closely KEW hung the story's framework on real-life events and snatches from the letters. I bet Coye LOVED how the tale turned out!

The correspondence elements of this story made it feel a lot like 'The Whisperer in Darkness' to me, although with a more traditional occultist conspiracy rather than an extraterrestrial alien one. The 'surprise' at the end (which I saw coming, but still enjoyed) was also similar, although without the retrospective delay used in 'Whisperer.' (Makeup falling off = discarded 'mask')
I didn't much care for J.K. Potter's illustration for this story in the AH Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos: I couldn't even figure out who the person pictured was supposed to be.

Here are some snippets from Coye's correspondence as he remembered his trip to the Mann Brook area of New York and what he found there:
There were all sorts of strange contraptions. Sticks from trees and bits of board nailed and wired together in a fantastic array. I cannot describe them adequately so will have to draw pictures. Sometimes these structures were stuck in a pile of stones or a stone wall – sometimes they were nailed in trees. One I remember could have been a child's tree-house. It had a definite third dimension, except it was so abstract and useless it was just a conglomeration of sticks and wire woven into the fabric of tree branches.
Roughly two miles from my starting point I came upon the ruins of a house. It was fast falling into the ground; nearly swallowed up by the undergrowth and weeds and rampant lilac bushes but you could see what had once been a lawn and there were shade trees. The lawn and the trees and even the house were covered with these structures. I went inside and on the walls in some of the rooms were drawings, in what appeared to be charcoal, of these weird, abstract concoctions. The drawings were applied directly to the walls, that is, right on the wall paper and plaster. Some of them covered a whole wall; huge, fantastic murals.
Shortly after his return home, his signature 'sticks' began showing up in his artwork:
Later on, in 1962-63, Coye was urged to try to locate the Mann Brook site by a folklore expert named Andrew Rothman (disguised as Strefoi, in the story), who was trying to make a NY connection with the ''New Light' cult, led by Shadrach Ireland in the Harvard area, ca. 1780'. Apparently Rothman was looking for megaliths and other strange man-made structures in the area as evidence. Coye was eventually able to locate the site, but due to what seemed to be flash flooding and other abuse from the elements, all of the structures and evidence had vanished.
Here is a current view of the Mann Brook area in Google Maps: http://goo.gl/maps/ZFTPH

>8 paradoxosalpha:
KEW does make the ending compelling fun, although not exactly unpredictable, as you note. I think the first Jove Whispers paperback has a nice illustration by Steve Fabian for 'Sticks'. Have to check on that.

I enjoyed this one.
>9 KentonSem: Even without knowing this stuff -- beyond that somehow Coye's work inspired this story -- there was a semi-metafictional air to the story with the references to horror writers and artists and small presses.
The references to megaliths and cults transplanted to America from Europe put me in mind of Barry Fell though I see his America BC is after this story. Rothman seems to have been looking at similar things and inspired that association of European horror creeping into the New World -- though, of course, the Margaret Murray influenced witch cults of Lovecraft are of a similar vein.
I thought the 1942 opening was very effective in terms of the quite specific mood and situation that it establishes for a story -- a man going off to war and maybe not returning. It seems an underused context in horror stories. If any mention is made of a war, the horror will take place during it or a veteran will feature in it.
I liked the idea of the sticks being evocative of a greater pattern that it seems necessary to evoke -- unconsciously and unwittingly -- in the minds of many people before the Great Old Ones can do their work.

>11 RandyStafford:
I agree with you regarding the quasi-metafictional feel to the story, regardless of its source, as well as the 1942 setting at the beginning. Speaking of which, I admire the fact the KEW has the scary encounter with the lich begin the story. One would expect that sequence to be the high point of terror at the climax of the average weird tale. Wagner merely starts there and then proceeds to amp it up several notches.

Yeah, I recall getting to the end of the first section with the lich encounter and thinking, 'Hm. This is strange pacing. I seem to have reached the story's action climax, and I'm less than 20% through.' And rather than trying to pile more high-adrenaline events on top of that one, Wagner very effectively uses it as a point of orientation to build unease and alarm gradually thereafter.
I found it easy to identify with the artist's wish to rationalize and disbelieve in the original episode, as the story continued with its interesting communications among the various characters.

I wrote this last night, and I haven't looked at what anyone else has written.
Well, it was unsettling to learn that there's a basis of truth in this Lovecraftian zombie story. Karl Edward Wagner's afterword reveals that the stick designs were originally discovered by Weird Tales artist Lee Brown Coye in much the same way as Colin Leverett in the story, and subsequently appeared as a signature in his work.
I don't actually get scared reading horror stories, but there were a couple of moments in Sticks that can as close as anything I've read. It helped that I thought I detected prefigurings of elements in some of Italian director Lucio Fulci's better-regarded films - the figure of Althol is, superficially, rather like Dr Freudstein in 'The House by the Cemetery', and the whole idea that zombies would figure heavily in a Lovecraftian apocalypse is seen in 'The Beyond' and 'City of the Living Dead'. It makes me wonder if Fulci or his screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti were aware of this story.
There are layers to this story. It strikes me as very ‘70s in some ways: the paranoia, the downbeat ending, even the interest in the pulps of the 40s (a lot of pulp material was republished in paperback in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but there was in addition a 'behind the scenes' interest fostered by things like the autobiographical material interweaved with the stories in The Early Asimov).
Setting the first scene in the ‘40s is, to my mind, another aspect of this. In the UK, the War was still culturally very present (in film, TV, boy's comics - and of course everyone of middle age or older had vivid memories of at least one war that had directly touched their lives. I imagine it was different in the States because although the conflict did not reach US soil, of course people fought in Europe and the Pacific. Plus, the draft continued to be a close and real presence for the next generation - Karl Edward Wagner's generation - because of US involvement in Viet Nam (not forgetting Korea in the ‘50s, of course).
This, I imagine, can both allow KEW to enter into the mindset of Colin Leverett at the start of the story, and through another light on his character when he returns from the War (i.e how his character changes are taken, by the people around him, as the effects of the conflict. In the context of the story it's primarily the result of his experience a the farmhouse. It could also be an oblique commentary on the situation of returning Viet Nam veterans).
Alongside Lee Brown Coye's creepy discovery, I think Arthur Machen may have been an influence. The cultists with their roots in stone-age European migrants are not a million miles away from Machen's 'Little People' (indeed, the migrants could be those same people, driven from their ancestral land - shades of the Robert E Howard story we looked at a few weeks ago). The name 'Shadrach Ireland' could be a nod to Machen's friend, the composer John Ireland.
I didn't know, until I did some rootling about on the internet, that the Aklo-like phrases in the story tie it in to KEW's 'Kane' stories.
Edited to add:
Shadrack Ireland (Wickipedia spelling) was a real person? Blimey! (it doesn't rule out a John Ireland - Arthur Machen - Little People/ Shadrack Ireland - perfectionism - undead cultists - Cthulhu cultists connection of ideas in KEW's mind, though).

>14 housefulofpaper:
A lot of very perceptive comments there! I like your take on the Fulci films (not counting the Haitian-style voodoo of ZOMBIE). There is an element of black magic in those that can be extrapolated into the more Lovecraftian aspects of 'Sticks'.
The story evokes not just Machen, but also the rugged, supernatural wilderness of Blackwood's 'The Willows' and 'The Wendigo'.

Paradoxos and Kenton, you're right. This is an oddly paced story, almost, despite the 'The Whisperer in Darkness' ending of a disguise revealed, a Lovecraft mythos story turned inside out: physical horror of the lich encountered first then the accumulation of evidence of an historical cult followed by evidence of its survival into modern times.
Yet, at the end, Wagner opens the story up to realms of cosmic horror at the end as surely as Lovecraft did with his physical, conclusive markers confirming the preceding intimations of horror.

>7 KentonSem: & 9
This actually happened to Coye (ok, obviously the whole story didn't actually happen to Coye, but you're right, the story as he tells it is almost verbatim what happened in the first 3/4 of the first chapter of 'Sticks')? That's creepy! =:^O
There is something just fundamentally disturbing about those sticks that kept showing in up in Coye's artwork, and I recall thinking that before I knew anything about their origin or this story. What is it? I think it reminds me of the concentric lines that Robert Crumb's elder brother Charles started to draw obsessively at the onset of his mental illnesses in the movie Crumb (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109508/), like some unconscious or semi-conscious force that kept materializing, unbidden, in his work (which, of course, it may have been). I think the lack of any clear referent to any object in our everyday lives factors in, too; it's not like those clay ashtrays we used to make for our parents in 3rd grade art class - no matter how poorly constructed they were, Mom and Dad always knew what they were supposed to be. These.. things, on the other hand, seem to elicit a fairly universal reaction of 'WTF?'
Speaking of films - the creators of The Blair Witch Project (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185937/) had to have read this story before making the film. I realize there's a lot to be said for the notion of Lovecraftian horror tropes generally being assimilated via cultural osmosis, but come on now..
>11 RandyStafford:
I thought the 1942 opening was very effective in terms of the quite specific mood and situation that it establishes for a story -- a man going off to war and maybe not returning. It seems an underused context in horror stories. If any mention is made of a war, the horror will take place during it or a veteran will feature in it.
Funny you should say that - our very next Deep Ones tale ('Shoggoths in Bloom') has a WWII setting (actually, it's set during the buildup to The Big One in the 1930s, but close enough). I shall say no more.. :)
>14 housefulofpaper:
Alongside Lee Brown Coye's creepy discovery, I think Arthur Machen may have been an influence.
Isn't there a scene in The Great God Pan where a character finds a bunch of weird drawings in an abandoned building like the protagonist of 'Sticks' does?

>27
Good observations, Art. I was lucky enough to see The Blair Witch Project when it was released, just before it became a huge media sensation. I remember telling anyone who'd listen that I knew what those sticks were! I felt a little bit like Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. :-D
Glad to hear our next tale takes place in the 1940's too. I think I like the idea because it's the next logical stop, time-wise, to build on HPL's stories which were often set in the 1920's and 30's.