THE DEEP ONES: "The River of Night's Dreaming" by Karl Edward Wagner

"The River of Night's Dreaming" by Karl Edward Wagner

Discussion begins on March 20.

First published in Whispers III in 1981.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://tinyurl.com/bkcjnhy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?50992

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

In a Lonely Place
The Hastur Cycle
The Mammoth Book of Terror
Where the Summer Ends

MISCELLANY

http://www.thecimmerian.com/the-horror-karl-edward-wagner%E2%80%99s-contribution...
http://karledwardwagner.org/LastInterview.html
http://tinyurl.com/azd4hmj
http://tinyurl.com/bjgul8u
http://www.darkecho.com/darkecho/features/kew.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Edward_Wagner

The Hastur Cycle for me. Looking forward to this one.

I'm reading this from 'The Hastur Cycle' as well. A note regarding the google books online version: The preview cuts off midway through the story, and then jumps to the back cover, so you may need to find an alternate version to get the whole story.

>3 lammassu:

Thanks for noting that - I'll remove the link. Where the Summer Ends for me.

> 3,4

That's strange. I see what appears to the whole work. It starts with an introduction on page 53 and has every page until 83 which looks like the end (last two words are "my dreams." if anyone wants to compare it to a known good version). Page 84 is the introduction to "More Light".

Or am I just missing out on some elobrate joke about unsettling works that no one can to stand to read to completion!

>5 lucien:

That is strange, when I tried to read it online, the story only when to page '65' before it jumped to the back cover. Does 'google books' require a membership of some kind to get access to the entire book? Without talking about the story in particular, I can assure you it was nowhere near resolving the story when it jumped.

I'll be reading this out of the Hastur Cycle.

>5 lucien:,6

Ok, I just checked. The link goes to a Google Books scan of The Hastur Cycle. It runs from p.53-83. I believe this is the complete story. I'll double-check that later, and as of now will re-post the link up in >1 semdetenebre:.

>8 semdetenebre:

Well it must be my work computer then, because I just clicked on that link and sure enough, it cuts the story short at page 64. Oh well, I have the Hastur Cycle anyway, so I'll read it at home. Thank you for looking into this KentonSem.

The Google Books links are occasionally problematic. My experience has been that if you cannot read the whole story initially, you can try hitting the "Refresh" button on your browser and then try again - this will often enable you to read the whole story.

If you need a quick reference back to The King in Yellow, this wiki might prove very useful. Especially the search function.

http://kinginyellow.wikia.com/wiki/Have_You_Seen_The_Yellow_Sign%3F

Wagner has provided a particularly uncomfortable descent into madness here. The melding of dream, memory, drugs, insanity... it all provides a hallucinatory experience for the reader as well as for the unreliable protagonist. I enjoyed the gradual escalation of nightmare, as well as the nods to gothic literature - especially the sequence with Cassilda in her 19th century nightgown fearfully making her way with a candle down the darkened hallway.

Did Cassilda's personality actually merge with the missing Constance in something like a fugue state, as seen in recent David Lyncjh films?

Was Cassilda actually Constance to start with?

What does "actually" even mean in this story?

The fugue passage following "Images, too chaotic and incomprehensive to form coherent memory..." (pp. 79-80 in The Hastur Cycle) was very effective, I thought. It braids together different forms of authority with various modes of discipline and "treatment," while evoking coercion and compulsion.

An observation about gender: There are no male characters in this story, are there? I'm not counting the inhuman monster that appears outside the window at the end, which I think belongs in a class of masculine phantasmata along with the recurring visions of syringes. (ETA: Along with the conscious fabrication about Cassilda's would-be rapist.)

>13 paradoxosalpha:

Good points. Maybe Cassilda/Constance was even conjuring/channeling a false future history at the beginning of the story.

>14 paradoxosalpha:

Penetrating syringes, to be sure!

No male characters, true, although Mrs. Castaigne brings to mind the male cousins of "The Repairer of Reputations".

> 15 a false future history

We're never told what the date really is. Presumably, it's in the 20th century (see the reflections on decor and lighting when first entering the Castaigne house), and Cassilda's abortive diary dating of 18-- is a function of her own madness and/or the strange anachronism of the Castaigne household. But then she goes back to the earlier entries (by Constance!) and continues the dating from those. Still 18-- ?

I'm thinking about the significance of the anachronism here, aside from the mere echo of Chambers. At first it seems like "Cassilda" has found a nostalgic refuge from modern discipline in the antiquated Castaigne house. But the corset begins a gradual exposure of the constraints involved in older "fashions" and fashionings. The escapist nostalgia becomes something that must be itself escaped.

"Cassilda's" homicidal madness is perhaps of a piece with a desire to turn back time, even while her memories are inaccessible or impaired, and time might be the very river of night's dreaming, which permits only a little swim upstream before the swimmer is exhausted.

>15 semdetenebre:, 17

I think that there are multiple contributing factors to the bleed-through of time, events and personalities. Maybe the players in this little scenario are all merely hostages of what the book represents, with the "constraints" representing the hidden knowledge that they are all playthings of the King.

Did 18th-century Constance somehow leave the cursed house only to return from a disastrous excursion to the 20th century, identifying herself impulsively and subconsciously as Cassilda? Maybe not through something as simplistic as time travel, but through a collision of different points of time which confused personalities? Could she be clairvoyant and experiencing things to come?

"Cassilda's" homicidal madness is perhaps of a piece with a desire to turn back time, even while her memories are inaccessible or impaired, and time might be the very river of night's dreaming, which permits only a little swim upstream before the swimmer is exhausted.

I think you nailed it. You've also reminded me of "The River Styx Runs Upstream", the first published story by Dan Simmons, and one very much worth seeking out.

ETA

Make that 19th century. Thanks, bertilak.

> 11

Interesting little wiki, though a bit bogged down with ads, and annoying for its use of the Kevin Ross "Yellow Sign" as a graphic motif. (See the excellent revisionism at Propnomicon.)

The wiki article on "The River of Night's Dreaming" does a decent job of collating the character names with "The Repairer of Reputations," and proposes the alternative frameworks in which "Repairer" would share a narrative continuity with "River," or where they would be disjunct. But it mistakenly calls "Cassilda" the "narrator."

> 16, 18

Actually the diary entry says 189-, which is 19th century, not 18th. I love this maze of a story. I think there are a few fixed points which we can use to thread it. I will assume for now that the framing story involving the bus crash and Dr. Archer is 'true'. Dr. A finds the old copy of The King in Yellow in the asylum when clearing out 'Cassilda's' effects. It is signed Constance Castaigne, who may have been a previous patient (since the book is old). That puts the action in the present, near the 1981 date of the story. Presumably 'Cassilda' was driven mad by reading The King in Yellow, as was Constance before her. Thus I don't think there is time looping happening here.

'Cassilda' may have gotten the names of the characters she meets from that book. The fact that the doctor is named Archer, as was Hildred Castaigne's may be a coincidence, or a suggestion that the whole story is 'Cassilda's' delusions.

The name Castaigne does not occur in The King in Yellow, so 'Cassilda' may have read both that and The Repairer of Reputations, where the name does occur. But a simpler model is this: this story is a sequel to The Repairer of Reputations, set in the 1980s. In Repairer, Constance marries Louis Castaigne, thus triggering the breakdown of Hildred. So Wagner's story tells us that Constance also went mad later. The present Dr. Archer is a descendant of the Dr. Archer who treated Hildred Castaigne. The apparent retour eternel is caused by the recurring effect of reading The King in Yellow.

Furthermore, I think that 'Cassilda' imposed the names Mrs. Castaigne and Camilla on the lady and her maid. They did not initiate sadomasochistic activity, she did it to them and projected it onto them. These fantasies reflect her feelings about how she was treated in the asylum. Her perception that she "showed her the key and opened the way" is effectively chilling.

In Unutterable Horror volume 2 Joshi says rather dismissively that the story "requires a bit more poeticism than Wagner is apparently capable of engendering." No further details. I wonder if he is referring to passages like "metal crumpled and split open, scattering bits of humanity like seeds flung from a bursting melon"? I like this simile, but Wagner does not sustain this tone throughout the story.

I particularly like Robert M. Price's comment from The Hastur Cycle:

... one also sees in Wagner's tale, as well as in all of Chambers's stories of "The King in Yellow," a prime example of the literary technique of Mise-en-Abyme, or infinite regress, whereby the text is seen to contain a microcosm of the experience of the reading of the text itself.

Note: posted simultaneously with #19 above.

Here's a scenario ("explanation," if you will):

In the "yellow" 1890s, Constance Castaigne was tortured near to death by her mother, declared a danger to herself, and sent to the asylum. Her copy of The King in Yellow entered the institution's library when she died shortly thereafter, having somehow incorporated her obsessed attention. Time passes ... forty, fifty, sixty years?

When homicidal maniac "Cassilda" was committed to Coastal State Prison, her drug and electroshock regimen left her open to suggestion from Constance's trace in the book she found in the library. Then "Cassilda" became Constance's instrument of revenge, put into action after the bus crash. (Who knows, maybe she even engineered the crash by attacking the driver?)

She reaches a deserted stretch of the city, and in her fatigue she projects her own murderous impulses in the form of the monster from the church/bank. Fleeing these, she comes to the Castaigne home, which now has new inhabitants: wine-sodden derelicts who accept her as a fellow refugee.

But "Cassilda's" psychic infection from Constance causes her to hallucinate these as Constance's mother and maid, and their wine as the "yellow tonic." Identifying them as her oppressors (and conflating them with Dr. Archer, whom both Constance-trace and "Cassilda" wanted to escape), she kills them, but that only releases Constance's trace (allowing a glimpse of the room "festooned with torn wallpaper, empty wine bottles littered the floor and dingy furnishings"), while further empowering "Cassilda's" projected monstrosity. She flees once more into the water.

(ETA: Written without reading #20, and so showing a parallel line of thought.)

> 21

I generally look for materialist explanations first, but this reading works quite well. The important fact is that the current occupants of the Castaigne house are not actually Mrs. Castaigne and Camilla.

It's interesting that the medication mentioned is real: "PROLIXIN (fluphenazine) is a trifluoromethyl phenothiazine derivative intended for the management of schizophrenia." This gets distorted by 'Cassilda' as Prolixir and elixir.

Presumably the 'torn wallpaper' is another instance of The Yellow Wallpaper.

>20 bertilak:

This tale in particular does seem to sit alone in KEW's oeuvre. I know that he wrote it simply because he held The King in Yellow in such high regard. The tale is wonderfully enigmatic though, which leaves all kinds of fun to be had for DEEP ONES trying to unravel the knot a bit. That "Cassilda" may have had to have read "Repairer" just throws a further twist into some unravellings. I'm still thinking that something outside (The King) has named the characters in this particular play and they have been forced to assume roles into which they have been driven.

>21 paradoxosalpha:

A good take, paradoxosalpha. The "glimpses" of the physical surroundings as they might actually be does seem to provide a clue. I also like the concept of "psychic infection".

Wow. Some intriguing readings here. Yes, the play on "The Repairer of Reputations" is quite interesting.

At first, I thought the hints of eroticism were just sexual titillation, but then Wagner cranked the prose up with conflating imagery of therapy and SM sex.

I must admit my brain wasn't up to the sophisticated readings others came up with. I just wondered if the whole thing was a final burst of madness in "Cassilda"'s brain before she drowned, a dying hallucination a la Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge". Both stories even feature characters starting a journey by falling into water and then emerging. (I suppose you could see both stories as accounts of being birthed into the land of the dead.) And, yes, the current carrying her away is reminiscent of Styx.

I was telling my Other Reader about this story, and I emphasized its mise-en-abyme qualities as so adroitly pointed out by Price. She said, "Oh, sort of like If on a winter's night a traveller, then?" I replied, "Yeah, except that If on a winter's night is ultimately about the consummation of marriage through the medium of the text, and 'The River of Night's Dreaming' is about the consummation of gory matricide through the medium of the text."

>24 RandyStafford:

I considered something similar to the Bierce tale, although I was referencing Herk Harvey's 1962 film Carnival of Souls, which begins and ends with a watery car crash. As I read on, though, I became convinced that something beyond a point-of-death-hallucination was occurring.

Could "Cassilda's" madness be in some sense iatrogenic? In "The Repairer of Reputations," there is a possibility that Castaigne's sociopathy was somehow made more efficient by the treatments he received from Dr. Archer. Given the nature of "Cassilda's" dreams and their relation to her treatments, is it possible that her Dr. Archer -- deeming her "dangerous" -- actually instilled her with a homicidal volition that was previously absent from or peripheral to her hallucinations and paranoia?

>27 paradoxosalpha:

Meaning that Dr. Archer might have inadvertently or even deliberately created an assassin? Mad scientist mode?

> 28

Well, not deliberately. I can't see any justification for that in the text.

This Dr. Archer doesn't get murdered, either.

>29 paradoxosalpha:

I thought you were referring to "Cassilda" murdering both Mrs. Castaigne and Camilla. I'm actually enjoying having to consider this Dr. Archer versus that Dr. Archer, etc. Better watch out for psychic infections on my own part!

> 29 I thought you were referring

I was.

?

>31 paradoxosalpha:

Then you were merely observing that this Dr. Archer did not suffer the same fate as that Dr. Archer. Got it. I like your idea of "Cassilda" being afflicted with iatrogenic insanity of a homicidal nature.

I had assumed that this story was set in the present day (i.e. the 1970s). It hadn't occurred to me that it could possibly be a false future - like the 1920s of "The Repairer of Reputations" (or is that only one possible reading of that story - it's been a while since I read it).

Nor did it occur to me that "Cassilda" deludedly killed some homeless people in the belief that they were her tormentors. I thought she could have been alone in an abandoned building. I did think the "monster" that forces her back into the river could be some sort of projection - like the Jungian "animus", perhaps? and Mrs Castaigne and Camilla were similarly projections of her own psyche that although initially benevolent, turn against her.

One what I admit is a single reading of the story, I thought that the ending was ambiguous: "Cassilda" could either be straightforwardly mentally ill, or a victim of The King in Yellow.

I don't really understand Joshi's comments about "Poeticism" - would the story be improved if it was in the style of, say, Ray Bradbury, or Walter de la Mare? For what it's worth, I think the "normal" prose style of mid-to-late late 20th Century popular (U.S.) fiction is high quality stuff, and there's been a decline since. Also, in this particular story I thought the transition to a late-Victorian prose style was well-handled.

Maybe he's not talking about the prose style. Is it maybe that he doesn't get a sense of spirituality from Wagner's work, that one might get from Algernon Blackwood, or the terrified space agoraphobia/cosmic horror evident in Lovecraft?

>20 bertilak:, 33

I'm not sure what Joshi doesn't like here. This isn't typical Wagner, but I think he does an admirably poetic job in conjuring up bizarre, hallucinogenic scenes in homage to Chambers.

Interesting quote from Laird Barron regarding Wagner:

Karl Edward Wagner, Don Webb, Michael Shea. The three heads of Cerberus--Wagner the whisky-snorting brawler; Webb the hard-bitten academic; Shea the skald. Each of them sharing the influences of Lovecraft, Howard, E. Burroughs, and Leiber, each anchoring their tales in distinctive geographic locales. They favor stories of beleagured naturalists and explorers who operate in the face of often overwhelming supernatural menace in worlds colored by noir and crime themes. They complement one another like a trio singing three part harmony. This is seriously important work, bedrock work. You cannot truly understand horror fiction without reading the masters. To the hoary list of Poe, Machen, Smith, James, etc., I'd add these fellows.

http://laird-themanfromporlock.blogspot.com/

I'm very familiar with KEW and Michael Shea, but I don't think I've read any Don Webb.

> 34

I've not only read Don's work (both his mythos fiction and his occultist treatises), I'm personally acquainted with him. "Hard-bitten academic" seems like an odd characterization, but he's worth reading.

>34 semdetenebre:

As far as his fiction goes, do you recommend any Webb volume(s) in particular? Hard to believe that I've missed one of the "three heads of Cerberus"!

ETA

I see that I have five publications containing Webb stories in my collection - the magazines Deathrealm and Grue, plus the anthologies Cthulhu's Reign, The Year's Best Horror Stories 17 and The Starry Wisdom: A Tribute to H.P. Lovecraft. I shall excavate forthwith.

Sorry to come in late on this, and I haven't really thought it through in every detail, but the last time I looked at this powerful and puzzling tale it occurred to me that a possible reading was that Cassilda might be transgendered and suffering from misguided attempts at psychiatric "treatment".

I just finished reading the 2023 reprint of In a Lonely Place. In the author's 1983 afterword, Wagner writes:

Only a few readers seem to have realized that the protagonist of "The River of Night's Dreaming" is actually male, but perceiving himself as female in his psychotic state--and the reality of the story is from his/her point of view. The story is deliberately set upon two levels, supernatural and psychotic, and the levels merge and interchange.

I don’t have time for a full re-read ATM, but I just re-read the final bit with Dr Archer, and with >38 paradoxosalpha: in mind it’s noteworthy how the characters “just happen” to express themselves in ways avoiding the need for a gendered pronoun.