Episode 156: The Only Possible End: On Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 10:00:00 -0400

There are works of weird fiction that dispense their strangeness so subtly that many readers never pick up on it, books that allow themselves to be pass for mundane, the better to haunt us after we put them down. Donna Tartt's debut novel The Secret History, published in 1992, is such a work. On the surface, it is a brilliant, yet completely naturalistic, telling of the lead-up and aftermath of a murder. But The Secret History is also a work of the depths, and readers who go in seeking the Weird will find it lurking on every page. More than a masterpiece of psychological exploration, it is a story about the resurgence of the old god Dionysus, and a chronicle of fate; fate conceived, in the manner of the Ancient Greeks, as a cosmic force.

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REFERENCES

Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Robertson Davies, Canadian novelist
Weird Studies, Episode 98 on Exotica
M. R. James, English author
Weird Studies, Episode 3 on “The White People”
E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational
Jean Cocteau, La Machine Infernale
John Crowley, Little, Big
Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Outrageous Okana”
Weird Studies, Episode 110 on “The Glass Bead Game”
Gabriel Faure, Nocturne No. 11
Pierre-André Boutang, L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Episode 111: What Is Best in Life: On "Conan the Barbarian"

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 11:15:00 -0500

A wish-fulfilment fantasy for pubescent boys of all ages, or a subtle disquisition on the ethics of a sorcerous world? John Milius' Conan the Barbarian (1982) manages to be both, although one may be easy to overlook. In this episode, JF and Phil leave the heights of Hesse's The Glass Bead Game with a headlong dive to the trash stratum. Their wager: that Conan the Barbarian, a film without a hint of irony, is a spiritual statement that is equal parts empowering and disquieting, and a prime of example of how fantasy is sometimes the straightest way to the heart of reality.

REFERENCES

John Milus (dir.), Conan the Barbarian (1982)
Richard Fleischer (dir.), Conan the Destroyer (1984)
Robert E. Howard, American writer, author of the Conan stories
Jack Smith, "On the Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez"
Weird Studies #3: Ecstasy, Sin, and "The White People"
H. P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"
Fritz Leiber, American writer
Weird Studies #95: Demon Seed: On Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child
Dungeons & Dragons
Weird Studies #20: The Trash Stratum (part 1, part 2)
Masaki Kobayashi (dir.), Kwaidan
Jerry Zucker (dir.), Ghost (1990)
Roget's Thesarus of English Words and Phrases
Maria Montez, Dominican-American actress

Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Paganism”

Episode 156: The Only Possible End: On Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History'

Episode 111: What Is Best in Life: On "Conan the Barbarian"