It’s amazing how fine the line between comedy and terror can be. So frequently a horror film intending to thrill and chill its audience is met with howls of laughter rather than wails of fright, through a failure of special effects or subpar acting pedigree. It’s sometimes disarming to think that Plan 9 From Outer Space was truly intended to be a science fiction chiller. Yet oddly, the reverse can be true: something designed to be cheerful and fun, perhaps friendly for children, can result in abject fear if presented improperly. How many children closed their eyes at the twisted, disturbing “Pink Elephants” sequence in Dumbo, or the manic surreality of Alice in Wonderland? One of the finest examples of something that should be ludicrous and schlocky being utterly horrific is Karl Edward Wagner’s much-reprinted horror “Sticks.”

Deuce Richardson informed me of the fifteenth anniversary of Karl Edward Wagner’s death, and I agreed that the occasion deserved observation and celebration. As I was wanting to discuss this particular tale, I couldn’t think of a better time than today. Beware, for in my analysis I will scour through the story in great detail: I implore anyone who has not already read “Sticks” to postpone reading this post until they do. It’s one of those stories that I feel every horror aficionado should read without the contamination of prior knowledge.

The story of “Sticks” is certainly Lovecraftian in tone, and Wagner considered it a Mythos tale before he linked it to Alorri Zrokros, and thus to his own Kane universe. All the classic elements of a Cthulhoid chiller are there: Colin Leverett, an artist for a weird fiction magazine, is fishing in Mann Brook, upstate New York. Like Lovecraft himself, Kane imbues even this innocuous, almost cheerful scene with a subtle sense of wrongness. The overgrown railway a quiet reminder that all man’s works are nothing in the immensity of time, the huddled bushes momentarily reminding me of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” the deceptively sunny day providing a false sense of security from the greater horror of what was happening in Europe at the time. And, of course, the sticks.

The lashed-together framework of sticks jutted from a small cairn alongside the stream. Colin Leverett studied it in perplexment–half a dozen odd lengths of branch, wired together at cross angles for no fathomable purpose. It reminded him unpleasantly of some bizarre crucifix, and he wondered what might lie beneath the cairn.

Those damned sticks! No explanations for what they mean, why they are there, or who placed them so: the complex and elaborate arrangements incongruous with the rest of the landscape, where the handiwork of man has been brushed away or smothered by nature, to the point where it’s easy to forget man existed there at all. The fatal curiosity that marks and damns the Lovecraftian protagonist sets in, as Colin’s common sense is shoved aside by the insatiable desire to know.

Further into the forests the frequency and complexity of those monstrous lattices increases, as the density of a spider’s web grows when approaching the center. Soon he comes upon a dilapidated house, which itself is strewn with the objects. Ever the artist, Leverett takes out his sketchbook and scrawls the mad designs, page upon page marked with the symbols. Any sane protagonist would surely flee the scene rather than be alone in such a place, but the Lovecraftian mystery is as insidiously seductive as it is confounding. Besides, the reader himself has no right to criticize–are we not also complicit in this? We could put the book down any time, but we don’t. We can’t.

Leverett continues into the house to see designs like the lattices sketched on the mildewed walls, drawing and sketching all the way. He proceeds down into the cellar, and the tale’s Cthulhoid pedigree is clear when he finds nothing short of Cyclopean-walled architecture beneath the supposedly colonial-era house. In the center of that vast space, shrouded in a blackness more stifling than mere absense of light, is a dais… and something else.

There was something here–a large table-like bulk in the center of the cellar. Where a few ghosts of sunlight drifted down to touch the edges, it seemed to be of stone. Cautiously he crossed the stone paving to where it loomed – waist-high, maybe eight feet long and less wide. A roughly shaped slab of gneiss, he judged, and supported by pillars of unmortared stone. In the darkness he could only get a vague concept of the objet. He ran his hand along the slab. It seemed to have a groove along the edge.

His groping fingers encountered fabric, something cold and leathery and yielding. Mildewed harness, he guessed in distaste.

Something closed on his wrist, set icy nails into his flesh.

When you’re finished sitting back on whatever piece of furniture you leapt out of at that last sentence (as I very nearly did), you find that this seemingly lifeless place is all too inhabited. Leverett explodes out of the place as best he can, desperately beating back the lich-like thing assailing him. Only a deadly strike from his trusty skillet saves him as it cleaves through the horror’s skull, and Leverett flees, leaving that terrible house behind him.

The next chapter, Leverett has told not a single soul of his experience. His friends observe a change in him: haunted eyes, leaner frame, gray hairs. He has seen action in World War Two, and Leverett is content to let his friends assume the brutality of that hideous period of humanity took its relentless toll on him. A close family friend’s father served alongside the tanks in World War Two, and up until his death, he never spoke of his time there, not even to other veterans. To me, there’s something particularly chilling about someone using the specter of the Second World War as a front, an excuse, to conceal a trauma more profound than even that.

Sadly for Leverett, the nightmare never ends. Rationalising the thing in the cellar as merely a malnourished hobo does not diminish the stark, grisly shock of the face which leaps out of the dark in his dreams. Even in the maelstrom of war, it is the memory of one day in a secluded house which causes him to awaken screaming in cold sweat. He returns not only a changed man, but a changed artist: his work is too gruesome and disturbing for even the more scandalous pulps. Decades later, a reprieve comes in the form of Prescott “Scotty” Brandon, who brings news that the nephew of famed horror writer H. Kenneth Alden wants him to illustrate a new collection. Leverett is inspired: having hidden the sketchbook he brough to that terrible place in a drawer, he implements the hideous sticks into his illustrations, to the delight of Scotty.

Soon, Leverett is compelled to impart the tale of his inspiration for the sticks, omitting only the encounter in the cellar–something which takes on a chilling significance when one reads the afterword. Scott loves it, and relates the story to historian Alexander Stefroi, who contacts Leverett. Stefroi is convinced that Leverett stumbled upon an ancient megalithic site, linked in more recent times to cultists and colonial sorcerers. Shades of “The Black Stone” and others are quite apparent. Stefroi compels Leverett to seek out the place once again for the benefit of science, and through much reluctance, he steels himself to go back to that dreadful abode. When he returns, he is not disappointed to find the house demolished: the tides of flood and years have claimed the house, just as they claimed the railway. No trace of the house or the hateful sticks remains. Unfortunately, this apparent relief will give way to a creeping dread.

Stefroi relays his disappointment in his response to Leverett’s report, and also the shocking news of Scotty’s violent death. Leverett is stunned at the loss of his longtime friend: shock giving way to apprehension, as he recalls mention in Scotty’s last letter of a persistent and vaguely threatening inquirer, to whom Scotty eventually imparted Leverett’s details. It is just as he remembers this that the enigmatic stranger catches up with him.

Leverett studied the tall lean man who stood smiling at the doorway of his studio. The sports car he had driven up in was black and looked expensive. The same held for the turtleneck and leather slacks he wore, and the sleek briefcase he carried. The blackness made his thin face deathly pale. Leverett guessed his age to be late 40 by the thinning of his hair. Dark glasses hid his eyes, black driving gloves his hands.

The stranger introduces himself as Dana Allard, the nephew of H. Kenneth Allard. He is enthusiastic about Leverett’s work, and wanted to approach him in person with a proposal to illustrate a hitherto unpublished collection of his uncle’s work – his darkest, most gruesome stuff yet. Leverett is transfixed and readily agrees, gleefully affirming his willingness and ability to recreate the diabolical symbols represented by the sticks in illustrations, which are curiously reminiscient of elder glyphics described in Allard’s prose. The sticks would be brought to a wide audience throughout the world.

Just as Leverett sends his last batch of pictures to Allard, he is sent a letter by Strefoi, where he writes of another site similar to the one in Mann Brook. Leverett’s omnipresent dreams continue, decades on, but in the final, shocking chapter of the story, the dream world starts to merge with the waking world, and Leverett comes to the realisation of the enormity of the past events of his life–and the dark significance of those sticks.

“Glyphics symbolic of alien dimensions – inexplicable to the human mind, but essential fragments of an evocation so unthinkably vast that the ‘pentagram’ (if you will) is miles across. Once before we tried – but your iron weapon destroyed part of Althol’s brain. He erred at the last instant – almost annihilating us all. Althol had been formulating the evocation since he fled the advance of iron four millennia past.

Then you reappeared, Colin Leverett – you with your artist’s knowledge and diagrams of Althol’s symbols. And now a thousand new minds will read the evocation you have returned to us, unite with our minds as we stand in the Hidden Places. And the Great Old Ones will come forth from the earth, and we, the dead who have steadfastly served them, shall be masters of the living.”

The inspiration leading to the story’s writing is fascinating and unsettling in itself. Wagner considered the story one big in-joke based on a peculiar anecdote related by Lee Brown Coye, famed illustrator of Weird Tales and many others:

The story is really Lee Brown Coye’s and is about Lee Brown Coye, as the Afterword explains. Coye had described the events upon which “Sticks” was based to me, and when Stuart David Shiff decided to bring out a special Lee Brown Coye issue of Whispers, I stole time from my final few months of medical school to write a story inspired by Coye’s experiences. “Sticks” is shot through with in-jokes and references which the serious fantasy/horror fan will recognize. I wrote the story as a favour and tribute to Lee, and I never expected it to be read by anyone beyond the thousand or so fans who read Whispers. To my surprise, “Sticks” became one of my best known and best liked stories. It won the British Fantasy Award and was a runner-up in the World Fantasy Award for best short fiction. The story has been anthologized numerous times and translated into several languages. It was broadcast on National Public Radio on Hallowe’en 1982 and was to have been produced for the short lived television series, Darkroom. Not bad for an in-joke.

–Karl Edward Wagner

That story is indeed related in the afterword:

Some readers may note certain similarities between characters and events in this story and the careers of real-life figures, well known as fans of this genre. This was unavoidable, and no disrespect is intended. For much of this story did happen, though I suppose you’ve heard that one before.

In working with Lee Brown Coye on Wellman’s Worse Things Waiting, I finally asked him why his drawings so frequently included sticks in their design. Lee’s work is well known to me, but I had noticed that the “sticks” only began to appear in his work for Ziff-Davis in the early 60s. Le finally sent me a folder of clippings and letters, far more eerie than this story–and factual.

In 1938 Coye did come across a stick-ridden farmhouse in the desolate Mann Brook region. He kept this to himself until fall of 1962, when John Vetter passed the account to August Derleth and to antiquarian-archeologist Andrew E. Rothovius. Derleth intended to write Coye’s adventure as a Lovecraft novelette, but never did so. Rothovius discussed the site’s possible megalithic significance with Coye in a series of letters and journal articles on which I have barely touched. In June 1963 Coye returned to the Mann Brook site and found it obliterated. It is a strange region, as HPL knew.

Coye’s fascinating presentation of their letters appeared in five weekly installments of his “Chips and Shavings” column in the Mid York Weekly from 22 August to 26 September 1963. Rothovius, whose research into the New England megaliths has been published in many journals, wrote an excellent and disquieting summary of his research in Arkham House’s The Dark Brotherhood, to which the reader is referred.

The unsettling story is mentioned on the Morrisville State College Library site, which also has a gallery of Coye’s grim artwork.

It’s no wonder that “Sticks” has endured as one of the most popular Karl Edward Wagner stories. My first experience of it was in the anthology The Giant Book of Zombies, also known as The Mammoth Book of Zombies (which is only one Robert E. Howard story away from being a truly complete collection) edited by Stephen Jones, who is also known for editing the two Conan volumes in the Fantasy Masterworks series, recently combined in The Complete Chronicles of Conan. The Giant Book of Zombies was published in 1993, a mere year before Wagner’s death, and Jones speaks well of Wagner. In all, “Sticks” has been included in over a dozen collections since its appearance in 1975, and if there’s any justice, it’ll continue despite the twelve years since its last printing in The Dark Descent.

“Sticks” is not just a fixture of the written realm, as it was also adapted to radio, though from what I’ve heard it takes many liberties with the narrative. Sometimes that influence reaches farther than one might expect: more than a few commentators have noted the striking similarities The Blair Witch Project bears to “Sticks.”

Very few tales scare me. As an aficionado of horror, this is natural due to desensitivity through overfamiliarity, and unfortunate in that a genre ostensibly designed around the evocation of fear results in little fright in my soul. There are probably only about a dozen stories that I could name which still frighten me, the very memory sending the Tingler of Terror trickling down my spine: Blackwood’s “The Willows” and “The Wendigo,” Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” Howard’s “Pigeons from Hell.” Wagner’s “Sticks” is one of those tales. Though my experience of Wagner’s writings is sorely limited due to the scarcity and price of some of his work, the little I have read is nothing short of enthralling: “Sticks” being the tale which made the most lasting impression. Much like the titular lattices, the memory of that story has never truly left my mind. What’s most unsettling is Wagner’s own thoughts on the tale: from his description of the tale as an “in-joke” with sly winks and references, one gets the impression that this was almost intended to be tongue-in-cheek, a fun little jaunt for the Weird Tales crowd to chortle and smile at. Yet in my mind, it stands tall among the true masterpieces of terror and the supernatural, perhaps because, rather than in spite, of that strange duality of the amusing and the horrifying.

Funny, isn’t it?

DEUCE ADDS: The Blair Witch Project follows the basic plot of “Sticks.” In both cases, after the protagonist(s) discover the “sticks,” he/they are locked in a loop that eventually leads them back to the root of the horror. Both stories climax in the cellar/subterranean crypt of a building associated with the source of the evil. It’s possible that HPL’s “Dreams in the Witch-House” was also an influence on the “Blair Witch” writers. The ”witches” in both tales, combined with the hyperspatial elements, would seem to indicate that.