"Atmosphere.In.Weird.Fiction" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Clark Ashton)

In the paragraph immediately following this, the potential elements are
even more predominant:

As he pressed forward he became conscious that his way was haunted by
malevolent existences, invisible, and whom he could not definitely
figure to his mind. From among the trees on either side he caught broken
whispers in a strange tongue which yet he partly understood. They seemed
to him fragmentary utterances of a monstrous conspiracy against his body
and his soul.


Here, through the generalized character of malevolence imputed to things unseen
and half-heard, images of almost illimitable spectral menace arc conjured up. It
should not be inferred, how- ever, that precise statements and sharply outlined
images are necessarily lacking in potential quality. On the contrary, they may
possess implications no less frightful or mysterious than the wildly distorted
shadow cast by some monster seen in glaring light. To illustrate this point, let
me quote again from The Death of Halpin Frayser:

A shallow pool in the guttered depression of an old wheel rut, as from a
recent rain, met his eye with a crimson gleam. He stooped and plunged
his hands into it. It stained his fingers; it was blood. Blood, he then
observed, was about him everywhere. The weeds growing rankly by the
roadside showed it in blots and spalshes on their big broad leaves.
Patches of dry dust between the wheelways were pitted and sputtered as
with a red ruin. Defiling the trunks of the trees were broad maculations
of crimson, and blood dripped like dew from their foliage.


This, it would seem, is a prime example of kinetic atmospheric description,
owing its power to a visual definitude and exactness rarely equaled. Consider a
moment, however, and you will realize the added potential element which lies in
the unexplained mystery of the bloody dew, and the abnormally strange position
of many of the sanguine maculations. Things infinitely more dreadful and more
horrible than the blood itself are somehow intimated.

In much of Poe's best work, the atmospheric elements are so subtly
blended, unified and pervasive as to make analysis rather difficult. Something
beyond and above the mere words and images seems to well from the entire fabric
of the work, like the "pestilent and mystic vapor" which, to the narrator's
fancy, appeared to emanate from the melancholy House of Usher and its
inexplicably dismal surroundings. The profuse but always significant details
evoke dimly heard echoes and remote correspondences. Suggestion is less easily
separable from statement, and becomes a vague dark irridescence communicated
from word to word, from sentence to sentence, from paragraph to page, like the
play of lurid gleams along somber jewels cunningly chosen and set. To this
suggestive element the rhythms, cadences and phonetic sequences of the prose
contribute materially but more or less indeterminably. As an illustration of
well-nigh perfect atmospheric writing, embodying the qualities I have indicated,
I quote from The Fall of the House of Usher the description of the room in which