Whistling Past the Graveyard

Released in the plague year of 2020 by Strange Attractor, There Is a Graveyard That Dwells In Man is a companion volume to The Moons At Your Door. Like that book, it’s an anthology of short stories selected by David Tibet, the creative mind behind the pioneering ambient industrial/apocalyptic folk project Current 93 – weird tales that have tickled his fancy and prompted his creative instincts over the years.

Two H.R. Wakefield stories bookend the collection; the first story here is A Black Solitude, which is notable for breaking from the precedent set by Wakefield’s own “He Cometh and He Passeth By” – and M.R. James’s Casting the Runes, which “He Cometh” was very much a pastiche of – by presenting a Crowley caricature who is not an antagonist but is instead presented much more sympathetically.

It’s not that Wakefield had suddenly gone full Thelemite or something – he still presents the thinly-veiled Crowley analogue as being 90% a big sleazy charlatan – but he’s much less hostile to that side of him, and he’s willing to credit the remaining 10% with some actual occult nous (but not enough to stop the culminating horror from consuming him). “He Cometh” emerged in 1928, whilst A Black Solitude was published in 1951, and evidently in the intervening years Wakefield seems to have decided that Crowley was kind of cool in his own way. (The character even has a celebrated mountaineering career, as Crowley had, which might have helped persuade Wakefield that Crowley wasn’t just a total waster.)

Hauntings of All Phases

Though David Tibet will likely be primarily known forever as the mind behind Current 93, which as previously chronicled started out as part of an esoteric circle of influential industrial musicians before mutating into a poetic Gnostic weird folk project (after steering uncomfortably in the direction of fascistic neofolk before Tibet wised up, righted the ship, and changed up his collaborators), this is not the only string to his bow.

As well as a sideline as a visual artist, Tibet has also maintained a long career as a collector of vintage horror fiction and weird tales, and has also turned his hand to publishing, editing, and facilitating the reprinting of rare material from time to time; for instance, he played a key role in rediscovering and making available again the eccentric work of Count Stenbock, and it was his suggestion which led to Wordsworth releasing The Drug and Other Stories, the most substantial collection of the short stories of Aleister Crowley ever put between two covers.

Tibet has also, more recently, tried his hand at being an anthologist. The Moons At Your Door, published in 2015 via Strange Attractor and released in conjunction with the Current 93 album which shares its title, is a collection of fiction which has over his years of reading and collecting continued to resonate with him. Inevitably, a lot of this has seeped its way into Current 93’s musical output, because Tibet is the sort of creator who isn’t shy of acknowledging his influences, and so the selection is in some respects idiosyncratic and reflective of Tibet’s expansive range of interests and obsessions. But is it any good to read for anyone who isn’t David Tibet?