Notebook: Leiber's Sinister California

From Mount Waterman and steep Mount Wilson with its great observatory and hundred-inch reflector down through cavernous Tojunga Canyon with its many sinuous offshoots to the flat lands and then across the squat Verdugo Hills and the closer ones with Griffith Observatory and its lesser 'scopes, to sinister, almost inaccessible Potrero and great twisting Topanga Canyons that open with the abruptness of catastrophe upon the monstrous, primeval Pacific—all of them (the hills) with few exceptions sandy, cracked, and treacherous, the earth like rock and the rock like dried earth, rotten, crumbling, and porous.

- Fritz Leiber, "The Dweller in the Depths," collected in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

On a gray day in Rhode Island, it is not so difficult to feel that one has found the setting of a Lovecraft story: that the dark and patient forests have retaken many an ill-fated farm, and some force within them is planning the next advance, that a mouldering old mansion in Providence contains a forbidden library and a sorcerer's undecayed corpse. Your humble critic writes from the southern Appalachians, which can, from time to time, suggest grim secrets in the gnarled rhododendrons of some hidden holler.

But southern California is a sunny Eden, at times almost shadowless. A visitor might wonder how such a paradise could ever seem sinister. Filmmakers from Billy Wilder to David Lynch have managed it, as have Chandler, Didion, Steinbeck, Ellroy, and, perhaps most memorably, the exiled Brecht¹, but the focus is typically on the cities, farms, and general human overlay of California. What is interesting about Leiber's "The Dweller in the Depths" is that he finds a sinister quality in the geography, describing it as "outwardly wholesome and bright, inwardly sinister and eaten-way landscape, where Nature herself presents the naïve face of youth masking the corruptions of age." Indeed, the occasional visitor easily forgets the threat of earthquakes, wildfires, droughts, and mudslides.

Leiber is one of the nimblest stylists of twentieth-century fantasy and science fiction; his prose dances and capers around that of his many plodding contemporaries. And beyond his sinister California, there was a wide and mysterious America. We catch a glimpse of it in another brief passage:

As we ate by its dancing, crackling flames, he regaled me with brief impressions of his trip west—the cold, primeval pine woods of southern New Jersey with their somberly clad inhabitants speaking an almost Elizabethan English; the very narrow dark roads of West Virginia; the freezing waters of the Ohio flooding unruffled, silent, battleship gray, and ineffably menacing under lowering skies; the profound silence of Mammoth Cave; the southern Midwest with its Depression-spawned, but already legendary, bank robbers; the nervous Creole charms of New Orleans's restored French Quarter; the lonely, incredibly long stretches of road in Texas and Arizona that made one believe one was seeing infinity; the great, long, blue, mystery-freighted Pacific rollers ('so different from the Atlantic's choppier, shorter-spaced waves')…

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¹ Brecht's dyspeptic view of Los Angeles's gardens is impossible not to quote:

In Hell too
There are, I've no doubt, these luxuriant gardens
With flowers as big as trees, which of course wither
Unhesitantly if not nourished with very expensive water. And fruit markets
With great heaps of fruit, albeit having
Neither smell nor taste.