The joey Zone
LEE BROWN COYE, Scrying Stones & Dolmen & Others: Chips & Shavings 1963-1964. Foreword by Mike Hunchback. Camillus, NY: Chiroptera Press, 2022. 78 pp. $36 tpb.
limited edition.
Scrawny and thin my dead come in
But looks are soon forgotten.
With respect to Ye Grizzled Shade, we can never unsee your art, Lee Brown Coye. The dermatology of a typical Coye (1907-1981) personage—revenant or living—is reminiscent of twisted sunbaked roadkill. His construction of architecture is all ingrown and fuzzy, the surrounding landscapes subscribing to a Wilmarthian permaculture. Lee’s influence can be deduced in superlative modern-day scratches with gleeful grue of GUCKER or the feathery shadows of FELTON. But there is only one COYE.
The cover of this newest Chiroptera Press offering is one of his most brutal table settings: “Murgunstrumm’s Work Room” from the title tale of Hugh B. Cave’s Carcosa collection of 1977. This wrapper belies its contents however—here be a quieter creep. Words etching a stillness unnerving:
Sometimes—minutes or hours later—a terrible silence woke him and he jumped from his chair. He looked at the clock. It had stopped and the tick sound was gone…The peepers had
stopped and though he could see the splash of rain against the window there was no patter. The kerosene lamp burned but dimly. The wind had gone down and he hung shivering in a vast nothing.
The eighteen stories comprising Scrying Stones are accurately described in the publisher’s prospectus as “less literary fictions than they are examples of American folklore” from “a time of horse drawn hearses and handmade coffins.” Coye could be properly classified therefore as a Regionalist, much like Lovecraft. Ten stories had been previously transmitted audibly in the Cadabra Record releases Where Is Abby? & Other Tales and Scrying Stones & Dolmen (2015 and 2018 respectively). These were read by Lee’s son, Robert Coye, who also corrected the texts in this volume before his death in June 2021. All had originally appeared as “Chips & Shavings” columns of the local Mid-York Weekly.
Four “Shavings” previously unseen or heard since original publication are: “The Black Dog”, a surprisingly sweet tale of a dog showing his owner where he should have been buried; “In Sight Fill My Soul”, a version of The Phantom Hitchhiker folktale, getting you to take her to a dance first; “Three Steps and About Face”, which describes the regimen of the ghost of a Continental soldier, albeit one only three feet high. Albeit just the mix of too many boilermakers with a dash of narrator; and “Spooked House,” being a standout melodrama not dealing in the supernatural, with but “little need to fabricate the morbid when reality was harsh and grim enough.”
The importance of this reprinted work is cemented by its title piece “Scrying Stones & Dolmen,” a set of correspondence between Coye and others in something of a roman à clef including “John Vedder” [Vetter]; “Anthony Davis” [August Derleth]; and “Andrew Rothman” [Rothovius]. This regards weird geologic and wooden constructs glimpsed in Central New York’s “Burnt Over District,” “a belt of territory which seems to stretch along the length of the Erie Canal and toward the west that has been productive of many strange cults and beliefs.”
Dead wood thus spoke to Lee Brown Coye and, as Mike Hunchback writes in his foreword, “he never stopped seeing those sticks in his mind, eventually drawing them over and over.” A treatise on the omnipresent crescent moons in those drawings remains to be conjectured. Karl Edward Wagner based a story upon this ‘conversation’–“Sticks” appeared in Stuart Schiff’s third issue of Whispers in 1974 (Here I might blasphemously proffer one of Stephen Fabian’s better illustrations appended to the yarn where this reviewer first encountered it, in the first Whispers anthology collection of 1977). In a blur, The Blair Witch Project (1999) culturally appropriated those twig-formed sigils. For that matter, the code in J. H. Watson’s treatise on the “Adventure of The Dancing Men” posits a runic predecessor.
The stories of Lee Brown Coye himself however will not only “live on through the long tradition of weird fiction small press adulation” but once read cannot be unseen. Nor in the posterity of print soon forgotten.