Lafferty completed "Horns on Their Heads" in June 1971, though even that date feels late. The writing belongs to the late 1960s, when he likely began working on it. There is much to admire here: Lafferty’s verbal brilliance is in full force, and the story offers an intense configuration of favorite themes: supernatural children, incantation, demonology, nature and machine, allusiveness, and apocalyptic stakes.
What weakens the story as art is its historical allegory. That may have been inevitable, given that Lafferty’s frustration with the times drove him to write it: its aesthetic blemish is also its birth pang. This pattern is common in the history of allegory. Just look at what became of Spenser’s grand ambitions for the historical dimension of The Faerie Queene. Spenser wisely dialed it back, only turning it up again in a few moments—some sharp jabs at Ireland here, a hint of disappointment in Good Queen Bess there.
I reread "Horns on Their Heads" after someone in the "East of Laughter" Facebook group mentioned it, and this clarified something I sometimes struggle with in Lafferty.
To explain this, I’ll outline three levels on which to read the story to understand why it doesn’t fully succeed. From there, I’ll propose a critical term that may help Lafferty readers recognize the dynamic in other Lafferty works—a technique that throws light on how he triumphs or falters.
On its outermost level, "Horns on Their Heads" follows four extraordinary kids—Annina, Daniel, Quick Mick, and Azorro—who are called "devil children" for their supernatural powers, which are (ironically) both outlawed and declared nonexistent in the Monitored World. In this world, God and the Devil have been pronounced dead. The corrupt social order has constructed a myth about a washed-up blue whale, the “sky whale.” This supposed sky whale was, at once, both God and Devil. After seeing so much rotting whale meat on the shore, the people of the Monitored World have nothing to worry about.
It’s antinomian time: let it all hang out.
The devil children won’t go along with this. They disrupt the enforced disorder of the "Lion-People" and "Jackal-People," reshaping reality itself. They summon storms, alter landscapes, have fun, and confound their would-be authorities. Eventually, a thirteen-year-old Judas figure betrays them (with a dark hint that he might somehow be an iteration of the historical Judas), leading to their capture at the height of their adoration of—Lafferty doesn’t say, but we know. Condemned to execution, they have more fun and rain down fiery, Sodom-and-Gomorrah-style vengeance on the Lions and Frizzes.
As a historical allegory, the story critiques the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. The "Lion-People" and "Frizzes" are obviously hippies, with psychedelic drugs, hot rods and motorcycles, sexual license, and slogans like let it all hang out.
Lafferty slips into weak satire here, unable to modulate away from his disgust to land a line like the children being asked, "Will you now take pot and hemp and acid and snow to show your solidity with the free people?"
On the level of historical allegory, the four devil children are just good Catholic kids of the 1960s. They’re like those kids in Spain, the ones who experienced visions of St. Michael the Archangel and the Blessed Virgin Mary in the small village of San Sebastián de Garabandal, which is alluded to in the story. What good Catholic kid wouldn’t reject long-haired freaks and LSD?
This is the blemish. Now, to where it succeeds brilliantly.
Lafferty doesn’t just rewrite the Book of Daniel in "Horns on Their Heads"—he wrenches it into eschatology. This is brilliant because Lafferty isn’t merely adapting a biblical story. This is not a simple retelling. What he’s doing is fundamentally altering its spiritual function in a way that I haven’t seen before. Have you? He’s bending a book of biblical prophecy so that it fulfills itself.
Prophecy looks ahead, revealing a divine promise yet to be fulfilled. Eschatology, on the other hand, is the endgame—the moment of reckoning where judgment is rendered and divine forces actively reshape reality. Lafferty takes the most frequently quoted book by Jesus in his ministry, with Daniel as a clear type of Christ, and transforms it into blistering, ecstatic judgment. Here, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego don’t just survive the fire—they direct it. They do not wait for the antitype: they become the antitype.
Instead of passive deliverance, the figures are eschatological agents, avenging angels. They are not helpless victims awaiting divine salvation but wielders of divine wrath. “When we go into the fire, you'll see some fun… Stand back or you'll be crisped by it,” Annina declares.
This is mind-bending stuff. But what does it achieve on the level of historical allegory? It sets the hippies’ beards on fire—which is terribly disappointing.
And then we’re back, moving again at genius speed.
The children's horns. They aren’t the horns of devils. They never were. They aren’t Daniel’s prophetic "little horn" (Daniel 7:7). They are Moses’ radiant horns, the horns of Exodus 34:29:
"And when Moses came down from Mount Sinai, he held the two tables of the testimony, and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord."
Lafferty then really dazzles us: real horns, white-fire horns, white-light horns, Moses-horns!
No one but R. A. Lafferty does something like that. The sacrificial kids (pun) have become the priests.
And that brings me to the point of this post. “Horns on Their Heads" exemplifies a central dynamic in Lafferty’s best—and at times weakest—artistic practice, a pattern I’m calling Theotropic Dissonance.
Theotropic signifies an upward movement toward divine reality, the anagogical, while dissonance marks the deliberate rupture of simple allegorical equivalence (aesthetic defamiliarization), creating the possibility for deeper anagogical and mystical insight. In “Horns on Their Heads” defamiliarization of the historical reality fails.
I have addressed some of this in my earlier post about Lafferty's sliding scales of allegory.
Despite its powerful theological imagination, "Horns on Their Heads" falters on the level of radicalized theotropic dissonance. Its historical allegory constrains and neuters its anagogy, preventing the story from achieving the power of Lafferty’s strongest efforts.
There is a lot to learn here about his genius as a writer.
Current notes:
Коментарі