Wilum Pugmire

Reflections on S.T. Joshi

I have been rereading S.T.’s magnificent I Am Providence — the Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft, and it continues to amaze me how this man has changed my life, even before we became personal friends. I became an obsessed H.P. Lovecraft fanatic in the 1970s, at the time when, directly after Derleth’s death, Lovecraft scholarship began to percolate and permeate fandom. S.T. was an intimate part of this growth, and his exceptional labors would eventually lead to his becoming the world’s leading expert on HPL. He began his own journal, Lovecraft Studies, edited the Corrected Text editions of Lovecraft’s fiction for Arkham House and eventually Penguin Classics, and with Hippocampus Press is collecting Lovecraft extant correspondence in a series of more than twenty volumes. S.T. is working with Larry Roberts on a new line of books for Arcane Wisdom Press, Modern Mythos Library; and he has a number of projects that he is working on with Jerad here at Centipede Press, who also publishes S.T.’s newest journal, Weird Fiction Review.
      It became an ache of youth, to write Cthulhu Mythos fiction. Thanks to the works of S.T. Joshi, that ache matured into a desire to pen adult and original Lovecraftian weird fiction, fiction that was tied more closely to Lovecraft’s own works than most Mythos fiction seemed to be. I became more and more convinced that one had to intimate with Lovecraft’s poetry and prose in order to write fiction that was authentically Lovecraftian — not that I have yet to fully understand that which makes a story Lovecraftian. Then the miracle occurred: S.T. moved to Seattle, and he became the editor of my first book for Hippocampus Press. I didn’t have a computer when I wrote that book, and thus I composed the entire thing on my electric typewriter, and then I Xeroxed the whole mess and sent it to S.T., who then had to scan the entire book! We won’t be doing this again, he told me, insisting that I get online, use Microsoft Word and email him my fiction. I saw no need to do so until Jerad blew my mind and said he wanted to publish a Centipede Press omnibus of my finest fiction. I became obsessed with working on The Tangled Muse, and one of the facets that made the writing of it so exciting and yet so easy was knowing that S.T. was my editor. Having him as my editorial guide gave me confidence in my writing and filled me with the desire to produce the finest book I could. The publication of The Tangled Muse remains my happiest experience as an author. It would never have happened if it wasn’t for S.T. Joshi.
      It is interesting to see S.T. grow, expand — and become this generation’s August Derleth — what rich irony! He has long been extremely vocal in his criticism of modern Cthulhu Mythos fiction and has expressed more than once his desire to see the writing of such fiction halt. What an eldritch transition has overwhelmed him! The daemon seed was sewn when S.T. wrote a lengthy entry on the Cthulhu Mythos for one of his books. He complained about having to read so much lousy Mythos rot for just a wee essay and thus decided to put his ordeal to good advantage and write an entire book, The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos. I have pored over that fascinating history of Mythos fiction many times and continually return to it. There are some few things in the book with which I heartily disagree, such as S.T.’s curious dismissal of The Dunwich Horror as one of Lovecraft’s artistic failures; but the history that the book relates, to which I am so emotionally linked, is so absorbing. But this wasn’t enough, and soon S.T. began to edit a line of Mythos titles for Perilous Press. He then abandoned that job and created Modern Mythos Library for Larry Roberts and Arcane Wisdom Press. His first anthology of original weird fiction, Black Wings, is a book of modern Lovecraftian horror, and he has edited a second volume and is now looking for tales for Black Wings III. And now S.T. has written a complete novel about H.P. Lovecraft, a novel in which one finds elements of the supernatural and the Mythos. And like Derleth, S.T.’s work in the weird tale genre is but one facet of his work as editor and scholar.
       But it is his work in our beloved genre with which we are concerned here. Last week-end S.T. came to my pad and sat down for a 15-minute video interview for my YouTube channel, and one of the things he mentioned was his forthcoming edition of Arthur Machen from Penguin Classics, The White People and other Weird Stories, for which Guillermo del Toro has written a foreword. One of S.T.’s obsessions has been to get everything Lovecraft has written into print. We now have all of HPL’s extant poetry, all of the fiction, five volumes of the complete essays. Thanks to S.T.’s efforts Lovecraft has been published by the prestigious The Library of America. And with Hippocampus Press S.T. is seeing all of Lovecraft’s extant correspondence published in a series of over twenty volumes.
       S.T. also has a number of projects lined up here at Centipede Press, so stay tuned for news concerning them, or visit S.T.’s blog for further news. He has, I firmly believe, revived our genre and helped to establish H.P. Lovecraft as one of America’s great artists and thinkers. His passion for supernatural horror in literature knows no bounds, and he will continue his tireless, nay his frantic, efforts in bringing neglected weird writers back into print.
       I am honored to have him as a friend, and it is pure joy to work with him as my editor. Because of his encouragement I worked on my second book for Hippocampus Press, Uncommon Places, a collection of mostly prose-poems and vignettes. I had the nerve to work on such a collection because I knew that S.T. loved the form and would see that my book was published. He has inspired my finest work and fills me with unquenchable desire to write more and more Lovecraftian weird fiction.
             ——  Wilum Pugmire

RETURN TO TOP

Laird Barron

The Tiger Stripe

A while ago, Publishers Weekly solicited an essay about why I write. Lovecraft was the theme. There was more to it, though; more than the word count budget of that article permitted. There always is. And so, here we are.
      Sages love this prescription: write what you know. Well, damn, I’ve spent years avoiding what I know, writing around it like a man with a load of stolen hubcaps under his arm trying to sneak past the junkyard dog. I wore down a redwood tree worth of No. 2 pencils as a teen making like Zelazny’s ghostwriter. I tried epic fantasy and Philip Dick-style science fiction. I plundered Tolkien and Jakes. I was the man on the treadmill on that killer game show in the Bachman Books before I knew who the hell Bachman was. Regardless of what I wrote or how hard I worked, I kept sliding ever closer to my origins in life, the ol’ event horizon that allows nothing to wriggle free.
      What I know and how I know are still there, nonetheless; following shadows, provenance that has proved inescapable in the most fundamental sense of the term. I can squirm and struggle, I can flail and fight, but there’s not much chance you’ll get a romance novel out of me in this go around of the big wheel of Karma, and probably not a Pat McManus-style essay, either. Strunk & White and all their prescriptions and all their revised editions can’t change the stars you were born under. Neither good nor bad, this simply and plainly is.
      Write what you know, write what you know. Man, that sounds good, sounds pure, it rolls off the tongue, but watch out. Sure, everybody’s got a story. What you know most intimately isn’t the key, however. Poe, for all his travails, demonstrated that. Lovecraft demonstrated that. So did Howard, and so did Wallace Stevens, and Robert Service for that matter. No, it’s not the story of ourselves at all. It’s what the story does with you and what you do about it. It’s about other people’s stories, what they do to you, what you do about them. It’s about walking, or crawling as the case may be, through this messy existence with eyes open. It’s about squeezing a fistful of shit and praying for a diamond.
      Before my time, my father joined the Marine Corps and ran off to the jungle to fight. He was seventeen. Granddad signed those papers right smartly — he and the boy didn’t get along, not a lick, but then no one got on with Granddad. That southern charm and Bible salesman polish got chipped in a hurry when the heat of his volatile nature overcame him. He’d served as a sailor during the Second Great War, cashiered out right before his ship got sent to the bottom of the Pacific, or so the legend goes. A hard-bitten man, Granddad; not a drinker, but certainly a fellow of towering rages, given to fist and belt when his mood was savage, and it often was. Perhaps he was thus because of all those years dwelling in the cabin he bored and built from a hollow hill in the 1940s, a bear den that became a modern day cave for a contemporary cave family. Alaska is as dark as the pit, but a cave is darker, and darker still is the heart of the man who resides there, like a beast. Maybe he was bitter because of his failed novel manuscripts, or his failed get rich quick schemes, or that he wound up a widower and his children, except a couple of favorites, were scattered on the wind. Perhaps it was a glitch in the genetic matrix. Plain old madness. There’s a streak of that running through both halves and all the branches of my family tree to the core, the heartwood and roots; probably the same as most family trees. Granddad’s life made an impression on me, and so too his lonely death in the Yukon Territory many years later, but I’ve never written him into a story, never based a character on him. His memory and the consequences of his actions are just a splinter of the fault line running through my mind.
      So, he ran my father off, sent him packing overseas to participate in the great Police Action of the 1960s and early ’70s. Dad survived Vietnam and returned to the States and got married. Funny thing, his replacement stepped on a claymore and got blown in half. Beat Dad out of the country by a week.
      I came along and was yet a toddler when the doctors diagnosed me with cancer. There was an operation and I lost an eye and everyone speculated how a baby could get a tumor. Agent Orange, family and friends concluded. Dad had been exposed to many terrible things during his service, industrial grade defoliants among them. He’d acquired a strange rash that bloomed from time to time, igniting near his ankle and spiraling up his body in a morbidly beautiful arabesque that terminated at his neck, just under the hairline. You could plot its trajectory across his flesh. A wildfire, a tiger stripe. A red badge of courage for defense of God and country. Proof enough that something happened to him, that he’d been changed. Proof, confirmed by the melanoma that took a bite of my baby eye, that he’d passed along the imprint of metamorphosis like a black gift to his firstborn. Ah, at least cancer is something your parents give you that you can cut out, if need be.
      Dear old Dad knew I was in for hell in public school, what with my weepy composite prosthetic eyeball that always stared straight ahead, dead and icy as that of a stuffed animal, so when I was five he got down on hands and knees and taught me the rudiments of boxing. Nothing complicated, nothing fancy — pivot and drive with the hips straight into the nose or mouth, cross with the right. And repeat until somebody went down. He knew from brawling. There was a scar on his brow awarded in battle during Boot Camp, his nose was crooked from being smashed repeatedly, several of his teeth were sheared close to the gums, consequence of a swipe from a logging boot during a drunken scrum at a party in his youth. Most of the scars were on his knuckles, though. The shallow ones, the ones you could see.
      I was a quick study and growing up, I used every dirty trick he ever taught me, from fishhooks to hip throws. Sometimes I won and sometimes I took a beating and I learned to make friends with pain and suffering, because buddy, it was all about pain and suffering no matter what side of the scoreboard I found myself on at the end of the day. A little bit of toughness, a little pride, a little equanimity in the face of fear and loss that served me well whether I was getting my balls kicked up into my lower intestines, or lying at the bottom of a sledbag in a blizzard while my face, hand, and foot froze black, and no sign from the good Lord, just me and the huskies in the howling dark. I’ve Dad to thank for that much.
      But I don’t write about him either.
      It really wouldn’t make a difference anyway. Hardnosed bastards like Dad were a dime a dozen in rural Alaska, and I bet they still are. When I worked the canneries and construction sites as a lad, everybody — man, woman, child — carried a knife; most kept a gun on hand or near enough. The tenders and the bloody, grimy fishing ports, the quarries and the backwoods shacks, were tenanted by the hardest drinking, crank-snorting, pot-growing automatic rifle toting anti-social scofflaws as any white bread mother in a California suburb could hope to imagine corrupting her college-age daughter when she adventures to the Last Great Frontier for a little summer work experience between chucking her cap and settling in at papa’s law firm. I bunked with plenty of these folks; eight men to an iron room in the belly of ship. The kind of environment where the commissary is always short on razorblades and cough syrup, even when nobody’s got a cough and sure as hell ain’t a one of those hombres wasting time shaving. Yeah, another thing I’ll have to get around to putting in a story someday. Meanwhile, I keep on chewing what chews on me, and occasionally I spit out the pieces and arrange them like the soggy leaves at the bottom of a cup, and try to divine my fortune. That’s all there is, nothing more.
      The truth is, these incidents leave their mark and they become the flaw in the fabric of one’s soul, and whether I deploy them in a fiction or store them in some cabinet in my brain, their essential reality bleeds into everything I attempt, more or less. I don’t often write what I know, but what I know has written the book of me. And daily, I am overwritten. Daily, I am overwritten.
             ——  Laird Barron

RETURN TO TOP

Dave Roberts

The Scholar Geek

Horror is a genre with a slightly less-than-infinite number of low-level subgenres, depending on how you want to take a crack describing them. The beauty in these subgenres is that they cover a range from serious examinations of guilt, regret, and consequence on one end to over-the-top childlike glee about our fear of the dark on the other. They span a breadth that cannot be contained by either erudite scholarship or basement geeky squabbles alone.
      Few things in life are more obnoxious than being cornered by a close-minded scholar or geek. The person who cannot possibly see with any iota of tolerance anything of value that was produced post-MR James is just as annoying as the one who really, really, really needs you to know that Halloween H20 is a modern classic.
      Articulating these subgenres and properly tracing their relationships to each other is an enjoyable, argumentative, and, let’s face it, sometimes overbearing task. It should be pursued both with serious examination and humor. The trap comes in trying to avoid redundancy. As in any other literary discourse, there is a greater probability for misfires and missed targets than bulls-eyes. That’s a part of the game.
      We have a place at the table for both the open-minded scholars and the open-minded geeks to disassemble, reconnect, and argue the influenced and the influencers. The Scholar Geek might have the best luck at making sound arguments and connections. For example, the scholar recites the classic argument that if any horror novel is good enough, it transcends its genre and therefore becomes literature. But the Scholar Geek knows that literary horror is just another subgenre, one that is a creditor and debtor to other subgenres. The Scholar Geek understands the joy in linking or disproving a relationship between, say, Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde and Sheitan (I’m guessing that many on the extreme side of scholarship won’t make it through an entire screening of Sheitan ).
      Not everything can or should be connected to each other. For example, John Fowles’s The Collector clearly falls in the realm of Literary Horror. Rarely has there ever been such a heartbreaking, frightening work of horror, with such much marvelous characterization and structure. Its influence on more modern classics, such as Silence of the Lambs, is undeniable. But I would never go so far as to directly connect The Collector to the work of a torture porn hack. While the torture porn writer might claim to be influenced by Fowles, this influence can really only be traced through of line of dilution. If you can imagine a line of titles between The Collector and the hack in which character, writing skill, and story structure are gradually stripped away so that all that remains are a victim, and villain, and a similar plot, then you can make the connection.
      So that serves as a long-winded introduction to the way I approach this thing. I sit somewhere in between scholarship and geekiness, a student of both but a master of neither.
      Imagining a taxonomy of sorts, we start at the general heading of Horror and work my way down a level. Here we might find cosmic horror, literary horror, ghost stories, exploitation fiction, transformative horror, and many others at this level. We can branch from this level to the next level of subgenres and apply filters, such as temporal, political, or critical.
      And so we dig down and think about what really gets us going when I read horror, and, somewhere in there we get a view of them: those sub-genres that speak to us in ways that no others do. Maybe they’re a few levels down and it’s not yet clear how to connect them back up to the larger genres, but they beg examination immediately. Obviously, they fit in there somewhere. How do they all come together?
      For my money, few subgenres are more exciting that Confusion Horror. As a subgenre of Psychological Horror, Confusion Horror is usually told in the first person. If not, it’s a tightly wrapped third person narrative with fluid interior monologues. Our narrator is unreliable though he or she may not think so. The reader may be able to piece together an explanation for the events in the story, but it is sometimes difficult to distinguish which plot points in the story are really happening to the main character and which are delusions or hallucinations. Secondary characters provide clues through dialogue and actions as to what really may be going on. The ending is not always concrete.
      The subgenres of Confusion Horror sometimes overlap in a Venn diagram sort of way. The main character is generally someone dificult to sympathize with, though they may have brief moments of awareness that evoke a sort of sympathy from the reader. A good writer nevertheless makes this character completely fascinating. This skill in characterization is a key differentiator between someone who produces good work in this subgenre and the hack who comes up with annoying characters that hold no interest whatsoever.
      Our main character is in a state of confusion before the story even begins and he or she is solely responsible for their state. Generally speaking, these characters are not victims nor do they embody much of a sense of victimhood. For this reason, The Haunting of Hill House would never fit into Confusion Horror, while Bret Easton Ellis’ horror novels always fit into this genre. Jackson’s Eleanor clearly perceives herself as a victim. Ellis’ characters, not so much.
      It’s easy to map relationships between works that clearly belong in this subgenre. A direct line exists between The Watcher and American Psycho. But to connect something like Aickman’s Trains to writing of Ellis, I have to compare both literary skill and look at the responses their writing creates. The Scholar might cry foul and say that you have to drop subjectivity and emotion when making such connections, while the geek might say that it all about subjectivity and emotion. It’s a combination of both. Both writers are masters of their approaches to storytelling, in terms of characterization, structure, and setting, though they take radically different approaches. However, the foreboding and doom that Aickman generates for the protagonists in Trains, the deep sense of finding oneself lost, trapped on a path that cannot be reversed, with ambiguous forces that may or may not be working against them, in an almost hallucinatory situation, is the exact same foreboding and doom that Ellis generates in his novels.
      Stylistically, are they anywhere near each other? Do their subject matters ever align? Not even close. But that head-swirling feeling is there, it’s undeniable. Both writers pull the reader into worlds in which the loss of control, the persistence of confusion, is palpable.
      Some of you might disagree with that conclusion; many of you will even argue that Ellis and Aickman should not be mentioned in the same sentence. And we should have some good conversations about it. How about it?
             ——  Dave Roberts

RETURN TO TOP