Lovecraft's legacy

• Luc Sante discources on H.P. Lovecraft at The New York Review of Books.

Just in time for Halloween, a scholar takes on everyone's favorite Gothic [over]writer:

...Lovecraft's work is essentially unfilmable, not because his special effects are too gaudy or too expensive to translate to the screen, but because they are purely literary. Lovecraft was bookish in an extreme, almost parodistic way. He may not have worn a fez or been able to afford a wing chair, but he assumed the archetype of the nineteenth-century man of letters (Wilson calls him "a literary man manqué") with his circle of disciples, the roughly 100,000 letters he wrote to them (and he was only forty-seven when he died), the preciously archaic language in which he expressed himself (almost always using "shew" in preference to "show," for instance), the humid cultivation of in-jokes that migrated from the correspondence to the stories and were perpetuated in stories by the disciples, and the carefully tended aura, if quite self-aware, of "forbidden knowledge."

In other words, he was a nerd. He was a nerd on a grand scale, though— a heroic nerd, a pallid, translucent, Mallarméan nerd, a nerd who suffered for his art. His art consisted exclusively of conveying horror, and in this his range was encyclopedic. As a setting for his horror he built a whole world—a whole universe, with a time-span measured in eons—which others could happily continue furnishing indefinitely. His horrors themselves are, with a few unhappy exceptions, described loosely and suggestively enough that in effect they present a blank screen on which the reader can pro-ject whatever visual imagery is most personally unsettling. This explains the seeming paradox of an exceedingly bookish writer enjoying a legacy that is to a very large degree extraliterary. As a supplier of instruments for the cultivation of horror he was custom-tailored for the suggestible fourteen-year-old boy, and the number of fourteen-year-old boys—some of them chronologically rather older, a few of them even female—is continually on the increase.

Boo!

• Terrence Rafferty surveys some recent horror novels at the New York Times.

I've always been amused by the constant, unending dismissal of the horror genre by mainstream literary critics. You could just about do a book on the subject; hell, it took nearly a century for H. P. Lovecraft to get the credit he deserved, but that's the way these things work most of the time. Rafferty is then, of course, obligated to get his apology out of the way in the first paragraph of his piece, but once that's done, he gets into some interesting waters:

The ability to embody your fears and anxieties and revulsions metaphorically may or may not give you pleasure or contribute in any measurable way to your mental health, but it's a perfectly legitimate function of the working brain: one of those operations that help you maintain the appropriate respect for the power and weird beauty of unreason, its relentless prankishness, its capacity to prick us with sudden joys and sudden dreads. Horror fiction, even at its direst, frequently betrays an unexpectedly giddy quality, a sense of heedless, headlong freedom that's the proper effect of a good metaphor, building and rolling and breaking like a wave of the sea.

As with all genre fiction, horror writers work too much and too fast, too often rely on serviceable but weary conventions to get themselves through a rough patch of plot and are generally rather too quick to sacrifice aesthetic unity to speed and raw shock. But the reckless grip-it-and-rip-it approach to storytelling is less damaging to this genre than it is to, say, detective fiction, because the feeling of being at least a little out of control is basic to the experience of horror. What's terrifying in a story by Stephen King or Peter Straub is, finally, nothing less than the sensation of pure helplessness, of confronting something that cannot be conquered — or regulated, or even understood — by reason alone. At its worst, horror is just a scary, kind of exhausting amusement park ride. But at its best, it can produce effects close to Rimbaud's ideal: the derangement of all the senses. If that's your thing.

I always responded to the metaphorical side of top-notch horror lit; the sense that the worst nightmares were all around you, in the everyday world. Gore and bloodshed weren't really the attraction; I grew up in farm country and saw more than enough carnage to numb me to its fictional counterpart. Few, if any, horror books/movies ever really frightened me; suspenseful they could be, yes, but not necessarily terrifying in the sense that I had to go to sleep with the nightlight on and the closet door flung wide open.

But the horror genre is one that not only embraces the dark side of humanity, but runs towards it, to learn more. Of all the writers I can think of with an esteemed literary pedigree, only Joyce Carol Oates comes to mind as an example of a writer who's taken horror conventions/tropes and bent them to her will, and not gotten blackballed as a genre hack in the process. (I'm waiting for someone to correct me here...) Horror, to me, is an immensely fertile ground for metaphor and drama, a genre you can really put to interesting use if you're so inclined, and Rafferty's piece is a very welcome exploration of its possibilities.

So anyhow... go say hi to Damien today.

Everyone hail to the pumpkin song

I love Halloween.

David J. Skal’s illuminating book The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror is a must-read. Skal takes the genre seriously, and does an exemplary job of examining the social and historical contexts from which great horror and science-fiction tales emerge. The umbrella term “speculative fiction” has long allowed for much political and social commentary, disguised as simple monster films; it’s often a great way for storytellers to make points without having to get all obvious about it. Authors like Anne Rice and Stephen King get their discussion time, with a particularly interesting section on how Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles” series dealt metaphorically with the AIDS crisis in the 80s and 90s. And it’s always fun to read about the controversies, too, from fun bits on the original screen adaptations of Dracula and Frankenstein to a recounting of a 90s-era editorial in the New York Times that objected to the look of the Crypt Keeper, the “host” of HBO’s short-lived Tales from the Crypt series, because its emaciated resemblance was too reminiscent of starving Iraqi children(!). Skal’s work is well-researched and refreshingly nonjudgmental, and it’s a fun, juicy read to boot; also recommended as a companion read is his Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween.

Stephen King’s digressive Danse Macabre came along at a time when, if his On Writing is to be believed, his own bad habits were getting really out of control. Like any prolific author, King has had his peaks and valleys, and Danse Macabre, a book-length essay on the horror genre whose approach predated the aforementioned The Monster Show, was written just as his fictional work took a decade-long spiral into excess. Still, as a funhouse tour through King’s influences, likes and dislikes, it’s engaging and unpretentious, and he helpfully shines a spotlight on many lesser-known and/or forgotten genre works that helped shape his tastes. There’s a helpfully idiot-proof checklist of horror/sci-fi books and films, which makes for a great video-store decision-maker. And then, of course, there are the classic King white-knucklers: The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, Pet Sematary and Misery, all terrific pieces of storytelling.

Gaslight is the online archive of a discussion group, hosted through Mount Royal College, “which reviews one story a week from the genres of mystery, adventure and The Weird, written between 1800 and 1919.” There’s a ton of great stuff available on the site, all public domain; old-school ghost stories from Oscar Wilde, Louisa May Alcott, William Makepeace Thackeray, Kate Chopin and Joseph Conrad reside alongside the usual suspects (H. G. Wells, O. Henry, Arthur Conan Doyle). There’s also a great selection of stories from Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek-born, British-educated journalist who began his career in Cincinnati in the 1870s. Later in life he became a legal citizen of Japan, and his collection of supernatural Japanese folk tales, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things became the basis of a remarkable 1965 film directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Also sprinkled throughout are a number of excellent nonfiction pieces, including a particularly interesting essay by H. P. Lovecraft called “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”

Another good resource for horror texts online can be found in the horror section of short stories at east of the web.

The standbys:
- The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
- The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
- The Monkey’s Paw by W. W. Jacobs
- Famous Modern Ghost Stories, edited by Dorothy Scarborough (1921)

Great scary tunes:
- Krzysztof Penderecki: Anaklasis, Threnody, etc.
- John Zorn: Magick and Rituals
- Michael Nyman & Damon Albarn: Ravenous
- Bernard Herrmann: Psycho

Great scary flicks:
- Ginger Snaps
- Diabolique
- Carnival of Souls
- Suspiria