'this less material life is our truer life' - again, Lovecraft and spirituality

Regarding what I wrote about Lovecraft and spirituality and transcendence yesterday, observe the opening passage to his story 'Beyond the Wall of Sleep' (1919) below.  Sometimes these opening philosophical gambits are worth the price of admission alone, regardless of what Lovecraft may be able to subsequently achieve with the narration itself.  Here I think he rather clearly exhibits the sort of Dark Sehnsucht and anti-reductionism I alluded to:

I have frequently wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences—Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism—there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal character permits of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence no less important than physical life, yet separated from that life by an all but impassable barrier. From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know; and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking. From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet prove little. We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

Sometimes I side with those who find Lovecraft's verbose 'purple prose' somewhat ponderous and amusingly porcine.  At other times I think his hefty phrases lean slightly more in the direction of Milton or Faulkner than Edward Bulwer-Lytton and achieve a certain degree of thoughtful opulence (if you're willing to also chuckle a little as you appreciate it).  This whole passage is a pretty good example of his wordiness working well, I think.  His 'immundane' is a very aptly chosen word for his subject matter and one I plan to use in the future.  His 'terraqueous globe' is just delicious - in the way monsters like Godzilla and Gamera are epic and outrageous at once.  The constant recurrence of globulous phrases like 'titanic significance' and 'uncorporeal life', couched as they are in syntactical rhythms that mirror their manatee-like eloquence, induce in the reader a flavour of the very dream state that is under review.  Matching form to theme is one crucial mark of great writing.  Today, here, Lovecraft is a great writer in my opinion.

At any rate, the content is substantial.  This is not merely a dreamy prose-poem.  Lovecraft is hungrily excavating his lifelong philosophical pursuit:  a depth-dive into ontology, a refusal to accept commonsense,  commonplace reality and a determination to dig beneath its surface.  Or, to move the metaphor from 'under' to 'over', a determination to escape the orbital pull of everyday appearances.  This supra-mundane impulse and the careful explication it engenders in Lovecraft's works are, I submit, rather clear signs of his bent toward something not at all unlike a spiritual worldview.  I know many spiritualities seek a totally 'immanent' picture of the world, without immaterial remainder, but 'a certain remainder' is exactly what Lovecraft feels in his gut here and he thinks it unwise to ignore that intuition.  And equally unwise to throw an 'ordinary interpretation' at it (such as that it was just the spicy burritos we ate, or a Freudian/Feuerbachian projectionist sort of explain-it-away theory).

To be fair, the point I cited S. T. Joshi making - that Lovecraft consciously sought a 'non-supernatural cosmic art' (in Lovecraft's own words) - was put forth by Joshi as being an arc of intellectual growth that Lovecraft underwent during his short career.  I agree that just such a development of ideas and ideology occurred in Lovecraft.  But his 'spiritual' roots are prominent in this early story and I'm not yet convinced he ever 'outgrew' them in his heart, even though he sought intentionally to do so by means of the theoretical rhetoric he adopted.  I do think his intellectual convictions had sincerely moved in the direction of materialism, but I also think that position was in tension with his heart's impulse for the 'beyond' and that even his own artistic fleshing out of materialism (the Cthulhu Mythos) was decidedly non-reductionistic.

It's fascinating really.  I think so many atheists and secularists and 'neo-pagans' are drawn to Lovecraft because he is really one of the great spiritual writers of the 20th century, a mystic for materialists I suppose.  (And I would welcome your thoughts on this if you self-identify as such.)  Lovecraft's keen sense of 'cosmic horror' seems to be in tension with his equally keen sense of Sensucht, of spiritual yearning.  And I think this is why so many 'religious believers' have enjoyed and imitated Lovecraft too, despite not sharing his atheism (in popular genre fiction one thinks of the likes of Catholics such as Gene Wolfe and Tim Powers).

Of course, Christian theology's emphasis on physical creation and bodily resurrection would, ironically, give far more substance and meaning to material, earthly life than Lovecraft intimates here (our 'vain presence' in the physical ecosphere is 'secondary' at best, he surmises).  But Lovecraft's deep-seated hunch that we are more than merely meat-machines remains hugely significant to me and I think we do him an injustice if we reduce him to merely an apostle of a grim cosmic realism comprised of particles-all-the-way-down.  His view was sincerely bleak and devoutly 'scientific' (as he understood it), but the beat of his heart's longing for Something More never stops pulsating throughout his work.  If we ignore that, at times faint, palpitation, it will, Poe-esque, grow louder and louder in our ears until we scream out our confession that we buried it beneath the floorboards.

The Rats (1974) by James Herbert

I picked up a cheap second-hand copy of this book on a whim last year.  Swarms of rats attacking cities is a trope I’m familiar with from 70s and 80s films shown on TV in my childhood, so I think it was partly nostalgia that made me pick it up.  I had very low expectations as to the quality of writing and wondered if I’d even be able to finish it.  It sat on my shelf until I noticed a brand new copy of it sitting in the bestseller rack of my local supermarket, which alone said much about its longevity as a work of fiction.  But what grabbed my attention even more was that none other than Neil Gaiman had written a new introduction to the novel.  Intrigued, I slotted The Rats up to my next book to read.

          I have never read a novel so quickly.  I’m a slow reader at the best of times, so even this slim page-turner took me a handful of sittings over a couple of days.  But it’s the kind of thing my wife could read in one afternoon.  This is superbly economic and engrossing storytelling.  It’s the way Stephen King usually is for a hundred pages or so, off and on, in his novels.  But Herbert’s debut didn’t really let up, and it’s a short novel anyway.  

          Also like King, Herbert’s backstory characterisations are what make the pace so relentless and make the brutal nasty crescendos so chilling.  The book tells terse but enthralling little tales about a number of quite different sorts of characters only to (SPOILER – but you would only expect this) have them devoured by rats.  What King says about his own fiction applies here:  he makes you care about the characters and then unleashes the monsters on them.  These hordes of vermin are headed up by a swelling population of huge black mutations, which, in addition to being vicious flesheaters, are uncannily intelligent.  Having gotten a taste for human blood early in the story, they now seek out only that delicacy all over London.  

          It’s a shocker.  The killing set pieces are gruesome and unforgiving.  Yet it doesn’t really linger on gory detail.  This balance of shock and restraint makes the sheer animal brutality all the more sinister and effective.  Well played, Mr. Herbert.  

(I should probably note that this little book is very rated R for graphic sexual content as much as violence, done in a similar succinct but evocative manner.  It has the same breezy attitude to sex you find in King and others from the 70s, though perhaps a little less of the 'heart' that King at least tries to put into that subject matter.)

          I suppose you could call Herbert's debut novel a specimen of eco-horror, but I’m not sure how strong that resonance really is.  It’s actually far more sociological than ecological.  It’s frankly kind of disturbing in its seeming classism and racism (even from the narrational point of view) and, making those prejudices redundant, its misanthropy.  That the human population itself is seen by the main protagonist as not unlike a swarm of vermin is pretty obvious.  This is in tension, however, with the book’s clear decrial of urban poverty, both in terms of living conditions and education.  The tension between a humanitarian impulse and unanalysed prejudice really makes the book more successful on the thematic level.  The terror of the rats is the terror of our own inhumanity to each other en masse.  

          But I think this book is first and foremost entertainment and at that it succeeds very well.  Whereas James Herbert wasn’t really on my radar before, popular though he is, I’m now actually looking forward to reading more from him.  I don’t think this will be a one-off.  (Recommendations are welcome, but I’ll probably go for The Fog next.) 

 

It’s good to be getting a sense of the emerging popular horror writing scene of the 70s.  Born in ’73 myself, I feel some kind of connection to this era in a lot of ways, not least to what was happening in one of my favourite and formative genres.  Up next in that vein:  the 1976 debut novel by Ramsey Campbell, outrageously titled The Doll Who Ate His Mother.  

1970s Stephen King

I only really started reading King’s fiction in earnest about three or four years ago (I had read 1987’s The Eyes of the Dragon as a fantasy-reading teenager and a few short stories in my 20s).  After sampling a few novels, novellas, and short stories from his early, mid, and ‘late’ career (the dude churns out so many books that his ‘late’ phase is ever becoming his ‘mid’), I decided I wanted to try to read his output chronologically.  I’m not super strict about it, but it’s fun and somewhat enlightening.  I’ve now finished his 1970s publications (not every one of the Bachmans, but all the Kings).  

King is a fascinating phenomenon to writers and publishers who don’t quite know what to make of his practically unparalleled success as a bestselling author.  Is it a fluke?  Sheer luck?  Some sociological phenomenon?  I suspect it’s real talent mixed with a certain uniqueness and, yeah, probably some sociologically driven moment-in-history ‘luck’ too.  And also due to the fact that the guy is maybe the hardest working writer ever – or the most prolific hard working writer anyway.  And, still further, that he felt personally challenged and driven, despite his success, always desiring to be better as an artist, and actually getting better through endless practice and growth.  

Anyway, at the very least I think I’ve discovered that King did come out of the gate really, really strong in the 1970s, his debut decade.  Most of those novels became almost instantly iconic and have probably only become more so – not just due to cinematic adaptations of varying success and quality, but due to King’s own original narrative and imagination behind whatever form of cultural production the stories take (not at all unlike Mary Shelley’s first novel and the endless mutations of Frankenstein monsters it yielded – her genius is ultimately behind them all).  Here’s my brief report on each one.  (I don’t think there’s anything massively spoiler-ish in what follows, but this discussion is mostly for those who have also read the books already.)

Carrie (1974)

In a weird, twisted way this somewhat threadbare little first novel seems like an ‘All-American’ classic.  Or the kind of twisted classic America really needs in its canon.  It’s the Prom Gone Wrong teen novel full of sincerely believed-in telekinetic powers, graphic language, and claustrophobic social and sexual mania. It luridly describes a horrifically repressive, isolationist, and mentally ill version of religious fundamentalism brutally crashing into a cynical secular high-school hedonism and hate – the resultant copiously bloody mess of fire and broken steel is very much the car wreck you can’t tear your eyes away from.  In a world now tragically and terrifyingly overfull of school shootings and bullying (and it’s sadly easy to play that scenario out to the international level), this somewhat pulpy (but always promising more than that, as King ever does in his fiction) little book is one of the central narratives for our times.  In terms of the writing, it’s definitely King still finding his feet, but it’s pretty smartly done for all that and an uncharacteristically short number anyway.

‘Salem’s Lot (1975)

I wish I could have read all of these novels as they came out in the 70s.  I think the impact must have been like a fetid roar and a raking of claws to the face.  I suspect it was all so fresh and ferocious back when it first appeared, especially to the general audience it so immediately reached.  I wish I could’ve read King’s vampire novel when it came out more than any of these other early works.  It must have been exquisitely thrilling to encounter vampires in a contemporary, small town setting for (one of) the first time(s).  King really hits his stride here in terms of his trademark gregarious tone, his plentiful ‘porch-swing’ sort of storytelling.  The autumnal New England setting is gorgeous in its Bradbury-esque bitter-sweetness.  The prose is occasionally marred by a slightly lazy Lovecraftian floridity when describing Gothic elements of the story, moments which made me cringe and laugh simultaneously.  But overall I think King has more or less matured as a writer at this point.  The characterisation takes solid hold and the monsters are lean and mean and nasty, either killing off or taking over some already nasty characters as well as more tragically offing or enslaving characters you root for.  But I have to admit that reading the novel in the midst of our oversaturated day and age of Mod Vamps, King’s stab at the genre didn’t feel especially vivacious.  It was, of course, refreshing that the vampires were simply inhuman blood-drinking overlords from some darkness in the Old World come to roost in the New World – instead of (poorly written) tormented teens or detectives or whatever. And King’s vampire book can still be very profitably mined for themes in my pet area of ‘theology of monsters’ since a priest’s earnest soul-searching about ‘traditional’ vs. ‘progressive’ Christian faith are a central conceit and concern of the novel.  It’s quite powerful in that regard actually.  At any rate, it’s good classical monster fodder if not as remarkable and original as the rest from this era.

The Shining (1977)

Uh oh.  Now it really hits.  By his second novel, King had more or less matured into a young prose craftsman.  In his third novel he intentionally ups the ante for himself.  He wrote in a 2001 introduction to The Shining that it was a crossing-the-line sort of novel for him and he felt that was the case as he wrote it.  He decided to go deeper and darker with his central character, creating a hybrid protagonist-antagonist.  I think I’d say this is one of King’s best books that I’ve read so far.  It is one of his most internal.  If Kubrick’s visually brilliant film version is an exercise in atmospheric and rather inexplicable horror, King’s novel is nearly the opposite.  It’s one of the most inwardly labyrinthine tales I’ve read.  The characters are trapped inside the endless interlocking and haunted rooms of the infamous hotel and we are trapped inside the endless interlocking and haunted rooms of the characters themselves.  It feels almost like the entire novel is a series of counterpoised internal monologues.  It also features King’s ability to nest story within story, reaching back and back into characters’ lives to round them out and make you care about the horrific tragedy they endure in the chilling preternatural circumstances at hand.  Of course, it’s not really just the craftsman’s ‘rounding out’ to make his characters effective – you feel like King wants to know why they are the way they are as much as you do and he’s just digging up the dirt on them and publishing his finds.  Indeed, King tends to have a very ‘juicy’ or ‘gossipy’ tone that makes you turn the pages to know why So-and-So has become so warped.  He even ends up getting you just as invested in the antecedent warping of the mothers and fathers or whoever that have warped the character all this backstory began with.  It’s a feat to make fellow writers feel very, very jealous.  (Philip Roth’s The Human Stain is the main other example I’ve run into of this endlessly stacked and breathlessly related backstory characterisation.)  I’m often surprised we don’t all just wish King ill in our jealousy and insecurity in the face of his obvious God-given talent.  He’s nothing if he’s not a hard worker.  He has clearly sweated, bled, and cried to achieve what he has achieved.  But he started with the Gift, there’s no doubt.  And some of us can’t help being a rather sick shade of green with envy.  But he wins you over.  Ultimately, you just go:  ‘You lucky dog.  Good for you.  And thanks.’  (It helps a lot that he’s so disarmingly humble, honest, and charming when he comes out from behind the authorial curtain and talks frankly to his Constant Readers in introductions and notes.)  There are enough differences with Kubrick’s film to keep you going even though you essentially know the novel’s story already if you’ve seen that film.  It’s good.

Night Shift (1978)

Ah, now this is just a delightful collection of short stories.  I admit it has a bit of personal history with me that adds to its glow.  I was very ill with the flu and trying to meet an essay deadline and take care of five children (also ill) while my wife was out of town when I read most of the stories in here.  They enthralled and appalled me deliciously and soothed my overwrought brain through a tough time.  They’re all early stories, most of them first published in ‘gentleman’s magazines’ (what the hell is so gentlemanly about viewing pornographic photos of women will always be a mystery to me).  The earliness of the material shows.  This is not always King at his best in terms of skill, but it is often King at his best in terms of sheer imagination and verve.  And sometimes in terms of skill too, to be honest.  A few of these stories are some of the most gripping suspense stories I’ve ever read – even when they were about themes or scenarios I wouldn’t normally be the least interested in.  Most of the stories stick pretty firmly to more or less familiar horror genre territory.  But there’s an originality and flare here!  I nearly tossed my cookies once or twice at just a few descriptive words of gore.  I’m still haunted by one or two of the monstrous images.  I even cried at the end of one of them it was so tragic and poignant!  This is pulp fiction in the best sense:  sensational and thrilling and chilling and pleasantly garish.  There are also a few in here that push beyond that.  ‘Night Surf’ and ‘I Am the Doorway’ are two of my very favourite atmospheric horror pieces.  The former gives a tantalising slice of dystopian post-apocalypse (it’s apparently a first-run at the material that will make up The Stand) and the latter is, for my money, one of the best contemporary translations of Lovecraftian ‘cosmic horror’ I’ve come across – simple and impossible and inexplicable and cree-eepy.  The collection contains one of King’s New England small-town elderly ‘voice’ pieces too (it’s one of the things King does best and I think it might still largely be a secret to the majority of his readership and the critics).  The yarn is called ‘Gray Matter’ and it too is an exemplary contemporary take on Lovecraft, but this time his more terrestrial horror.  Many of the stories have King’s infectious emphasis on the potential malice of inanimate objects, which could be analysed fruitfully by those interested in ‘object-oriented ontology’ and the like.  The story ‘Trucks’ (upon which was based the hilarious and awesomely bad Maximum Overdrive movie) was a great little piece in this vein.  Many like it in the collection are fanciful exercises in grim imaginative play and some are delightfully absurd, such as ‘Battleground’.   ‘The Lawnmower Man’ (utterly unrelated to its later film ‘version’) and ‘The Children of the Corn’ are other standouts of the weird.  Lots of good stuff in here.  A great addition to the 70s output.

The Stand (1978)

I actually lucked upon a first-edition paperback of this book, so I’ve only read the 70s cut version and not the later 90s expanded version.  But even this earlier shorter version is the longest thing King wrote in the 70s, coming in at around a thousand pages.  It’s a beast.  Once again King tops his previous game.  Now he shows he can do thrilling, page-turning characterisation for a whole sprawling cast of characters, not just a few.  This is high-octane King in the form of plague-decimated and supernaturally haunted post-apocalypse.  The scope is nationwide and the tone is brutal, warm, chilling, and visionary by pretty quick turns.  I don’t think I really took much of a breath until about halfway through.  This is one of a number of King’s tales that turns the USA’s highways and geography into an epic painstakingly journeyed quest-scape of darkness and light.  King has mentioned a number of times his desire to emulate Tolkien in various ways, but specifically in a North American instead of British setting.  Though King and Tolkien couldn’t be more different in so many respects, King does manage to capture that feel of a very long and costly journey on foot through terrible dangers and against towering odds that is central to much of The Lord of the Rings.  He succeeds in reminding me how incredibly large and diverse and scary and beautiful the sheer landscape and roadways of modern North America are, an ample testing ground for the souls that travel through it.  I think the middle of the book lags a bit, but it picks up again and I wouldn’t have wanted to miss anything.  I do think most of the real power and magic are in the first half.  I’m actually looking forward to reading the later revised and expanded version someday.  It’s definitely a long, strange and dark adventure I want to revisit.  On a different note:  I have to say, it seems to me like it’s some kind of well-guarded secret that this is a flat-out Christian novel.   No, no, not ‘Christian bookstore’ fiction or the like.  It’s got all the copious profanity and graphic content so characteristic of King, which alone would disqualify it (thank God) from getting anywhere near the sanitised industry of ‘Christian fiction’.  (Whether King goes overboard with graphic content is whole other issue.)  Think more along the lines of Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy.  Regardless, The Stand is decidedly not merely a generic Good-vs-Evil or Triumph-of-the-Human-Spirit saga.  Crucial to its whole plot and theme is the ‘intervention’ of the Christian God himself – yeah, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that deity.  I’ve probably never read so much actual prayer in a modern novel (indeed, this spiritual activity recurs throughout King’s works, even those that are otherwise in no way blatant about matters of faith).  God-given visions and faithful obedience to God’s call are key characteristics of the story.  The Christian characters are downright attractive too, real people with real flaws and struggles who nevertheless shine in their integrity and leadership – as do characters who are not explicitly ‘of the faith’; it’s not that King portrays the Christian characters better than the rest, but simply as good as some of the other admirable players in the drama, something many (most?) modern writers seem unwilling to do, if they acknowledge the existence of people of faith at all.  King wisely weaves in doubt and agnosticism and so on also.  He’s not beating anyone over the head.  You can take the side of rationalist reductionism or conscientious epistemic doubt if you want.  But real supernatural faith is right there on the table too.  And this is the early King we’re talking about here.  Not some later ‘converted’ King.  And he’s only going to go on developing and circling back to this blatant Christian spirituality in the face of horror again and again in various later novels and stories (1996’s Desperation is a shining instance).  And The Stand itself remains one of King’s single most celebrated novels.  Why does no one really talk about the central Christian aspect of it?  At any rate, it’s a book for everyone, regardless of worldview, a classic of contemporary urban fantasy writing and the kind of rich and engrossing tale you can really live with for a while.

The Dead Zone (1979)

This seems like it’s probably the least known of the 70s books, but to me it’s probably the very best – indeed, one of the very best of King’s whole canon out of what I’ve read so far (and I think I heard somewhere that King himself felt that way about it).  Except for ‘Salem’s Lot, the rest of the novels from this era I would only call ‘horror’ fiction in a hybrid sense:  they are woven as much of ‘realistic’ thriller or suspense fiction and paranormal fantasy and adventure fiction and just plain ‘homespun’ social drama as they are of actual horror tropes.   There’s certainly enough of a centring emphasis on supernatural fear and grotesque violence to warrant his label as a horror writer, but anyone who’s read more than a few books by him will surely have discovered that there’s just so much more to him than that label implies.  If I’d never heard of King before and the first thing I read by him was The Dead Zone, I seriously doubt I would have labelled it a horror novel.  It is very dark, very magical and mysterious, at times incredibly menacing or nerve-racking, and there’s a serial killer subplot in there that is indeed out and out horrifying.  These are all elements that could be found in, for example, a Neil Gaiman novel and we don’t call Gaiman a horror writer.  We call his work ‘dark fantasy’ maybe and there’s a significant distinction there.  I think a lot of what King writes could be better described under this rubric than bald ‘horror’.  Anyway, The Dead Zone is primarily a highly poignant character-driven tale of deep loss and coping with that loss.  It describes a man finding purpose in choosing to do good with what gifts tragedy has left in his hands whether he wanted those costly gifts or not.  It is social and political too, as all of King is, but whereas The Stand was his most blatant book in this era on spirituality, The Dead Zone is his most blatant on politics.  Indeed, the political baddie in this book is as terrifying as any supernatural baddie in King’s others.  And the novel makes contemporary socially-torn America seem every bit as dangerous and scary as post-apocalyptic America.  Yet this is such a personal novel too.  It’s rather beautiful, the paranormal powers and the people both.  (It’s worth noting that King gives a much more gentle and sympathetic portrait of a religious fundamentalist mother here, almost in counterpoise to the one in Carrie that opened this decade’s publications – and he also provides an alternative example of a more admirable faith in the father in this novel.)  He really crowned his first decade with this book I think.  It’s slightly less furious than the rest but no less urgent and searching.  It’s like he’s taking a deep and calming breath before plunging on into the 80s (which turned out to be a troubled drug- and alcohol-fuelled, if still wildly successful, decade for him). Good show, Mr. King, good show.

Addendum:  The Long Walk (1979)

This is the only of the 70s Bachman books that I’ve read so far.  By the end of it I was really won over.  This is quality disturbing dystopian fiction, ultimately very effective in its mesmerising and inexorable brutality.  I do quite a few miles of walking in getting to where I need to every day.  Doing so during the days in which I was reading this book invested those long-ish walks with a heightened sense of perception and urgency (and maybe, to be honest, a hint of terror!).  If the […vague SPOILER…] ‘dark figure’ at the end of the book is akin to the ‘ragged figure’ that Flannery O’Connor spoke of in the introduction to her novel Wise Blood, then King’s The Long Walk may be the darkest and most brutal version of the (otherwise rather saccharine) ‘Footprints’ poem ever created.  Indeed, the whole of King’s output strikes me, theologically, as something of a long and variegated Dark Theodicy.  Don’t get me wrong, King is no C. S. Lewis.  He’s not a Christian apologist.  His method is very different (though complementary I would maintain).  Theodicy is odyssey for King.  He throws every amount and kind of monstrous evil and suffering at his journeying characters and then shows faith, hope, and love somehow, in at least some of them, miraculously surviving the onslaught (again echoing Tolkien’s own sort of Dark Theodicy).  King does not at all deny the plausibility of Lovecraftian ‘cosmic horror’ or Nietzschean nihilism, that we are utterly alone in an utterly indifferent universe.  These worldviews are given a full and fair and even rather seductive hearing in all of King’s works, indeed a particularly compelling one in The Long Walk.  And yet, in King’s fiction, ‘these three remain’ (1 Corinthians 13:13).  Just look at the self-sacrificially communal actions of the protagonist Garraty and the friends he has made out of his competitors by the end of the horrific Walk, even in the face of inexorable death and tyranny.  That’s just one in a long line of such examples throughout King’s fiction.  We are all of us on the terrifying and self-revealing Long Walk and it remains to be seen whether at the end of the line we are awaited by the sinister Major and his Prize or some other figure harder to see in all this obscuring inhumanity.  What will we become during the journey?  That’s what King’s fiction seems to ask.  ‘This inhuman place makes human monsters’ is a refrain in The Shining.  But not all the characters were turned into monsters by the hotel’s malevolent influence.  Some made it through, wounded but wiser – and even, miraculously, more humane, more fully human.  This redemptive motif is often left out of King’s public persona (usually crafted by others, not himself).  For example, his words toward the end of his 2001 introduction to The Shining are often quoted and memed:  ‘Monsters are real, and ghosts are real, too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.’  I’ve even passed this one on myself on social media.  It’s a cool little sound bite.  But, inexplicably, what King wrote right after that cool little sound bite, the conclusion to his introduction, is never included:  ‘That our better angels sometimes – often! – win instead, in spite of all odds, is another truth of The Shining.  And thank God it is.’

So as I say, King comes out of the gates very strong in his first decade of writing.  He’s made his mark and in some ways has no need to say anything further.  Yet I am so very glad he did.  I think some of his very best stuff is yet to come in each of the subsequent decades, probably including the one we are currently in.  The quality of the writing in the 70s, as throughout the rest of his career, is mixed – mostly quite good I think, and doing some things better than anyone else.  The good for me far outweighs the ‘bad’ and the bad is often trying to get at something good.  I don’t, like others, fault King for being ‘homespun’ or ‘sentimental’.  I mean, come on, surely part of his genius is being something like Lake Wobegon in Hell, or Mark Twain meets H. P. Lovecraft, or Norman Rockwell meets Hieronymus Bosch.  I only fault him for his at times faltering or out and out unsuccessful execution of that sentimentality or rocking chair storytelling.  But no writer is perfect and King has hooked me for good.  Maybe in another five years I’ll be able to do a report on the 1980s Stephen King.  (In the meantime, I’ll definitely review some individual novels from time to time, including some more recent stuff like Doctor Sleep.)

The Strange Adventures of H. P. Lovecraft (2010), Image Comics

I think I mainly enjoyed this graphic novel because of the way it resonated with me as an aspiring writer of fiction.  That's a bit odd in that I'm not a huge fan of Lovecraft's actual writing.  I'm more into Lovecraft for his philosophical struggle and unique artistic vision - his actual prose inspires me very rarely.  But it is Lovecraft's vexed career as a writer that forms the central motif of this period comic set in the 1920s.  It's a very well-told and gripping tale if relatively simple.  The complexity comes not in the plot but in the meditation on art and life.  It's about 'high' literary aspirations in a world that can only take what you make as pulp fiction, lurid shockers to be read and trashed.  If what you make can be read at all, that is.  The opening portrays the editor of Weird Tales magazine complaining to Lovecraft's fellow writer Clark Ashton Smith that Lovecraft's stories are just too bizarre and not gripping enough.  The scene shows how even the pulps didn't have much time for Lovecraft's truly (not just surfacely) weird tales.  (Various characters throughout, such as policemen, remark that they've never been able to actually finish reading one of Lovecraft's stories.)

Lovecraft was too freakish and monstrous for the literary canon and too meditative and visionary for the pulps.  Add to that a childhood disfigured by parental mental illness and a failed attempt at romance (central plot features of the graphic novel) and you have the quintessential (and slightly clichéd) Unhappy Poet.  Such a man might be prone to make monsters in his art, but in this comic's story the monsters step outside Lovecraft's brain and murderously into his world. It's another fairly hackneyed trope, but fun enough nonetheless and, again, not really the point.

The point is that it's incredibly difficult to grope toward an original artistic vision in a world that needs to sell, sell, sell, and in a world where we're all nursed on lowest-common-denominator aesthetics and ontologies.  Probably about half of the graphic novel's text is comprised of actual quotes from Lovecraft's writings - I recognised a number of them from both his fiction and non-fiction writing. Some seemed obviously from letters or journals.  There's a lot of soul-searching and frustration and bleak determination, but in a way I found sincere and inviting, not goth-angsty.

The illustrations are fine.  They are skilful drawings that get the job done and tell the story well.  It's not really my style, but some of the monsters are interesting interpretations, quite gruesome and repugnant.  They flesh out effectively the sheer madness of what it would be like to see the brain-shattering otherworldliness of such beings disgustingly intersect with our own organic matter and psyche.  There was, however, perhaps not enough emphasis on the cosmos, the dreadful sense of deep space and lightyears so crucial to the ambient of the Lovecraft's monstrosities, his seminal 'cosmic horror'.

One thing I found interesting was that the editor of Weird Tales complained that Lovecraft didn't have busty blondes and the accompanying sexual under- or overtones in his tales, the misogynistic soft-smut that sold so well.  But this graphic novel's illustrator made sure to include a number of panels of fairly graphic sex and nudity (the comic would surely need to be rated R for a number of elements).  I thought most of these sex scenes fairly gratuitous.  Some of them were commenting on men's abuse of women (e.g. prostitution), but as is so often the case in our society, these depictions drag the male imagination through a suspiciously loving and lingering objectification of lust-embellished female bodies in order to 'subvert' that same male gaze. I find this element of the comic highly ironic in light of the complaint that Lovecraft couldn't sell well without such lubricious voyeurism.  There is a deeper and real issue in Lovecraft about phobia of sex and relationships, but that's not really touched on in this comic in favour of a more simple Hollywood tragic romance line.

Speaking of Hollywood, there have apparently been talks with Ron Howard about adapting this comic to film.  I found myself wishing that might happen as I read it, especially as a number of counter-cultural writers have had films made about them in the last decade (e.g. Hunter S. Thomson and Allen Ginsberg).  I just wish a more visionary director than Howard could get hold of it.

Fellow Lovecraft enthusiasts might at least enjoy seeing Lovecraft's own words on writing and life strung together into a tale as I did.  And those interested in a first glimpse of the thinking and worldview behind this tragic mad genius of outré literature might find this graphic novel an accessible intro (but please don't stop here as it is probably misleading in some ways).  The book cemented a growing feeling for me, that in spite of the fact that I don't care for Lovecraft's actual prose, he is becoming something of a writer's writer for me, a rather poignant champion of artistic integrity in a world that doesn't value that often enough.

For an outro, here are a few of the pretty cool cover illustrations from individual issues of the series, found at the back of the book:

Zombie Sharks With Metal Teeth (2013) by Stephen Graham Jones

Look, I'm the type of person who, if you give your book this amazing title and adorn it with this amazing artwork, I'll buy it before I really knew what hit me.  It's a Pavlovian reflex for a dog like me. Plus I'd already read Jones's Zombie Bake-Off (2012) and was very eager for more.

I polished this sucker off pretty quick after receiving it in the post (I don't know if local bookstores even stock this kind of stuff).  It's a compulsively readable collection of short stories and yes, there's a titular one. But no (I think readers deserve to know), there are no zombie sharks with metal teeth, not really - I mean, yes, technically there are, right at the end of that story, but barely and only in a passing conjecture.  This surprised and disappointed me because Zombie Bake-Off had been about exactly that. And when the blurb said it had zombie soccer moms vs. zombie pro-wrestlers, it wasn't lying or exaggerating.  The whole novel's setting was a bake-off and the whole novel's action involved pro-wrestlers, soccer moms, and zombies - battling each other and a small band of the living.  So I don't think I was out of bounds in expecting from the titular story of this collection literal undead sharks that somehow had teeth made of metal.

But I wasn't disappointed with this volume, no no no.  When what it does give you is plenty of stories that do feature zombies, in fresh variations of scenario and depth of survivor characterisation, and a story about a hardboiled detective flying through outer space by means of being psychically implanted into a giant space-faring lobster, and enigmatic alien encounters aplenty, more apocalypses than one has a right to expect from a collection, the most elliptical meta-fictional slasher story you'll ever read, and a story starring Rod Serling, well, you don't complain, you give thanks.

But the reader will inevitably wonder:  what am I reading?  What is this stuff?  Horror?  Well, some of it, yeah.  Sort of.  Science fiction?  Some of those too.  Kind of.  Weird fiction or ‘the New Weird’? Mm, not really, not to me, not from what I've read of China Mieville and Jeff VanderMeer - this is a different kettle of queer fish.  Is it ‘bizarro’ fiction?  I guess maybe that’s the main thing I expected from the title and cover art.  But that label too only partly captures it.  I want to say these stories feel like they're by someone who set out to be a pulp writer influenced by the cosmic horror of Lovecraft (or, probably closer to the mark, the nihilism of Romero's classic Dead Trilogy), but said pulp-ist got liberal arts educated and introspective and transmuted his impulse toward horror through the likes of, what... Wes Anderson?  David Foster Wallace?  I don’t know exactly.  (I don’t have the reference in my experience, but I’m sure someone does.)  There’s an unflinching attention to monstrosity, violence, freakishness, aliens, cosmology-that-dwarfs-the-cosmologist, and so on.  But it’s all delivered through a very sensitive, even tender, heart.  Indeed, even though there is bloodshed and body-horror aplenty in this book, my final impression is that it is gentle, contemplative.  And I think that's just Stephen Graham Jones.  No one genre or genre-mix can really hold him.  He does what he does.

Despite being clearly intellectual, it all comes across fairly working-class too.  The characters tend to be underlings in offices or warehouses or laboratories.  Or they're young or old married couples who remain devoted to each other despite (or because of?) discovering very disturbing darknesses about one another.  Or they're little kids being cruel and kind to one another as kids do.

Part of the gentle contemplativeness is also down to the way tales are told, for they are as much about the telling as the subject matter.  The diction is at first hard to parse until you get the hang of Jones's almost oral cadences and patterns, like how a normal guy from right here and now would talk to you, would unfold a narrative to you in person.  Yet, paradoxically, it's also poetic and writerly, made for the page it seems to me.  It's downright mesmerising when you get into its rhythms.

And (I had never noticed how much this also is how it sounds when someone is telling you a story they know off the cuff) though the narrator usually seems to know what’s coming and codes that story arc into the opening pages, these tales do not feel heavily plotted.  Stephen King says stories are pre-existing fossils that writers discover and unearth and that plotting is a jackhammer that breaks as much as it liberates.  Jones feels almost hyper-aware of this.  He works very delicately, mostly with small hand spade and brush, to exhume the tales he's found.  He leaves a lot of the story still buried. But he has taken depth-readings and he knows what’s down there, if murkily, and I tended to find myself halfway through a story going back over its first few pages with a better understanding of all that was being revealed to me right off.  In other words, Jones writes richly enough that (as with Gene Wolfe) re-reading is almost required, and a pleasure.  You get your money's worth.

Philosophically, the stories evince ruminations rife with material for my own interests in monster theory and horror theory ('Little Monsters' is a two-page piece packed tight with fodder for this and I hope to do a separate post about it).  The story 'How Billy Hanson Destroyed the Planet Earth, and Everyone On It' is my favourite contemporary mutation of Lovecraftian cosmic horror that I've encountered.  It is a mutation though, as is every other bleak demise of humanity or relativising of humanity in the face of infinity that Jones depicts.  There's definitely a warm beating heart underneath the cosmic coldness in Jones's take.  What I can't tell is whether he's simply saying let's hold onto our scrap of humanity even in the face of the nothingness that will eventually devour us all, or whether he might just might be saying that such 'scrap of humanity' might just might actually be a grubby little hint or clue that nothingness is not necessarily the final word about either us or the cosmos.  Even Cthulhu and his elder god ilk look very different in Jones's vision:  alien intelligences vastly above us may view us only as food, sure, but that doesn't mean they might not be 'humane' souls who cause us no more suffering than is necessary.  The story 'Catch and Release' is the best variation on an old s.f. twist-ending that I've come across and illustrates this almost anti-Lovecraftian theme poignantly.

Jones says in an interview (the interview is a masterclass in creative writing, by the way) that one of his favourite short stories is about a boy who can predict the future who has a TV show:

But then one day he looks ahead and sees this comet just hurtling to Earth, to wipe us all out, no chance of survival, no Bruce Willis, so, on his program that morning, he looks right into the camera and he says that this is going to be the best day ever. That people are going to hug each other, nobody's going to be unhappy, all of it. It's the best gift he could possibly have given the world, and it's a lie. This is at the bottom of everything I write.

What I wonder is whether Jones thinks that this 'lie' gives the lie to ultimate meaninglessness, whether he thinks that maybe such a 'lie' really serves a greater truth about us and the world.  I don't know. (His delightful story notes at the end of the book are, though disarmingly vulnerable, as elliptical as the stories themselves and only deepen the mystery and poignancy.)

I do know I can't wait to read more by him (I've got his first novel The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong coming in the post).