The View from the Cheap Seats

by Neil Gaiman

  (Poor Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan and of King Kull, is one of the other Weird Tales authors who’s still remembered, when Seabury Quinn and many of the rest of them have blown away into the footnotes. Howard killed himself at the age of thirty, in 1936, when he heard of his mother’s impending death. Then there’s Robert Bloch, who, at the age of eighteen, published his first professional short story in Weird Tales, and went on to a long and distinguished career.)

  Some of the influence of Lovecraft was immediate. His correspondents and fellow writers, including Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Manly Wade Wellman, and others, played with the mythos he created: a world in which we exist in a tiny fragment of space-time, in which space, inner and outer, is vast, and inhabited by things that mean us harm, and by other things to which we matter less than cosmic dust. Much of Lovecraft’s influence on fiction, however, would not really be felt for fifty years after his death.

  His fiction was not collected while he lived. August Derleth, Wisconsin author, cofounded with Donald Wandrei the small-press publisher Arkham House, in order to publish Lovecraft’s fiction: and Derleth first collected Lovecraft’s prose in The Outsider and Others, two years after Lovecraft’s death. Since then Lovecraft’s stories have been collected and re-collected internationally, in many anthologies, in many permutations.

  This anthology is about dreams.

  DREAMS ARE STRANGE things, dangerous and odd.

  Last night I dreamed I was on the run from the government, somewhere in middle Europe—the last holdout of a decayed communist regime. I was kidnapped by the secret police, thrown in the back of a van. I knew that the secret police were vampires, and that they were scared of cats (for all vampires were scared of cats, in my dream). And I remember escaping from the van at a traffic light, running from them through the city, trying to call several unresponsive city cats to me: gray and sleek and skittish, they were, unaware that they could save my life . . .

  It is possible to go mad, looking for symbolism in dreams, looking for one-to-one correspondences with life. But the cats are Lovecraft’s. And the vampiric secret police, in their own way, are his too.

  LOVECRAFT GOT BETTER as he went on.

  That’s a polite way of putting it.

  He was pretty dreadful when he started out: he seemed to have no ear for the music of words, no real sense of what he was trying to do with stories. There’s no feeling in the earliest material of someone putting their life, or even the inside of their head, down on paper; instead, we watch Lovecraft in the beginning, copying, pastiching awkwardly—here’s a dash of Poe, there’s a little Robert W. Chambers—and over and above all the other voices of Lovecraft’s early days, the awkward Anglophilic imitation of the voice of Lord Dunsany, the Irish lord and fantasist, whom Lovecraft admired more, perhaps, than was good for his fiction.

  Dunsany was one of the great originals. His prose voice resonated like an oriental retelling of the King James Bible. He told stories of strange little gods of faraway lands, of visits to dream-lands, of people with odd, but perfectly apt names: always with a slight amused detachment. Many of the stories you’ll find in this anthology, like “Hypnos,” or “The Quest of Iranon,” are vaguely Dunsanyish in tone.

  Somewhere in there, however, as time passed, Lovecraft’s own voice began to emerge. The writing became assured. The landscape slowly becomes the inside of Lovecraft’s head.

  IT WAS SEPTEMBER 1983, at the New Imperial Hotel in Birmingham, in the English Midlands: I had come to Birmingham for the British Fantasy Convention, to interview authors Gene Wolfe and Robert Silverberg for English magazines.

  It was my first convention of any kind. I went to as many panels as I could, although I remember only one panel. The panelists were, if memory serves, authors Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell, and the late Karl Edward Wagner, and Irish illustrator Dave Carson.

  They talked about the influence of Lovecraft on each of them: Campbell’s hallucinatory tales of urban menace, Lumley’s muscular horror, Wagner’s dark sword and sorcery and modern, slick tales: they talked about the psychology of Lovecraft, the nightmarish visions, how each of them had found something in Lovecraft to which he responded, something that had inspired him: three very different authors, with three very different approaches.

  A thin, elderly gentleman in the audience stood up and asked the panel whether they had given much thought to his own theory: that the Great Old Ones, the many-consonanted Lovecraftian beasties, had simply used poor Howard Phillips Lovecraft to talk to the world, to foster belief in themselves, prior to their ultimate return.

  I don’t remember what the panel’s response was to that. I don’t recall them agreeing with it, though.

  Then they were asked why they liked Lovecraft. They talked of the huge vistas of his imagination, of the way his fiction was a metaphor for everything we didn’t know and feared, from sex to foreigners. They talked about all that deep stuff.

  Then Dave Carson, the artist, was handed the mike. “F—— all that,” he said happily, having drunk a great deal of alcohol, dismissing all the erudite psychological theories about Lovecraft and cutting to the chase: “I love H. P. Lovecraft because I just like drawing monsters.”

  Which got a laugh from the audience, and a bigger laugh when Dave’s head gently touched down on the table a few seconds later, and then Karl Edward Wagner took the microphone from Dave’s fingers, and asked for the next question. (And, now, a decade later, Dave Carson’s still with us, last heard of fishing off the pier at Eastbourne, probably fishing up strange Lovecraftian beasties he draws so well from the depths of the English Channel, but the bottle carried away poor Karl.)

  It’s true, though. Lovecraft’s influenced people as diverse as Stephen King and Colin Wilson, Umberto Eco and John Carpenter. He’s all over the cultural landscape: references to Lovecraft, and Lovecraftian ideas, abound in film, television, comics, role-playing games, computer games, virtual reality . . .

  Lovecraft is a resonating wave. He’s rock and roll.

  I’m introducing a collection here that takes us through the dream-fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, weaving it into a huge tapestry that drives from Fantasy to Horror and back again. Here’s the tale of “Pickman’s Model”—pure horror, and vintage Lovecraft—and then there’s Richard Upton Pickman, creeping through “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” . . . The chronological arrangement of stories forms odd patterns. Dreams and nightmares, too. Vampires and cats.

  THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT Lovecraft’s fiction, about his worlds, that is oddly alluring for a writer of fantasy or horror. I’ve written three Lovecraftian stories: one obliquely, in Sandman—a quiet, dreamlike story (it’s the first story in the Worlds’ End collection. You can tell it’s Lovecraftian, because I use the word cyclopian in it); one a hard-boiled “Maltese Falcon” variant with a werewolf as hero (in Steve Jones’s fine anthology Shadows over Innsmouth), and a third, when I was much younger, that was an awkward attempt at humor, an extract from Cthulhu’s autobiography. If I go back to Lovecraft again (and I’m sure I shall, before I die) it will probably be for something else entirely.

  So what is it about Lovecraft that keeps me coming back? That keeps any of us coming back? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that we like the way he gives us monsters to draw with our minds.

  If this is your first excursion into H. P. Lovecraft’s world, you may find the way a little bumpy at first. But keep going.

  You’ll soon find yourself driving down a road that will take you through the twin cities, and off into the darkness beyond.

  If literature’s the world.

  And it is.

  * * *

  This was my introduction to The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death, 1995.

  * * *

  On The 13 Clocks by James Thurber

  Something very much like nothing anyone had ever seen before came trotting down the stairs and crossed the room.

  “What is that?” the Duke asked, palely.

&
nbsp; “I don’t know what it is,” said Hark, “but it’s the only one there ever was.”

  This book, the one you are holding, The 13 Clocks by James Thurber, is probably the best book in the world.

  And if it’s not the best book, then it’s still very much like nothing anyone has ever seen before, and, to the best of my knowledge, no one’s ever really seen anything like it since.

  I had a friend call me one evening in tears. She was fighting with her boyfriend and her family, her dog was sick and her life was a shambles. Furthermore anything I said—everything I said—only served to make matters worse. So I picked up a copy of The 13 Clocks and began to read it aloud. And soon enough my friend was laughing, baffled, and delighted, her problems forgotten. I had, finally, said the right thing.

  It’s that sort of book. It’s unique. It makes people happier, like ice cream.

  James Thurber, who wrote it, was a famed humorist (most of his stories and articles were for adults) and a cartoonist with a unique style of drawing (lumpy men and women who looked like they were made out of cloth, all puzzled and henpecked and aggrieved). He did not illustrate this book because his eyesight had got too bad. He got his friend Marc Simont to illustrate it instead. In England, it was illustrated by cartoonist Ronald Searle, and that was the version I read when I was about eight. I was fairly certain it was the best book I had ever read. It was funny in strange ways. It was filled with words. And while all books are filled with words, this one was different. It was filled with magical, wonderful, tasty words. It slipped into poetry and out of it again, in a way that made you want to read it aloud, just to see how it sounded. I read it to my little sister. When I was old enough, I read it to my children.

  The 13 Clocks isn’t really a fairy tale, just as it isn’t really a ghost story. But it feels like a fairy tale, and it takes place in a fairy-tale world. It is short—not too short, just perfectly short. Short enough. When I was a young writer, I liked to imagine that I was paying someone for every word I wrote, rather than being paid for it; it was a fine way to discipline myself only to use those words I needed. I watch Thurber wrap his story tightly in words, while at the same time juggling fabulous words that glitter and gleam, tossing them out like a happy madman, all the time explaining and revealing and baffling with words. It is a miracle. I think you could learn everything you need to know about telling stories from this book.

  Listen: it has a prince in it, and a princess. It has the evilest duke ever written. It has Hush and Whisper (and Listen). Happily, it has Hagga, who weeps jewels. Terrifyingly, it has a Todal. And best and most marvelously and improbably of all, it has a Golux, with an indescribable hat, who warns our hero,

  “Half the places I have been to, never were. I make things up. Half the things I say are there cannot be found. When I was young I told a tale of buried gold, and men from leagues around dug in the woods. I dug myself.”

  “But why?”

  “I thought the tale of treasure might be true.”

  “You said you made it up.”

  “I know I did, but then I didn’t know I had. I forget things, too.”

  Every tale needs a Golux. Luckily for all of us, this book has one.

  There are stories out there where it helps to have an introduction, where you need someone to explain things for you before you begin. An introduction to set the scene, where the introducer shines light into dark places and lets the story shine more brightly, just as a precious stone polished and placed in a fine setting looks better than it might in a dusty corner or glued to a duke’s grimy glove.

  The 13 Clocks is not one of those stories. It doesn’t need an introduction. It doesn’t need me. It is like one of Hagga’s jewels of laughter, and likely to dissolve if it is examined too long or too closely.

  It’s not a fairy tale. It’s not a poem, it’s not a parable or a fable or a novel or a joke. Truly, I don’t know what The 13 Clocks is, but whatever it is, as someone else said of something else at the top of this introduction, it’s the only one there ever was.

  * * *

  This introduction was originally written for the 2008 New York Review of Books edition of James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks.

  * * *

  Votan and Other Novels by John James

  The hardest part of being a writer, particularly being someone who writes fiction for a living, is that it makes it harder to reread a book you loved. The more you know about the mechanics of fiction, the craft of writing, the way a story is put together, the way words work in sequence to create effects, the harder it is to go back to books that changed you when you were younger. You can see the joins, the rough edges, the clumsy sentences, the paper-thin people. The more you know, the harder it is to appreciate the things that once gave you joy.

  But sometimes it’s nothing like that at all. Sometimes you return to a book and find that it’s better than you remembered, better than you had hoped: all the things that you had loved were still there, but you find that it’s even more packed with things that you appreciate. It’s deeper, cleaner, wiser. The book got better because you know more, have experienced more, encountered more. And when you meet one of those books, it’s a cause, as they used to say on the back of the book jackets, for celebration.

  So. Let’s talk about Votan.

  I’m really late in getting this introduction in, mostly because I’ve been trying to work out how to introduce Votan without giving it all away. One does not want to explain the jokes, nor does one feel the need to assign homework before one gives someone a book to read. But it will not hurt if you are familiar with your Norse myths. They will make Votan a deeper book, a game of mirrors and reflections and twice-told tales. It might be a good thing to read The Mabinogion, and the Irish Táin. They will make you smile wider and shake your head in wonder when you read Not for All the Gold in Ireland.

  So. First of all, you should feel free to skip this introduction and go and read the book. You are holding a beautiful book here, written by a remarkable writer: it contains three novels. Two novels about a Greek trader called Photinus, who is at least the equal of, and, dare I say it, a finer rogue and tale-spinner than George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman; and a darker retelling, or re-creation, of a Welsh epic poem.

  I read them as a young man—they were republished as fantasy novels in the early eighties, having been published in the sixties as historical novels. They are not fantasy novels, nor are they strictly historical novels: instead they are novels, set in historical periods, which people who read fantasy might also appreciate. The Photinus novels (there are only two, with a third novel implied but, alas, never written) are based on mythic and magical stories. (Men Went to Cattraeth is bleaker, and based on an old Welsh poem, the Y Gododdin.)

  Photinus’s mind and his point of view, his voice if you will, is not ours. It is this voice that lingers longest for me. His attitudes and his world are those of the past. Occasionally he commits atrocities. He does not have a twenty-first-century head. Many characters in historical novels are us, with our point of view, wearing fancy dress. Votan’s dress is rarely fancy. The conceit that all protagonists in historical novels should share our values, our prejudices and our desires is a fine one (I’ve used it myself), and it is much more difficult and much more of an adventure to create characters who are not us, do not believe what we believe, but see things in a way that is alien to us and to our time.

  My own novel American Gods has a sequence where the hero, Shadow, spends nine nights on the tree, like Odin, a sacrifice to himself: I did not dare to reread Votan in the years running up to writing American Gods, then once my book was written, it was the first thing I read for pleasure, like a chocolate I had put away as a boy until the perfect time. I was nervous, and should not have been. Instead I discovered a whole world inside a book I already knew. (And yes, I am sure that Shadow’s tree-hanging owed a huge debt to Votan’s.)

  So. Here are the things I will tell you, that might make reading this book more pleasant for you
.

  Votan is the story of a man called Photinus—a young man, a Greek trader, a magician, heartless and in it for profit—who seeks amber, and finds wealth and companionship and also finds himself Odin Allfather, the Norse god. The sagas and the tales and the poems that tell us about the Aesir, about Odin and Thor (Donar is Donner is Thunder), all reconfigure here, as if seen through a dark mirror: bleak tales they are, and dark.

  It is not that James demythologizes the stories, strips off all the beauty and the magic. It is more that he gives us reflection. At their best, these books are like holding a conversation with somebody from two thousand years ago. Occasionally, James can be too knowing or too wry (it is worth observing how many of Photinus’s observations are common sense and utterly wrong—where amber comes from, for example, or the commercial possibilities of coal) but these moments are swept away into the next glorious story.

  And the more you know, the more there is to find. I do not want to give away anything that James hid so well in his text, but here, I shall give you a couple of early ones for free: Loki is of the Aser, but not of them, trading on their behalf from his base in Outgard, not Asgard. In one of the most famous Norse legends, we visit, with Thor, Utgard, where the giants live, and meet the crafty trickster who is also King of the Giants, Utgardloki. (Loki is half giant, half Aesir.) In the Norse sagas, Fenrir (from old Norse, meaning “fen dweller”) is a monstrous wolf, the offspring of Loki, who bites off the hand of Tyr: here, our own Tyr tells the story of his own encounter with Fenris.

  The stories of the Norse gods are dark stories, and they do not end well: there is always Ragnarok waiting, the end of all things, the destruction of Asgard and the Aesir and all they hold dear. While Photinus/Votan becomes a god, he is doing it as a servant of another god, in this case an aspect of Apollo, who desires chaos, and who is laying, in his own way, the steps that will bring about the end of the world, in fire. We meet the gods in this book, in a way that reminds me of Gene Wolfe’s Latro tales.