Summary: Ramsey Campbell started out as a Lovecraft pasticher, something he responds to in his Dark Companions introduction. I respond to a line of it, on adopting Lovecraft's fears in lieu of facing your own, and why that is not accurate in my case.
A quick response to Ramsey Campbell, on why Lovecraft's fears *are* partially my fears, too...
BLOT: (07 Oct 2011 - 10:01:22 AM)
A quick response to Ramsey Campbell, on why Lovecraft's fears *are* partially my fears, too...
In his introduction to
Literary imitation is rather like ventriloquism—trying to say things in someone else's voice—and just about as limited a skill. My next book was a reaction against this, and sometimes so personal as to be wilfully incomprehensible. By now I'd left school and was working in the tax office, where I wrote stories at my desk in the lunch hour, surrounded by bureaucratic activity and ringing phones. No wonder my surroundings began to appear in my stories, and so did my growing obsession with movies and the dying cinemas where I caught up with films of the previous thirty years. Since my first book was an imitation of Lovecraft's horrors, it had been a way of sidestepping my own fears—I sometimes think that is why so many amateur writers imitate Lovecraft today—but now I was beginning to write about them, perhaps because I was gaining enough confidence as a writer to be more honest about myself.
I am not sure if he means Lovecraft's horrors in the sense of "another man's fears" or if he means it in the sense of "the universal dread", but as far as the latter goes, I'm in camp Lovecraft[ian potrayals of universal dread]. It is not outsider-ness that freaks me out, but just the concept of how flimsy our comfort zone really is when looked at in any universal ratio. Just think of all the dead, quiet matter in the universe, out beyond the sight of eyes, unseen because colors as we know them and what we call vision only exists in tiny pockets inside tiny bubbles, bouncing century old x-rays off of pools of chemicals that would kill a human foolish enough to touch them with bare skin. A great inhospitable infinity more vibrant on wavelengths that we cannot sense than on any wavelength we can readily use.
We are the children of a goldilocks era on a goldilocks planet and out there are nebulae so vast that our best attempts at long term space travel would still only prick a fraction of their width if we dedicated generations of human endeavor to conquering them.
In my horror stories, what minor horror stories I have, that is the concept I most often toy with: mankind lost inside of infinity, unable to conceive of what is going on around him. I just also try to work in elements from my day to day life: backroads, making ends meet, run down cars, small academia. Still, I get kind of freaked out thinking about some rogue planet, lost from its now burned out mother-star, floating in a cold and blackness so deep that no current technology would ever be able to effectively overcome it. And on that planet...maybe some small artifact, a footprint or toy or bit of scrap metal that once represented the pinnacle of some technology, is all that remains from another cosmic accident that also grew up in a billion year moment on a hospitable planet. Now gone.
OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: October 2011
dickens of a blog
Written by Doug Bolden
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