Homesick
I was going through the usual
last-minute Christmas shopping frenzy last week at a local chain
bookstore which was nestled in Roseville, one of the first ring
suburbs of Minneapolis. Whenever I am in these bookstores, I tend to
make a direct path to the science fiction and fiction sections, even
if I ultimately will buy something else. Usually, my goal is to make
a fairly clinical survey of what is being published and what is being
sold. I prefer to do my actual shopping in any one of the fine local
shops around the Twin Cities. I hold plenty of well-earned prejudices
about chain bookstores.
Which is why I was shocked to see a
lone copy of The
Starry Wisdom sitting
askew on the anthology shelf. It looked out of place, rare, perhaps
mysterious. With a constellation of occult and horror luminaries
spread across the cover, I had to give it a look. Within a few
moments of picking it up, I was at a table with the first pages
waiting for me. I had forgotten about the shopping I was supposed to
be doing.
I am not all that interested in writing
a review of this anthology here and now. The book did pull me in, and
I finished over half of the book before I remembered what I was there
for. So, the stories and the presentation are something to be
admired. What was most exciting for me was the sense of discovery,
no, of encounter, which I can't say I've had with many books lately.
Moving through these pages was a journey, a journey which was
unhindered by my own genre assumptions.
While reading these stories I realized
that I missed having this kind of communion with a book.
Reading provides all sorts of rewards, but this uncanny and strange
aspect is seldom present. As a superstitious person, I tend to think
this is a result of the authors themselves believing what they are
writing, perhaps not in the banal daylight, but certainly while they
labored under the writing and editing of the fictions. Perhaps it was
a result, in this particular case, of editor D.M. Mitchell's
willingness and desire to seek the truth that propelled H.P.
Lovecraft's elaborate and obsessive stories.
I am not defending the notion that H.P.
Lovecraft fell victim to his own imagination. There's been some
suggestion that in his later years, Lovecraft became more and more
convinced that his creations were real and communicating through him.
This is possible, the same case has been made against another genre
visionary, Phillip K. Dick. I don't believe that Lovecraft sincerely
believed Cthulu waited under the ocean to return one day, but I can
believe that he became overwhelmed by the forces he was trying to
express in his fiction. Good horror takes itself and it's subject
seriously, so like that adage about chasing monsters, it isn't too
surprising that some might fall victim to the same abyss they seek to
illuminate.
In the wake of reading The
Starry Wisdom, I felt a longing and homesickness as I recalled
how long it had been since I had felt this kind of power in a book. I
need stories to reach as deep as they can go and clutch at my bones.
I need reading to be an experience in itself, not merely an
simulacrum of experience. I expect that this hunger is what drives
much of my writing, this quest to transcribe the ineffable or the
unnameable into a manageable format. This attraction toward the dark
heart of these stories is not some new feeling, rather it is a
welcome, if bittersweet, reminder of all that has driven me to write.
The magic of this communication is the same as the first time I read
Edgar Allen Poe, Thomas Ligotti or Clive Barker. Not a strange,
unknown chill, but the paradoxical comfort of returning to the murky
home of imagination's original darkness.