Lovecraft, Moorcock, Bradbury
Three From the Vault

3,364 words

Just as the great pleasure of having a good bottle of wine is having another, so too one of the great pleasures of reading a book you enjoy is re-reading it. When you approach a book for a second time, you already know you like it, which takes the pressure off. If it’s Dostoevsky, for example, you don’t have to spend the first 20 pages memorizing 17 different characters who each have three different names. You already did all that. Now, you can enjoy yourself. You can slip into a once-read book like a comfortable and familiar old item of clothing, enjoying the writing as writing and perhaps seeing patterns form in the storyline you could not have recognized first time around. And you will likely find the book changed or, rather, you can gauge how much you have changed. The book, of course, has stayed the same.

I recently found a good (ie. free) source of science-fiction/fantasy novels online, and treated myself to three books I first read half a century ago. H. P. Lovecraft’s The Lurker at the Threshold is actually a collaborative effort, as we shall see. Michael Moorcock’s The Jewel in the Skull is the first volume in his History of the Runestaff. Finally, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes is the second novel in that author’s Green Town trilogy. These are books I first read when I was 14 and 15 years old, in 1975/6, and they marked the shadow line between science fiction and science fantasy for me. Brian W. Aldiss, in a foreword to the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic, makes a distinction between “hard” science fiction, such as Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov, in which the laws of nature and physics are obeyed, and “soft” science fiction, in which they are not. The three books here are definitely in the latter class. Andrei Tarkovsky filmed Roadside Picnic as Stalker, and I reviewed both book and movie for Counter-Currents. A reader rather splendidly translated the piece into Czech, which remains the first and only time I have had my writing translated, and for which I am grateful. If I knew anyone, I’d brag about it. “Well, yes, of course some of my work has been translated into Czech, you know…”

I got to science fiction via the route all boys of my generation got there. We started with the funnies, comics such as Beano and Dandy, Whizzer & Chips and Topper. Clash fans may be interested to note that drummer Nick “Topper” Headon got his nickname due to the fact that his fellow band members found in him a striking resemblance to Mickey the Monkey, the front-page character from the Topper. Extraneous information, you sneer. But just wait until it wins you a pub quiz. No information is extraneous. But I digress.

From Dennis the Menace, Minnie the Minx, Beryl the Peril, and the Bash Street Kids, we moved on to more serious comics, at least in their subject matter: The Eagle (featuring Dan Dare, pilot of the future), the Commando war stories (Eat lead, Fritz!), and then on to Marvel Comics. After I had finished my own paper-round on a Saturday, I would go back to bed with Marvel Comics Weekly and Spider Man Comics Weekly, black-and-white reprints from a British franchise, and featuring the last month’s American releases. We could buy the originals as well, but they were imports and therefore expensive. I had hundreds of them at one time and, back in England, I still have Swamp Thing #1. I joined FOOM (Friends of Old Marvel), sending them a quid or so and getting a poster and some merch. I still know, today, the real names of The Fantastic Four, Daredevil, and even obscure villains such as Mysterio (Quentin Beck, since you ask), but I can’t remember where I put my keys. Such is life. A school-teacher once told me that if I memorized the chemistry book as well as I did The Who’s lyrics, I would be a star pupil. Never happened.

There were a few kids who went down the DC route, but the characters didn’t have the psychological depth of the Marvel pantheon. I mean, I wasn’t thinking that at the time, I was a kid, but you take my point. This was all before the greatest British comic of all time came along, 2000AD, which kept me reading comics long into adulthood (along with Viz), and way past the time I should have put away childish things. Why no one has made a film from Bad Company, Halo Jones, Nemesis, Ace Space Trucking Company, or many of the other 2000AD strips is beyond me.

So, I am revisiting my youth, but I think it’s a decorous way to do so. I haven’t had a punk rock haircut or bought some groovy clothes or anything. Me and an old mate of mine, almost the same age, went through our midlife crises together aged 40. He bought a Triumph Bonneville, and I bought a narrowboat. But back to the books. We’ll start where I started, 50 years ago in a snug little attic room in a holiday house in the county of Dorset, but also in the dark hills of Arkham…

The Lurker at the Threshold was actually published as a book in 1947 by August Derleth, who seems to have completed Lovecraft’s work. In fact, he claims the lion’s share of it, claiming to have more or less written the novel himself from Lovecraft’s notes. One source claims as few as 1,200 words of what is really a novella were by Lovecraft. If this is so, I really must read more by Derleth, because this ranks high in what I thought was Lovecraft’s oeuvre. But I have read more than one tale of this book’s completion, so I suppose it will remain a mystery. A mysterious book; Lovecraft himself would have approved. H. P. Lovecraft is well known to readers of Counter-Currents, more perhaps for his political leanings and editorship of The Conservative than for his genre-creating prose. Given his views on race, there is a fairly strong argument that Lovecraft’s alien invaders lurking in other dimensions and beyond the stars, waiting for a chance to ravage earth, represents Lovecraft’s fictional recreation of immigration.

The plot of Lurker is pure American Gothic, as a moneyed young American, Ambrose Dewart, takes up residence in an inherited house deep in the mysterious Billington’s Wood. As soon as I read the opening line, I realized why a teenage boy would have been hooked from the start:

North of Arkham the hills rise dark, wild and wooded, and much overgrown, an area through which the Miskatonic flows seaward, almost at one boundary of the wooded tract. Travelers in this region are seldom impelled to go beyond the outskirts of the wood…

Few writers create that post-Romantic atmosphere so easily. Lovecraft’s prose is taut and controlled, always, and this is a key component in his style; creating horror from the ordinary. Back in Billington’s Wood, the house has an adjoining tower, a strangely decorated stained-glass window, and a list of precautions left in the will which bequeathed Dewart the house:

He is not to open the door which leads to strange time and place… nor invite Him Who lurks at the threshold, nor to call out to the hills… nor disturb the frogs… He is not to touch upon the window… He is not to sell or otherwise make disposition of the property without inserting a clause to hold the island and the tower are in nowise disturbed…

“It is a complex of riddles,” Dewart bemoans. In fact, and obviously unbeknown to Dewart, the tower and the window are portals between earth and the nameless world of the Great Old Ones, where “They walk calm and primal, of no dimensions, and to us unseen.” The frogs which surround the tower are referred to as “locks and guards,” and Lovecraft informs us that their amphibian heritage means that they can sense the presence of these dreadful entities. The frogs’ hellish din is also the harbinger of Dewart’s decline, as he is gradually taken over, Bodysnatchers-style, by a long-dead and blasphemous ancestor. Returning from neighboring Dunwich, Stewart rushes out to listen to the frog chorus. “I’m going outside to listen to them. They’re welcoming me back.”

The book is composed of three narratives, those of Dewart himself, his cousin, Stephen Bates, and a young academic from a neighboring university (there is always a neighboring university in Lovecraft stories, and they almost always have a copy of the Necronomicon, by the “mad Arab,” Abdul Alhazred). There are scenes towards the end in which academics follow the awful clues to the dreadful truth, and it can seem a bit hokey. But this is because we are inured to it now, and have been since Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing hammed it up in the 1970s Hammer horror movies. There was always someone saying, “You don’t seriously expect me to be believe in all that mumbo-jumbo, do you?” This is the horror of Lovecraft: the mumbo-jumbo is real.

Lovecraftian horror is of a particular kind, blending as it does visual horrors with their psychological effect on the viewer. The creatures he describes are, he states, literally indescribable, changing shape and size, defying geometry with their angles, and challenging language itself to come up with something adequately eldritch, to use one of Lovecraft’s favorite words.

For those interested in the Cthulhu mythos (which is part-Lovecraft, part-fan production), Lurker gives a whole family tree. Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, Dagon. The gang’s all here. If Derleth did write the book based on Lovecraft’s notes, I think we can safely assume that the genealogy of the Great Old Ones was Lovecraft’s creation. Derleth was an acolyte; I doubt he would have interfered with the master’s family tree.

Lovecraft is an obvious influence for modern writers such as Stephen King. I have never got on with King; he and Norman Mailer are the only authors whose books I have started but failed to finish. With Mailer, it’s because I can’t stand all that macho shit (which only Hemingway can really pull off), and I wholeheartedly supported my teenage literary hero, Martin Amis, in his rather snarky crusade against Mailer. King books, it has to be said, sometimes make good movies. Just look at The Shining (which King hates). And it is not that King makes such a tit of himself every time he opens his mouth in public, it’s just a natural antipathy, I suppose.

Michael Moorcock’s The Jewel in the Skull I know I bought on the same holiday as The Lurker at the Threshold, so those were both read when I was 14. I know I read The Lord of the Rings at 15, and I’m pretty sure that was also the year I discovered Ray Bradbury, so that means my first reading of these three books was between 1975 and 1976. With Jewel, I remembered it from the very first scene, with old Count Brass riding the plains of the Kamarg and slaying a baragoon, the awful creations of the mad scientist who had ruled the realm before him. The time is the Europe of the future after the “Tragic Millennium” (which I suspect we are actually in right now), and the realms of Europa are part ruled by men, part by magic.

I am delighted to see that Michael Moorcock is very much alive, and 85 years old. An Englishman from west London, Moorcock’s editorship of the science fiction/fantasy magazine New Worlds is credited with creating a “new wave” of science fiction in Britain which would go on to influence cyberpunk in the US. Moorcock dislikes Tolkien, preferring the dark mysteries of Mervyn Peake, whose Gormenghast trilogy, and Castle Groan in particular, must have influenced Moorcock’s sense of proto-steampunk Gothic.

It’s tempting to read a touch of Roger Scruton’s oikophobia (hatred or fear of home) in Moorcock’s book, as he describes the evil empire which threatens the Kamarg and the whole of Europa:

In the west lay the island empire of Granbretan, the only nation with any real political stability, with her half-insane science and her ambitions of conquest.

The Granbretanians, when they venture out from their awful capital, Londra, act pretty much like standard Nazis, so unravelling Moorcock’s message here is not straightforward. I was highly amused to see that the Darth Vader figure in Jewel is the “Baron of Kroiden.” I grew up around Croydon, and I can cheerfully report that the gene pool does not seem likely to produce a conquering warlord any time soon. Desperate to know how he is to defeat the armed might of Granbretan, the novella’s hero, Dorian Hawkmoon (my mother loved the name when she read from the back of the book in the shop before buying it for me, affecting an odd but fetching American accent as she did so) is amazed to see Count Brass’ secret weapon:

Soaring into the sky, the scarlet flamingoes, with their riders in their high saddles, each man armed with a flame-lance, wheeled toward the brazen ornithopters.

Giant war flamingoes v brazen ornithopters? All right! As a 14-year-old, this was sensational. Science fiction was perhaps the first type of literature written specifically to conjure up cinematic images – small wonder it rose in popularity as moving pictures improved their quality. Now that CGI has long since dominated the movies, and is passing the baton on to AI, we are used to extraordinary visual images, but books such as Jewel force the reader to create the visuals for himself, and of its time (1967) was sparkling with imagination. J. G. Ballard, another Englishmen, was similarly gifted. I bet we dream differently, incidentally, since the onset of enhanced cinematic graphics.

Hawkmoon, captured by Granbretan, has a jewel embedded in his forehead. He is given a mission; go to Kamarg and steal the girl Yisselda, with whom the evil Baron Meliadus has fallen in love, seeing an advantageous marriage for the Granbretanian empire. Meliadus can see all via the crystal, and in case Hawkmoon has any thoughts of going rogue and siding with Count Brass, then they activate the jewel, which will come to life and eat Hawkmoon’s brain. So, something of a disincentive against betrayal. Count Brass realizes something is afoot, and nullifies Granbretanian science, freeing Hawkmoon for the time being, but with no guarantee the technological spell will hold. Technology in Moorcock is invested with moral status (as indeed it is in our own world), and either serves good or evil. There is very little neutral machinery.

This book is a thorough romp, and I note that the whole series is four books, which I will definitely be reading. Also, I had forgotten another Moorcockian trilogy, The King of the Swords, and Queen, and Prince thereof. I think it may be time to get involved with science fiction/fantasy again. If any readers know any worthwhile contemporary stuff, let me know in the comments.

I saved Something Wicked This Way Comes for last because I even re-read it when I was a kid, I was so attached to it. Bradbury suddenly became very big in England in the 1970s (although Something Wicked first came out in 1962), and The Martian Chronicles, The Machineries of Joy, and The Illustrated Man all became part of the staple diet of the teenage sci-fi fan. Bradbury also wrote the great dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, a book whose time may have come round again as the left begin to censor literature. Bradbury also wrote for TV, theater, and film, including the screenplay for John Huston’s classic adaptation of Moby Dick, and the TV series Ray Bradbury Theater ran to 65 episodes. Something Wicked This Way Comes, with its title taken from Macbeth, is a dark children’s novel, really, with a pair of Sawyer/Finn-type boys waiting in their small town for two imminent arrivals: a storm and a carnival.

This is the only book of the three in which the bad guys don’t want to rule the world. Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones wish to enter through some inter-dimensional gap and rule the world as they did back in the day. Moorcroft’s Granbretanians want to rule Europe. But the carnival owner seems as though he will be content with souls… Actually, I recently saw an old fifties schlock-horror movie called Carnival of Souls, which made me think of the Bradbury book. There always will be something frightening about fairgrounds. As for some kids being afraid of clowns, well, you Americans started that with John Wayne Gacey.

Bradbury’s prose has a touch of magical realism about it without wallowing in it as South American authors have a tendency to do. It works here because it gives an appropriately teenage feel to the prose, which fits it into the American rite-of-passage novels, books such as Catcher in the Rye and Portnoy’s Complaint. Something Wicked is, in that sense, a sinister coming-of-age novel. As I’m sure you have experienced yourself, male readers, the mind of a pubescent boy is quite a chaotic place:

The night was sweet with the dust of autumn leaves that smelled as if the fine sands of ancient Egypt were drifting to dunes beyond the town. How come, thought Will, at a time like this, I can even think of four thousand years of dust of ancient people sliding around the world, and me sad because no one notices except me and Dad here maybe, and even us not telling each other.

I use the phrase “American Gothic” without really knowing exactly what I mean, if I am honest. I know it is a famous, Depression-era painting, but it is also applied to literature, and it seems that American Gothic is rather different from its European cousin. The books I’ve looked at here (yes, I know Moorcock is English) all seem to share in a deep strain of American Gothic, particularly Lovecraft and Bradbury. Not along the lines of recognized Gothic classics such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, or Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk. Gothic is a fascinating genre, and worth investigating. Poe, Thomas Love Peacock, Bram Stoker and many others were fine prose stylists as well as psychologically skilled writers, or, rather, writers whose skill lay partly in their understanding of psychology. Frankenstein is obviously a Gothic novel but, looked at from a certain angle, so is Northanger Abbey. It just depends how you like your Gothic.

Something Wicked This Way Comes revels in creepy detail, unbearably corny in one way but, as noted, possessed of a scatter-brained teenage spirit. There is a Tarot-reading gypsy (who really does have a “wicked pack of cards,” as T. S. Eliot puts it in The Wasteland), a carousel that ages the rider or makes them younger depending on which direction it is running, and a tattooed man whose tattoos enact dramas (Bradbury would expand on this theme in The Illustrated Man). It also has a splendid first line: “The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm.”

Yes, I am going to read a book that starts with a line like that.

I had something of an epiphany while writing this piece. I do think it is time to turn to sci-fi again. I have such vivid memories of getting Dune from my half-sister for Christmas, of reading A. E. Van Vogt’s The Silkie, the brilliant Roger Zelazny. “Soft” science fiction, to use Aldiss’ phrase, shares the ability of cartoonists in that anything can happen, just as long as you justify it in terms of the world you have foisted on us, to our great delight. Realist fiction says; we have to break down the door and get the guns to shoot these bad guys, or, I have to have an abortion. Soft sci-fi says, If we put the stone with the cosmic symbol back in place in the roof of the tower, we will close the inter-dimensional portal, or, that Indian servant is over 200 years old and served your ancestor. Same difference. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to find some prime-time Philip K. Dick or Frank Herbert. I’ll be in my study.