Posts filed under 'The Book I Would Like To Be Buried With'
This special twentieth Bury Me… features grand panjandrum and actor Robert Lloyd Parry, the man behind the Nunkie Theatre Company, responsible for many an uneasy evening with the master of English supernatural stories…
“There are works of fiction I’ve enjoyed as much as M R James’s ghost stories, but few, I think, that I’ve enjoyed more. Certainly none have played so unexpectedly large a part in my life. I think that I first came across MRJ in a paperback edition of the Collected Stories belonging to my dad, when I was 13 or so. But the book I’d like to be buried with is a first edition of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary [1904]. (I don’t own a copy incidentally – the readers of this will have to club together in time for the funeral. No flowers, please).
Of the eight stories in this, his first collection, I would count six as absolutely first rate, and rank the remaining two alongside the best work of other Edwardian supernaturalists. Five of them, and a later story – A Warning to the Curious – form what I now call the M R James Trilogy, a set of one man shows in which I take on the role of the author telling spook tales in his Cambridge study, circa 1904.
Most people who love M R James – and I’ve only ever met those who love him or have never read him; I have yet to meet a full blooded James hater – most people who love him seem to have got hooked during adolescence. But they’re a pleasure that endure into adulthood and – for the purposes of this, anyway – beyond.
They grow on you. Of the stories I perform, The Mezzotint, The Ash Tree and Lost Hearts have increased in stature in my eyes over the years while Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook, Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to you, my Lad, and A Warning to the Curious have retained their status as firm favourites.
I started doing MRJ shows five years ago, when I worked at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and got the chance to perform in his old office – the Founder’s Library, a magnificent Victorian book-lined interior with a huge marble fireplace, where he catalogued so many of the medieval manuscripts in Cambridge collections. I think I’ve probably performed Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook over two hundred times since then and I’ve really not got sick of it. The gradual build up of tension, the accumulation of detail, the spectacular, climactic apparition, and that slow, rather melancholy coda – they affect me now as they affected me a quarter of a century ago.
Perhaps, in fact, after so many repetitions the stories aren’t quite as chilling as they were on first reading. One might think that’s a failure in a ghost story but I don’t. For me the shudders – and they are undoubtedly there – have always been only part of the pleasure that MRJ delivers. There’s a humour in the stories, a playfulness, and that distinct narratorial voice – sometimes diffident, always friendly – that make them perfect holiday reading. Particularly if that holiday is taken alone. In winter. By the sea. And one reaches it by train. I think I’ve always found something strangely comforting about M R James.
They were composed for the holidays in the first place. James wrote all except one of the stories in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary to read aloud to friends at Kings College at Christmas (the last, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas is for me the least satisfying of the collection and was written at the publisher’s request to fill up the volume). So they are party pieces, really, candlelit, donnish entertainments, to be enjoyed with wine and anchovy toast after chapel on Christmas Eve. James’s protagonists are often solitary men, even lonely men, and this often leaves them vulnerable to inexplicable phenomena, but he’s not out to describe or inspire any existential agony. He doesn’t show us a cruel, random universe. His is a world of cathedral precincts and pipesmoke-filled hotel sitting-rooms, into which the monsters and grotesques that lurk in the margins of his beloved medieval manuscripts sometimes intrude. If James has a world view it is, as he admits himself, a very simple one – that there is more in heaven and earth, Horatio… And that golf is an inexplicable waste of time.
I also love James McBryde’s illustrations in the book. Poor, genial, doomed, talented James McBryde, MRJ’s beloved friend. A reluctant medic, he had in 1904 at last embarked upon a career as an artist. The illustration of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was his first professional job and he went at it with gusto. A framed print of McBryde’s version of the climax of Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad, hangs above the desk where I’m writing this.
A quick recap: Parkins, the Professor of Ontography at Cambridge University, is enjoying a golfing holiday on the Suffolk coast. He finds an ancient whistle by the beach, blows it and inadvertantly summons a… well it’s hard to say what exactly… but something responds to the whistle and attacks him in his room in the middle of the night, something wrapped in bedsheets.
The story makes the being’s “intensely horrible face of crumpled linen” the focal point of the terror. James McBryde pays more attention to the grimace of its victim: in the picture Parkins is skeletal, his mouth a lunatic rictus, his cheeks hollowed out by a scream. The story has him lurching out of the window to escape his attacker; McBryde hems him in against a chest of drawers, his claw-like hands reaching out to fend off a being that he is too terrified to touch. Like the best book illustrations, it not only complements MRJ’s prose, it adds to the enjoyment of it.
The young artist himself sensed that he had created something special. On the 6th May 1904 he wrote to MRJ. “I have finished the Whistle ghost… I covered yards of paper to put in the moon shadows correctly and it is certainly the best thing I have ever drawn…”
It was probably also the last piece he completed. By the 4th of June he was dead, from a botched operation to remove his appendix. It was partly as a tribute to his great friend that James published Ghost Stories… in the first place.
I’ve also grown to love the look and feel of that first edition – the weight of it, the thick pages, the brown, hessian-like binding, the Gothic script on the cover. I’ve seen and handled a few copies over the last few years and still scour charity shops and jumble sales just in case one of those mythical copies turns up, going for 50p because the vendor doesn’t know what he’s selling.
And finally I like the idea of some Dennistoun or Parkins of the future digging up my funerary copy and becoming increasingly uneasy as he reads about what can happen when you pilfer the treasure of the past. So uneasy in fact that, by the time he has reached the end of the book, he decides it might be best to return the modest looking volume to the bony grasp of the skeleton from whose grave he snatched it. Yes, that would be the sensible thing to do.”
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About Robert Lloyd Parry:
Since December 2005 Robert has been performing two one man shows based on the stories of M R James, the greatest writer of supernatural tales in English. His uncanny resemblance to the author has been noted with a shudder by more than one enthusiastic audience member.
July 26th, 2010
The nineteenth entry in the Bury Me… series features US-based Stephen Graham Jones, author of Demon Theory among others, and by day Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“Just realizing that this is a completely different question than What book have you reread the most, or even What book is your favorite book, though I kept trying to read it that way. Since you asked, I’ve generated lists and lists, and consulted old lists, and it’s too painful to select just one, but at the same time I keep wanting to allow myself to cheat, just string ten or twenty together here, the same way you wallpaper your room with band posters when you’re fourteen, in hopes somebody’ll walk in, see how obviously cool you must be.
Or, really, I kind of gave up on an answer, was ducking the reminder I’d set to do this. But then, yesterday, I was writing the notes for this story collection I have coming out, and it hit me, or, I discovered it on the page, which is pretty much where I discover everything: It. Stephen King’s It.
That story’s still running in my head, is probably the most permanent piece of fiction I’ve ever read. The most influential, anyway, the one I’m just now seeing that I’ve always been trying to rewrite without getting caught. Because, even just looking at it on my shelf, that’s enough for me to see some chrome eyeballs rolling my way, sure, but the real magic of that story’s those kids, their dynamic, how they’re growing up together. With It, you get the horror but you also get the, I don’t know, the distinct sense of what it means to be human, and to keep trying to be human, even when the world’s failing all around you. A completely magical book for me, and I so appreciate the way it splits into all these distinct storylines but then comes back together. I mean, reading it, just remembering it, I know it’d be dangerous to be in that story, and it’s likely stupid to secretly want to be, but, just for the chance of gambling everything on that bike ride at the end, the chance of gambling and winning, it’s got to be worth it, yeah? My heart’s pounding, even, writing this. Just thinking about that story again, about It.
I’m going to have to read it again now, soon. Need to get back to Derry for about a thousand pages.”
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About Stephen Graham Jones:
Stephen Graham Jones has seven books out so far, two of them horror – Demon Theory and The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti (the second a Shirley Jackson Award finalist) – and has two more horror novels on the horizon: The Ones That Almost Got Away, a collection of horror stories out with Prime Books in October, and It Came from Del Rio (Trapdoor Books), Book 1 of the Bunnyhead Chronicles.
Jones has been an NEA fellow, a Texas Writers League fellow, has won the Texas Insititute of Letters Fiction Award and the Independent Publishers Multicultural Award, and, in spite of all that Texas stuff, he now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, assigning Jack Ketchum to his students every chance he gets. His next two courses are The Slasher and The Zombie.
Visit Stephen’s website at http://www.demontheory.net/
July 19th, 2010
Bury Me‘s eighteenth instalment focuses upon the UK’s Gary Fry, whose short stories have graced my shelves since I encountered Both And way back in 2003′s seminal Gathering The Bones anthology…
“…E Mortius Revoco, a Guide to DIY Practical Resurrections.
Only kidding.
In fact, that’s a hard question, but put a gun to my head (and let’s face it, such an act would bring the grave a tad closer) and I’d have to say Money by Martin Amis. I love it. One of those books you can read from start to end with undiminished pleasure, or simply dip into and revisit certain seminal passages. The prose is wonderful, the jokes as dark and funny as they come, and the whole thing is frequently profound, provocative and stimulating. Amis is my generation’s big UK voice. Nuff said, sir.
Here’s a short extract to illustrate only some of the foregoing eulogising:
In LA, you can’t do anything unless you drive. Now I can’t do anything unless I drink. And the drink-drive combination, it really isn’t possible out there. If you so much as loosen your seatbelt or drop you ashes or pick your nose, then it’s an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there’s a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug.
So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown sky line carries a smear of God’s green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hours, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF–BOOZE–NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON’T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don’t walk. Stay inside. Don’t walk. Drive. Don’t walk. Run! I tried the cabs. No use. The cabbies are all Saturnians who aren’t even sure whether this is a right planet or a left planet. The first thing you have to do, every trip, is teach them how to drive.
What I love here, as in the great majority of Amis’s work, is the brilliance of the ideas, their phrasing, the way he alludes to great literature by way of tawdry modern life (“God’s green snot”). He has made the hideous beautiful – quite an achievement. If great writers hold up a mirror to their times, what is Amis giving us? In Money, it’s the way that the whole of social life has been commodified and subjugated to the rigors of capitalism. John Self is a void, a man who moves from one effortless addiction to the next. When he goes to watch an opera, he interprets the story according to a soap opera or a tabloid headline story. He’s drunk most of the time, but those blank-outs serve another purpose. Amis also offers us a meta-reflective rumination on the nature of novel writing. Characters disappear for great patches of all novels – Self simply blacks out: a nicely judged metaphor what happens when the reader ‘isn’t looking’. But Amis goes further, and later in the book we get a character called Martin Amis who’s deliberately manipulating his central character much in the way that ‘Godlike’ authors do: a smart touch. There are other things going on in this novel which beggar belief. The complexity masquerades as endless vitriolic and painful comedy. It’s probably the funniest thing I’ve ever read. And if Self achieves a little pathos and independence towards the end of the book, what are we to make of this? Is he redeemable? Are our times? Are we?
On the basis of this book in particular, Amis has been described as a misogynist, but nothing – in my view – could be further from the truth. Selina Street manipulates Self, for sure, though it’s he who holds all the money and that’s what she’s after. And of course it’s another female character, Martina Twain, who attempts to reform Self, even though, when left in her flat a while, he spends rather less time reading the copy of Animal Farm she’s lent him than he does seeking out choice bits of photography over which he can masturbate. But come on, that’s all true – it’s so true. And that’s the bottom line for me: Amis tells it the way it is for men in these not-so-long-departed modern times.
Maybe he’s therefore a geezers’ author. I’m not entirely sure. All I do know is that his fictional worlds resonate with me. The headiness of the language is intoxicating. He does what V S Pritchett insisted all writers should do: give voice to all the wonderful thoughts inside even the most base of people. And boy is Self base. But…maybe we all are. Maybe Amis is reminding us of that, and perhaps he uses his divine gift for prose as a way of smuggling these truths through the ever-so-refined filter of ‘good taste’. In short, he challenges what literature is supposed to deal with, the higher aspirations and concerns of humanity. Well, what can I say to support that? Something in the style of the superb Money, maybe: okay, here goes – Bach, Galileo, Shakespeare, Churchill, Keats, Constable, Brunel, to name but a few – they all surely enjoyed a handjob now and again.”
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About Gary Fry:
Gary Fry lives in Dracula’s Whitby, literally around the corner from where Bram Stoker was staying when he was thinking about that character. Gary has a PhD in psychology, though his first love is literature. To date he’s had four short story collections and over 60 tales published. His first novel – a frightening haunted house piece called The House of Canted Steps – will be published in 2010 by PS Publishing. He also has a disturbing novella – the colourfully entitled ‘The Invisible Architect of Psychopathy – out from Pendragon Press in 2010: this accompanies a fine piece by Simon Maginn in a book called Feral Companions.
More news and views on Gary’s new website at: http://www.gary-fry.com/
July 12th, 2010
The seventeenth entry in the Bury Me With… series; Paul Kane, one of the nicest men in genre fiction I’ve met, offers up his choice of entombed reading matter.
“My choice for this shouldn’t come as much of a shock, bearing in mind myself and my better half Marie have just co-edited an anthology based on it which came out from Pocket Books (Simon and Schuster) last September. Yes, of course it’s The Hellbound Heart by my favourite author, none other than Clive Barker (we just removed the definite article and added an ‘s’ at the end – Hellbound Hearts – clever, eh?). The other small-ish clue was that I also wrote a book focussing on the film series this novella spawned, The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy. Obsessed? Me? Naw. It’s just that The Hellbound Heart, which was originally published back in 1986, contains the seeds for such a rich and never-ending mythology, that the short book itself is a springboard for many other tales; or at least it was in my imagination. After reading it for the first time, and later watching the movie based on it, I found myself asking questions like: who are the Cenobites, really? What are their day-to-day lives like? (I know, I’m a weirdo, right?) How many other people have they visited after various puzzles have been solved?
But, as cool as they are, the Cenobites aren’t the only reason for choosing this particular book. At its…well, at its heart remains the story of a woman’s love for one man. The kind of love most people can only dream of. The kind that forces her to kill for him… A pity that love isn’t reciprocated then, although there’s definitely a lot of passion when characters Frank and Julia get it together. It’s also a shame – for him anyway, though not in story terms – that Julia’s married to Frank’s brother, Rory (changed to Larry in the film). If any one story represents the insanity, and the lengths that love can drive a person to, it’s The Hellbound Heart. To reference yet another of Barker’s stories, it highlights and encapsulates The (In)Human Condition perfectly. Especially poignant is the unrequited love that Kirsty experiences – here a friend to Rory rather than a daughter, which explains a lot about their screwed up relationship in the film, not to mention Frank’s own incestuous feelings. The way she feels about Rory also sees her doing some pretty stupid things, like going and confronting Julia for example. Big mistake.
So, what do we have? An intriguing premise about a hedonistic waster who thinks he’s opening the doorway to untold pleasures, only to discover that some folks’ interpretation of ‘pleasure’ is a little different to others. We also have some fantastic central characters in the form of the aforementioned Frank, Julia, Rory and Kirsty. A quartet who form one of the most dysfunctional ‘families’ ever. But let’s get back to those Cenobites for a moment. One of the things the authors found most appealing about working on Hellbound Hearts was the freedom we gave them to create new Cenobites of their own devising. Clive himself even came up with his first new one in twenty years for the cover: Vestimenti. There’s just something unique and refreshing about the ‘villains’ of this book (I use the word cautiously, because, as we all know, they’re ‘Demons to some, angels to others…’). And here they are presented in their rawest form, if you’ll pardon the expression: the first Cenobites ever, even before Doug, Nick, Simon and Grace donned the make-up to become their cinematic counterparts. Yes, you can see flashes of all of them – in particular ‘Pinhead’, a name given to the character by fans of the franchise – but here they are different, almost from a parallel universe rather than another dimension.
There are so many stories and novels I could have chosen written by Clive (the Books of Blood, for instance, would have given me infinite pleasure as I drifted off to who knows where – perhaps along the highways of the dead written about inside?). But even though it’s short, The Hellbound Heart I find brings something new to the reader every time. I’d be more than happy to read and re-read that for an eternity, thank you very much…
I was also asked which edition of the book I’d like shoved into my cold hands as they plant me in the ground. Well, I’m actually lucky enough to be the owner of a copy of the original anthology in which it appeared, Night Visions, edited by George R.R. Martin, also featuring stories by the excellent Ramsey Campbell and Lisa Tuttle. It’s a little battered now, in that loving way we voracious readers keep returning to and handling our favourite books, but it’d do for me. Either that or the lovely limited hardback Earthling edition that came out a few years ago, with brand new Barker artwork on the slipcover and introductions from not only Ashley Laurence (Kirsty from Hellraiser) but also Peter Atkins (scriptwriter on Hellraisers II-IV), both lovely people and very dear friends (in fact you can check out another fantastic intro from Pete in my latest novel from… plug alert…Screaming Dreams: The Gemini Factor… ahem).
So, that’s about it. Hope you enjoyed my little love letter to what, for me personally, is one of the best genre tales ever written. I’m looking forward to reading what the other reprobates selected have chosen… See you all in Hell!”
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About Paul Kane:
Paul Kane has been writing professionally for almost fourteen years. His genre journalism has appeared in such magazines as The Dark Side, Death Ray, Fangoria, SFX, Dreamwatch and Rue Morgue, and his first non-fiction book was the critically acclaimed The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy, introduced by Doug ‘Pinhead’ Bradley. His award-winning short fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic (as well as being broadcast on BBC Radio 2), and has been collected in Alone (In the Dark), Touching the Flame, FunnyBones and Peripheral Visions. His novella Signs of Life reached the shortlist of the British Fantasy Awards 2006, The Lazarus Condition was introduced by Mick Garris, creator of Masters of Horror, and RED featured artwork from Dave (The Graveyard Book) McKean.
As Special Publications Editor of the British Fantasy Society he worked with authors like Brian Aldiss, Ramsey Campbell, Muriel Gray, Robert Silverberg and many more, plus he is the co-editor of Hellbound Hearts for Pocket Books (Simon and Schuster), an anthology of original stories inspired by Clive Barker’s novella, featuring contributions from the likes of Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, Kelley Armstrong, Tim Lebbon, Yvonne Navarro, Richard Christian Matheson, Chaz Brenchley and Nancy Holder.
In 2008 his zombie story ‘Dead Time’ was turned into an episode of the Lionsgate/NBC TV series Fear Itself, adapted by Steve Niles (30 Days of Night) and directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (SAW II-IV). He also scripted the short film The Opportunity which premiered at Cannes in 2009. Paul’s mass market novels for Abaddon’s Afterblight Chronicles – Arrowhead and Broken Arrow – detail the adventures of a post apocalyptic version of Robin Hood. His latest novels include The Gemini Factor, from Screaming Dreams, and Of Darkness and Light, from Thunderstorm books. He currently lives in Derbyshire, UK, with his wife – the author Marie O’Regan – his family, and a black cat called Mina.
July 5th, 2010
Bury Me With‘s sixteenth entry features the choice of UK writer and editor James Cooper…
“If ever there was a more fitting book to be buried with than Clive Barker’s Books Of Blood, I can’t for the life of me imagine what it might be. I’m one of the lucky few to own a copy of the definitive Stealth Press hardback editions containing all six volumes in one glorious package. I cherish it beyond measure. It’s protected by a Mylar plastic cover and weighs 4½ pounds – the equivalent of about five pints of beer (and, yes, merely in the interests of research, I have checked). Suffice to say, it is not a book to be read in bed. Again, I’ve tested this so you don’t have to and can report that my feeble triceps, accustomed to lifting only one beer at a time, were unable to support the book for more than a few minutes. Pathetic, I know, but true…
Still, it is a book that elevates the spirit each time I hold it in my hands. It reminds me of something hot and primal, beyond the simple act of reading, as though merely to own such a thing has the capacity to quicken the blood. These stories, all thirty-one of them, possess the unique quality of every great story: when you read them for the first time, they feel fresh. Unlike anything you’ve ever read before. It doesn’t matter if you first read them back in 1984, or if you’re reading them for the first time now, these tales retain a pulse of such startling originality, such raw, elemental power, they become the yardstick against which one instinctively measures everything else, from Bradbury to King, and all the pretenders that nestle in between.
Why are the Books of Blood so good? Because they complement each other so beautifully. Because they enrich the soul of the reader. Because every brutal stroke of Barker’s pen reveals something new. Because at the heart of every story lies the truth.
Don’t take my word for it; go and read them for yourself. Or re-read them. I defy you not to be mesmerised by the sheer variety of the tales, the humanity (and inhumanity) of the characters, the dark poetry embedded in Barker’s prose.
Ah! To be buried with the Books of Blood. How sweet eternity…”
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About James Cooper:
James Cooper’s latest collection of stories, The Beautiful Red, is available from Amazon or direct from the publisher, Atomic Fez. He is the author of the novel The Midway (Crowsing Books) and is the editor of the anthology Dark Doorways (The Prufrock Press). A collection of interviews with some of the leading lights in dark fiction, In Conversation: A Writer’s Perspective, was published by the British Fantasy Society in September 2009.
June 28th, 2010
The fifteenth entry in the Bury Me With… series features a genre author who has utilised the power of the internet with his free series fiction, garnering word-of-mouth recommendations like no other: David Wellington came to prominence with his Monster Island zombie series. He’s thought long and hard about his choice…
“The answer to that question really depends on the context.
Assuming that I am cremated, as I would prefer, I wouldn’t like to take any books with me at all. I’m not in favor of burning books under any circumstances. Not even Twilight.
If I were to be buried in a traditional pine coffin, a circumstance which presumably would only happen if I died anonymously in some foreign land, perhaps a tropical country where bodies are required by law to be buried as quickly as possible, well. It’s unlikely that the kindly folks who bury unknown bodies would waste any more money on buying books for the anonymous deceased. If they did, I hope that some cosmic twist of fate would make sure it was one of my own books that I was buried with. Hopefully – and here we’re getting into the realm of extremely unlikely events – they would also seal the book in some kind of plastic that would last a very long time. The whole point of these improbabilities is that when my bones are eventually uncovered by some future society, the highly advanced energy beings who dig me up will either a) realize that these are the bones of a long forgotten but underrated author from another era, or b) be so confused that I will become one of those unsolved mysteries of history that bother people so much.
In the far more likely, if less sanguine prospect that I was somehow buried alive – that is, if I was to fall victim to some sort of deep, coma-like sleep but a (highly incompetent) doctor mistakenly diagnosed me as, in fact, dead, and the coroner, all the morgue assistants, funeral home director (too cheap to embalm my “corpse”), and family all failed to correct the mistake – then I would like to be buried with a blank book for use when I wake up inside my coffin. Given the conditions that I never obtained in life, i.e., peace and quiet, plenty of free time, and no high speed internet access, I believe I could finally write my masterpiece. Hopefully I would finish it before I asphyxiated. Alternatively, if all of the above happened but – cruel fate – I was accidentally buried, alive, with a blank book but no pen or pencil to write with, I would at least be able to appreciate the terrible morbid irony of the situation.”
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About David Wellington:
David Wellington is the author of seven novels. His zombie novels Monster Island, Monster Nation and Monster Planet (Thunder’s Mouth Press) form a complete trilogy. He has also written a series of vampire novels including (so far) Thirteen Bullets, Ninety-Nine Coffins, Vampire Zero and Twenty-Three Hours, and in October of 2009 began his new Werewolf series, starting with Frostbite (all with Three Rivers Press).
In 2004 he began serializing his horror fiction online, posting short chapters of a novel three times a week on a friend’s blog. Response to the project was so great that in 2004 Thunder’s Mouth Press approached Mr. Wellington about publishing Monster Island as a print book. His novels have been featured in Rue Morgue, Fangoria, and the New York Times.
June 21st, 2010
The fourteenth entry in the Bury Me With… series features a relative newcomer to the writing scene, R.B. Russell. However those not yet familiar with his quiet unease might well recognise him due to his sterling work co-running the Tartarus Press.
“I’d like to take my old battered Corgi paperback The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen. (I would probably have taken the Collected Aickman if Simon hadn’t beaten me to it!)
Machen’s The Hill of Dreams was given to me to read at a time when I was immersed in Camus, Hesse and Sartre, and I read it as an existentialist novel; the story of an artistic outsider who has problems coming to grips with the world around him. What astounded me, though, and set it apart from the other authors I’d been reading, was the great beauty of the language. I found the novel hard-going that first time, but each re-reading has been a joy.
From The Hill of Dreams I went on to Machen’s Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, which baffled me completely. Why would an existentialist write horror stories? Machen, though, doesn’t really fit into any categories. His work suggests that there is more to the world around us than we may ordinarily perceive, and sometimes this revelation offers us great beauty, at other times great horror. An apparently banal marriage may conceal a wonderful, mystical love (A Fragment of Life), or the depths of evil (The Inmost Light). The Hill of Dreams, though, is Machen’s masterpiece, from the resonant opening through to the profound, echoing last line.”
About R.B. Russell:
R.B. Russell is the author of the short story collection Putting the Pieces in Place and the novella, Bloody Baudelaire (both Ex Occidente, 2009). His second collection, Literary Remains (PS Publishing, 2010) is recently published. Russell‘s stories have appeared in The Best Horror of the Year, Supernatural Tales, Postscripts and The Black Book of Horror. He runs the Tartarus Press with his partner, Rosalie Parker.
June 14th, 2010
The thirteenth entry in the Bury Me With… series. This week, Matt Cardin, in my humble opinion a uniquely philosophical voice in horror and weird fiction…
“The book I would like to be buried with is the unabridged facsimile edition of the late British philosopher Douglas Harding‘s frighteningly outsized and terrifyingly brilliant über-tome The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth – which I haven’t read in its entirety and almost certainly never will.
Let me explain.
The idea of a book that you’d like to be buried with differs significantly from the familiar challenge of choosing your “desert island book,” the single book that you’d like to have with you if ever you find yourself stranded on a desert island. The proper choice for that challenge is a book that you wouldn’t mind reading over and over again, one that you’d be perfectly happy to have as your sole and perpetual literary companion, so dearly do you love it and so inexhaustible do you finds its contents.
For a burial book, however, the proper choice has more to do with how you would like to be remembered. After all, you won’t be reading the book as you lie there returning to the earth in your coffin. You won’t be enjoying it yourself, except maybe in the satisfaction you feel during the run-up to your death as you reflect that this book and no other will serve as a kind of appendix to your epitaph should anybody ever happen to exhume your mortal remains. “Hm,” the grave robber, court appointed or otherwise, might muse as he looks at the durable leather book lying atop a mass of rotted pages, which are in turn piled atop the nastier rotten stuff below. “So he was a Stephanie Meyer fan.” Or some such thing.
So the choice of a burial book requires some careful thought, because it’s not the same as, although it’s related to, choosing a favorite book.
What, then, would I myself choose? Various reasonable options suggest and then dismiss themselves. Lovecraft’s complete fiction, for example. I mean, after all, it’s gloriously available today in a single Barnes & Noble hardcover volume, and in the corrected texts, too, thus blowing away the lovable but suspect Ballantine paperbacks that I was weaned on. But that book would only go properly with an epitaph like “He loved cosmic horror” or “Lover and Dreader of the Great Gulfs Beyond.” And that’s a bit too bounded to encompass my entire sensibility, despite my enduring love for and personal emotional connection to HPL.
What about Ligotti’s The Nightmare Factory or Teatro Grottesco, or maybe even his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race? Good candidates all, supremely important to my emotional, intellectual, and artistic development. But again, they would say more about Tom than about me.
What about the Bible? That’s another viable one to consider, since this library of religious texts is crucially implicated in my deepest life patterns, both inner and outer. I was raised in a cultural atmosphere of “high” biblical regard, where the Bible was unquestioningly regarded as inerrant and authoritative. Then I broke through into a more nuanced view – or perhaps it broke through into me – and have spent my life wandering around ever since in a deepening daze at the wonders of this ancient record of archetypal spiritual encounters interacting with bloody pre-modern moral, political, and cultural codes, all tending toward a cosmic revelation of shattering scope. So that’s all wonderful stuff. But, on the other hand, being buried with a Bible might send the wrong message, so impenetrable is the thicket of presumptions surrounding this book. My hypothetical gravedigger might think I was a typical “Bible thumper” from the religious-cultural backwater that Alan Watts used to refer to in inflammatory (but very memorable and accurate) fashion as the lunatic Protestant fringe. And that wouldn’t do at all.
Speaking of Watts, he’s a candidate with his The Way of Zen, Psychotherapy East and West, Beyond Theology, The Supreme Identity, and The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are. And if he’s in the mix, then why not Eckhart Tolle with The Power of Now? Or Huston Smith with Forgotten Wisdom? Or Shunryu Suzuki with Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind? Or Jan van de Wetering with The Empty Mirror and A Glimpse of Nothingness?
This could quickly turn into an impromptu imitation of Colin Wilson’s The Books in My Life. How many more books and authors suggest themselves in passing fashion because of their deep, deep significance to me? Robert Pirsig and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Allan Bloom and The Closing of the American Mind. Theodore Roszak and Where the Wasteland Ends. Wise and Fraser’s Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. E.F. Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed. Henri Amiel and his Journal. Pretty much everything Robert Anton Wilson ever wrote. And on, and on.
So why reject them all and choose Harding’s The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth? It’s partly because this massive magnum opus, which offers a philosophical vision and explanation of the entire universe (and as such presents a kind of respectable alternative or counterpoint to the New Agey Urantia book), intersects at a billion points with my other books, authors, and passions. C.S. Lewis, for example, was dazzled when a young and unknown Harding sent him the manuscript. Lewis insisted on writing the preface to the original edition. Harding was friends with Alan Watts, a circumstance arising out of their respective prominences in the heady countercultural spiritual stew of 1960s and 70s Britain and America (a period that has long glowed with a mythic significance for me). Huston Smith has spoken approvingly of Harding’s work, and even wrote the preface to Harding’s brilliant little book, On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious. Crossing over into my horror interests, I introduced Tom Ligotti to Harding’s work circa 2001, and not long afterward the idea of headlessness began showing up in some of Tom’s output. Obviously, Harding resonates with him, too.
But what about the fact that I haven’t actually read the Hierarchy? That’s an interesting story in its own right, and it gets to the heart of my choice.
A few years ago Harding’s estate published for the first time the complete version of the book, composed of facsimiles of the actual pages Harding typed, wrote, and drew during the eight-year span of the Hierarchy‘s daemonically driven composition after his original mid-1930s mountain top experience – literally, not figuratively; he was actually climbing a mountain when it happened – of awakening to first-personhood. The original edition, published in 1952, was drastically abridged. The new version was a long-awaited publishing revelation. When I saw it announced and read of its ultra-limited-ness, I immediately preordered a copy, and thus became one of only a handful of people on planet earth to own it.
And, to repeat, I have never read it. The book has sat on my shelf almost untouched. Why? For one thing, because it is forbiddingly huge, which means it will inevitably eat up literally years of my life if I dive in, since I know I’ll be helplessly hooked for the duration.
But more importantly there’s the almost perverse fact that, well, I kind of prefer to keep it a mystery. Having read many of Harding’s other writings, I know that he really did hit upon the key to understanding everything, most especially the ontological place of humanity in the cosmos. And he made the special contribution of crystallizing this key, which is so often stated in difficult or opaque fashion by other philosophers and gurus, in an astonishingly straightforward and accessible guiding concept with accompanying practical applications. Notice, he says, that you can never see your own head, that you are actually, in your first-person experience, headless. Use this recognition to extrapolate – experientially, not theoretically – the wider fact that you really are, as a phenomenological fact, not the burdensome, positively existing self that you’ve always thought you are: a vulnerable subject that’s constantly threatened with danger and want. You are verifiably a far wider identity than that. In fact, you are nothing more nor less than pure awareness, pure capacity for experience. This explains everything, including the doctrines all of the world’s great religions.
In short, Harding boiled down the basic nondual insight into easily statable and confirmable form, and he stated it far more easily than I just did. This much I know from reading some of his other work. But in his Hierarchy he laid out the full ramifications of the insight for human life, and for the macrocosmic and microcosmic levels of the universe. I’ve browsed enough in there to be thoroughly dazzled.
And that’s why I prefer in the end to let it all remain sealed up between the book’s covers, safely sheltered from my understanding, or vice versa. As a writer, musician, and thinker, I’m constantly skirting the boundary between mystery and knowledge. I find a bottomless reservoir of energy in the tantalizing interplay between the two, especially as they figure into works of supernaturalism and cosmic dread. Harding, I think, really has said what there is to say about the deep knowledge of heaven and earth, not just partially but completely, as a fully formed statement. It can be said other ways, but he’s one of the few who have said it comprehensively. Therefore, I cherish his book – and choose to leave it tantalizingly unread.
So this is book I would like to have buried with me. I think fondly of it lying forever atop my motionless breast, this literary embodiment of intertwined mystery and knowledge. And I imagine a day when it may greet a would-be grave robber with a suitable coda to the epitaph I hope to have carved on my stone, if I’m worthy: “He honored the mystery.”"
About Matt Cardin:
Matt Cardin is the author of Dark Awakenings and Divinations of the Deep. He’s a staff reviewer for the horror journal Dead Reckonings, and his stories, essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Dark Faith, Cthulhu’s Reign, The HWA Presents: Dark Arts, Cemetery Dance, The Thomas Ligotti Reader, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and elsewhere. He blogs about everything at The Teeming Brain and about consciousness and creativity at Demon Muse. He has an M.A. in religious studies and works as a college teacher in Central Texas, where he resides with his wife.
June 7th, 2010
The twelfth entry in the Bury Me With… series focuses on the London-based mystical urban miserablist Mark Samuels.
“Being buried with a book can lead to later unrest. I think of Dante Gabriel Rossetti having interred, as a tribute, the sole copy of a handwritten volume of his love poems with the corpse of Elizabeth Siddal – only to have her coffin dug up years later when his poetical flood had almost ceased, so that he could retrieve it.
But to answer the question: I should like to be buried with a copy of the Folio Society’s The Quest for Corvo [by A. J. A. Symons]. Biography I often find as compelling than fiction, and the two forms are closely aligned. Attempting to encompass a person’s life (even the dullest) in a few hundred pages is a conceit of outrageous proportions, but a great entertainment. Baron Corvo – Catholic, Arch-Paranoid, author of the magnificent Hadrian VII – affords perfect subject-matter and until such time as we are fortunate enough to have a full-scale biography of Count Stenbock, The Quest for Corvo will be sufficient to keep me company beyond death.”
More information about A.J.A. Symons can be found at Wikipedia.
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About Mark Samuels:
Mark Samuels was born in 1967 in Clapham, south London and grew up in Crystal Palace. His novels and story collections include The White Hands (2003), Black Altars (2003), The Face of Twilight (2006), and Glyphotech (2008). His work has also appeared in magazines and anthologies such as Dementia, Tales from Tartarus, Terror Tales and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Thomas Ligotti called The White Hands “a treasure and a genuine contribution to the real history of weird fiction” and T.E.D. Klein called it “genuinely chilling.”
- Download a PDF of Mark’ short story Vrolyck, (from The White Hands), courtesy of Tartarus Press
- Read an interview with Mark at The Teeming Brain
May 31st, 2010
Deep within Bury Me With’s… eleventh one-book posthumous library* lie insidious and whispering words from the doyen of cosmic hopelessness, Thomas Ligotti:
“The book I would like to be buried with is a book I have never read, and likely never shall read. Its title is Die Philosophie der Erlösung (The Philosophy of Redemption) by Philipp Mainländer (born Philip Batz). The Philosophy of Redemption was published in German in 1876 and has not yet been translated into English. Perhaps it will be so translated before I die; perhaps not. I own a selection of Philipp Mainländer’s works in German that I would like to pay someone to translate, but translators are expensive. I’ve thought about taking on the task myself, but I know enough about the German language not to attempt to become so intimate with it that I could translate the words of a nineteenth-century German philosopher. (See Mark Twain’s The Awful German Language).
While I have not read the massive Philosophy of Redemption, I know its main points from reading others’ writings on it to be absolutely certain that this is the book I want to be buried with. Most of these writings are cited in my book The Conspiracy against the Human Race, which contains a section on Mainländer and his philosophy. Basically, the German pessimist believed in the goodness of the prospect that the human race should become extinct. This good thing would happen, according to Mainländer’s metaphysics, because there exists within humanity a gradually mounting Will-to-die, the mirror image of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Will-to-live as elucidated in his World as Will and Representation (which fortunately has been translated into English three times). Here I quote from Conspiracy:
Mainländer was confident that the Will-to-die he believed would well up in humanity had been spiritually grafted into us by a God who, in the beginning, masterminded His own quietus. It seems that existence was a horror to God. Unfortunately, God was impervious to the depredations of time. This being so, His only means to get free of Himself was by a divine form of suicide.
God’s plan to suicide himself could not work, though, as long as He existed as a unified entity outside of space-time and matter. Seeking to nullify His oneness so that He could be delivered into nothingness, he shattered Himself—Big Bang-like—into the time-bound fragments of the universe, that is, all those objects and organisms that have been accumulating here and there for billions of years. In Mainländer’s philosophy, “God knew that he could change from a state of super-reality into non-being only through the development of a real world of multiformity.” Employing this strategy, He excluded Himself from being. “God is dead,” wrote Mainländer, “and His death was the life of the world.” Once the great individuation had been initiated, the momentum of its creator’s self-annihilation would continue until everything became exhausted by its own existence, which for human beings meant that the faster they learned that happiness was not as good as they thought it would be, the happier they would be to die out….
Rather than resist our end, as Mainländer concludes, we will come to see that “the knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all human wisdom.” Elsewhere the philosopher states, “Life is hell, and the sweet still night of absolute death is the annihilation of hell.”
More beautiful and soothing words I’ve never heard in my life than the above two quotes from Mainländer’s book — the book that I would like to be buried with.”
More information about Philip Mainländer can be found at Wikipedia.
* Thomas Ligotti’s words.
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About Thomas Ligotti:
Thomas Ligotti is often cited as the most curious and remarkable figure in horror literature since H. P. Lovecraft. His work is noted by critics for its display of an exceptionally grotesque imagination and accomplished prose style. In his stories, Ligotti has followed a literary tradition that began with Edgar Allan Poe, portraying characters that are outside of anything that might be called normal life, depicting strange locales far off the beaten track, and rendering a grim vision of human existence as a perpetual nightmare. His works include:
Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1986, rev. & exp. 1989), Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991), Noctuary (1994), The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales (1994), The Nightmare Factory (1996), In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land (1997, accompanying CD by Current 93), I Have a Special Plan for This World (2000, accompanying CD by Current 93), This Degenerate Little Town (2001, accompanying CD by Current 93), My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror (2002), Crampton: A Screenplay (2003, with Brandon Trenz), Sideshow, and Other Stories (2003), Death Poems (2004), The Shadow at the Bottom of the World (2005), Teatro Grottesco (2006, reprinted in 2008), The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (published in April, 2010 by Hippocampus Press).
May 24th, 2010
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They were composed for the holidays in the first place. James wrote all except one of the stories in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary to read aloud to friends at Kings College at Christmas (the last, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas is for me the least satisfying of the collection and was written at the publisher’s request to fill up the volume). So they are party pieces, really, candlelit, donnish entertainments, to be enjoyed with wine and anchovy toast after chapel on Christmas Eve. James’s protagonists are often solitary men, even lonely men, and this often leaves them vulnerable to inexplicable phenomena, but he’s not out to describe or inspire any existential agony. He doesn’t show us a cruel, random universe. His is a world of cathedral precincts and pipesmoke-filled hotel sitting-rooms, into which the monsters and grotesques that lurk in the margins of his beloved medieval manuscripts sometimes intrude. If James has a world view it is, as he admits himself, a very simple one – that there is more in heaven and earth, Horatio… And that golf is an inexplicable waste of time.
The story makes the being’s “intensely horrible face of crumpled linen” the focal point of the terror. James McBryde pays more attention to the grimace of its victim: in the picture Parkins is skeletal, his mouth a lunatic rictus, his cheeks hollowed out by a scream. The story has him lurching out of the window to escape his attacker; McBryde hems him in against a chest of drawers, his claw-like hands reaching out to fend off a being that he is too terrified to touch. Like the best book illustrations, it not only complements MRJ’s prose, it adds to the enjoyment of it.
About Robert Lloyd Parry:
