Many of you will be familiar with our guest today, Johnny Mains. His mission to resurrect The Pan Book of Horror Stories has made him an instant legend in the horror community. As I said to him in a recent Facebook exchange, he is at the forefront of Horror Reanimation.
I invited Johnny to join us here in the Hell-realms of Horror Reanimated where we could interrogate him properly – a chat on Facebook never quite satisfies, does it? At least down here, where the walls drip pus-thick sulphur and our interrogation equipment never fails, we could get to know each other…more intimately. He could barely wait to get his genitals through our mini-guillotine!
Unfortunately, Johnny pressed the wrong button in the lift (B is for Blowtorch not Basement!) and got a bit of a roasting.
Joseph D’Lacey: Hi, Johnny. Thanks for riding the elevator down to Satan’s crypt – where the resident bloggers are enslaved for all eternity. You’re looking a little crispy but I’m sure we can soon excise the excess dermis. Anyway, we’re delighted to have you here – Mathew’s been blunting his razors in anticipation.
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July 6th, 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?
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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
I first discovered today’s featured artist when I stumbled across his blog. I’d been Googling my short story ‘The Food of Love’ to see if its ghost remained online. Instead, I found Nick’s site and his detailed explanation of an illustration titled ‘Brainburgers’. Nick had been commissioned to provide art for my story in an anthology now titled Darc Karnivale. His image of zombies queuing for ‘Brainburgers’ in a fast food joint appears in the book, as do many other fine examples of Nick’s work.
As you’ll glean from his frank responses to our questions, Nick has survived a lot to get where he is today.
Joseph D’Lacey: Welcome to Horror Reanimated, Nick. I’m glad you could make it all the way out to our quaint little corner of Hell.
Nick Rose: Joseph, I am very honoured. You know you’re Madison’s and my favourite writer, and you’re a wonderful man on top of that. Illustrating “The Food of Love” was probably my favourite assignment to date. And guess what? – This time next month everyone will be able to have a print or T-shirt with “Brainburgers” on it. And don’t worry, brother, if we sell a good many of these, we’ll send some money your way! After all, you gave me the idea…
Actually, this will be the very first time that fans and friends can buy prints of Nick Rose art. I really hope that I get the chance to work on more of your stories in the future.
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June 17th, 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. (more…)
June 7th, 2010
Oh, joy!
Tonight, after months of scheming and dirty deals, I have finally snared the slippery and elusive Jasper Bark, author of Dawn Over Doomsday and Way of the Barefoot Zombie. We tracked him down using private detectives, crooked coppers and undercover prostitutes. After a failed blackmail attempt, we kidnapped his children. He said we could keep them. In the end, we had to resort to a large transfer of funds into his numbered Swiss account. There’s nothing we won’t do for you, the horror-lover, here at Horror Reanimated.
Okay, that’s a complete lie. We should have strapped Jasper into the ‘interview chair’ several months ago but I forgot.
Still, he’s comfortable now. Ears pinned to the backboard with carpet tacks, hands nailed to the armrests with a staple-gun. We removed his foreskin and eyelids – purely for reasons of hygiene, you understand; the filth of the dungeon just doesn’t enter the bloodstream properly if we don’t take certain precautions. Septicaemia should be setting in about now…
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June 4th, 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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