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The seventh Bury Me With… and Devon-based, cosmically tentacled, blood sucking, mind-reading legend Brian Lumley explains his choice for his own literary-accompanied interment:

“I’ve been a fan of Jack Vance for as long as I can remember. Bury me with one of his books, by all means! Why? Because he can make light of the direst of situations — and I can’t think of a more dire situation than reading in the ultimate darkness. The book I’m talking about would be Cugel’s Saga. Anyone who hasn’t read it doesn’t know what he’s missing. Some of the funniest, cleverest stuff in modern fantasy fiction, not to mention some of the most nightmarish!

I wouldn’t want anything by Poe – let’s face it,  he’s already been prematurely buried!”

More information about Jack Vance’s Cugel’s Saga at Wikipedia.

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Quite a lot about Brian Lumley:

Born 2nd December, 1937, Brian Lumley came into the world just nine months after the most obvious of his forebears – meaning of course a “literary” forebear, namely, H. P. Lovecraft – had departed from it. By his pre-teens Lumley had read Dracula and some other horror classics, but having followed the adventures of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future in the British Eagle comic, his first love was Science Fiction. Then, in his early teens – as a result of reading Robert Bloch’s Lovecraft pastiche Notebook Found in a Deserted House in a British SF magazine – he became more surely attracted to macabre fiction, an attraction that has lasted a lifetime.

Later still, in his early twenties while serving with the Corps of Royal Military Police in Germany, on finding a collection of stories by Lovecraft himself, Lumley began searching for every available item of the author’s work. This culminated in his contacting HPL’s publisher August Derleth in Sauk City, Wisconsin, in order to purchase the one or two volumes still missing from his collection. Then, after Derleth had read various “extracts” from the Necronomicon and other fictional “Black Books” of the so-called Cthulhu Mythos, which Lumley had included in his letters, he asked if the aspiring author had anything solid he could use in a book he was preparing for publication, to be entitled Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Thus Lumley began writing in earnest. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Derleth included stories by Lumley in a number of Arkham House anthologies and went on to publish three of the author’s books. One was a short novel with the title Beneath the Moors; the others were collections of short stories and novellas: The Caller of The Black and The Horror at Oakdeene. These stories, set mainly in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos milieu, echoed HPL’s literary style: a somewhat archaic, adjectival mode of writing which, during the course of Lumley’s military career, he would gradually eschew in favour of his own very distinctive style.

Despite that Lumley completed a full term of 22 years with the RMP – during which time he rose to the rank of Warrant Officer and, in his final years, served as the WO Chief Instruction (the DI) at the RMP Depot and Training Establishment – still he managed to write and see published his three Arkham books plus the first of the six paperback novels in his Titus Crow series, and the stand-alone novel, Khai of Ancient Khem, while he was still a soldier. But by then: “it was time for the serious stuff!”

Having “retired” from the Army in December 1980, Lumley became “a professional author” (he had never really considered himself that way before) and of necessity began to write in earnest. he still had a projected series of four books in H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dreamlands milieu” to complete, during the writing of which he began the Psychomech trilogy, the very first of his works (with the exception of a handful of short stories) to be published in the United Kingdom.

Then came his breakthrough book. In March to September 1984 he wrote his dead-waking, ground-breaking horror novel Necroscope®, featuring Harry Keogh, the man who can talk to dead people. Not at first realizing, however, how successful this book would be (for it would eventually become a best-selling series), in late 1984 early 1985 he wrote the stand-alone novel Demogorgon. Also in ‘85 to early 1986, he completed his “Dreamlands” series with a book of short stories and novellas called Iced on Aran; which will explain the gap between the writing of Necroscope and Necroscope II: Wamphyri! After Wamphyri!, however, Necroscope III: The Source, took only five months to complete in 1987, and with the first two volumes having seen initial paperback publication in the UK, finally the trilogy was picked up by TOR Books, USA. Except it wasn’t going to stop at being a trilogy!

Such was the appeal of the Necroscope books that TOR published the so-called trilogy in the space of just twelve months: September 1988 to September 1989 — by which time Lumley had written Necroscopes IV and V: Deadspeak and Deadspawn. And in just five years, 1984 to 1989, the financial problems which the author had experienced on leaving the Army were well and truly behind him. Bestsellers in the USA, his books had already passed one million sales and were heading for two million.

But still the story wasn’t finished; in fact it wasn’t half-way there yet! Such had been the success of the first five volumes, and such was the demand from readers, that Lumley went straight on from Deadspawn to commence writing the massive Vampire World Trilogy, which he considers his finest, most ambitious and important work. Begun in 1991, finished in 1993, Blood Brothers, The Last Aerie and Bloodwars between them contain some three-quarters of a million words of horror, fantasy … even a little of the author’s first love, Science Fiction.

In 1994, just short of six years since publishing the original Necroscope, TOR began reprinting the entire series in hardcovers: a rare event in the modern publishing world. And Blood Brothers was the first Necroscope – or more properly the first series spin-off – to be published in hardcovers from the outset. The rest of the volumes in this incredible series have all followed suit. Their titles are:

The Lost Years and Lost Years Two: Resurgence – the Invaders Trilogy: Invaders, Defilers and Avengers – and the novellas: Harry Keogh: Necroscope and Other Weird Heroes – and, in the Summer of 2006, Necroscope: The Touch. Harry and the Pirates – a volume of Necroscope novellas – appeared in 2009, and one final novella is promised.

Thirteen countries and counting have now published, or are in the process of publishing these and others of Lumley’s novels and short story collections, which in the USA alone have sold well over three million copies. In addition, Necroscope comic books, graphic novels, a role-playing game, quality figurines, and in Germany a series of audio books have been created from themes and characters in the Necroscope books, and Lumley has added his “real” voice to Dangerous Ground, a Downliners Sect rock-&-roll album released in the UK in 2004.

Lumley’s works other than Necroscope – such as his SF-ish novel The House of Doors and its sequel Maze of Worlds; also a dozen collections gathered from his more than 130 short stories and novellas, most notably Fruiting Bodies & Other Fungi, whose title story won a British Fantasy Award in 1989 – have seen or are seeing print in many European countries as well as the USA, and all the while his reputation is growing apace. As far back as 1990, the readers of Fear Magazine voted Lumley “Best Established Genre Author” for The Source, and his short story Necros (not a Necroscope spin-off!) was adapted for Ridley Scott’s The Hunger series on the USA’s Showtime Television series. But best of all, in 1998 as Guest of Honour at the World Horror Convention in Phoenix, AZ, he received the genre’s most coveted Grand Master Award in recognition of his work. Moreover, the original Necroscope has now been optioned (and four times re-optioned) for a major film, and the original trilogy will be included in the deal if there’s a follow through.

From 2000 through 2007 fans of Necroscope and Lumley’s other works convened at the annual KeoghCon, and there celebrated with the author and his wife Barbara Ann, who is known to one and all as “Silky;” where each successive year forged stronger bonds between the members of this much extended “family” of friends and fans. (As for the last word, “fans:” Lumley prefers to refer to these people — his friends — as “dedicated readers.”)

Widely travelled, Brian Lumley has visited or lived in the USA, France, Italy, Cyprus, Germany, Malta, Canada, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, not to mention a dozen or more Greek islands. He still makes regular visits to the Mediterranean, indulging a passion for moussaka, retsina, just a little ouzo … and Metaxa, naturally! In addition – as icing on the baklava – Necroscope and its sequels, along with others of his books, are now appearing in Greek translations.

UPDATE LATE 2009: Recently, both Subterranean Press in the USA and Solaris in the UK have published two companion volumes of Lumley’s previously uncollected Cthulhu Mythos tales: The Taint and Other Novellas and Haggopian and Other Mythos Tales. Other books from Subterranean include a very special edition of Necroscope®, Brian Lumley’s Freaks, Screaming Science Fiction, A Coven of Vampires,  The Nonesuch and Others and Necroscope: The Plague-Bearer (forthcoming).

As for the future: “Well, the future is always uncertain.” But with several books from an extensive backlist awaiting reissue, it certainly isn’t over yet!

When they’re not travelling, the Lumleys keep house in Torquay, Devon, England…

• Visit Brian’s website.

Horror Reanimated… the home of Bloody Books

The ninth featured author is the truly scary Adam Nevill, who tells me about the book that means everything to him…

“I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at the age of sixteen. At that age my relationship with fiction was based upon classic ghost stories, Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, Lovecraft, Tolkien, Lovecraft, Stephen King, pulp horror, and more Lovecraft. Which was all accompanied by a relentless soundtrack of pounding heavy metal, chiefly Iron Maiden and Deep Purple. I was also an acutely sensitive, self-loathing and angry misfit, displaced from New Zealand, and quite ashamed of the maelstrom of creative energy I had no outlet for, as well as being convinced that I was destined to be a pariah and too absurdly different from most anyone I knew. A familiar profile, I’m sure. And then I passed into the sixth form and just had my eyes opened on the A Level English Literature course.

I was surrounded by great novels at home, but had churlishly resisted anything that wasn’t horror or fantasy, as I’d foolishly imagined that anything else was conservative, dull, impenetrable, and not meant for such a loathsome creature of the shadows such as I. A levels back then were more rigorous than degrees and very hard to pass; you would study a dozen texts in minute detail with senior teachers in small classes, over two years, and then pass or fail in two three hour exams per subject at the end of the second year; there was no assessment. Less than 10% of school leavers made it to university. And I remember when my teacher Mr O’Brien, took me through Joyce’s Portrait in the lower sixth, I was stunned. Just stunned by revelation after revelation within the text. It was as if I’d waited my whole life for that one book to make sense of myself.

The lead character has a poor Catholic boyhood in turn-of-the-century Ireland, which was about as far away from Birmingham in the 80’s as you could get, but the young Dedalus’s responses and reactions to the world – the very manner in which he felt and perceived life – I identified with at a profound level.  This book articulated how I had always felt. It overwhelmed; nothing had inspired me as much until that point; I felt confirmed and immensely comforted by reading it; it made me feel more defined. No work of art, nothing, had been such a revelation. It sounds horribly self-serious and pretentious now (and I was all of those things, as Dedalus is too), but I finally better understood what I could be. And as it’s a narrative of infancy to adulthood, I felt as if Dedalus’s childhood, his boyhood, and his adolescence were emotionally and cerebrally a mirror of my own; there were a hundred years between the character of Dedalus and myself, and a sea, but the underlying basis to our characters, I felt, was the same. Applicable to me in my time.

And that was it; I knew what I was going to do in this life: I was going to write. I remember plodding past the lower school field, silver-framed glasses twinkling, a long fringe in my eyes, scruffy bag over my shoulder, denim jacket festooned with Rainbow and Iron Maiden patches, when the vow was made.

And as set out by Joyce, I then followed the old school route to writing: reading the canon of what had gone before me; acquiring experience for its own sake; endlessly revising to acquire the craft; seeking mentors. A purpose for life. It guided the choices I then made for my future. It’s the book that changed my life.

And Joyce was a great poet; he is a master of language like a great poet, so his language is so precise, his description in the novel so multi-sensory, so transporting, so powerful. I can think of few better written novels. The closest I had come to such richness before was in Ray Bradbury’s fiction. Becoming a better reader makes you a better writer; it opens your eyes to different ways of writing, not just the means of expressing yourself, but choices that can be made about narrative, about point-of-view, about voice. I then looked at the seemingly endless library of literary and canonised fiction and felt utterly humbled by my ignorance. So I took an English degree to find a way into it – especially modernism – and to find teachers who could unlock it for me. I put down my pen and decided I could not write again until I had read much more. So much more.

I never returned to reading genre fiction until about ten years later, but have a better appreciation of the weird and fantastic in fiction now because of this break, in which I read widely of the 20th century classics, with an emphasis on modernism, and am a better equipped reader now to fully appreciate the best in our field too.

In terms of the affecting nature of Joyce’s language, there are many passages dealing with Stephen’s terror of eternal damnation, while he is tormented by the great struggle within himself, between a calling to the mysticism of the Jesuits, and his desire to be an artist, that just terrified me. It made my own pathetic inner turmoil pale in comparison. Here he dreams of hell:

A field of stiff weeds and thistles and tufted nettle bunches. Thick among the tufts of rank stiff growth lay battered canisters and clots and coils of solid excrement. A faint marshlight struggled upwards from all the ordure through the bristling greygreen weeds. An evil smell, faint and foul as the light, curled upwards sluggishly out of the canisters and from the stale crusted dung.

Creatures were in the field; one, three, six: creatures were moving in the field, hither and thither. Goatish creatures with human faces, hornybrowed, lightly bearded and grey as India-rubber. The malice of evil glittered in their hard eyes, as they moved hither and thither, railing their long tails behind them. A rictus of cruel malignity lit up greyly their old bony faces. One was clasping about its ribs a torn flannel waistcoat, another complained monotonously as his beard stuck in the tufted weeds. Soft language issued from their spittleless lips as they swished in slow circles round and round the field, winding hither and thither through the weeds, dragging their long tails amid the rattling canisters. They moved in slow circles, circling closer and closer to enclose, to enclose, soft language issuing from their lips, their long tails swishing besmeared with stale shite, thrusting upwards their terrific faces …

The poetry of terror is right there; perfect choice of diction, precise repetition. It’s probably only bettered in the novel by a description of eternal suffering, that left me aghast and agape.

Portrait also developed in me an insatiable appetite for the great outsider literature, and eventually led me to Hunger by Hamson, Steppenwolf by Hesse; The Moon and Sixpence by Maugham, Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, The Outsider by Camut and Colin Wilson respectively, Notes from the Underground by Doestoyevsky,  Ask the Dust by John Fante, Factotum and Post Office by Bukowski , Youth by Coetze. Novels about the great struggle of self actualisation in a creative soul; the inner conflict between a calling and convention, between exile or a life of quiet repression; and the external battle between the artist and components of the world, ranging from family, society, religion, the status quo, or consensus of a particular time, in order to pursue art/writing as a vocation, as a purpose for life. And there is no greater examination of the alienation and eventual self-imposed exile of an artist than in Joyce’s Portrait.

When Dedalus is finally confirmed in his purpose, after a experiencing an epiphany, a moment of striking beauty in which a mixture of the divine and the natural world combines around him and within his senses, there is this great moment of becoming. It follows a simple, innocent and purely visual encounter with a girl on a beach; a girl that becomes his muse:

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness – He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.

Her image had passed into his soul forever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph. To recreate life out of life.

I can’t think of a better way of expressing the role of an artist. I’ve kept this as a kind of motto: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph. To recreate life out of life.” Stephen then collapses amongst the sand dunes “that the peace and silence of the evening might still the riot of his blood.” I just love that: “the riot of his blood.”

Of course Joyce deliberately uses sentiment and irony and humour to poke fun at the young pretentious artist, and at himself when he was an emerging writer, but I can find no better model of becoming a writer in fiction. If things had turned out differently, I guess, this is also the book that would have buried me.”

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About Adam Nevill:

Adam Nevill is the author of Banquet for the Damned – a novel of supernatural horror, published by PS Publishing and Virgin Books, and nine other novels under a pseudonym. His latest novel, Apartment 16, (click to read my review) is published in May 2010 by Pan Macmillan, which he is signing at Forbidden Planet in London on May 20th.

• Visit Adam’s website
• Visit Adam’s blog, A Scarecrow Screams
• Adam takes part in a discussion about horror over on the Blog With Bite

Horror Reanimated… the home of Bloody Books

It’s the tenth instalment of Bury Me With… and the book dark cosmic speculist Laird Barron wants to be buried with is…

“T.E.D. Klein’s Dark Gods, a quartet of novellas that hit the stands in 1985 as a follow-up to his famous novel The Ceremonies. Klein, a respected former editor of The Twilight Zone Magazine, gave us a tour de force with his novella collection and demonstrated his standing as a master craftsman possessed of a sophisticated and cerebral style matched by perhaps a handful of modern fantasists.

The contents of Dark Gods include Children of the Kingdom, in which the author is enthralled by the tales of an old priest regarding lost tribes, subterranean kingdoms, and an ancient evil that occasionally rises to plague the surface world; the events of Petey transpire during a housewarming party in a remote Connecticut mansion as guests slowly uncover a macabre puzzle left behind by the former, utterly mad occupant; Black Man with a Horn may well be the crown jewel of the set — certainly a classic homage to Lovecraft’s Mythos in which an elderly author shares a plane ride with a missionary who’s convinced agents of a diabolical tribe are stalking him; Nadelman’s God is the tale of a man whose melodramatic college-era poetry has been co-opted by a lunatic who believes it possesses the power to summon a monstrous supernatural entity. Hilarity ensues.

Dark Gods has exerted some influence on my writing career. It reinforced my long held notion that novella-length horror is the genre at its most sublime. Klein’s masterpiece, alongside Peter Straub’s Ghost Story and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, is always close at hand. I often open it at random to instruct  myself in the fine art of building atmosphere that gradually, and inexorably, draws in the reader and delivers unto him or her an exquisite thrill; a glimpse of the numinous in the yellowed and curling pages of an ‘80s paperback.”

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About Laird Barron:

Laird Barron is the author of two collections: The Imago Sequence & Other Stories, and Occultation; both from Night Shade Books. His work has appeared in places such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Lovecraft Unbound, Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, Clockwork Phoenix, and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It has also been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies. Mr. Barron is an expatriate Alaskan currently at large in Washington State.

• Visit Laird’s website and journal
• Read interviews with Laird at Clarkesworld Magazine, and at Books Are My Only Friends – Part 1, Part 2

Horror Reanimated… the home of Bloody Books

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.

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

Horror Reanimated… the home of Bloody Books

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.

Horror Reanimated… the home of Bloody Books

Variety reports David R. Ellis has been tapped to direct Humpty Dumpty, a 3-D sci-fi horror pic is about a half-human, half-alien creature who embarks on a murderous rampage after his alien mother is abused by two rednecks in the Deep South.

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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.

◊◊◊

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).

• Visit Thomas’ community website
• Read an interview with Thomas at Horror Garage

Horror Reanimated… the home of Bloody Books

It never fails.  You and your friends are sitting around, watching some horror heroine put the smack down on the bad guy(s), and one of them says, “Man, I’d love to get with that”. No, you wouldn’t.

Sure, horror heroines are tough, smart and sexy, but they’ve got more baggage than an airport.  There’s no doubt that these women bring the goods, but the sorts of things that you’d have to put up with if you dated one of them should put you off the idea for good.

Listed below are five horror heroines who, while all wonderful in their own way, are more trouble than you’d ever want to deal with.  The heroines are listed in order from simply bad to date, all the way up to absolutely catastrophic to date.  While the list is dedicated to the fellas, I’ve got a little something for the ladies at the bottom.

5:  Laurie Strode (Halloween): Laurie has some nice qualities.  She’s resourceful, thoughtful and not hard on the eyes.  The catch here is that she has a stalker.  The Shape is not the “hide in the bushes and make threatening phone calls” sort of stalker.  He’s the “break into your house and stab the living crap out of you” sort of stalker.  Did I mention that he’s virtually indestructible?  Definitely another mark against her.

On the plus side, he’s fairly predictable.  He likes to show up around Halloween.  It doesn’t seem like it would be too difficult to plan your vacation for whatever week Halloween falls on and just give him the slip entirely.  I figure he’ll blow into town, off a few people, get himself shot/stabbed/blown up/whatever and carted away, all while you’re sipping drinks with little umbrellas in the tropics.  It’s just a matter of making sure that you’ve already left by the time he arrives and don’t return until he’s gone.

Due to the ease with which you can evade The Shape, combined with Laurie’s level of pure awesomeness in dealing with a guy that should’ve snapped her like a twig, Laurie is number five on the list.  In all honesty, if you’re planning on just having a “spring fling” with Laurie, then I’d remove her from the list entirely.  I would advise, however, that if she’s hanging up the shirts and you’re feeling amorous, DO NOT try to sneak up behind her and give her a kiss.  She’s dangerous with a hanger.

4:  Selene (Underworld): Gorgeous face, killer body and sexy in every sense of the word, Selene looks like a keeper.  Looks, as they say, can be deceiving.  The problem with Selene is that you two have absolutely nothing in common.

What are you going to talk about?  When you’re sitting at the breakfast table, talking about how work was last night, how is that going to play out?  She’ll say something like, “…so then I managed to behead the third Lycan while simultaneously putting a bullet through the heart of the double-crossing vampire that set me up.”  Then it’ll be your turn, whereupon your story will go something like,  “…then I stepped from behind the counter and told both of them to take the video games out of their jackets and leave before I called the cops.  I know it doesn’t sound like much, but they were pretty big for thirteen year-olds.”

As already mentioned, Selene is beautiful, but how’s the sex going to work out?  Sex is a full-contact sport and, like all such sports, the better the shape that you’re in, the better at it you’re likely going to be.  Selene is in phenomenally fantastic physical condition.  Your training regimen is probably not as rigorous as hers (nor are you a vampire), so what this boils down to is you being just some flabby, frail, sex-toy.  Your stamina is a joke and you’ll be huffing and gasping for air long before she’s even close to satisfied.  I know what you’re thinking, “I don’t care.  As long as I’m getting some of that, I’m okay.”  Let me reply by saying first that, considering your attitude towards attending a woman’s sexual needs, I can’t imagine why you’re still single.  It’s a true conundrum.  Second, do you know what kind of injury a rupture of the tunica albuginea is?  No?  Don’t worry, you’re going to find out the hard way.

While the constant reminders of your physical inadequacies is definitely a let-down, the fact that Selene is absurdly sexy offsets that somewhat, placing Selene at the number four spot.

3:  Rachel Keller (The Ring): Drop-dead gorgeous with a mind for uncovering facts, Rachel’s like a super-hot version of Nancy Drew.  She’s got a kid and, depending on how you feel about that sort of thing, that may or may not be a deal-breaker.  Assuming that you can get over the kid, there’s one other snag:  Samara.

On the off-chance that you’re unfamiliar with Samara, she’s a supernatural killer.  What’s her modus operandi, you ask?  You watch a movie and seven days later she hauls herself out of a TV, shuffles across your floor, (tracking water everywhere she goes, like you need another mess to clean up), gets all up in your face and then tries to scare you to death by flashing you her toughest mean-mug.  Of course, if you wanted drenched, black-hair-dyed, emo tweens to glare at you, you’d trip the sprinkler system at a Hot Topic.  Since you’ve never done that (I’m guessing), you probably don’t want to deal with the hassle that is Samara.

You’re not going to give Samara the slip, either.  Oh, sure, that might work on The Shape, but Samara is more persistent.  Therefore, you’re going to have to get a little more creative when dealing with her.  Consider, on the seventh day, having your dog pee in front of the TV.  When she crawls her soggy ass out of the TV, she just might be disgusted enough to go back in.

Unfortunately, no matter what you do, she’ll be back at some point and you’ll have to go through this whole charade over and over.  There’s probably always going to be some nitwit jamming the stupid tape into a VCR somewhere (although, if we consider the relative obsolescence of the VCR, this shouldn’t be happening too many more times).  Rachel feels that she can’t just let these people die off, so she’ll always be rushing off to help them and destroy copies of the tape whenever she can.  She’s probably going to want you to go with her, which means you’ll have to deal with Samara…again.

Rachel’s certainly a babe, but the fact that she has a kid and she won’t just walk away from Samara (meaning that you’ll have to keep saving both her AND her kid), is why she finds herself at the number three position.

2 Kirsty Cotton (Hellraiser) : Kirsty has a girl-next-door sort of beauty about her that really makes her appealing.  Kirsty has a mind that’s razor-sharp and she’s tough as nails.    Kirsty is smart, but she’s also willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done.

Kirsty is also about a thousand times harder than you.  She is absolutely cool with doing things that you’re probably not.  Like deliberately going to Hell.  Or wearing her stepmother’s skin.

Don’t get me wrong, she’s not doing this stuff for kicks, she’s got an agenda.  But you’ve got to be seriously hardcore to see four Cenobites and immediately think to yourself, “I should get those guys to drag my uncle back into Hell, act like they’re gonna get me too and then give ‘em the old fifty-two fake out with the puzzle box”.  You’ve got to be even harder to actually do it.

When Cenobites appear, she seems alert, but not particularly horrified.  When she sees a Cenobite, she steels her resolve and gets ready to make a deal.  You probably think that you’d do the same, but I think your track record tells a different story.  Remember that time you found a dead snake in your yard and you needed to find a stick longer than your whole body before you’d pick it up?  Cenobites are slightly creepier than that, so I figure that when you see one, you’ll curl up in the corner and hug your knees as tears stream down your face with a snot-trail all the way down to your chin.  After something like that, I’m guessing that you’ll be moving, changing your cell phone number, deleting all of your e-mail and IM accounts and praying she can’t find you.  This is, of course, futile as Kirsty is the same person who successfully navigated her way through Hell.  Good luck, though.

#1 Sidney Prescott (Scream): Sidney’s got that special “something” that makes her instantly adorable.  It’s difficult to nail down exactly what that something is, but whatever it is, she’s got it in spades.  Those perfect lips and sultry eyes don’t hurt.

The main problem with Sidney is that if you’re her boyfriend, you’re going to get cut, shot and, ultimately, killed.  I don’t mean that you might get killed; you’re a dead man.  Sidney’s boyfriends wind up in body bags and that’s probably something you’re trying to avoid.  Strangely, this isn’t the worst thing about dating Sidney.

Sidney has a way of being chased by some of the most inept, illogical dumbasses ever.  These people always have some absurd beef with Sidney, but rather than just walk up behind her and pump a slug through her head, they come up with schemes so convoluted that you expect Fred, Thelma and the rest of the gang to jump out and apprehend them.  The nonsensical gibberish these people string together to justify their idiocy will make you pray for death.

Unfortunately for you, at least one of them (they often travel in pairs) is going to run down their ridiculous 1980′s Saturday morning cartoon-style plan before you die.  What’s even worse is that you fell for it.  Some of you are probably thinking that you’d be willing to take that hit if you could just get with Sidney.  Uh-huh.  Remember that time one of your girlfriends suggested that you get in shape, so you decided to do some sit-ups but stopped after about seven because your stomach started to hurt and so you sat on the couch with a beer instead?  It’ll be like that, but instead of your stomach hurting because of sit-ups, it’ll be because you just got stabbed.  Also, instead of sitting on the couch with a beer, you’ll be laying on the slab with an embalming machine.  Sidney’s cute, but she’s not that cute.

Due to the fact that your death is guaranteed, as well as you having to fall victim to some of the most scatterbrained villains in the history of the world, Sidney manages to snag the top spot.

And now a word to the ladies (told you I’d get back to you).  Every time some guy talks about how this-or-that horror heroine is awesome and how they’d love to date her (or is simply ogling her like she’s an eye-exam chart), I see your shoulders slump, your arms cross and watch you slouch down in your chair.  I imagine this is because you’re comparing yourself to her and you’re feeling inadequate.  This is some of that crazy, wacky, weird woman-logic that we men just don’t understand.  Let’s step off to the sidelines for a minute.

In the old days of horror movies, women usually just stood around screaming, waiting to get rescued by the big, strong men.  Eventually this stereotype was discarded because of its absurdity.  Women rarely ever sit around waiting for a man to rescue them, because they don’t need to do so.  Women are fast on their feet.  Think about all those times you intended to make one thing for dinner, but were either missing some crucial ingredient or you suddenly remembered that someone doesn’t like what you were planning to make, so you improvised on the fly and came up with something that satisfied everyone.  Women are capable.  Think about all those times that you picked up a wrench, screwdriver, hammer or paintbrush, rather than wait for a man to get around to doing it.  And finally, for the acid test, think about which parent a child calls out for when he’s hurt.  To a child, mommy is basically a goddess draped in flesh that single-handedly and simultaneously soothes injuries, egos and fears.  I’d take a woman with those attributes over a woman who is always on the verge of being stabbed, mauled or soul-flayed any day…and so would every other man.

So ladies, the next time you’re with your significant other and his jaw is on the floor while some horror heroine is saving the day, relax.  Just smile, lean back, pat your man on the back, allow him to engage in his ten-second fantasy and always remember this:   Those horror heroines are trying to live up to the ideals set by you, not the other way around.  Now let’s get off the sidelines and back in the game.  I can’t wait to see what you (and by extension, the women of horror) are going to do next.

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