16 September 1997: The Shadow Over Madison

Tuesday, 16 September 1997:

The Shadow Over Madison

So I woke up this morning, and it was chilly and foggy and terribly humid, and the radio was talking about chance of rain in the afternoon and near-certain rain in the evening. And I haven't slept well the last couple of nights and felt generally groggy (and having a furry, purring cat lying on the pillow next to my head didn't help get me out of bed).

So I drove to work, rather than biking. What a slug I am!

After work I had more shopping to do - new sunglasses, new sheets, new belt, all that sort of stuff. (I also need a new electric razor, but haven't found the one I want. I wonder if the standard two-blade Remington Microscreen has been discontinued?) I also stopped at the excellent Frugal Muse books, which sells used books, CDs, videos, and a few comic books. However, I didn't really find anything I wanted this time; but it's always fun to browse.

(I did chuckle that Dr. Laura Schlessinger's new book, Ten Stupid Things Men Do To Screw Up Their Lives, is already showing up in the used stores. What a self-righteous ass she is!)

This evening it was time for more cleaning: Sweep the floor, mop the floor, clean the toilet, do more laundry. All this and I have an APAzine I need to finish by Saturday!

I forgot to mention that when I was at Hope and Karl's last night, their tenant Bill came back. Bill works at Pegasus Games downtown, which is an outstanding gaming store, and he's also a gaming buddy of mine once in a while. I guess he had an extra copy of the pre-fab edition of Mythos, Chaosium Games' collectible card game based on the books of H.P. Lovecraft. I haven't yet played it, but I would like to do so at some point.

I've always enjoyed Lovecraft, not so much because he's a great storyteller (his prose is below-average), but because he's a great idea man, and was one of the masters at unfolding a horror tale without becoming gruesome. Basically the prototypical "there are some things man was not meant to know" author. Favorite stories of his include The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward, "In The Walls of Eryx" (which is actually an SF story), "The Cats of Ulther" (and most of the rest of his Dreamlands stories, really), "The Doom That Came To Sarnath", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", "Pickman's Model", and of course his many great Cthulhu stories, especially "The Shadow Out Of Time".

I'm also a fan of Clark Ashton Smith, one of Lovecraft's contemporaries, whose stories were more fantastical, plumbing the depths of fantasy-horror rather than contemporary-horror. His best work is mostly contained in the volume Zothique, which consists of stories of the last continent on Earth, many millions of years hence. Although his basic stories are somewhat more pedestrian in concept than Lovecraft's, he's a fundamentally better writer and is slightly more terrifying for it. His best story, I think, is "The Empire Of The Necromancers".

In these days of big-budget movies, the concept of "science fiction horror" and "fantasy horror" tends to mean "slasher flicks in space" a la Event Horizon. I think there's actually a lot of territory yet to be covered in doing genuinely terrifying - but not grotesque and bloody - stories set against a science fictional or fantasy backdrop. Although Lovecraft and his kin are much-revered these days, I don't think they're much followed.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)