What Do I Want?

As I sit here to stare at the blank page and to worry about the upcoming book, I ask myself: What do I want?

What do I really want?

I want to show different ways to write horror fiction. These ways are not better than approaches used by other people, and -- I hope! -- not worse, but they are my ways, and they do the work I ask of them.

Along with methods, I want to show an imagery that is mine, based on dreams, on hillside wanderings near midnight, on things half-seen beyond the pines and aspens but felt right down the spinal chord. I trust my obsessions, even as they force me to question my competence in describing them.

I want to satisfy readers impatient with easy tricks and cliched concepts, readers with no tolerance for show-offs, bores, and fakes. Readers who toss books aside in disgust at such things are the people I respect as my friends and allies.

Above all, I want to be known as a writer who did his best even if the odds were against him, even if he had no patience for the postmodern smog or the zeitgeist of corporate consumerist fairy tales that guarantee public acceptance. I want to make other people with similar allergies and doubts feel less odd, less isolated, less alone. You are not the only ones who feel this way.

De Heredia versus Dr. Seuss

Click for a better jpeg, but don't expect a better parody.

"Quelle est l'ombre qui rend plus sombre encor mon antre?"
-- From LES TROPHEÉS, 1893.

As much as I respect the sonnets of José-Maria de Heredia, I do find some of his lines (unintentionally?) funny. That question from "Sphinx" would fit right into a translated book by Dr. Seuss.

I can admire his economy of means, his control of language, his refusal to pad the sonnets with images or metaphors that do not contribute to his planned effect, but at the same time, I don't sense any person behind the words, and I feel as if his focus on classical topics were an evasion of modern life.

In contrast, when Leconte de Lisle writes about distant cultures and distant places, I do get a sense of who he is, and this impression is reinforced whenever he denounces the modernity of his time, or stares into the future and sees a world without human beings. For all of the distance and objectivity that he shows in his work, Leconte de Lisle is there in his poems, while de Heredia seems absent in the sonnets

Am I being unfair? Am I missing a nuance of personality in the work? Perhaps I am... but I can't shake this feeling of concealment, of refusal to stand forward and to be himself.

Never Put Yourself Down

A friend of mine once told me, "Mark, you should never put yourself down, because there is a long line of people ready and waiting to do it for you."