On Lovecraft, Nietzsche, Kirk, and...me

I've been having a discussion with myself about why I write what I do for a long time. When I was younger, I never really thought about it. I wrote what I liked. I wrote what I wanted to write. That was it. And then my mom ruined everything.

Yes. My mom.

I used to send all my stories to her and she dutifully read them. They were obviously not her kind of thing, but I wasn't sure why. She'd read and enjoyed The Lord of the Rings. She'd read Ivanhoe while in the hospital at my birth. (I used to think this was responsible for my love of all thing sword and plate mail.) She'd watched Star Wars with us as children and was a devoted Star Trek fan. I even remember her watching and enjoying Die Hard, so it didn't seem like that much of a stretch for her to enjoy my kind of stories. But she clearly didn't.

I sent them to her anyway. If anyone was going to read them, it would be her, and it's nice to have somebody read your stuff every once in a while. As time passed, however, and the stories continued, things became awkward. Her comments were carefully worded and she started to look wary when it seemed I had another piece for her.

When I mentioned this to my dad, he nodded and more or less said, "Yeah, she probably wouldn't be that sad if you stopped sending them."

"Really?" I said, a little shocked. This was my mother, after all. "Why not?"

"You know how your stuff us," he said. "It's dark and violent. She doesn't understand how stuff like that can come from you, her good, little boy."

I laughed at that at first, but I've been trying to figure it out ever since, because she's right.

I'm not some angsty teenager. (At least not anymore.) I'm no lonely outsider who was bullied my whole life. I'm a happily married father of five. I believe in God and go to church every week. I think I have a positive and hopeful attitude about life. So why do I write stories about monsters that rip people into pieces, violent conflicts, and living landscapes that drive people to madness, death, despair?

The easy answer, of course, is that nothing's changed from when I was young. I like monsters. I grew up on violent stories, and I've had more than one run in with madness, so maybe it's not that strange that my imagination tends in those directions. Case closed.

But as I've mentioned, I've thought a lot about this and it's of interest to me what commentary these stories make about my worldview. Outside my stories, I have a pretty clear idea of what I think the world is and of what my role in it is. Of how I should act and of what should motivate those actions. And on the surface, maybe my writing doesn't reflect those ideas. I'm okay with that because I think stories should be an invitation for you to bring your baggage, not a venue for me to air mine, but it seems like anyone who knows me well (or any literary critic in some distant future where my stories have become a bedrock of human culture) should be able to look at my stories and see some kind of reflection of me.

And so I hope that means there's more to it than violence, horror, evil, and death.

I don't really have any definitive answers. I don't know why I write what I do or how it really fits in with my perceptions of the world, but I read a quote about H. P. Lovecraft recently that rekindled the discussion. I read it in this fun collection, "New Cthulu: The Recent Weird," but it's actually from China Miéville's introduction to Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness."

He says, "Traditionally, genre horror is concerned with the irruption of dreadful forces into a comforting status quo—one which the protagonists frantically scrabble to preserve. By contrast, Lovecraft's horror is not one of intrusion but of realization. The world has always been implacably bleak; the horror lies in our acknowledging that fact." (viii)

This is a pretty incredible insight, in my opinion, and one that really clearly illuminates the heart of Lovecraft's fiction.

Not surprisingly, I'm a fan of Lovecraft and I like to think that some of his horror has trickled into my own stories, and to be honest, I think that's where a lot of the problem lies. I don't think my mom believes that I see the world as "implacably bleak." And she's right.

Except, she's not. At least, not completely.

This isn't some nihilistic confession, but the truth is that for all the wonderful things I love in this world, I tend to agree with Tolkien. Life is hard. Good doesn't always win, and when it does, it does so at a cost. Beautiful things are fleeting. And yes, the world is often the grim, horrific place that Lovecraft paints. There are monsters. It sometimes feels like some cosmic trap.

But the caveat is that I believe there's a way out.

And sure, my faith is such that I believe I know what that way is, but I'm just one guy. What do I know? Probably not very much.

For me, much of the pathos I see in the world comes in the form of people looking for their own escape. Sometimes they seem to succeed, but a lot of times they fail. Either way, they leave stories in their wake, stories that encapsulate the search for meaning in the face of Lovecraft's implacable bleakness. This is what happens after Miéville's realization. Maybe this is the madness so common in Lovecraftian characters.

It makes me think of the now-somewhat clichéd words of Nietzsche: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."

It's in that space of the switch, the moment when we teeter on that edge between human and monster that I seem to find stories that compel. If the world is as Miéville's Lovecraft says it is, then we're all looking into that abyss and we've just realized it's looking back and the stories come when we decide we need to do something about it. Or to let it take us.

I find Star Trek's Kobayashi Maru—the unwinnable scenario—an apt metaphor for life. But there's always a Kirk. We're always searching for a way to change the parameters of the test and when it comes down to it, it's that struggle that speaks to me. Not necessarily the success of that struggle, but not necessarily its failure either. (Maybe it's not surprising that Wrath of Khan is one of my favorite movies.) If, according to Miéville, traditional horror is about intrusion, and Lovecraft is about realization, I think I can say that mine is one of rebellion, or maybe redefinition. As Dr. McCoy might say, my horror is the horror of cheating.

I create my own Kobayashi Marus and I dump my characters into them and I watch to see what happens. And so there's darkness. There's violence. There's failure. And there are monsters. But there are other things too.