My oldest (sixteen) made plans to go bowling with friends tonight. His good friend (also 16) was supposed to come by about 7:45. At 7:50 he calls and says he’s missed our driveway, drove to the end of the dead end road we live on, and ended up in the corn field that road leads into.
After the massive deep freeze we had a couple weeks ago (it’s the global warming, I’m telling you, it has to be), the ground is a gooey sponge for about the first 18 or so inches. He had his four-wheel drive Jeep buried to the axle in cold, sticky mud. My son and I drove down there to see how we were going to get him out. I knew I couldn’t do it in my truck. The tractors we have are small and I didn’t think they would be able to pull him out.
We always sit in the same general area of the bleachers. I bring the girls in with me since my wife is helping get the concession stand set up. They’re frying funnel cakes and pretzels (have you ever had a big pretzel fried crispy on the outside and served with cheese to dip it in?) The line is always four or five people deep outside their stand. The girls and I sit down on the south end of the bleachers three rows up from the front. The bright, aluminum bleachers extend from about the 20-yard line on one end of the field to the 20-yard line on the other. The sun is going down and stringy, patchy clouds sit in the east and reflect the red-orange glow of the evening. The breeze is perfect. The massive lights are on and the bugs are already gathering around the glow. As it gets darker, bats come out to eat all the bugs around the lights.
Although this essay is several years old, it deserves a place here, where Google, et al, can make binary mince-meat out of it and other fans of H.P. Lovecraft can hear the pot-banging call of another fan. –J.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft wrote his strange stories in the early twentieth century. He never had a real novel published in his lifetime since he wrote mainly essays, letters, and weird fiction set (mainly) in the Northeast. He died in 1936 (at age 46) of intestinal cancer and suffered both physically and mentally throughout his life. He is considered by many contemporary authors as the father of modern horror. I’ve read most of his published fiction but my two favorites are “The Dreamquest of Unkown Kaddath” and “The Lurking Fear”.
This story has many of the classic elements you’d expect to find in any Lovecraft story. Although there aren’t any worshippers of hideous, mythological creatures and there are no references to the Necronomicon (mainstays of almost all other Lovecraftian stories), it has his dark, brooding atmosphere, an almost embarrassing xenophobia of poor rural folk, and a vicious monster the main character is both repelled by and drawn to.
Secular Humanism is responsible for the sagging sales of books, not declining literacy.
There may or may not be fewer readers today. There are, however, fewer buyers. The explosion of the Internet in the last ten years has certainly altered the reading patterns of literate, connected people (the only people who ever really bought books to begin with), but people have stopped reading novels largely because writers have stopped writing novels worth reading.
Writing programs have largely failed writers (with a few exceptions) because they’ve become preternaturally occupied with mechanics and the superficialities of writing. Certainly grammar is important to a new writer, but even more important than understanding the purpose of a prepositional phrase is understanding what makes people tick. If you’re going to write something worthwhile–something that sells well and speaks to people on many levels–you have to write something theologically and mythologically substantive.
A sermon delivered 2/22/2009:
I
1 A good name is better than precious ointment,
and the day of death better than the day of birth.
2 It is better to go to the house of mourning
than to go to the house of feasting,
for this is the end of all mankind,
and the living will lay it to heart.
3 Sorrow is better than laughter,
for by sadness of face the heart is made glad.
4 The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.
Ecclesiastes 7 (ESV)
It turns out my Gothic sensibilities aren’t all that far off the mark after all!
It’s not that I don’t like being happy. And it’s not that I don’t like seeing others being happy. Sometimes, I’m absolutely running out the ears with happy. It’s just, well, to use a cliche: complicated.
