HP Lovecraft

I was both horrified and amused in recent years as a cadre of sick, twisted, authoritarian no-talent shitheads did their damndest to remove the image of HP Lovecraft from a mildly well known (but largely insignificant) literary award. Every few days the Internet would bring me the news of what these almost brainless louts would have to say about how the little bust of Lovecraft enraged them, or made them angry, or--and this was the best--offended their odious, worthless sensitivities. (This is their code word and their mantra. Things offend them.)

Alas, these punks succeeded in their stinking efforts to remove Lovecraft's name and image from their tiny circle-jerk awards ceremony. Well, I suppose they enjoy lathering the Vaseline upon one another's nether regions every twelve months. Let them have their moment of disgust.

After this went down I kept seeing one after another of these talentless shitheads droning on and on about what they term Lovecraft's worthlessness as a person and a writer or, if they were feeling magnanimous that day, the overrating of his body of work.

Yes, even Lovecraft's most ardent fans will readily admit that his purple prose is an acquired taste and that his fiction is sometimes riven with racist imagery. It was, as they say, a product of its time, and HPL was a result of his era and social station. That does not remove the importance of what he did any more than what any flawed human being did in their life both within and outside of their art. I don't see any of these morons trying to burn down Allen Ginsberg or Will Eisner, both of whom have awards created in their names, both of whom are guilty of offensive actions in their professional and personal lives.

At any rate, this all got me dwelling on what it was about HP Lovecraft that made him and his fiction so important and so influential. The following is why his stories became such seminal works. In addition the fiction of the anti-Lovecraft louts will be totally and utterly forgotten the second they are dead or otherwise unable to engage in their magical circle-jerk. And the stories of Howard Phillips Lovecraft will still be published, will still be read, and will still be imitated, will continue to influence many writers who will come.

And this is why Lovecraft and his works are deserving of respect.

Here's the thing about Lovecraft: He was an atheist. An adamant atheist. He believed in not one speck of the supernatural. Nothing. They also called themselves at that time, "realists". If it could not be detected or proven, then it was likely false.

So...a truly guilty pleasure of Lovecraft's was supernatural fiction. He loved the stuff. He reveled in it. Combined with his ironically Puritan ethics, such guilt must have driven him close to bats struggling with the incongruity of it all.

Thus, to assuage his guilt and put the matter to bed, he was struck with the spark of brilliance to create fiction in which the supernatural was given a SCIENTIFIC origin and principle.

This is the genius of Lovecraftian fiction. It puts the shade of supernatural within the realm of what is real. There is no magic, only science. There are no gods, only alien beings. Evil has no place; but cosmic indifference to squalid, tiny, insignificant Man rules the universe.

Therein lies the art of what Lovecraft did with horror/supernatural fiction. Nothing was the same after he created his literary work. It has dominated horror fiction and fantasy since the day he began to publish these works.

The whiny cadre of modern literary worms care not one whit for art. They only bother about themselves, all of whom will soon be forgotten and extinct. I have no doubt that they would dearly love to burn Lovecraft's books, but that would be too obvious.

The busts--created by artist Gahan Wilson--which so offended the worms.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the writer whose works offended the worms.

And yet, somehow, some way, for some reason, the man who created this image fails to upset any of the worms. They are not, for some inexplicable reason, offended by his name and reputation being touted and announced and celebrated every year for another award largely among a similar and connected genre literary ghetto.

Hideous, offensive, racist image created to demean and dehumanize, from the pencil and pen and mind of Will Eisner. Somehow I don't hear any voices raised over this offensive image of a widely published character that influenced millions of people in its day. Why is that?

MY CURRENT WORKS OF FICTION.

When I'm not hiking and kayaking and camping and backpacking and generally enjoying the outdoors, you can find me working on my short stories and novels.

Here, then, are my current published works of fiction.

First up, WORKING CLASS HERO: The Autobiography of Billy B., A Hyper Human.

First chapter in what is slated to be a trilogy all nicely bound and wrapped up by the end of the third novel. Hopefully, I'd like to even continue writing WORKING CLASS HERO novels for years. I could, quite actually, keep the series going for a long time.

What are you waiting for? Read it now! Pure fun for cool people! Available in paperback, ebook, and audio! Woo-HOO!

WORKING CLASS HERO by James Robert Smith.

Next up is FOUR FROM MANGROVE. When Hippocampus Press published my short story collection, A CONFEDERACY OF HORRORS, they excised the four "Mangrove" stories for being too fantasy oriented. These stories are set in the mythical world of the city-state called Mangrove. The stories range over a period of hundreds of years, during which Mangrove might be a might continent-spanning empire, or a busy trading port controlled by outside forces. But it's always Mangrove and its citizens are always busy about the task of commerce and mischief.

Influenced by my love of the works of Karl Edward Wagner and Robert Ervin Howard, here are four fantasy tales of swords and sorcery, of humanity. FOUR FROM MANGROVE.

FOUR FROM MANGROVE by James Robert Smith.

Next up is LOVECRAFT'S COMIC. This horror novella concerns itself with some extreme Lovecraftian creepiness. Two old comic artist friends, one flush with success in the comics industry, the other left behind to live in poverty and failure, are taken on a ride straight to living Hell by the accidental discovery of something evil. One decides to translate the evil to comics format, and the other is caught between friendship and pure horror.

Available in print and ebook. (Warning: this ain't a pleasant fireside ghost yarn.)

LOVECRAFT'S COMIC by James Robert Smith.

And, last, some folk were clamoring for the next chapter of WORKING CLASS HERO (and it's not quite ready), so I offered up this short story of superhumans Billy B. and SHYLOCK HOLMES as they do battle with a particularly creepy outlaw.

Here, then, is TURN OF EVENTS. Available only in ebook format. (Alas.)

"Turn of Events" by James Robert Smith.

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR??!! BUY A COPY! MORE FUN THAN A BOTCHED REVOLUTION!

WORKING CLASS HERO!

Slippery Slope Time!

I have been amused at the little tantrums and fits of the politically correct crowd. But of course they peck at the low-hanging fruit.

Recently the World Fantasy Awards committee voted to remove the image of the formerly highly respected fantasist Howard Philips Lovecraft from that award. Because of the puking whining of a disjointed elite within that part of literary fandom.

This is a problem. Where does it end? I know people who want us to blast the President faces off of Mount Rushmore. Do we hand them the dynamite?

Now, I pose to this same disgusting crowd of crowing idiots:

There is an award in comics named for, and in honor of Will Eisner. He was a racist. He was also a brilliant artist who did more than almost anyone else to promote sequential art. He also created this:

Art by the racist, Will Eisner. (See his signature there? Huh? See it?")

So I ask them...are you going to agitate for the removal of the Eisner Awards?

Huh? Are you?

Recent commentary by ST Joshi.

Literature and Me

My parents always had books around. Tons of them. Even before they became booksellers there was always ample reading material around for me. My initial memories are of comic books.

 Here, then, are the literary influences that stuck in my brain throughout my life. Not necessarily the most important influences for me, but the ones that made initial impressions. Starting from as far back as I can remember.

The first comic that I can recall reading was the Jesse Marsh version of JOHN CARTER OF MARS from Dell Comics. I couldn't have been older than four or so when it was given to me. The next comic that I read was FANTASTIC FOUR #4. Again, I must have been five...it was before I entered first grade.

By the time I was eight I had discovered Hugh Lofting's DR. DOOLITTLE books. My mom watched me consume those and she gave me a copy of Bradbury's THE ILLUSTRATED MAN. Scared the shit out of me, and cemented a life-long love of horror. Then I discovered Ernest Thompson Seton and learned a respect for wild animals and later, I developed a love for our fellow creatures.

My dad gave me a copy of Darwin's VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE when I was nine. That began a love of science and learning and initiated a constant thirst for knowledge and kindled what I can only call a hatred for religion.

After that, of course, it was one discovery after another without any direction from my parents. I was too busy finding my own works to read. And of course it never stops. I'm always searching for the next writer to engage my imagination and to inspire my sense of wonder.

 

My Favorite Book

I used to collect limited edition books. I would buy nice limited edition hardcovers from such publishers as Arkham House and Donald Grant and Dark Harvest, etc. Specialty publishers produce easily the most beautiful hardback books on the market. However, I soon discovered a nasty secret about the folk who collect such things:

Unlike me, they don't read these books.

I love to read my books. That's what they're for! But after a while it dawned on me that many of the people who purchase the limiteds are anal-retentive condition freaks who would panic at the very thought of human hands touching their books! Yeah, I know what you're thinkin':

That's totally and completely insane, Bob!

Yeah. Yer right. It is.

So after a while I just couldn't stand the thought of buying these books and knowing that one is not supposed to actually read these small print runs volumes; these finely bound editions in slipcases with tipped-in sheets and autographs by the author, by the illustrator, by the lady who proofread the damned thing, by the guy who swept the office when everyone else went home. Why was I buying these things if I'm not supposed to crack the covers (AAIIEEE!) and put my fingers on the pages and lay my eyes on lines that human eyes are not meant to see?

So, realizing how silly this all was, I stopped "collecting" limited edition books. And then I sold off every single one that I owned. Out went the Arkham House books. Away with the Donald Grant books! Off to auction houses with my Gnome Press novels and my Carcosa volumes and the rest.

Except for one.


In all of those books, there was one with which I could not part. It was just too damned gorgeous. Yes, I realize that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and believe it when I say I read and enjoy all of my books. But this one was just way too perfect to hand off to some other buyer, no matter if I could buy groceries for a month with the profits.

It was my Arkham House copy of 3 TALES OF HORROR by H.P. Lovecraft, illustrated by Lee Brown Coye, and edited (after a fashion) by August Derleth. This book is perfection, to me. The cover is wonderful to behold. The contents are a trio of Lovecraft's finest nightmares. The execution of print and paper and binding are unequaled in any book I have ever owned.


There is no way that I would ever part with this book. It will be with me until I croak.

Then my wife or my son can sell it.

Until then, however, it remains with me.

The place of honor for 3 TALES OF OF HORROR by HP Lovecraft (illustrated by Lee Brown Coye) on my oak office desk.





Buy a copy of my latest novel, THE LIVING END!



Available in trade paperback
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Available soon in Nook format!

Hack

A lot of people use the term "hack writer" as a pejorative. I once knew (online only) a writer who referred to HP Lovecraft as a "hack" because he sold his stories to the pulps. This same writer went on to write comic books for Vertigo. Now would be a good time to actually use LOL!

In fact, "hack" writing is merely writing to order. It's writing as a task, generally per order. It's a job.

I admire the so-called hack writers who entertained me in my youth. Anyone who wrote work on contract were, essentially, hack writers. There's nothing wrong with being a hack. The same author who called Lovecraft a hack was wrong on that take. As far as I know, HP Lovecraft only contracted to write a single story, that one for Weird Tales which was ghosted for Harry Houdini. Other than that one instance, HPL wrote all of his work as he felt the inspiration. This is the exact opposite of a hack. And it generally leads to starvation.

Writing as a job is nothing to be sneered at or belittled. Many writers do that. Fellows such as Lester Dent made quite a good living being hack writers. It was a job, and those who did it well earned good money at it.

A few years ago when I was desperate to sell a novel, I began looking around for a job as a hack writer. I'd already written for the comic book series CLIVE BARKER'S HELLRAISER, so I know what it was like to produce fiction by formula. Pretty much all mainstream comics work is hack work. Whether it's for a continuing Vertigo series or for Archie Comics. If you write stories for titles created by others, then you're a hack.

I'd given up trying to get back into comics. The doors were just sealed up too tight. So I looked around for paperback series that I might be able to crack. I settled on THE EXECUTIONER and related titles being published by Gold Eagle. Somewhere along the way I'd gleaned the names of a couple of the top editors there and started inquiring about the possibility of working for them. And I kept writing to them, sending my resume' of published works, emphasizing the comics work. For a long time they ignored me.

Finally, one day I received an email reply from the editor-in-chief there. He told me to work up some plot outlines and to submit them.

So--it had been a long time since I'd seen any of their books--I went out and bought a stack of second-hand copies of their adventure titles. I was, quite frankly, horrified. There was a powerful gun-crazy right wing tilt to the books. Yeah, yeah. I know. What the hell did I expect? I'm not quite sure what I expected, but I did know that I did not want to write fiction that promoted reactionary gun-mad politics. I'd just forgotten the titles from my days as a bookseller.

I sat down and tried to brainstorm my way into it. I kept coming up with outlines and fleshing them out and they would always end up being...well...right wing rants. And I'm not into that whole scene. The guns. The knives. The subtle racism. The killing. Gods, the killing.

And, in the end, I just let it all slide. I got rid of the books and forgot about the whole scheme.

I just ain't got what it takes to be a hack.

Fun With Agents

I've been writing a long time. A loooooooooooooooooong time.
I'm fifty-two years old and I recall writing my first stories when I was in the second grade. So that's forty-five years of writing fiction. My first stories were silly beyond belief. I don't even recall what they were about, really. By the time I was in the third grade I was collaborating with my pal Billy Bridges on stories about Godzilla. Billy was a much more intense Godzilla fan than I was, but I liked the giant lizard dude enough to write these stories with my buddy Billy. Forty-four years later I don't know what happened to either those Godziller stories, nor to Billy. He moved away some time after that and I never heard from him again.

I continued to write stories all during my childhood. I tackled my first novel, a story about an Alaskan Brown Bear, when I was in the sixth grade. To show you where my mind was at in those days, this huge Alaskan Brown Bear was named "Fluffy". Following that I tried writing a novel about a bobcat (I've forgotten his name, but the tattered old hand-written manuscript is stored around here somewhere). Other animal stories followed until I discovered the works of HP Lovecraft. At which time I began to write horrid tales of adjective-laden supernatural angst.

Some time after I graduated high school I went through a period of several years wherein I wandered aimlessly and did nothing but pursue dreams of being a retail merchant. That ended badly. Around the age of twenty-six or so I got serious about writing again and started creating short stories. The first ones sucked ass, but the more of them I wrote the better they were. At some point I was sending them out to magazines and after a relatively short time I started selling them.

A few more years passed and I was regularly making professional sales. Everything from short stories to Weird Tales to comic book scripts to CLIVE BARKER'S HELLRAISER for Marvel Comics. Along the way I dredged up a novel plot that I'd written down when I was fifteen years old. Looking at it, I figured it had some promise and so I began writing my first novel as an adult. Every day I would come home from work and start hacking away at it on my electric typewriter. There were only a few people then who even knew about wordprocessors, let alone owned one. So in those days before common home computers I found that, in short order, I had written my first real novel, THE CRAG.

I sent it out to the biggest agent of whom I was then aware:

Richard Curtis.

I didn't expect him to respond. After all, he was a major agent with an impressive client list. Maybe he'd just send my manuscript right back, or throw it away. To my surprise, he liked the novel and agreed to represent me. I think I was 30 years old.

Over the next three years he came very close indeed to selling the book. At a couple of points we figured it was a done deal. Alas. When push came to shove, the editors always passed. When I delivered a second (admittedly awful) novel to Mr. Curtis, he cut me loose. I got the "Dear John" letter on my 33rd birthday in the midst of a high fever and nausea. That royally sucked dried dog turds, but I never blamed him. It was only business.

For a time after that I worked without an agent. This is a very tough thing to do. Most publishers won't look at your work unless it arrives via a literary agency. And most agencies won't look at your work unless you've already sold a novel. Yeah--a classic Catch 22.

Finally, I started calling some writer friends to see if they'd connect me to their agents. This was not a good thing to do, apparently. Some just flatly refused. Some told me that they'd mention it to their agent. Nothing happened, of course. Finally, I called a writer named Brian (last-name-redacted). He wouldn't give me his current agent's details, but he did agree to put me in touch with the agency from which he'd just fled. I was begging, so I couldn't be choosing.


I gave her a call. To make a long-ish story short, she agreed to agent my work. Then she went crazy and then she died. True fucking story.


There followed another long period wherein I worked without an agent, writing books no one would see and despairing of ever selling a novel. I even stopped writing fiction for several years. Finally though, I started writing again and shortly thereafter began trying to find a new agent. The writing went well, but the agency thing did not. No one would agree to champion my work. At last, when it seemed that I would not be able to do it, I found an agent who would try to sell my new novel, THE FLOCK.


She was an okay lady. I recall that she even took the time to line-edit the book and suggested changes and ways to improve it. Mainly, I agreed with her critiques and soon molded the novel to fit her criticisms. The book went out. No one bit. I suggested another novel that I had almost completed, but she didn't like it. She went totally silent on me. So I figured she just didn't know how to cut a client loose and I made the job easy for her by firing her with a "Dear Susan" letter.


A few months after that I began to try to sell THE FLOCK on my own. Unfortunately, I kept running into that same problem of old:

Publishers only look at manuscripts that arrive via reputable literary agencies.

Then I heard about an imprint that was willing to look at unsolicited manuscripts. I sent a query out to Five Star Books. They found the query intriguing and asked for the entire novel. I sent it to them. I'm not sure what I expected, but I was very pleased when I got an acceptance letter for THE FLOCK in late 2004. It saw print in 2006.


Since Five Star only publishes in hardback and oversize formats I began searching to see about selling the mass market rights. For this, I would need an agency. I sent out queries to many, many agents, thinking that it would be no problem at all to nab a spot on an agency's client list now that I'd sold a novel that had done pretty good in hardback. Haha. I was wrong. No agency would take me on. I kept telling them that it would make a killer movie--that I'd plugged all that into the book as I was writing it.


No dice. No agency would take a chance on me, not even a guy with a track record of more than fifty short story sales, hundreds of pages of comic book scripts sold, and one published novel.

I'd even had inquiries about movie rights, but none of the studios who'd inquired ever followed up with an offer. But I'd gotten enough of these to know that it might actually happen.


Then, in a bit of serendipity, I pissed off Don Murphy who glommed a copy of my book to see who I was and what I was about. Mainly so that he could tear me a new one in print by having been cool enough to first read my book. Instead, he saw what so many others had seen--it was a ripping good yarn! He made an offer to option the film. And did so, proving that while his reputation is as a prickly guy, he's totally honest.


And, then, after having sold a novel without an agent, and an offer of a movie option without an agent, here I was again without an agent. You might think that I wouldn't need an agent. You'd be wrong.


You still have to have an agent to get your foot in the door at all but a tiny handful of the smallest of publishers, no matter what you may have done on your own. It's just part of the way things are conducted in the publishing business. So, there you have it. James R. Smith was again in search of an agent. The seemingly endless quest.


I should write a novel about that some day.