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Sunday, July 26, 2009
A week or so ago I was feeling down in the dumps. Old. Kind of depressed. So I decided to take a walk in one of my favorite places: The library.
Like most of you, I'm sure, I always loved libraries. From my earliest years I adored the walls of books, the smell of them, the feeling of being surrounded by literature, knowledge, and information. And all of it is free. All you have to do is provide proof of residence to be able to borrow all sorts of materials. Art, film, literature. You don't even need to prove who you are to use the facilities in most of them.
Libraries are my favorite charity too. Some might think that supporting the library isn't as important as disease research, hunger, homelessness, but I would disagree. Libraries literally saved my life in my youth. Times when I had nowhere to turn, no one I could go to, I always had the library to go to for peace and sanity.
So anyway, I went there. I was thinking about re-reading some books that I loved years ago. But the thing is, I haven't spent a whole lot of time in libraries for the last decade. The reasons for that are numerous. The frantic life of a parent being one and the demands of a more-than full time job is another. Then there is the lure of the Internet and all of the small press books that have dominated my reading time. I had lost sight of the simple joy of spending time wandering through the books, picking up one here or there, knowing that I could take a chance on reading it without any cost.
And mostly, on that recent day, I wanted to spend time with old friends. Old friends being the books I loved in the 1980's. A time when my money was almost always short and the library was one of the only ways I could read.
I entered the hallowed building and climbed the stairs to the fiction section. What I found made me even more depressed than before.
It's the oldest story in the world. It's always been this way and it always will be this way. Out with the old and in with the new. It has to be that way, but that does not mean that I have to like it.
So many treasured books have gone from the shelves. So many classics, masterpieces even, gone. And a lot of just plain good books. Out with the old and in with the new. Books that shaped modern horror fiction are quickly being forgotten.
Take Charles Grant for instance. His novels, short stories, his anthologies. They have had an immeasurable influence on the genre. I don't believe that it's too much of a stretch to say that Charles Grant has had as much impact on the genre as Stephen King has. What writers have not been influenced, directly or indirectly, by Grant? None, I say. I read at least a half a dozen of Grant's books from the very same library that I was at. Yet almost all of them have been discarded. And why not? It's not as if anyone were checking them out any more. What's worse is, there are literally no Charles Grant books currently in print. God, the man sold so many books back in the day. Back when readers craved atmosphere and mood. How many young horror fans read him today? Precious few is my bet.
Then there is Ray Russell. How many know his name? I borrowed Ray Russell's Incubus from that library, as well as some of his other Gothic works. Gone. Ray Russell was as important as, say, Richard Matheson to the field. As an editor for Playboy he was responsible for getting short stories by genre writers like Charles Beaumont, Jack Finney, Bradbury, Matheson, Bloch and many, many others. His short story, Sardonicus, was called "perhaps the finest example of the modern gothic ever written" by Stephen King.
So many others. T.E.D. Klein's The Ceremonies. The early and mid-period books of John Farris. Chet Williamson. Ramsey Campbell's Incarnate and Obsession. F. Paul Wilson's The Keep. Even the early works of big league writers like King and Straub are among the missing.
And I haven't even mentioned all of the great science fiction writers from the golden age that are being forgotten. Guys (and women) that made their livings writing the stuff that made SF great. They poured their blood and guts on the page just as surely as the horror writers did, and most of them delved into the world of fright in their careers.
I know that it's easy to obtain these works secondhand. Amazon.com Marketplace, Ebay and Abebooks.com make it easier than ever to find nearly any book you might be seeking. But that gets expensive too. Paying five to ten dollars (when you add in the shipping fees) or more for books that you might want to read or reread adds up fast. And who has room for them all? It's so much nicer to be able to walk in a library and grab the titles you want and then take them back later.
I suppose I sound like an old fogey that decries all the new trash coming out and preaching about the days when real writers were writing horror. I'm not saying that we should ignore the stars of today. I love to read Keene and Lee and Gonzalez and a hell of a lot of the modern practitioners of horror fiction. I am saying that all readers in the genre should mine the fields of the past. And especially those that wish to break into the field as writers need to read the classics. I'm not necessarily talking about Poe and Stoker and Lovecraft (though I do recommend reading them), but you all should try writers like Joseph Payne Brennan. Manly Wade Wellman. Les Daniels. Michael McDowell. Henry Kuttner. Elizabeth Engstrom. Dig up copies of amazing books like Lowland Rider, by Chet Williamson. The Rats Trilogy by James Herbert. George R.R. Martin's Fevre Dream (and The Armagedden Rag). K.W. Jeter's The Night Man. Marc Laidlaw's The Orchid Eater. C. Eric Higgs' The Happy Man. Whitley Strieber's The Night Church. Charles Grant's The Pet. Thomas F. Monteleone's Night Train. John Coyne's The Piercing. T.M. Wright's A Manhattan Ghost Story. The list is long and rich.
One of the worst things about growing older is watching the things you love disappear. It's not as bad with music or movies. A reader is a rarer sort of bird.
It didn't seem as bad when I was young. In the 70's a lot of the materials on the bookstore racks were reprints of pulp fiction. Doc Savage was huge and so was Conan. Science Fiction from the Golden Age was selling like gangbusters. Now it seems as though few young readers care about the past.
It's not all dire news. Heinlein and Lovecraft and Bradbury and Dick continue to be discovered by successive generations. Richard Matheson has continued to get the respect he deserves from Hollywood. Then there are the specialty presses that bring the literary wonders of the past to us in beautiful editions.
One of the best is Hafner Press, which publishes deluxe editions of classic by Jack Williamson, Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton. Hamilton's horror stories are collected in The Vampire Master and Other Tales of Horror. Wildside Press reprints gems from the pulp era. Paizo Publishing, a company that does a lot of gaming media, puts out some deliciously cool Sword and Planet fiction. Ash-Tree Press delivers a ton of vintage works of supernatural fiction, by writers that even a lot of so-called scholars haven't even heard of. NESFA Press has published dozens of beautiful, affordable retrospectives of classic science fiction and fantasy. A new company called Rocket Ride Books has published a damned nice trade paperback of John W. Campbell's Who Goes There?, with an Introduction and a movie treatment by William F. Nolan, as well as the first-ever audio presentation of the influential novella.
The stuff from the 80's is still to be found too. Library sales are one of the best ways to find the treasures, especially is you (like me) prefer to read hardcovers. And the used bookstores still have a lot of the wonderful paperback originals. Yeah, I know, most of the cool used bookstores are gone too.
Don't discount thrift stores, where I've made dozens of great purchases. You can go many times and find nothing, but there have been occasions where I've found whole collections at them. It's kind of sad to see a whole bunch of books with the same name inscribed in them, knowing that the owner might have passed away.
Still and all, it's not that bad being a veteran reader of the genre. You can read the new materials with the knowledge of hundreds of books from the past as perspective. Opening a beloved old books is like embracing a dear old friend. And if you're lucky, young readers will give you respect and maybe you'll even get asked to pen a column for a major magazine.
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