Darrell Schweitzer is
an American writer, editor, and essayist in the field of speculative fiction.
Much of his focus has been on dark fantasy and horror, although he does also
work in science fiction and fantasy. Schweitzer is also a prolific writer of
literary criticism and editor of collections of essays on various writers
within his preferred genres. Together with his editorial colleagues Schweitzer
won the 1992 World Fantasy Award special award in the professional category for
Weird Tales. His poem Remembering the Future won the 2006 Asimov's Science
Fiction's Readers' Award for best poem. His
novels include The White Isle, The Shattered Goddess, The Mask of the
Sorcerer, and The Dragon House. His most recent story
collection is the explicitly Lovecraftian Awaiting Strange Gods published
by Fedogan & Bremer. He has also been known to lead the choir at Cthulhu
Prayer Breakfasts, where his The Innsmouth Tabernacle Choir is
used. He has published books about H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Lord
Dunsany.
SEL: What Beauty is there in horror and sadness? Edgar Allen Poe subscribed to evoking melancholy to
stimulate 'Beauty'. In his 1846 “Philosophy of Composition”, Poe revealed
his views on experiential beauty by detailing the deliberate construction of
his poem The Raven: “Regarding then, Beauty as my province, my next question
referred to the tone of its highest manifestation-and all experience has shown
that this tone is one of sadness. Beauty of whatever kind in its supreme
development invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is
thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones. In “Windows of the
Imagination” you interview Poe, through dubious means. So we must turn the
tables. Paraphrasing from you, “Which do you prefer writing [poems for Beauty,
or tales for Terror]?” More broadly, how do you define Beauty in art/fiction
that appears to be repulsive (weird/horror/melancholy)?DS: If I am to make a guess in the case of Poe (who, being dead, was not as entirely revealing as you might want in my interview with him), the beauty of horror does indeed have to do with sadness and loss. It is a reflection on the inevitable passing away of all things. Poe was the guy who said that the most poetical subject in the world is the death of a beautiful woman, and I don’t think he was into necrophilia. You can see this in his life. He knew his wife was dying. Various other beloved figures in his life kept dying on him. He knew that his own stay on this mortal coil was always tenuous.
SEL: Do
you find beauty in your weird fiction? Dissect an example.
DS: This
seems a little pretentious. It is a “look how great I am” question. The
time-loops & their links to innocence and youth in “The Sorcerer Evoragdu”?
The dancing resurrected goddess at the end of The Shattered Goddess?
The strange redemption at the end of “On the Last Night of the Festival of the
Dead”?
SEL: What scares you? Is it beautiful?
DS: I
think we are all scared of death and the loss of identity or mental acuity. In
real life, it is NOT beautiful. There is no “City of the Singing Flame” in the
mundane world.
SEL: Art vs. the Artist: Is there a character that you most
empathize with or reflects you (i.e., Julian the Apostate or Sekenre the
Sorcerer)?
DS: I am neither of these persons.
Julian the Apostate (the knight, not the emperor) is a lost soul precisely
because he still has his faith. If you do not believe in God and the Devil, you
do not fear them. Sekenre the sorcerer is the kid that never grows up, and
always feels left out of normal society. There are some advantages to this,
such as long life, but I think his existence involves much loneliness and
suffering. I think of him as a cross between Joseph Curwen and Peter Pan. His
agenda, however, is not, unlike Curwen’s, evil. He has expressed an intention
to survive until the end of time and demand of the gods the reason for the
world’s pain.
Have I ever written myself into a story? Not really. I can see how, if I had not somehow managed to face the world, I could have ended up like the character in “Jason, Come Home,” but he is a very sad and unfulfilled fellow, is he not? There is a little of me in the comic artist in “Pennies from Hell,” but this is caricature. Also, that other guy draws better than I do. I do pick up pennies off the street, but not for purposes of occult divination. After a certain age you do it because you STILL CAN. Also, I am superstitious. I believe it is bad luck to leave money lying around when I could have it.
Have I ever written myself into a story? Not really. I can see how, if I had not somehow managed to face the world, I could have ended up like the character in “Jason, Come Home,” but he is a very sad and unfulfilled fellow, is he not? There is a little of me in the comic artist in “Pennies from Hell,” but this is caricature. Also, that other guy draws better than I do. I do pick up pennies off the street, but not for purposes of occult divination. After a certain age you do it because you STILL CAN. Also, I am superstitious. I believe it is bad luck to leave money lying around when I could have it.
SEL: Regarding other, Dark Arts: Clark Ashton Smith, whose soul or
muses seem to have corrupted your own, was a poet, illustrator, and sculptor.
Do you practice other arts? If so can we share them (i.e., images of fine or
graphic art) or mp3s/videos (of music). Likewise, can you discuss how art can
from one medium can inform/inspire another?
DS: I
have been known to draw cartoons. I suppose with some art training I could be
mediocre. There is some talent there, but I think that as a cartoonist I am a
pretty good gag writer. See attached.
 |
| Art by Darrell Schweitzer [Sidebar: Wilbur Whateley is a character in Lovecraft’s 1923 The Dunwich Horror] |
SEL: Cadence in fiction. In a 1930 letter to
Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith described his strategy of using aesthetics to
heighten the reading experience of his weird works: “My own conscious ideal has been to delude
the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by
means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use
of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other
stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation. You attain a black magic,
perhaps unconsciously, in your pursuit of corroborative detail and
verisimilitude. But I fear that I don't always attain verisimilitude in my
pursuit of magic! However, I sometimes suspect that the wholly unconscious
elements in writing (or other art) are by far the most important.” What tips or tricks can you reveal about
delivering the right cadence to affect beauty or horror?
DS: I have a theory that some of the best and most
“poetic” prose writers – Lovecraft or Dunsany for instance – have the impulse
to write poetry but not quite enough talent. So it is sublimated into their
prose. Lovecraft held that the rhythm or cadence was the most important aspect
of prose. Indeed, prose is for the ear, to be read aloud. The ultimate example
may be the last few lines of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” which is both
hideous and exquisite at the same time. Poe of course had the full poetic
talent, but also could do it in prose.
SEL: Unpublished
Conan and Inspiration: What Makes A Genuine Muse (inspired by your essay “My
Career As A Hack Writer” in the collection Windows of the Imagination)? Many
do not know that you wrote Conan the Deliverer (not a midwife,
but perhaps a milkman you jest in your essay) which was never published. It was
to be the “definitive Stygian novel.” I’m not sure of the chronology, but you
certainly wrote some beautiful-weird-adventure with Egyptian (a.k.a. Stygian)
influences (Mask of the Sorcerer and Sekenre) and proved yourself capable of damn good heroic tales (We Are All Legends). On the surface,
having you script Conan the Deliverer sounds awesome. But you
reveal that the script was perfect, and it was because of the artistic
inspiration (or lack thereof). Please explain more. What makes a
quality muse?
DS: A quality muse is one that inspires you to create works of genius
all the time. One can only wish to have one … The Mask of the Sorcerer was
indeed written on the rebound from the failed Conan novel. I simply let go of
all the restrictions of trying to write a Conan novel, the first of which was
to dispense with the character of Conan or anyone like him. My Conan novel did
indeed deal with a descent into the Stygian afterworld, but the details are
very different. I have to admit that this many years later, I do not remember Conan
the Deliverer very clearly. That may be a sign that it was not,
ultimately, very successful. Tor Books still owns it. They paid for it. They
could publish it if they like. It used to be that about every five or ten years
I would mention this to someone from Tor and they would say, “Oh, I never knew
this existed,” and I would send a copy to them, and then they would lose it
again and a few years later the subject would come up again. The last time this
happened, I photocopied it for them and they did not bother to reply.
SEL: You have a
B.S. in geography and an M.A. in English; has the geography ever served your
writing? If not your degree, then
perhaps the geography of your person [I was honored to listen to you read “Girl
in the attic” the World Fantasy Convention 2016, a story that was published in
Black Wings VI S. T. Joshi. I recall the imagery of the
Pocono ridge lines pretty well.] Was this inspired by time spent in
PA? Actually, this line of interrogation reminds me of my favorite CAS tale,
“Genius Loci”. How does “place” affect one’s art?
DS: It does make me a little more aware of other places, but then so
does collecting stamps. I am not one of those Americans who has only heard of a
country when we have gone to war with it. I know where Kazakhstan is. Otherwise
my getting a degree in Geography was a naïve attempt to do something practical
so I could make a living while writing. But as with all the sciences, I could
not proceed very far because I couldn’t do the math.
The Pocono ridge lines in the stories are inspired by long drives to Niagara Falls. I used to be a regular at Eeriecon, and I drove up that way alone many times after my wife stopped doing. You do notice on such trips how the familiar and safe world is only along the roadway, and eldritch rites or hideous murders could be taking place a half a mile away into the forest and no one might ever know. That whole landscape has inspired the Chorazin series of stories, of which “The Girl in the Attic,” and also my YA novel The Dragon House. Chorazin is located in the “flyover” part of north, central Pennsylvania, which is pretty blank on the map. Go to the Poconos, turn left, and go beyond any of the towns or resorts, and there is … what? Any large state in America holds such mystery. It is quite different from Europe, particularly Britain, where if there is a clump of more than two or three trees, it probably has a name, a hereditary forester, and a record in the Domesday Book. We have a lot of empty land.
The landscape of Arizona and the area around the Grand Canyon inspired my “Howling in the Dark.” So, yes, I do respond to landscapes. In the southwest there is vastness of both landscape and sky, and the realization that everything around you is also mutable. An Arizona landscape may be dry, but it is shaped almost entirely by water. You can also look out over the Grand Canyon and realize that among those hundreds of spires you can see are places where, very likely, no human being has ever been, so if Lovecraft’s Great Race of Yith is still hiding on one of them, as long as they don’t shoot off fireworks or play their boom boxes too loudly, we might never know.
The Pocono ridge lines in the stories are inspired by long drives to Niagara Falls. I used to be a regular at Eeriecon, and I drove up that way alone many times after my wife stopped doing. You do notice on such trips how the familiar and safe world is only along the roadway, and eldritch rites or hideous murders could be taking place a half a mile away into the forest and no one might ever know. That whole landscape has inspired the Chorazin series of stories, of which “The Girl in the Attic,” and also my YA novel The Dragon House. Chorazin is located in the “flyover” part of north, central Pennsylvania, which is pretty blank on the map. Go to the Poconos, turn left, and go beyond any of the towns or resorts, and there is … what? Any large state in America holds such mystery. It is quite different from Europe, particularly Britain, where if there is a clump of more than two or three trees, it probably has a name, a hereditary forester, and a record in the Domesday Book. We have a lot of empty land.
The landscape of Arizona and the area around the Grand Canyon inspired my “Howling in the Dark.” So, yes, I do respond to landscapes. In the southwest there is vastness of both landscape and sky, and the realization that everything around you is also mutable. An Arizona landscape may be dry, but it is shaped almost entirely by water. You can also look out over the Grand Canyon and realize that among those hundreds of spires you can see are places where, very likely, no human being has ever been, so if Lovecraft’s Great Race of Yith is still hiding on one of them, as long as they don’t shoot off fireworks or play their boom boxes too loudly, we might never know.
SEL: Any current or future endeavor we can
pitch?
DS:
Latest novel is The Dragon
House (Wildside).
Latest collection is Awaiting
Strange Gods (Fedogan
& Bremer). PS Publishing will publish a Best of DS in two volumes next
year. I am also working on two anthologies for them, The Mountains of
Madness Revealed and Shadows Out of Time. My most
recent anthology (for PS) was Tales from the Miskatonic University
Library co-edited with John Ashmead.
SEL: Any new
callings from the Church of Dagon?
DS: Funny you should ask. The spirit moved me to testify at the last
Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast at Necronomicon 2017. I spoke briefly on the fact that
the Esoteric Order of Dagon is the only nihilistic doomsday cult with a
positive message. The text of my remarks was published in Audient Void magazine
recently (No. 5), and will be used as a kind of preface for the second volume
of The Innsmouth Tabernacle Choir Hymnal. I write a new hymn
for every prayer breakfast. Last time it was “Great Old Ones” to the tune of
“Kumbaya.” There are now four uncollected hymns. I need to write three or four
more, and I can have another booklet. I don’t just want to do a revised,
expanded version, because that would render the old one obsolete and I want to
go on selling it too. It is good cultist relations too. No one wants to be told
that what I sold you last year is now out of date, so you have to buy a new one.
I want your money, but I’d rather let you keep the value of your previous
investment while I empty your wallet with the new one. So, I hope to have
Volume II available at Necronomicon 2019. Come and sing along!
Partly
squamously, partly rugosely, Darrell
Schweitzer (a.k.a. “Brother Darrell” in the Esoteric Order of Dagon).
