John Linwood Grant writes occult detective and dark fantasy stories, in between running his beloved lurchers and baking far too many kinds of bread. Apart from that, he enjoys growing unusual fruit and reading rejection slips. He is six foot tall, ageing at an alarming rate, and has his own beard.
We are by nature trivia-hounds, fascinated by those odd little nubbets which litter the universe – facts and fancies which provide endless interconnections between people, places, and events, often to no great purpose. And thus we were delighted to receive a copy of Don Swaim’s new collection, Deliverance of Sinners: Essays & Sundry on Ambrose Bierce (Errata Press, 2021) – the book you didn’t realise you wanted (but you should).
Hang on, you mutter – is this going to be some dry, scholarly meditation on yet another dead white writer? Well, fear not. Deliverance of Sinners may be scholarly under the surface, but Swaim is (as was Bierce) a journalist as well as an author, and has the knack of drawing you willingly into the most peculiar rabbit-holes. This is, quite frankly, a great read, darting in and out of so many aspects of Ambrose Bierce’s life, his work, and his contemporaries that we’d be surprised if you didn’t find something of interest.
Amongst enthusiasts of the weird, Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) may be best known for his tales of supernatural and psychological horror, such as ‘The Damned Thing’ and ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, and for his origination of Carcosa, in ‘An Inhabitant of Carcosa’, which went on to be a keystone of Robert W Chambers’ famous King in Yellow stories*. And of course, many have speculated about the (-1914?) element of his biography, as Bierce’s date and place of death have never been established.
* See also our article on Carcosa, its roots, and the Carcosan art of Michael Hutter:
“Bierce will remain an equivocal figure in American and world literature chiefly because his dark view of humanity is, by its very nature, unpopular. Most people like writing that is cheerful and uplifting, even though a substantial proportion of the world’s great literature is quite otherwise.”
S T Joshi
Drawn together from articles and pieces written by Swaim over the years, Deliverance of Sinners produces a picture of Bierce and his times which is more entertaining and intriguing than many a biography.
Don Swaim
It teases, speculates and subverts, as well as providing a wealth of sourced material. The overall style is wry, yet Swaim’s erudition and his understanding of Bierce shine through.
Contrast, for example, a detailed look at the unusual figure of Colonel Robert G Ingersoll (1833-1899), the rousing agnostic author and speaker who was, like Bierce, a veteran of Shiloh, with Swaim’s light-hearted explanation of how rumour of Bierce’s death relates to the Marfa Lights of Texas.
“The ‘Marfa Lights’ of west Texas have been called many names over the years, such as ghost lights, weird lights, mystery lights, or Chinati lights. The favorite place from which to view the lights is a widened shoulder on Highway 90 about nine miles east of Marfa. The lights are most often reported as distant spots of brightness, distinguishable from ranch lights and automobile headlights on Highway 67 (between Marfa and Presidio, to the south) primarily by their aberrant movements.” Judith Brueske
Or try an imagined interview between Swaim and Bierce on politics, religion, terrorism and other issues, using Bierce’s own words to provide the responses, followed by the author going on a road-trip with Bierce through contemporary America, in ‘Return to Carcosa’. Bar-fights and pithy remarks galore.
Want something more complex and literary after that? Then dip into a fascinating article on Stephen Vincent Benét* (1898-1943), the author of ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster’ (and of the Pulitzer-winning epic poem ‘John Brown’s Body’).
It’s a story they tell in the border country, where Massachusetts joins Vermont and New Hampshire.
Yes, Dan’l Webster’s dead–or, at least, they buried him. But every time there’s a thunder storm around Marshfield, they say you can hear his rolling voice in the hollows of the sky. And they say that if you go to his grave and speak loud and clear, “Dan’l Webster–Dan’l Webster!” the ground’ll begin to shiver and the trees begin to shake.
And after a while you’ll hear a deep voice saying, “Neighbor, how stands the Union?” Then you better answer the Union stands as she stood, rock-bottomed and copper sheathed, one and indivisible, or he’s liable to rear right out of the ground. At least, that’s what I was told when I was a youngster.
* A selection of Benét’s tales can be found in Thirteen O’Clock: Stories of Several Worlds – dry and odd in places, but often imaginative.
Deliverance of Sinners also includes what is perhaps one of S T Joshi’s most extensive interviews (conducted by Swaim), covering Lovecraft (who described Bierce’s fictional work as “grim and savage”), Bierce himself, George Sterling and all manner of other topics.
Then there’s a piece on Bierce’s appalling ‘Little Johnny’ sketches, dreadful mock-bumpkin ‘shorts’ which no one but Bierce seemed to like – and no one seems to know why he kept writing the ghastly things – followed by a far more worthy offering, Swaim’s own one act play concerning the relationship between Bierce and the feminist writer Gertrude Atherton (1857-1948). Based on true events and drawing on Atherton’s 1932 autobiography Adventures of a Novelist, this is both touching and informative; we had read this one before, and found it just as good to revisit.
Atherton will also be known to supernaturalists for her disquieting stories, such as ‘The Striding Place’, which can be read in full here:
There are many more snippets and curios in Deliverance of Sinners, enough to absorb the idle reader for some time, or to set the acadmeic on new trails. In short, this is a fine read and an excellent resource – studious and playful, clever and self-aware.
To mark the anniversary of William Hope Hodgson’s birth (15 November 1877), here’s one of my Hodgsonian tales again for free. It’s downloadable, designed with a cover and Author’s Note at the end. The original story, ‘A Dark Trade’, was written for Carnacki: The Lost Cases (Ulthar, 2016), and is a tale of the injustice and wickedness of other times.It hasn’t yet appeared in any of my collections.
It’s the first and only ‘traditional’ Carnacki story from me, despite what people think. I don’t do Carnacki pastiches in general, and my ‘Tales of the Last Edwardian’ series deliberately covers the period after his death, and the period when he was less well known, with the character as an aside or a passing mention.
Lost Cases included three pieces by me: i) an introductory story that was, in effect, a really bad joke; ii) ‘A Dark Trade’, which is canonical and has a very uncomfortable theme beneath it, and iii) a very different tale – ‘Grey Dog’. ‘Grey Dog’ is my quintessential comment on Thomas Merton Carnacki’s life, and may be the only, or one of the only, stories which is entirely from his inner viewpoint. That one, which is in my collection A Persistence of Geraniums, has variously been described as “the best Carnacki story Hope Hodgson never wrote”, “too downbeat”, and “tragically sad”. I saw it more as a meditation on life, and simply like its mood.
The story below has all the trappings you’d expect, but takes the Ghost Finder somewhere that ought to make monsters of the Outer Circle seem kind. Any more would sort of give it away.
This standalone version will be downloadable here for the next week.
You can find many articles and interviews about Hope Hodgson or Carnacki on greydogtales using the search box. And next year should see the publication of The Book of Carnacki (Belanger Books), edited by me – an anthology of tributes, pastiches and other pieces devoted – rather obviously – to Carnacki the Ghost Finder.
In the meantime, do have a look at my recent second collection, Where All is Night, and Starless (Trepidatio 2021), which is less Edwardian but more wide-ranging…
AVAILABLE NOW THROUGH AMAZON UK & US, AND THROUGH THE PUBLISHER, JOURNALSTONE
Today’s special – an extensive interview with Alan M Clark, award-winning artist and writer, on his recent novel Fallen Giants of The Points (IFD Publishing, 2021), something which should be of interest to many readers, novel writers in general, and those who use historical settings in particular.
Most readers will know Alan from his Jack the Ripper Victims series, widely praised for its focus on the real women of Whitechapel in the 1880s, where their lives, their hopes and failures, are what truly matters – not the murderer. His latest book, set some forty years before that terrible autumn and a continent away, revisits poverty and deprivation to commence a new and epic journey:
A novel inspired in part by the early gangs of New York, this sprawling adventure is also a western, a coming of age story, and a tale of redemption that carries readers from the streets of infamous Five Points, New York City in the 1840s to Gold Rush era San Francisco. Told from the point of view of two dauntless orphaned children, Alta Mae and Cedric…
It’s a rattling good read, skillfully done – we dipped in from curiosity, but found ourselves reading the whole thing through, and glad we did. So we cornered Alan and got the full story what lay behind the book – his approach, his inspirations, and his thoughts on some of the issues raised.
alan m clark
FALLEN GIANTS
greydog: Alan, welcome back to greydogtales. First of all, although we’re most familiar with your powerful late Victorian fiction set in England, Fallen Giants seems to fall within your ‘Early Americana’ body of work, one which includes The Door that Faced West and A Parliament of Crows. Both of those books were inspired by true events –Fallen Giants is, as far as we know, purely fictional, albeit rich with genuine period detail and historical themes. What inspired you to take this one on?
alan: I started out wanting to write a novel set, at least in part, in The Old Brewery in Five Points, New York City. The place has a role in Martin Scorsese’s film, The Gangs of New York, but we get mere glimpses of it, and much of its character is missing. For years, I’d been fascinated with The Old Brewery’s history as a haven for criminals and the extremely squalid nature of the place as a tenement. While the Old Brewery was a brewery, the three-story structure had been expanded with numerous additions and ended up looking like several structures jammed haphazardly together. It became a tenement some time in the 1830s.
The descriptions of the place as a tenement beggar belief—the numbers of people residing there, the debauchery, the murder rate on the premises—yet all descriptions I’ve found, though from different sources and worded differently, seem to be fairly consistent. To rid the city of the place, a charity bought it and razed it to the ground. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn they’d then sown that ground with salt to prevent another crop of criminals from growing there. If they did, it didn’t work—that part of New York City has bred some of the worst gang violence in history.
So then I had to bone up on the criminal and political gangs of the 1840s—the time period of my story—in and around Five Points. The Bowery Boys and other Protestant, nativist gangs caught my attention because their politics were so similar to that of the MAGA crowd of today: Their bigotries, their use of outrageous conspiracy theories, and just bald-faced lies to manipulate people, to divide and conquer politically. In the decades following the 1840s, their politics would go a long way toward building the Know Nothing Party, a nationalist group of some power in the late 19th century.
I discovered that members of the nativist gangs of New York joined up to fight the Mexicans in California during the Mexican-American War. The notion of Manifest Destiny had Americans enthralled in that time, and the idea of westward expansion had become so popular that the small number of Mexicans on the West Coast didn’t stand a chance of keeping the land they’d claimed as their own. Gold was discovered near the end of hostilities. When the war ended, and the New York gang members were mustered out of service, some chose to stay in California. Many Mexican civilians remained as well. Some of the white, Protestant Americans, arriving by the day along the California Trail during the Gold Rush, didn’t want to share California with the brown, Catholic, Spanish-speaking people. The Nativist Gang members who had stayed saw an opportunity in that. They formed a new gang called the Hounds, and hired themselves out to merchants and politicians as a private security force to run the Mexican’s out of the area.
With all that, I decided I’d found the historical bones of the tale I wanted to tell. Now I just had to create characters to move around in it and help me “see” the terrain of that history and the story that might unfold within it.
other americana also from alan
greydog: How did you settle on telling the tale from the point of view of two children, the girl, Alta Mae, and her younger brother, Cedric, rather than the adults?
alan: I needed characters that could represent young America herself. The orphaned children emerge from the cultural melting pot of New York City. They are innocents in a lot of ways, not worldly, but canny children of the streets with pluck. Like many orphaned children of that time, they were concerned with keeping their liberty rather than working in the service of others, either as adopted children required to labor for a household or farm, or sold through contract as labor for some industry. They engage in criminal behavior to survive on the street, but are not heartless and cruel. Many of those aspects of their characters speak to me of early Americans in general, a downtrodden and flawed but capable bunch, with strange notions about gaining and keeping their liberty, a sizable share of them with criminal backgrounds.
Photo by Jacob Riis. The photo was created in the 1880s. That shows that the plight of homeless children was not addressed for decades in New York City.
greydog: The children are as young as five and seven when the story begins. What was it like trying to depict a child’s thinking and motivations? Presumably you were able to draw on the fact that children exposed to such harsh conditions had to develop a degree of ‘know-how’ just to survive – more than sheltered or advantaged children.
alan: Yes, I think we like and respect them because they are toughened enough by their experience growing up in Five Points to be rather fearless. That toughness was handy while considering what they’d be willing to do in dire circumstances, of which there are many in the narrative.
In writing from a child’s perspective, I try to narrow the scope of my understanding of what they encounter, as if I only have their experience to draw on. They make simpler connection in understanding than I might, ones that are often naive, or even laughable, depending on their age. In communicating with others, they more often take people literally. Here’s an exchange of dialogue that might demonstrate that last idea:
Adult: “Please accept my condolences.”
Child: Not knowing what condolences were, I thought he would hand me something. Like a goosecap, I just stood there looking at him, waiting. A moment passed before he nodded and walked away.
Since they age by several years in the course of the narrative, I had to adjust my approach to depicting them as the tale progressed, to allow for the greater understanding that they gain over time.
greydog: The chapters alternate between the point of view of Alta Mae and that of Cedric. Did this arise as a method of revealing different aspects of the overall story, or for other reasons—and were you ever tempted to add in chapters seen through the older brother Egan’s eyes?
alan:I was never tempted to add chapters from Egan’s POV. He, too, is an orphan, but several years older and not at all the innocent that his younger siblings are.
Bouncing back and forth between Alta Mae and Cedric, I could have two views of the same thing if needed, I could show differences in their personalities, and how they could be drawn together as fiercely loyal allies, or separated as enemies, at least temporarily, with a sense of betrayal. Having survived together on the streets since earliest childhood, they had naturally developed resentments toward each other. The hard feelings that come between them threaten their chances of reaching shared goals—just another bit of conflict thrown into the mix to make the drama multi-layered, and human.
greydog: The novel starts out with the children believing their parents are giants composed of animated clusters of buildings. It’s a powerful piece of imagery. What inspired that aspect, and how did you set out to make it believable?
alan:Fallen giants as those who were looked up to but have fallen from grace is a key theme explored in the novel, so why not take it literally as well, I thought.
My own weird beliefs when young told me it was plausible that children of five and seven might believe such things. And the “giants” thing was actually inspired by my own experience—I was maybe five when my grandparents took my brother and me to a baseball game. The grownups talked up how exciting it would be to see the Giants play—this was when the Giants were a New York team. I suppose I didn’t think too hard about what the Giants were like until we got to Shea Stadium and I saw the high ceilings. Then I became afraid, because I knew we were truly going to be exposed to real giants. That is a hazy memory, but an indelible one.
To make that believable in the novel, I show the conversation in which Egan presents the lie. Here it is from Cedric’s memory (abbreviated):
“Our Ma were a giant prostitute,” Egan told us. “She died shortly after giving birth to you, Cedric, and fell dead along Little Water Street. People took up inside her.”
“They lived inside her?” Alta Mae asked.
“Yes—still do—but you have to understand she were made of houses. We’ve visited her corpse many times. It now looks like houses along a dead end.” (In that day, several houses in a row under the same landlord might be considered one tenement)
“The Cow Bay tenement?” she asked, tilting her head this way and that.
“Yes.”
Alta Mae gave Egan a withering look, her lips drawn back. “She couldn’t move if she were houses.”
“Little girl,” he said with a big, loving smile, “there are more things possible than you’ve known or seen in your short life.”
She shook her head slowly, as if unsure.
Egan nodded, his face open and truthful, or so it seemed.
Alta Mae frowned, squinted at the bright sky, then nodded to show she understood. And, so, I took his words as true.
Egan tells them that their father, also dead, was a drunkard and is the tenement known as the Old Brewery. Alta Mae struggles to understand how that’s possible and finally works it out in her head:
I remember some of how I’d found my own truth in his lie. Must have been six years old when I saw the head of a figure in each of two windows set close together in the Old Brewery’s main building. As they moved about, as if together, I thought of them as Papa’s blinkers looking out at me. Never mind he was supposed to be dead. Two sets of five privies along the North side became Papa’s toes. I pictured him wiggling them and startling folks inside doing their business. The long brick parts, set close together with a corridor between, I had as his legs. Along the west side, a couple of splintered sheds, with boards poking out this way and that became his hands and fingers. In the largest chamber, which I knew to be his gut and chest, stood the old abandoned brewing equipage: a giant copper tank, vats, and barrels. They had to be Papa’s bread bag, sweetmeats, and giblets.
Here’s an example of one of several dreams Alta Mae has in which her parents are alive and moving around:
Sometimes folks fell out of Ma. Saw a cove and his prostitute, in the midst of passionate missionary hogmagundy, fall from a window in the house of her bosom. Dreamt once that Ma and Papa paused to kiss, and a man ran up to a tap in Papa’s ankle and drew off a pail of whiskey.
They’re just the sad fancies of a girl who longed to know her parents, I suppose. Because they believed the untruth at such an early age, they cannot shake it from their imaginations later even when they know better. This is in part because, as orphans, they have a deep need to know something of their origins.
greydog:The narrative and the dialogue are peppered with slang. How much research did that take, and how did you get it to blend in?
alan:People of America in the mid 19th Century would not likely say, “How cute is that?” as a rhetorical question, but they would have their own interesting expressions. The slang is much like any other elements that tells the audience they are not in Kansas anymore. Of course, getting the atmosphere of the period right helps the audience to more easily imagine the time and circumstances in the story. The trick of letting the audience in on the meaning of slang terms is making it clear through inference. Here’s an example using the slang term “dimber:”
They thought me a boy. And why shouldn’t they? I wasn’t a particularly dimber girl. Dressing as I did, in what rags I could find to keep warm, woolen cap on my head, pulled down over my hair, I’d hidden what prettiness I may have had.
With almost a decade of writing my Jack the Ripper Victims Series, I’d used in dialogue a lot of British slang, that of the sea faring, that from the streets of London—the thieve’s cant, among others. I knew that early New York City, much of it settled by English immigrants, had slang that borrowed a lot from those same sources. I found a glossary of the slang used in New York City in the time period of my tale. Here’s what I put in the front of the book to explain (abbreviated):
Many slang terms appear in this book. The reader can find most of it defined in a book published in 1849, Vocabulum, or, The Rogue’s Lexicon, by George W. Matsell. The book is available for free in a Project Gutenberg ebook
George W. Matsell was the first New York City Police Commissioner. He wrote the dictionary of American Thieves’ cant to make certain his police officers understood what was being said on the streets, as many criminals spoke to one another while assuming others would not understand their slang.
History and Prejudice
greydog: The young characters are unreliable and flawed narrators, who must change and grow with the events in the tale. Why did you burden them with so many outrageous untruths and bigotries?
alan:The flaws in their understanding are important since I wanted to demonstrate the changes that came over them with time and experience in the wider world; ones that parallel many of the changes that came to America, herself, with time.
Egan is eight years older than Alta Mae, and represents a father figure for his younger siblings. At first, he is with them on the streets. When an adolescent, he hooks up with the Bowery Boys as a scout and messenger. By this association, he is afforded comforts that Alta Mae and Cedric are not. He gets to sleep in a shed, while they have to brave the New York winter nights. Egan still does his best to help them get by, but he is slowly moving away from then, trying to make his life better. He lies a lot, and with the gullibility of youth and their respect for him as patriarch, Alta Mae and Cedric are easy to manipulate. He has a bit of fun with seeing what they’d believe. He also fills them with the bigotries and anti-immigrant world views of the nativist Bowery Boys to whom he is in thrall.
greydog: Speaking of bigotries, the anti-Catholic sentiments of some characters are mentioned prominently, echoing factual events such as the earlier nativist riots in America, and those later clashes featured in Asbury’s 1927 book The Gangs of New York (filmed in 2002). Such prejudice continued well into the twentieth century—did you find this a difficult issue to cover?
alan:Not really. The anti-Catholic prejudice is perhaps less a factor in the U.S. today. I hope so. In my life, I can only remember one person ever saying anything to me directly that was disparaging about another just because of their catholic faith. Still, like other bigotries, it’s basic xenophobia, and comes partly from our human need to find scapegoats for our fear and anger. Bigotry is one of the major themes explored in the novel.
Tape Primer Sharps rifle like one used by Argus Leventus in the novel
greydog: Without giving too much away, Fallen Giants as a whole touches on many social justice issues with which we deal today, and the ending includes a degree of positivity. The social construct of ‘race’—and its artificiality—is also an important factor. What did you hope to accomplish with that?
alan:Because I found so many parallels between the nativist gang members in the 19th century and the nationalists encouraged by the last United States presidential administration, I looked for ways to give a haunting reflection from our past of the silent and not-so-silent religious bigotries and racism so prevalent in our politics and on our streets today.
In my life, I have a family member who once had a strong racist streak instilled in earliest childhood. Through life experience and extensive exposure to the race that person apposed, the racism was erased, as far as I can tell. Witnessing that was for me a very hopeful sign of the sort of change human beings are capable of. I wanted to demonstrate that transformation in characters in the novel, and to do it in an emotionally persuasive manner to project that hope. I think we desperately need that right now.
greydog: We’ll admit that we hadn’t expected that a story of the slums and oppression on the East Coast would turn into a western adventure and a suspense-filled tale of the great wagon trains, even referencing the Donner Party. What made you decide to splice these two together and form a whole?
alan:When I set out to write the novel, I didn’t intend to write a gangs of New York/western book. But I always allow the history of my settings to take me for a ride. Truly, the notion of it becoming a western came along when I saw that Egan, a Bowery Boy, might have been among those nativist gang members who joined up to fight the Mexicans in California. It was then that I also saw the arch of the story and its pertinence to the awful politics of our time. I’d already conceived my main characters. I knew Egan wanted out from under the responsibility of taking care of his younger siblings. Of course, characters talk to a writer, and this one told me he wanted to join up for the fight, get away from New York, and start a new life. Alta Mae and Cedric told me they’d follow because they were absolutely dependent on him. The vastness of the North American continent loomed in my imagination as an impenetrable wilderness to have to depict. I was seriously frightened by the prospect of writing that story, but decided I needed the adventure before I got too old to do it, and so I set out.
greydog: Finally, as we mentioned at the start the bulk of your work is historical fiction. What fascinates you about using history as a stage?
alan:Part of it is that ride I just referred to. Researching a historical setting will throw many things in a writer’s path, some that work, some that don’t, but all are considered. While developing the plot for Fallen Giants of the Points, research turned up many wonderful elements to include in the novel, things I would not have thought up on my own. The discovery possible in researching history is limitless. Exploration and discovery in creative process are what makes art, whether visual art or writing, fun for me.
greydog: Many thanks for joining us again, Alan M Clark.
FALLEN GIANTS OF THE POINTS, from IFD Publishing, is available now on Amazon.
As is the complete Jack the Ripper Victims Series, including the special edition 13 MILLER’S COURT, which interleaves Alan’s novel THE PROSTITUTE’S PRICE and John Linwood Grant’s novel THE ASSASSIN’S COIN to create an imagining of the life and final fate of Mary Jane Kelly.
Paul St John Mackintosh is a jolly stimulating chap. He has many imaginative ideas, and he has strong opinions; he has written all sorts of interesting stuff, and a conversation with him never bores. Last year he added to his CV with a brand new RPG game based on the works and ‘world’ of M R James. We wanted to talk to him about this, but then we drifted into a much longer and serious conversation about weird and horror fiction, so we’re doing this interview in two halves. Or in halves, basically. Why we needed to say ‘two’ is beyond us.
Today’s offering is therefore Part One, all about the Monty-inspired game and what Paul’s up to in general…
MONTY AND ROLEPLAYING
greydogtales: First of all, we’d like to talk about something in which you’ve recently had a lot of involvement – gaming. Were you a gamer in your youth, or is this a later development? And what formats do you prefer – board games, online RPGS or tabletop RPGs?
paul: I had a brief adolescent period of RPG playing while still at school, back in the late Seventies and Eighties when the first games that really defined the field – Dungeons and Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, etc. – were first coming out. Then that went into abeyance literally for decades, although I’ve played PC games enthusiastically and pretty much relentlessly. I rediscovered RPG gaming only in the past five years or so – principally thanks to writing and reading Lovecraftian and weird fiction. Pretty much through random Googling, I discovered that roleplaying games had advanced intellectually and creatively by leaps and bounds over the intervening decades, and that some RPG creators and writers were producing horror fiction as good as, if not better than, many weird and horror writers who were saving themselves entirely for literary and genre outlets. Plus, the whole field has dipped far more deeply and widely into cultural, historical, intellectual and literary sources than it had when I first encountered it. So I’m very happy and comfortable to be part of the reborn RPG scene.
Additionally, since we’re going to be talking plenty about weird and Lovecraftian fiction in a separate article, it’s my view that the current resurgence of both (if they’re not one and the same) owes far more to Call of Cthulhu and roleplaying games in general than those who only work the literary/genre fiction side of the street are aware of. For all the work done by Arkham House and the scholars diligently striving to confirm H.P. Lovecraft’s literary status, it’s not just their work that got Cthulhu plushies into almost every home, and made tentacle-waving gods and Deep Ones cliches of popular culture: it’s also the influence of a classic roleplaying game.
Call of Cthulhu was one of the earliest of the great pioneering vintage of RPGs, appearing in 1981, and it’s worn astonishingly well, remaining only just behind Dungeons and Dragons in popularity. (Perhaps All Things Lovecraft would have risen to their present eminence without CoC, but somehow I doubt it.) A sad proportion of its players admit to never having read a single work by Lovecraft; but I do wonder how many Lovecraftian fiction writers, editors, critics and publishers have never played Call of Cthulhu? I believe the cross-fertilization and the mutual debt deserves to be fully understood and acknowledged on both sides.
greydogtales: What attracted you to the basic concept of roleplaying games – the interactions with others, the problem solving, or the chance to inhabit a different character?
paul: It’s always been imagination: the opportunity to create different characters, different settings, different worlds. I’m a huge devotee of imagination itself, sui generis, as a creative faculty, almost regardless of the media it works with – whether “imagined fantasy” or “taken from life.” RPGs allow me an immensely fruitful, stimulating, and purely fun way to exercise that faculty.
That said, what I tend to enjoy most in RPGs is the opportunity to tell stories – both individually and collaboratively with other players. Any writer or critic who is concerned about the tyranny of the authorial voice should spend a little time playing or running RPGs. M. John Harrison has opined that: “the reader performs most of the act of writing” – that’s never been truer than in RPGs. A writer of RPG scenarios is essentially creating a scaffolding for collective improv, which comes alive at its best with the engagement of really imaginative players who create and contribute just as much of the final creative realization.
As it happens, my rediscovery of RPGs was facilitated by the fact that the hobby took a big turn into “Narrativist” versus “Simulationist” systems. In other words, the rules and mechanics of RPGs, first derived from pure tabletop wargames that attempted to simulate the dynamics of real combat, were revised and reconceived to support the dynamics of storytelling and narrative instead. It’s like the difference between sitting in an airline pilot training flight simulator, and sitting through a screening of Top Gun. There’s still something of a split in the RPG world between devotees of the two approaches – although of course both have their merits and are mutually interdependent. But you can guess which one really played up [sic.] to my talents and enthusiasms as a writer.
Also, the RPG hobby has entered an indie period where a huge number of fun and fascinating ideas are being worked on by creators outside the mainstream, using self-publishing and online community resources. Concurrently, the whole hobby has grown immensely more inclusive, socially aware, LGBT-focused, and generally coming out of Mom’s basement – despite shrill objections from the Neanderthal old guard in some quarters. That’s a trend we’ve seen in genre media across the board (no pun intended…), and RPGs, like comics or PC games or genre fiction, have emerged far stronger for it.
It’s also simply a question of purpose and focus. Games are meant to entertain. Fine, Thomas Ligotti, no less, has declared that “literature is entertainment or it is nothing,” and I heartily endorse that. But it’s even more comforting to be writing a game without various headfucking concerns that you ought to be doing justice to your inspiration, or saving humanity, or rejuvenating the language, or Getting Famous, or crusading for the insulted and injured, etc etc. The solipsistic fantasy of the Lonely Agonized Creative Struggle gets a lot more ludicrous when you’re rolling dice.
greydogtales: As we mention in the introduction, the major project you undertook last year was development of an investigative RPG relating to the disquieting world of that classic author of the supernatural, M R James. What was it that spurred you to take this on?
paul: Ironically, it was a kickback against the dominance of Call of Cthulhu and Lovecraftian horror in RPGs. You’ve got all the great legacy of folk horror, and of the classic ghost story by James and his peers, and yet in RPGs this stuff was either under-represented, or twisted and nerdtroped into Lovecraftian modes to make it palatable to gamers conditioned by CoC. I thought the great tradition of horror deserved to be enjoyed and appreciated on its own merits, rather than distorted through a narrowly Lovecraftian lens. So I went ahead and wrote Casting the Runes, using the investigative type of game system that’s been developed to tackle these kinds of stories effectively, and the whole thing slotted into place so neatly that I’m still amazed that no one tried it before. I offered it to a game publisher, and got signed up almost immediately, even though it was my first time writing an RPG game.
m r james
greydogtales: How did the process differ from your previous literary projects? We presume this was a much more complicated business.
paul: Surprisingly, it wasn’t all that different. I tend to incorporate a lot of research into my writing anyway, so the detail-crunching was remarkably similar. Plus, by the time I got around to writing Casting the Runes, I’d already digested the game system so thoroughly that I could adjust to it almost without thinking.
There’s one more part of the process that is absolutely worth mentioning for the benefit of writers everywhere: RPGs pay more. Not always, not more than a major book deal, but I certainly found I was netting bigger PayPal transfers for my RPG writing than I ever did for my weird fiction. That may be a reflection on my relative writing skills, but I do suspect it’s about the financial dynamics of the respective media. RPG players will happily fork out $15-20 for a PDF-only version of the latest reasonably popular game, and substantially more for hardback and printed versions. It’s not unknown for deluxe editions of well-regarded games and supplements to sell out at three-figure cover prices. With that kind of money driving the RPG industry, writers can sometimes benefit quite well from RPG writing – I certainly recommend it as a potentially lucrative alternative to screenwriting or blogging.
greydogtales: Are M. R. James enthusiasts commonly game players, or do you feel more that you’ve drawn other gamers into the MRJ ‘world’?
paul: In my experience, many Jamesians (or Full Montys, or whatever you want to call them) are as much strangers to RPGs as many Lovecraftians are to Call of Cthulhu. I suspect that the traffic between gamers and readers is about the same in both directions, but I wouldn’t be surprised if more horror RPG players were aware of MRJ already. Monty is a classic after all, and RPG playing is still far less popular than plain reading.
MACKINTOSH AND WORK
paul stjohn mackintosh
greydogtales: So, you now have a fairly wide-ranging back catalogue, and number of roles – poet, writer, game developer, journalist. Are these roles equal, or do you yearn for one to be paramount?
paul: I look on those all as subsets of writer, and I want them all to flourish as reflections of that. The few times I’ve held one up above the others have turned out, in retrospect, to be big mistakes, so I’d rather keep pushing them all forward, and see how they work out. That said, I’d love for them all to be picked up equally and appreciated equally, rather than one or other gaining such prominence that people start to define me by it, and leave the others languishing in the shade. But that’s not my call.
greydogtales: On one specific strand, you have the second of your inventive ‘ghost adjuster’ tales coming out in Occult Detective Magazine soon. Playing around, or planning a series/cycle of these?
paul: Oh, I definitely want to churn out a cycle of Ghost Adjuster stories. Those tales allow me to tackle a few topics I’m really engaged by – the modern status of Scotland, the Caledonian Anti-syzygy (a.k.a. the Jekyll-and-Hyde dichotomy that Scots struggle with), the reality (or not) of human consciousness, etc. It’s not the only type of occult detective story that interests me, but I’ve certainly got a few outlines in my mind for that series that I plan to work up into full stories eventually.
greydogtales: What next for Paul StJohn Mackintosh? Do you have new projects or new ideas for your work that you’d like to share?
paul: I’ve currently got one dark urban fantasy novel half-written, one science-fiction-ish novel of oneiric unreality just begun, and a bunch of half-written short stories I want to get around to finishing soon. I have one completed historical novel I want to find a publisher for, as well as the first novel in that urban fantasy series. I’ve got one sonnet cycle of poems based on the Major Arcana of the Tarot and one cycle of modern Scottish supernatural ballads that I’m trying to find publishers for. On the RPG side, I’ve got one more complete game I’ve just about finished for a game publisher, and another under development. And I’m sure that more inspirations, ideas, and projects will keep bubbling up from the creative stinkpot of my brain. So I don’t expect to get a rest any time soon.
greydogtales: Many thanks, Paul, for joining us again.
PART TWO of our interview will follow along on here in a while, when we’ll be discussing the nature of genre, Lovecraftian themes, storytelling, and all sorts…
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