As I recently wrote about on my Chud.com blog, I'm experiencing a return to the works of H.P. Lovecraft lately. It's been a while since I've been able to 'get into' his writing, even though it has long been a MAJOR influence on me, insofar as writing, music, visually, atmosphere, etc. I walk around every day and conduct my life to constant music, always obsessing about atmosphere; this is due, I believe, to my Synesthesia, as I've talked about many times here before. The music produces a kind of adhesive that holds me slightly outside everything going on around me. In one way this can be a drawback, as 'shoegazing' can most definitely interfere with tasks or goals more grounded in the real world. However, it also leads to many late night and early morning 'jam sessions' wherein I find myself traipsing down the odd corridors in my head and, when I'm quick, pulling some of that stuff back for my writing, music, now video, etc. Somewhere in that adhesive there is a whole mess of H.P. Lovecraft – reading his mostly (entirely?) first-person accounts of the weird and macabre at such a developmental age I often find myself even now thinking in the tone of his protagonists. It's been that way for close to two decades now, to the point that I believe the day I was stabbed senior year in high school ('94) and whisked away in an ambulance I was thinking something to the effect of, 'Be it not for me to believe, but this account I give you today does indeed end with a blade in my chest.'Having such a massive predilection for Lovecraft, not just his tone and atmosphere but the far-reaching and frankly not-completely-unplausible concepts the man built and worked with, it really should not come as a surprise that my first attempt at writing a novel was a play on his works. Being that while he was alive Lovecraft appreciated and encouraged his literary friends to write within his mythos the influx over the last ten or fifteen years of new Lovecraft-related work is, in a sense, a natural and exponential extension of what he himself began and fostered. Still, the more I've written and read the more I've moved away from Lovecraft, to the point that even though I believe my take on his mythos is different enough to be far, far away from plagaristic or disingenuous, I've actually 'finished' the book, titled "Thee Subtle War", at least three different times only to scrape it and begin again because... well because it's not really my own.
But goddamn it, I still really want to give the world my take on it!!!
As I've moved more into other authors (Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace and Alex Garland have all become HUGE influences on me for their haunting, real world grit and slightly ego-centric pontifications on the way we move through the world around us) I feel I found my own voice and in looking back and trying to re-start Thee Subtle War I've just not figured out how to integrate the story with that voice. In the interim I've written two novels and four screenplay I am quite proud of. Only one of those, a screenplay titled "Wonderland's End" I co-wrote with German screenwriter Marc Mrosk, was ever optioned, but still, I can shop these works with pride because they feel 'whole' to me, in a way that first novel, no matter how many times I write it, never has.
However now that I am reading Lovecraft again, and feel really tapped into the pulse of his work, I can't help feeling as though it may be time to work on my first love once again... even though it may just turn out to be another abortive attempt.
Only time, and of course He Who Is Not To Be Named, will tell.
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The incredible picture I used for this post is from this website and unfortunately I cannot find a credit therein for the artist. Too bad, because this is incredible stuff. http://nyarlathotephp.blogspot.com/
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