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HMS: Can you tell us about some of the choices that you’ve made in Providence? You mentioned previously focusing on some lesser known aspects of different stories. And that’s actually where you’re finding the room and the right zones to stitch the stories together into one narrative, isn’t it?Alan Moore: Yes. Amongst the many, many books on Lovecraft that I’ve been reading, from the biographical ones, the critical ones, I came across somewhere the writings of psychologist, and then scholar, Dirk W. Mosig. He put forward the idea that all of Lovecraft’s stories were actually intended as chapters in some kind of “hyper-novel”. Now, I don’t think that’s true for a moment, but it’s an interesting idea.HMS: Wow. It certainly is.AM: But it doesn’t need to be true in order to explore that idea. One of the things that is perhaps problematic about Lovecraft stories, is that I don’t think anyone can agree about how the stories are supposed to connect up. It’s obvious from shared references between stories, that they kind of do relate to each other in some way, or at least most of them. But attempts to actually formalize that have been perhaps less than successful. One of the things that I decided quite early on is that there is no “Cthulhu Mythos”. Lovecraft never used that phrase. He seemed to be resistant to August Derleth’s attempts to propose some kind of mythology of Hastur. He seemed uncomfortable with that. Generally, he referred to his gods as “Yog Sothothery” or “Cthulhuism” in almost a self-deprecatory way. As if he’s saying, “This is a bit of fun. I thought that if other writers referred to them as well, it would give the readers a kind of frisson, a mistaken sense that there was some body of real occult lore that we were all drawing upon”. It was interesting background for his and other writers’ stories. So, “Cthulhu Mythos” doesn’t really work.Lovecraft did speak of an “Arkham Cycle”, but nobody really knows what that was, either. However, that does seem to be something that he was at least considering. So, by taking Mosig’s idea that somehow these were all chapters of some huge hyper-novel—and like I said, I don’t believe that’s true, but it’s an interesting concept—I asked myself, “If that was true, how would it all link up?” Then, I started a process, tracing back to Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, to some of the early New England wizards in Lovecraft’s fiction who must have known each other. Who were living in such a relatively small area at more or less exactly the same time, so that I thought it would do no violence to Lovecraft’s work if you said, “Yes, these three people, they knew each other”.This was the beginning of my formalization of Lovecraft’s stories and my connecting up of the various dots in them. This is not meant to be definitive, since I think a definitive approach to Lovecraft would diminish the work. I think there is no right way of doing Lovecraft and that’s what makes it so interesting. I think that there’s a variety of ways of interpreting these stories. And I think that it should be left like that.TRANSCRIPT
eeding Cool welcomes back The Castle of Horror Podcast tonight, a weekly internet radio show where professional writers in the comics, games and book industries take a look at horror movies, choosing one movie a week to discuss in depth.They say:This week we wrap up our retrospective on Found Footage horror with [REC], a 2007 Spanish zombie movie that we actually all found to be fairly effective. This means that we managed to hit three fairly decent exemplars of the genre. [REC] tells the story of a couple of journalists following a fire fighter team in Barcelona who go out on a routine call, only to get dragged into a zombie apocalypse. You absolutely should look for the Spanish language version, because its hard to capture terror effectively in dubbing.Check out the trailer:Also this week, look for an interview with New York Times bestselling author Richard Kadrey, who drops in to talk about his new demons-of-LA book Killing Pretty of the Sandman Slim series.Be sure and join us over on Facebook to chime in.Want to join the discussion and chat with us live while we record? You can do that and more on our page at Talkshoe.Some links:Talk about the show at our Facebook home.Get the Show: Hosted here. RSS Feed. Subscribe at iTunes. Listen on Stitcher.Twitter: @castleofhorrorpThe Team: Hosted by Jason Henderson, writer of IDWs Ben 10 series and creator of the HarperTeen novel series Alex Van Helsing.Featuring Drew Edwards, creator of Halloween Man, Tony Salvaggio of Clockwerx from Humanoids and Julia Guzman, attorney host of the mom-oriented podcast Podmoms.