Horror Authors

"And mayhap there to be no mystery in the thing; but a score of natural explainings, if that I did know, or had patience to think long enough upon such."

"And lo! the creature did work slow in the brain."

"We truly to think that the world doth even now be old; and this to have seemed a true thing unto every age that ever did live."

"Mr. H. C. Koenig has conferred a great service on American “fandom” by calling attention to the remarkable work of an author relatively unknown in this country, yet actually forming one of the few who have captured the illusive inmost essence of the weird. Among connoisseurs of phantasy fiction William Hope Hodgson deserves a high and prominent rank; for, triumphing over a sadly uneven stylistic quality, he now and then equals the best masters in his vague suggestions of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life."

"And truly, I to hope that I have made this thing somewise clear unto you; for, indeed, it doth be something hard to set out; for every Age hath the subtleties peculiar to that Age; and these to be hard to the understanding of other Ages, but yet to seem plain and utter natural, even without thought, unto the Peoples of the Age."

"And, as doth be human, I brake my rule straightway in the beginning."

"And this doth show how a man may act foolishly, even when he doth believe that he hath a great caution; and surely it is borne in upon me afresh that none should trust over freely unto unproven matters, the which shall you heartily agree with; but yet do as foolishly, according to your lights and characters. And so shall you laugh not over hardly upon me."

"I saw many creatures that went about the fire, and did have warmth from the fire and drink from the spring; and surely I did ponder that the Peoples of this our Age should say, if they had stood with me, that Providence had made nigh together the warmth and the drink that were needful unto life (for it was grown to a bitter chill now in the Gorge). But rather did this thing seem to me otherwise, that these creatures did be but of their circumstance, and if that it had been another way, then had they grown of their wits to meet it to their means of life. Yet, as some would say, the arguments do but meet, and be the same thing."

"Another vast space went by, and the whole enormous flame had sunk to a deep, copper color. Gradually, it darkened, from copper to copper-red, and from this, at times, to a deep, heavy, purplish tint, with, in it, a strange loom of blood. Although the light was decreasing, I could perceive no diminishment in the apparent speed of the sun. It still spread itself in that dazzling veil of speed. The world, so much of it as I could see, had assumed a dreadful shade of gloom, as though, in very deed, the last day of the worlds approached."

"And, surely, this doth seem but a sane thinking unto me; but yet without proof, and to be said to you, only as the shapings of my thoughts."

"Despite a tendency toward conventionally sentimental conceptions of the universe, and of man’s relation to it and to his fellows, Mr. Hodgson is perhaps second only to Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality. Few can equal him in adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through casual hints and significant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and the abnormal in connexion with regions or buildings."

"I am not at sea because I object to bad treatment, poor food, poor wages, and worse prospects. I am not at sea because very early I discovered that it is a comfortless, weariful and thankless life—a life compact of hardness and sordidness such as shore people can scarcely conceive. I am not at sea because I dislike being a pawn with the sea for a board and the shipowners for players."

"Among those fiction writers who have elected to deal with the shadowlands and borderlands of human existence, William Hope Hodgson surely merits a place with the very few that inform their treatment of such themes with a sense of authenticity. His writing itself, as Mr. Lovecraft justly says, is far from equal in stylistic merit: but it would be impossible to withhold the rank of master from an author who has achieved so authoritatively, in volume after volume, a quality that one might term the realism of the unreal. In some ways, Hodgson's work is no doubt most readily comparable to that of Algernon Blackwood. But I am not sure that even Blackwood has managed to intimate a feeling of such profound and pervasive familiarity with the occult as one finds in The house on the Borderland. Hideous phantoms and unknown monsters from the nightward gulf are adumbrated in all their terror, with no dispelling of their native mystery; and surely such things could be described only by a seer who has dwelt overlong on the perilous verges and has peered too deeply into the regions veiled by invisibility from normal sight."

"The Night Land is one of the most extraordinary works in the English language. It is the story of the human race, trying to live long after it should have gone, long after everything should have gone, after the Sun has died, and the utter existential horror of that fact is the merest backdrop. It is a bestiary and an atlas of the bleakest dread imaginable. It is a piece of such stunning imaginative power, such awesome and terrible beauty, such majesty, that it defies its own faults and is a masterpiece."

"Goul or ghul, in Arabic, signifies any terrifying object which deprives people of the use of their senses; hence it became the appellative of that species of monster which was supposed to haunt forests, cemeteries, and other lonely places, and believed not only to tear in pieces the living, but to dig up and devour the dead."

"Vampires, like virgins or priests, are things that women believe in. We must never fail to humor them in such matters."

"When I was three or four, an older kid tried to scare me away from a barn full of dangerous junk by telling me the Bogeyman lived there. I spent a lot of time crawling around beneath rusted machinery and through barbed wire looking for the Bogeyman, but no luck. I've always loved a good scare, perhaps because the "Oz" and "Alice" books, the first things my mother read to me, are pretty scary stuff for a toddler. They had some wonderfully horrifying radio shows in those days, too — Suspense, Escape, and Quiet, Please. I still regret that I was listening to Charlie McCarthy when Orson Welles terrorized the country with his Martian invasion . . . As my membership in the Horror Writers Association attests, I don't mind the label."

"I believe that we are soft creatures in a world with some very hard edges. It's remarkable that we survive at all, much less do high deeds or write great music. I think … tension … is a condition of our existence, and I do my best to depict it."

"I had always been impatient with superstition. If I ever met a God, I would apologize for disbelieving in Him, but not until then."

"For all their laughter, ghouls are a dull lot. Hunger is the fire in which they burn, and it burns hotter than the hunger for power over men or for knowledge of the gods in a crazed mortal. It vaporizes delicacy and leaves behind only a slag of anger and lust. They see their fellows as impediments to feeding, to be mauled and shrieked at when the mourners go home. They are seldom alone, not through love of one another's company, but because a lone ghoul is suspected of stealing food. Their copulation is so hasty that distinctions of sex and identity are often ignored."

"American thinker Russell Kirk (1918­–1994) was among the few commentators, and possibly the only one among non-specialists, to underline that Plato’s “The Republic” is not a blueprint for political action. It is rather a philosophical metaphor on the ideal city of men and women. It must not be taken literally, but it serves its purpose best when considered as a mythical description of the theoretical coordinates that should limit and shape public life to obtain the highest level of decency for human beings. Plato’s endeavor in “The Republic” is in fact highly moral. In that book, the Greek philosopher aims at setting the standards that a community of human beings must observe to prosper, benefiting each of its members. And Plato aptly describes the “polis” as a “macroanthropos.”"

"In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality."

"Kirk was an artist, a visionary, almost a prophet."

"Kirk's understanding of conservatism was so unique, idiosyncratic, transcendental, elitist, and in certain respects premodern and European, that it bore little resemblance to political conservatism in the United States. Conservative Mind successfully launched an intellectual challenge to postwar liberalism, but the variety of conservatism Kirk preferred found few takers, even within the American Right."

"Conservatives have no intention of compromising with socialists, but even such an alliance, ridiculous though it would be, is more conceivable than the coalition of conservatives and libertarians."

"When heaven and earth have passed away, perhaps the conservative mind and the libertarian mind may be joined in synthesis, but not until then."

"What else do conservatives and libertarians profess in common? The answer to that question is simple: nothing. Nor will they ever. To talk of forming a league or coalition between these two is like advocating a union of ice and fire."

"Now the good government […] is the growth of centuries of social experience. It has been called organic; I prefer the analogy “spiritual.” Trusting to the wisdom of our ancestors and the experience of the nation, it puts its faith in precedent, prescription, historical trial and error, and consensus of opinion over the generations. Not infatuated with neatness, it prefers the strength and majesty of the Gothic style."

"Human nature being irremediably flawed, so that all of us in some degree rebel against the people and the institutions to which we owe most, there is in every man a certain impulse to make himself God: that is, to cast off all authority but his own lust and whim. From this vice comes the corrupting influence of total power upon even the best of natures. The rebellion of Lucifer is the symbol of this ancient anarchic impulse—the passion for overthrowing the just authority of God, that upon the vacant throne of authority the rebel may make himself absolute."

"The conflict is not really between royalty and democracy. It is between both and plutocracy, which, having destroyed the royal power by frank force under democratic pretexts, has bought and swallowed democracy."

"The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution."

"Global environmentalists have said and written enough to leave no doubt that their goal is to destroy the prosperous economies of the world's richest nations."

"Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos. If we are adrift in chaos, then the fragile egalitarian doctrines and emancipating programs of the revolutionary reformers have no significance; for in a vortex of chaos, only force and appetite signify."

"Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society is the end for which Providence has prepared man."

"Man's rights are linked with man's duties, and when they are distorted into extravagant claims for a species of freedom and equality and worldly aggrandizement which human character cannot sustain, they degenerate from rights to vices."

"The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of the spirit and character – with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest."

"Rousseau and his disciples were resolved to force men to be free; in most of the world, they triumphed; men are set free from family, church, town, class, guild; yet they wear, instead, the chains of the state, and they expire of ennui or stifling lonelines."

"Even the wisest of mankind cannot live by reason alone; pure arrogant reason, denying the claims of prejudice (which commonly are also the claims of conscience), leads to a wasteland of withered hopes and crying loneliness, empty of God and man: the wilderness in which Satan tempted Christ was not more dreadful than the arid expanse of intellectual vanity deprived of tradition and intuition, where modern man is tempted by his own pride."

"The mass of mankind, Burke implies, reason hardly at all, in the higher sense, nor ever can: deprived of folk-wisdom and folk-law, which are prejudice and prescription, they can do no more than cheer the demagogue, enrich the charlatan, and submit to the despot."

"Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors; they are dubious of wholesale alteration. They think society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine."

"There are six canons of conservative thought:"

"True conservatism rises at the antipodes from individualism. Individualism is social atomism; conservatism is community of spirit."

"If a man acknowledges no authority, he sets himself up as Cain, and before long he is struck down by nemesis, which follows upon hubris."

"We are indeed such stuff as dreams are made on, our little life rounded with a sleep. Thus I beam this tale into the cosmos; this message in a bottle, tossed into heaven's waves. Perhaps there is no one to receive it. Perhaps there is but one mind left to listen: the mind behind all things, like a face beneath the painter's canvas. Whoever you are, in whatever form you take - time, matter, light - I ask one thing only: that you leave us as we are. Let us sleep, and dream, and do the work of being human."

"And to you, the sleepers in my keeping: you have lived for countless lifetimes, you shall live for countless more. They will be different from the ones you've always known; your days of idleness and ease are gone. This is not a punishment - far from it. It is my gift to you, that you should be redeemed. I will give you childhood, so that you might know innocence. Age, so you will know the prize of youth. Children, so that you will care for the future. Toil, so that you will know the value of a day. The body's failings, so that you will know its worth. Death, so that you will cherish the bittersweet beauty of life. We are, each of us, born a sparkling soul, clothed only in our newness; now you will learn to be another."

"He returns to the helm. A perfect stillness lies around him; all is bathed in starlight. He could easily doze off himself, so profound is his contentment. How like a dream it all is, he thinks; a perfect dream, this life. He sits that way for a time, watching over his beloveds as they sleep, and, when the moment seems right, brings the bow around, finds the air to fill his sail, and steers his boat towards home."

"A new sensation swept my body, strange and still. I would know death in this place. What did it mean, to die in a dream? Would it be the same? Would it be a plunge into unbeing, or would I yet find myself passing into some new realm? And the thought came to me that maybe Thea had been right after all, that it was and always would be impossible to know what was dream and what was not; that all creation was boxes within boxes within boxes, each the dream of a different god."

"In gravity's grip, one ceases to experience gravity at all. One feels oneself floating, untethered to the world's binding force; it is as free a state of being as one can experience in life."

"So, at the last, a confession. I was the one who did it. Not the Nursery; that was Elise. But the rest of it. The Annex. The drones and watchmen. The splendid houses and grand edifices and endless, temperate days for the privileged few to pass in gentle ease while the unacknowledged masses labored in the shadows of their masters' pleasure. The dream of Prospera may have been Elise's; the design was mine from the start. Why did I do it? What thought possessed me that I should make one person's happy dream another's ceaseless nightmare? Better to ask: Who, having slumbered centuries in paradise, would willingly awaken to build a life from nothing, to hew it from the rock and ice of an alien world? To the colonists I say: I gave you what you needed, which was a weight to push against. A life you would be glad to leave, and a life to make you ready. Do you hate me for this? Surely I have earned your loathing. I will not ask you for forgiveness. For such a crime as mine, there can be no pardon, save for God's alone."

"His gaze widened, then taking in the entirety of the camp. All these people: they were trapped. And not merely by the wires that surrounded them. Physical barricades were nothing compared to the wires of the mind. What had truly imprisoned them was one another. Husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and companions: what they believed had given them strength in their lives had actually done the opposite. Guilder recalled the couple who lived across the street from his townhouse, trading off their sleeping daughter on the way to the car. How heavy that burden must have felt in their arms. And when the end swept down upon them all, they would exit the world on a wave of suffering, their agonies magnified a million times over by the loss of her. Would they have to watch her die? Would they perish first, knowing what would become of her in their absence? Which was preferable? But the answer was neither. Love had sealed their doom. Which was what love did. Guilder's father had taught that lesson well enough."