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Saved At Last!
The first time I ever saw a picture of Lovecraft, I
naturally thought it was a drawing by some weird cartoonist like Bilal
or Nicolet.
I guess it was on the back-cover of Dagon. He looked so eerie . . . angry and
scared at the same time. . . . Then I saw another picture, and another one, . .
. and by the gods, I had to surrender to the incredible truth: these pictures
were actually PHOTOGRAPHS!
Because of this first impression, the HPL Mythos has
always had a tangible irreality of its own to me.
I can't remember too well, but I think it was my
brother who told me about the Man. I was at the time in the process of quitting
the rock scene. Showbizz was lessening in my interest as I was more and more
charmed by literature, particularly horror and what is called in French the
"fantastique". As a teenager I was a frenetic reader of all
sorts of thrillers of any genre until I read a book I considered (and, by Yig,
still do) a remarkable masterpiece: Dracula by Bram Stoker. I was hooked
. . . and definitely damned.
As I said, it seems my younger brother introduced me to
HPL. He knew him superficially well (he is more a Poe fan than a Theobald one),
and so Lovecraft and I got acquainted. Rapidly, I began to dig in without really
knowing a thing about the field except that Lovecraft was somehow an ignored
figure and a weird myth-persona. But without a clue as to why, I actually had a
strange feeling about the author, a feeling that I was on the verge of
discovering something of crucial importance: something that would alter my very
life.
Life is, but Hell is not, a hideous thing; Baron von
Gustaff, my personal daemon, was particularly "on my side" at the
time, and light came at last: I bought Le couleur tombee du ciel (The
Color Out of Space, Presence du futur, Denoël ed.) and AAAHHHHH! Jouissance
supreme! Now this was what I'd been drooling for! Submerged, I was . .
. delighted! (As happens frequently, the first mighty impression I got from this
novel makes it my all-time favorite of HPL's works.) Soon, I had plunged into
the oeuvre of the Recluse, not to emerge for a long time.
For almost three years now, I've been actively devoting
my life, heart, and soul to the horror genre. It provides me with the ultimate
passion: Fear. Among the endless list of authors I love and respect,
Lovecraft holds a very special throne, for I consider him to be unique and part
of no known school. He isn't a pure science-fiction writer, nor is he a pure
weird-taler. A unique blend of all of this and none of that. . . . In fact,
I've always been amazed by the scholars' need to classify HPL in one way or
another; why must they absolutely file him? Probably only to justify their
illusory position as critics. . . .
Actually, HPL holds an important place in my day-to-day
life; for nearly ten months now, I've become more and more acquainted with the
Lovecraftians. Reading Lovecraft Studies, I discovered Crazy Bob's Crypt of
Cthulhu, from which I learned of Nyctalops, the Esoteric Order of
Dagon (of which I am now a member), and of course more books from the Mystic S. T. Joshi, etc. . . .
I also began to correspond with a few of those
weirdos,
delighted to exchange opinions or strange ideas, or just to know them for the
fun and the heck of it. Something else this activity achieved was to make your
modest servant write in English, which I had never done until a little more than
a year ago.
Do I owe all this to HPL? In a sense, yes. Because he's
been the inner flame pushing me ever farther, sustaining my faithful
imagination, training my patience and will to write to unknown persons and
forcing myself to make new acquaintances. Lovecraft took me where I always
wanted to be without knowing it: dreams, nightmares, horrors, fear, imagination
at its excessive peak and feverish conceptualization. . . . Thanks, HP!
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