Genres | CW Hawes

New Project and Vella Update

Threads that Bind is a new blog launched by Jack Tyler, a long time indie author.

The blog is a coalition of authors and artists specializing in things macabre. It doesn’t matter the genre, just as long as the subject matter is chilling. Because, as some argue, horror isn’t a genre, it’s a mood, it’s the atmosphere that is brought to a genre.

Aside from Jack and myself, David Lee Summers, an indie author who has also been around the block a few times, and Venus Tyler, an upcoming young artist who is demonstrating a superb command of the artistic media, are also involved in the project.

It is our intention to add other writers and artists to our consortium. So that we can get varied perspectives on the genre, the craft, and the art of the macabre.

So take a look at our new project and feel free to add comments as to what you would like for us to discuss and we will take that under advisement.

My inaugural post can be found here: https://threadsthatbind.net/2022/11/25/fear-is-always-with-us/

I talk about my own introduction to the horror genre, which goes back 60 plus years, and why I find the macabre captivating. I hope you enjoy the post! And the blog!

Vella Report

As you may recall, I launched Tales Macabre and Arabesque on Vella back in October.

So far, I would have to say the results are underwhelming.

I published the first four episodes in October, and have been releasing a new episode every Monday starting with Halloween.

Yesterday, Episode #8, “Diaphanous, In Red Silk”, was published. It is a flash fiction piece, that in Japanese literary fashion, provides the middle of the story, and invites you, the reader, to provide the beginning and end. I hope you enjoy it.

Thus far, there have been 20 episode reads; 7 of which were locked episodes. Which means readers paid tokens to read those seven episodes. The other 13 reads were of the initial free episodes.

Amazon told me that I earned a $10 bonus for October, and I noticed that so far for November I have earned 24¢ in royalties.

I do have 4 folks following the story, and have received 13 thumbs up. A nice bit of positive response there.

As I contemplate the less than stellar performance of my entry story, it may be due to the fact that I only have one story up. A story that is actually a short story collection.

And it may be that the indie mantra of write fast and publish often also applies to Vella.

If that is the case, then I should probably be running at least two, if not three or more series at one time. And that’s a lot of writing.

Another possibility for the underwhelming performance may be freebie grabbers.

Those are the folks who will read anything for free and suddenly disappear when they have to fork over some money.

I’ve run into freebie grabbers with my mailing list promotions, where I offer a free book in exchange for adding the person to my email list.

The freebie grabber takes the book and immediately unsubscribes or proceeds to never open a single email from me. And those folks usually constitute at least half of the responses I get on such promotions.

Amazon, by giving away the first three episodes of a Vella story for free, is, in my opinion, inviting freebie grabbers to the party.

I will have to talk with other Vella authors to find out if they have an issue with freebie grabbers. These are only my initial ruminations, and may need to be taken with a grain of salt.

On the positive side, from what I hear, for those who can produce the necessary product at a swift enough pace, some decent pocket change awaits. And who doesn’t like pocket change?

In the new year, I may have to consider running a couple of series and see if that moves the income needle more in my favor.

The one big advantage of Vella, as I see it, for now at least, is that it operates outside of the normal KDP world. It is its own entity.

Another is that Vella is sponsored by Amazon. It avoids the obscurity of platforms like Chanillo and provides a monetary incentive, unlike Wattpad. And who doesn’t want the advantage of prominence and money?

I encourage both readers and writers to give Vella a try. It just may prove to be the next best thing since sliced bread.

You can find Tales Macabre and Arabesque here: https://amzn.to/3u2mAwm

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

CW Hawes is a playwright, award-winning poet, and a fictioneer, with a bestselling novel. He’s also an armchair philosopher, political theorist, social commentator, and traveler. He loves a good cup of tea and agrees that everything’s better with pizza.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider buying me a cup of tea. Thanks! PayPal.me/CWHawes

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The Overpowered MC

Recently I ran across the term Overpowered Main Character.

I said to myself, “What the heck is that?” After reading the definition, I said “Oh, that’s what heroic characters are.”

If you’re like me, as writers we’re told our characters have to have flaws and then overcome them in the story. That we have to write the Hero’s Journey every time we put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, or voice to recorder.

As readers, we are bombarded with sales pitches telling us the author writes about flawed characters. Reviewers pan books where the characters aren’t flawed and therefore not “realistic”.

Now, to be honest, I’ve never cared overly much for the Hero’s Journey. Nor do I care overly much to read about flawed people. I want to read about people. Period. They may or may not have any flaws. Their warts don’t matter much to me. I want to see people.

I read for entertainment. I read to get out of my world and to take a trip to a different world. Usually one that doesn’t much resemble my own.

That world may be the fantastic world of Conan the Barbarian. Or it may be the ordinary settings of Jack Reacher’s world. Or it may be the hidden world of Pellucidar. Or the jungles of Tarzan. Or the California of Philip Marlowe.

But wherever the book takes me, I generally don’t want to read about flawed characters. Realistic characters — yes. Flawed ones — no.

Let’s face it, people are a bunch of odd ducks. A combination of good and bad, normal and perverse, ordinary and exciting. It is what makes us interesting. Variety, after all, is the spice of life.

When I read fiction, I want to escape me and my world and vicariously become the main character in a different world. I want to be the main character. So why the heck do I want him flawed? I don’t. Because if he is — then he’s no different than I am.

And I don’t want to read about myself. If I did, I’d write in my journal.

I don’t want to read about me. I want to vicariously identify with a larger than life main character. James Bond. Indiana Jones. Captain Kirk.

The Hobbit is often cited as a perfect example of the Hero’s Journey. Perhaps it is. I don’t care. What draws me to the book are the characters. I’ve re-read The Hobbit five times and I don’t usually re-read books, but the characters are so intriguing I just love to take a trip to that world every now and again.

The characters in The Hobbit are lifelike, but they transcend anyone I know. I like Bilbo at the beginning of the book and I like him at the end of the book. I don’t really give a fig about the journey and his change from Baggins to Took.

I revel in the the mini-dramas between and amongst the characters. That’s what makes the story.

I want characters who are realistic, yet larger than life. Who have a commanding presence I can respect — warts and all.

My character Pierce Mostyn is not an exciting one. Even with his strawberry blond hair, nothing is visually distinctive about him and he is easily forgotten, which is probably an advantage for a paranormal G-man.

Yet, the one thing he has that I don’t is calmness under fire. He is unflappable. Something I wish I was. He can also get himself and his team out of any monster-created jam that he finds himself in. Something I probably couldn’t do.

Justinia Wright is larger than life. Rather over-the-top even. She is “normal” on steroids, coupled with a whole heck of a lot of eccentric. Harry, on the other hand, is all sorts of normal. He’s the counterpoint to all of Tina’s eccentricities. Add to that, their sibling bickering and you have characters like us, but unlike us in that they get rid of all the bad guys.

Bill Arthur, the narrator of The Rocheport Saga, is my wannabe character. If I could be someone else, I’d want to be Bill Arthur.

He isn’t physically overpowered. But he is overpowered when it comes to imagination, leadership, and strategic planning. He’s also unflappable under fire.

The Overpowered Main Character is the person we all dream of becoming. Jack Reacher crushes bullies. Who amongst us hasn’t at sometime been bullied? Jack Reacher is our vengeance outlet.

Recently, I’ve been reading Michael-Scott Earle’s Tamer and Star Justice series. Both feature an overpowered main character. And in reading these books I can’t help but think of characters such as Tarzan, Superman, and Conan. There’s something viscerally appealing about a character who will always be triumphant. Probably because we want to be triumphant.

Boring, I hear some of you say. No, not really. The excitement is in seeing how our hero beats the odds. And the odds are always against him. Just like we feel they are so very often against us.

Fiction is entertainment. I don’t want my books to give me the same world I wake up to every morning. To me, that’s boring.

The Overpowered Main Character: he’s who we really want to be.

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!

If you enjoyed this post, please consider buying me a cup of tea. Thanks! PayPal.me/CWHawes

Conan image is from Lancer edition of the Conan stories.

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The Traditional Mystery

Riddles have been with us throughout our recorded history, and probably into our pre-history.

There’s something about the challenge of riddles and puzzles that draws us. Perhaps it’s like any other game: we want to be a winner.

In the world of literature, the traditional mystery, the mystery that began with Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, became popular with Sherlock Holmes, and entered its Golden Age in the 1930s, is at base a riddle — a puzzle that demands to be solved.

Some of the finest examples are those penned by Agatha Christie. But other excellent mystery writers were Patricia Wentworth, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Rex Stout, S.S. Van Dine, Jacques Futrelle, Edmund Crispin, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Ellery Queen.

The traditional mystery is a game, as it were, between the author and his/her readers. The author must play fair by giving all of the clues to the reader so that he or she has the chance to figure out whodunit before the detective makes the great reveal at the end of the book.

This game aspect of the classic mystery story pushes it into the realm of fantasy. The classic mystery is, in fact, guilty of Raymond Chandler’s accusation that it isn’t real, or true to life. I’d argue that it was never intended to be true to life.

The traditional detective story is a literary game. It is not meant to be a slice of life. Its purpose is not to expose us to the mean streets and the sordid folk who populate them. The classic mystery is not about the people who really commit murder.

The classic detective novel is a game of Clue in book form. Nothing more, and nothing less. It’s a game, pure and simple. And as such, it is great fun.

Sad to say, the traditional mystery has been on the decline since the 1940s, when, first, the hardboiled novel and then the thriller pushed the classic detective story into the backwater of crime fiction.

And while the number of mystery aficionados continues to dwindle, I have to say that the older I get the more I prefer the mystery to any other genre.

There is something about its simplicity, its gentler pacing, its eccentric characters, and the formulaic settings that I like. After all, the world is too often mean, nasty, and brutish — why do I want my entertainment to also be that way? Isn’t the nightly news enough?

And isn’t life hectic enough? Why do I want my fiction to also proceed at a breakneck pace? Well, I don’t. Which is why I prefer the gentler and more natural pacing of the classic mystery novel.

For me, fiction is a ticket to another world. A world where I can vicariously experience triumph and victory through the exploits of the main character. I read to be entertained. I don’t want a rehash of the nightly news. I read to escape my world. I don’t want my books to put me back into what I’m trying to leave.

Fiction is for fun. And perhaps that is why I so very much enjoy the classic detective mystery: it is first and foremost entertainment. No different than a game of Scrabble, or Clue, or a crossword puzzle, or a riddle. It is a fantasy dressed up in a pseudo-reality. A world that we perhaps wish were our own.

The classic detective mystery is not meant to mimic real life. It’s meant to be a challengingly fun bit of diverting entertainment. And the best mysteries most assuredly are.

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!

CW Hawes is a playwright, award-winning poet, and a fictioneer; as well as an armchair philosopher, political theorist, and social commentator. He loves a good cup of tea and agrees that everything’s better with pizza.

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Book Review: Last Deadly Lie

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve preferred the series over the standalone book. I read fiction because of the characters, I don’t give two hoots about the plot. Because if the characters are good, they’ll make any plot, or even no plot, work.

Nevertheless, every once in a while I do pick up a standalone novel or story and give it a read.

That’s what happened with Last Deadly Lie by Caleb Pirtle III. I like Mr Pirtle’s writing, the word pictures he draws, and I like his characters. So even though a standalone, I bought a copy of Last Deadly Lie. And I’m glad I did. (You can get it on Amazon.)

What I found was a tour-de-force of contemporary Southern Gothic. Now you might be asking, What the heck is Southern Gothic?

The sub-genre of Southern Gothic is uniquely American, and is a regionalized version of American Gothic. It is a literary attempt to deal with the issues of Southern culture that continue to this day from the Confederacy’s defeat in the War Between the States (Civil War is a misnomer because the South never wanted to take control of the Federal government, which is what a civil war is all about — they wanted to withdraw and be left alone).

Southern Gothic uses the themes of American Gothic not merely for suspense, but to explore the values of the South.

Using the setting of a church and its community in a smallish Southern town, Mr Pirtle gives us an explosive tale that is dark in mood, and filled with corruption, power struggles, overweening pride, and lies. Lots of deep, dark, and often desperate, lies.

Last Deadly Lie is a novel that becomes a mirror and forces us to look at ourselves, to take a long, deep, and honest look, and say, But for the grace of God go I. Then, again, maybe we can’t say that. Maybe we all, like those accusers of the woman caught in the very act of adultery, just have to slink away, tossing our stone to the ground.

Mr Pirtle has given us a suspense-filled novel that will keep us up past our bedtimes, forgetting about the baseball game and the vacuum cleaner, and will make us forget our dinners until they get cold.

Last Deadly Lie is one of the best novels I’ve read in a very long time. And that’s due to the life-like characters, placed in real-life situations, and Mr Pirtle’s magical way with words that stimulates the imagination to do what no movie or TV show can.

Seven months into the year, and Last Deadly Lie is still the book to beat for my best read of 2021.

Pick up a copy. You won’t be sorry.

Get Last Deadly Lie Here!

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!

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The Paranormal

Van Dyne’s Zuvembies is live! The seventh book in the Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations series. And it is off to a good start.

Each Pierce Mostyn investigation is a stand alone story. So you can read Van Dyne’s Zuvembies today — and read the rest of the series later.

Interest in the paranormal is high, and paranormal fiction is hot.

But what is paranormal fiction? When I was kid, back in the 50s and 60s, there was no paranormal fiction: it was called occult or supernatural fiction. Sometime between then and now, those terms fell out of use in favor of paranormal.

To understand these 3 terms, let’s see what the Merriam-Webster dictionary says.

Occult (noun) — matters regarded as involving the action or influence of supernatural or supernormal powers or some secret knowledge of them; used with the

Supernatural

1) of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe

2a) departing from what is usual for normal, especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature

2b) attributed to an invisible agent (such as a ghost or spirit)

Paranormal — not scientifically explainable: supernatural

So we can see all of these terms basically mean something that is not within normal or natural experience.

Therefore it doesn’t really matter what we call the genre, because paranormal, supernatural, and occult fiction cover the same subjects: myth, fairy tales, legends, cryptids, ghosts, monsters, the fae, and the like.

Popular subgenres include: cosmic horror, the ghost story, the Gothic novel, werewolf and other shapeshifter fiction, vampire and zombie fiction, and the like.

The paranormal story has been with us for a very long time and down through the ages has been called many different things. But in the end, they all refer to the same class of story.

At base, the Pierce Mostyn books are cosmic horror set in HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos universe. However, I’m not averse to stepping outside the cosmic horror subgenre to give readers a taste of a different class of monster.

Horror stories generally operate either viscerally or intellectually.

Visceral horror is horror that focuses on an emotive reaction, often resorting to the gross out. This is the in-your-face blood and guts horror.

Intellectual horror appeals to the mind. It is usually subtle, and often challenges our understanding of how things ought to be by showing us how things actually are.

Intellectual horror flips aside the curtain; it is taking the red pill.

While there’s plenty of action in the Pierce Mostyn stories, I definitely strive for an intellectual horror approach. Because at the end of the day I think that type of story is truly terrifying.

Comments are always welcome! Until next time, happy reading!

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Literary Fiction

Were Ernest Hemingway alive today, would he make it as an independent author/publisher? I don’t think so.

Why do I write that? Because literary fiction is a tough sell to the indie reader. Not that a reader of indie books won’t read literary fiction, because some do. I for one.

However, Lit Fic is not the main diet of the indie reader. Genre fiction is. And genre fiction written in serials.

When we look at Literary Fiction in comparison to genre fiction, we see the problem immediately: most Lit Fic is standalone, and how the heck do you categorize it to get a reader’s eyes on it?

With genre fiction, it’s easy. There are all manner of tags one can use. For mysteries there are: crime fiction, serial killer, detective fiction, police procedural, cozy, amateur sleuth, along with the general mystery and murder mystery.

But what category does a book like The Remains of the Day fall into? Or The Old Man and the Sea?

Amazon does put The Old Man and the Sea into the Sea Stories category, but is it really a sea story? It certainly isn’t what I think of when I think of the sea story category. I think of Patrick O’Brian, and the Horatio Hornblower books. I might think of Moby Dick, or a book by Joseph Conrad. But Moby Dick isn’t really about the sea or whales, and while many Conrad stories involve the sea, they aren’t actually sea stories either.

The Remains of the Day is in an even more difficult place. Classic British Fiction. Now that tells me a lot. And therein lies the problem with indies selling Lit Fic — what the heck do you call it?

Since the indie reader basically demands genres and serial fiction, I think therein lies the answer. And the indie writer of Literary Fiction has no better a model than Anthony Trollope.

Trollope invented the novel series with his Barchester Chronicles: six novels that take place in and around the cathedral town of Barchester.

The six novels loosely follow each other. Although they can be read as standalone books. What they share is a locale and a set of characters that show up in each of the books, but with each novel having a different main character.

Because Trollope touches on so many different aspects of mid-nineteenth century British society, we can fit these books into many categories.

The books are historical fiction and religious fiction. They could possibly be called Christian fiction, although they aren’t evangelical in nature. They are about small town life, church politics and specifically Anglican Church politics, middle-class life, and married life. There is a fair amount of romance, always a campaign for Parliament, so we could call them mildly political novels. They could also be called comedies of manners. And they are filled with humor.

Trollope, as if he had foreseen Twitter, made it easy of us to tweet his books. And therein lies the key to an indie author’s success in writing Literary Fiction: write a series of standalone novels that involve the same locale and a general set of characters.

The old format for the TV series works well here: a main trio of characters, a supporting cast of around nine, and a uniform locale; each week one character is the focal point of the episode. Gunsmoke ran for years on such a formula, as did every other series when I was growing up.

And Anthony Trollope gave us the formula over a century ago.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading (and writing)!

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Mystery vs Suspense vs Thriller One Reader’s View

Crime can pay. Crime writing, that is. Then, again, real crime can pay too. But we’ll leave real crime for others to do. Today I want to talk about crime fiction; specifically about mysteries, suspense, and thrillers.

Thrillers

Thrillers are all the rage these days, but what exactly is a thriller?

A thriller is an action story. Usually fast-paced. The protagonist is in danger from the beginning. There is a bad guy and the protagonist must stop him (or her) from accomplishing his nefarious deed. We usually know the good and bad guys right from the beginning.

The scope of the thriller is often large. The bad guy isn’t playing for pennies. He’s going to blow up a city, poison a country, start a nuclear war. The thriller is about big action and big bad guys. The protagonist, to some degree, must also be larger than life.

The works of Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler are examples of good thrillers.

In the hands of a good writer, the thriller can be a thrilling read. Often, though, the writing is sub-par and the story not plausible, unless I, the reader, exercise a mega-dose of the suspension of disbelief. This is how the Jack Reacher stories strike me.

Many books are labeled as thrillers, which technically aren’t. Why? Money. As one wit noted, the difference between a mystery and a thriller is about a hundred thousand dollars.

Suspense

The suspense novel is often a slow burn story. The focus isn’t on action, although there may be quite a bit of action. The focus is on creating a feeling of suspense in the reader.

In the suspense story, the reader is omniscient. We see everything. We see the bad guy planning whatever it is he is going to do. We see the protagonist completely unaware, at least at the beginning, of the bad guy and his actions. We, the reader, see much more of the danger than the protagonist does and therein lies the creation of suspense.

The scope of the suspense story is generally limited and focused on the main character. Things are happening, usually to the main character, and he doesn’t know why. We, the reader, usually do, however, which adds to the suspense.

Cornell Woolrich was the suspense writer par excellence. Lester Dent also wrote some fine suspense novels.

The Mystery

The mystery is about solving crime, usually a murder. The crime usually happens at the beginning of the story and the sleuth’s job is to solve it. The protagonist (the sleuth) can be a professional or an amateur. And we usually do not learn who the bad guy is until the end of the story.

There are many mystery sub-categories. Right now, the most popular is what I call the chick lit cozy. It is the cozy mystery with the addition of elements from chick lit: a young (or youngish) woman, who is the main character/sleuth; she is divorced or a widow; has moved to a new location, and embarked on a new career; and there’s romance. Along with the regular cozy mystery, these are very clean and non-violent reads.

An indie example is Agatha Frost’s Peridale Cafe Murder Mystery series.

In a mystery, the reader only knows what he or she is told. We see what the sleuth sees. The story is as much a puzzle for the reader as it is for the protagonist.

The mystery can be filled with suspense and it can be thrilling. The danger to the protagonist builds, along with the story. The more the sleuth learns about the criminal, the greater the danger he or she is in.

Personal Assessment

For me, I find the mystery to be the most satisfying reading experience. It combines the puzzle with suspense and thrilling action.

While the mystery is technically a plot-driven story, rather than character-driven, I find that the most interesting mysteries are those which have interesting characters.

Mystery plots are basically all the same. There is a murderer who has killed someone and is trying to cover up the crime while the sleuth is trying to uncover it.

What makes the mystery story interesting is the cast of characters and the twists and turns of the storyline. And quite often the cast of characters can save a mediocre storyline.

After all, we remember Nero Wolfe, Sam Spade, Hercule Poirot, Mr and Mrs North, and Sherlock Holmes. But how many of the actual mystery stories featuring these characters do we remember? I bet not many.

In my opinion, interesting characters make mysteries more interesting reads than thrillers or suspense novels. Which usually have fairly stock characters.

Pacing is another reason I prefer the mystery as a reader. The pacing accelerates with the action in the story. As the clues (and sometimes the bodies) pile up and the more the sleuth knows, the more desperate the killer becomes. And the sleuth finds himself in ever increasing danger.

The action ratchets up in a natural progression. Unlike the thriller where were out of breath by page 2 or 3. The mystery, to my mind, is much more realistic and natural.

Finally, as a reader, I don’t necessarily want to know everything. For me the suspense of knowing there is a killer out there is sufficient. As I learn information with the sleuth, I form a bond with him. We are in this together, as it were. The very nature of the mystery, helps draw me into the world of the sleuth and his dilemma.

There are some fine mysteries being written today by indie authors. Two I especially like are:

Richard Schwindt’s Death in Sioux Lookout trilogy

Joe Congel’s Tony Razzolito P.I. series

Both are very good and very much worth a read.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

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The Western

One of the staples of TV entertainment when I was growing up was the Western. The TV Western was popular because the Western was a very popular genre for books and short stories.

Here is a partial list of the shows I remember:

The Lone Ranger
Death Valley Days
Davy Crockett
The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin
Zorro
Gunsmoke
Broken Arrow
Maverick
Have Gun — Will Travel
Wagon Train
Bat Masterson
Lawman
The Rifleman
The Rebel
Rawhide
Bonanza
The Virginian
The Wild Wild West
The Big Valley
Daniel Boone
Laredo
F Troop
The High Chaparral

Then in the 1960s things began to change. Spy shows became the in thing (thank you James Bond) and the Western began a slow ride into the sunset. By the late 1970s, both Western TV shows and fiction were pretty much passé.

However, for lovers of the Western, things just might be turning around. TV shows have aired to a fair degree of popularity. Shows such as

Godless
The Pinkertons
Hell on Wheels
Deadwood
Into the West
Longmire

These shows are very different from their 1950s and 60s cousins. There is often more blood and gore. A lot more. There is much more foul language. There is nudity, sometimes lots of it. There are women in main roles. They take a more sympathetic view of Native Americans. And they present us with a more accurate, and more ugly view of American history.

Western fiction today is very much a niche market, being divided into several sub-categories, such as Classic Western, Western Romance, Weird West, and Steampunk.

A look at Amazon’s top 100 bestselling Westerns reveals that all of the books are in the top 5000 in the paid Kindle store. The #1 Western (which by the way doesn’t happen to be a romance), was written by an indie author, and ranked #154 in the overall paid Kindle store. Pretty doggone good, if you ask me. Especially for a genre that is supposed to be dead.

Even James Patterson (co-authored with Andrew Bourelle) has a Western. Its 46 pages long and Hachette charges $9.99 for the story. And some people complain that my Nightmare in Agate Bay, being 72 pages long, is too expensive priced at $2.99! I guess indie authors are just supposed to give their books away. Bullsh*t.

Now you might ask why am I talking about Westerns. After all, I don’t write them and I very rarely read them.

Well, last year I read Jacquie Rogers’s Hot Work in Fry Pan Gulch. The book was very funny and very good.

For #IndieApril on Twitter, I read Chris Derrick’s The Tainted Dollar. A doggone good classic Western.

Between those two novels, I watched

A Fistful of Dollars
For a Few Dollars More, and
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

And now I’m hooked on Hell on Wheels and I’m re-watching The Wild Wild West.

I guess I do indeed enjoy a good Western. To balance out the movies and TV shows, I may have to put Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Louis L’Amour on my TBR list and maybe a few indie authored books as well.

In a way, the Western is as American as apple pie. And I do so love apple pie.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

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Nietzsche, Lovecraft, and Cosmic Horror

Nietzsche and Lovecraft. Supposedly both were nihilists. But were they? Let’s take a brief look at both, in the light of cosmic horror.

Cosmic Horror

What do we mean by cosmic horror? Cosmic horror is the horror subgenre that focuses on the fear we feel when we are confronted by phenomena that is beyond our ability to comprehend.

Lovecraft wrote that the only thing saving us from death or insanity was our inability to correlate all known facts into a cohesive and understandable whole.

Nietzsche wrote about being nauseated by the truth after peering into the abyss.

Cosmic horror chills us, at least good cosmic horror does, when the story forces us to come to grips with our insignificance in the universe. Cosmic horror is the abyss which nauseates us with the truth. Cosmic horror is the bringing together of knowledge that should drive us insane.

Lovecraft

HP Lovecraft was 10 years old when Friedrich Nietzsche died at the age of 55, and as far as we know he did not read Nietzsche.

Lovecraft was not a philosopher, per se. Although he did spend much time thinking about realities, science, and religion. Through his fiction he worked out a philosophy of sorts, which is embodied in his creation of cosmic horror as presented in his Cthulhu Mythos.

For Lovecraft, the species homo sapiens is not at the apex of anything. In a very real sense, human beings are merely a form of advanced simian on a tiny planet, orbiting a pretty insignificant star in one of many thousands of galaxies in the vast universe.

Compared to the cosmos we are nothing.

Lovecraft would undoubtedly have agreed with Silenus’s answer to Midas’s question. What is the best thing for humankind? To not to be born. And once born, the best for us is to die soon.

For Lovecraft, at least as seen in his fiction, there is no real hope for us. We are, as it were, going into battle armed with pea shooters, when our enemy has machine guns and rocket launchers.

We are hopelessly outclassed by the universe. And the universe will ultimately win. I think that is the message of “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.

I think Lovecraft was essentially a nihilist. Life is meaningless and we have no intrinsic purpose.

Nietzsche

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche lays the ground work of his philosophy, which all of his subsequent books build on and expand.

Nietzsche, by means of the myth of Midas and Silenus, posits the essential meaninglessness of the human species. He goes on to tell us that when we actually comprehend Silenus’s message, when we look into the abyss, have our dark night of the soul, we come away nauseated — nauseated because we’ve believed a lie and now know the truth.

However, he does not leave us in despair. He reminds us that we are creators and it is through art — our creativity — that we find meaning in life. We are our saviors. The god out there is dead. What is alive and well is the god within us. Or perhaps better stated, the god that we are — because gods are creators, and we are creators.

What we see in Nietzsche is proto-existentialism. Nietzsche was not a nihilist. His is not a philosophy of despair. It is a philosophy of hope and life for modern humans.

Conclusion

Cosmic horror would never have come from the pen of Friedrich Nietzsche. Because for him there was always hope.

The closest Lovecraft comes to a sense of hope is in the conclusion of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” where the narrator embraces his future as one of the monstrous denizens of the deep.

For Lovecraft, our only hope is to join that which will destroy us. And that is true horror.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

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Where Have All The Mysteries Gone?

The latest Justinia Wright Private Investigator Mystery, When Friends Must Die, is now available. There are a total of seven books in the series (if we count Book 0, which Amazon doesn’t).

To be honest, of all the characters I’ve created Justinia Wright is my favorite. She was my first child, so to speak, and I know her so well it’s as though she’s a real person.

But in this age of thrillers and books whose pages turn themselves, Tina and her brother, Harry, have been a hard sell.

Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe books are the ideal detective reads, in my opinion. They have a bit of Sherlock Holmes and a touch of noir, a smidgeon of philosophy, and a lot of wisecracking banter. I will take Nero Wolfe any day over any other fictional detective out there — including the Great Detective himself.

However, the Nero Wolfe novels aren’t thrillers by today’s standards, and while excellent reads I do have to turn the pages myself. And therein lies the rub.

If the mystery writers of the Golden Age were plunked down into today’s publishing world as newbies, I doubt they’d make it. Why? Because at times their books are ponderously slow by today’s standards. The riveting action usually doesn’t appear until the last quarter to third of the book. The front part is all clue gathering and sub-plot and character development. This makes for a slower read, but one in which the plot is more nuanced and the characters are more richly drawn.

Just think, in today’s market the likes of Agatha Christie, Patricia Wentworth, Ngaio Marsh, and Rex Stout might never have seen a book contract from a publisher. And if they’d gone indie, they might have sold books, but I doubt their names would be household words.

In his day, the very prolific Edgar Wallace was selling mysteries like the proverbial hotcakes. Today, virtually none of his books are in print. He often has plenty of action, but his books are in no way, shape, or form thrillers.

Even Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, is edging towards oblivion as the generation that grew up reading and watching Perry Mason dies off. Why? Because for all the action, they aren’t thrillers.

Which introduces an interesting dynamic in the mystery vs thriller debate. The mystery reader tends to be older. The thriller reader, younger.

Today’s reader, especially readers of indie books prefer action — just like the pulp magazine readers of yore.

But there are writers of mysteries, traditional mysteries, who are managing to sell books. PF Ford, JA Mensies, and Renee Pawlish to name three.

There are, however, more writers of good mysteries who deserve a much bigger audience. Richard Schwindt and his Death in Sioux Lookout trilogy. Joe Congel with his Tony Razzolito, PI series. JP Choquette and her Tayt Waters mysteries. Just to name a few.

But why read traditional-style mysteries instead of thrillers? Primarily because I think they are overall more entertaining and engaging reads. Mysteries tend to be multi-dimensional, whereas thrillers, at least the ones I’ve read, are pretty much one dimensional. Kind of like superhero comic books. There’s a lot of unrelenting action and that’s about it.

Of course superheroes are all the rage, so maybe that explains the appeal of thrillers.

A good mystery is plot-driven, has multi-faceted characters, an engaging storyline, and a certain literary finesse. A good mystery engages one on a more intellectual level. But a good mystery isn’t all in the mind, because there will be plenty of action scenes to get the heart pumping.

Which is my point: a good mystery is a wholistic read. It appeals to the reader on many different levels.

Give PF Ford, JA Menzies, and Renee Pawlish a try. Give Richard Schwindt, Joe Congel, JP Choquette, and even my own Justinia Wright a try. You just might discover a whole new world opening up before you.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

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