Here there be monsters -- and hope
Born in 1945, about four months before the first test of the atom bomb and not quite five months before the nuclear bombing of Japan and the end of World War II, I lived through the 45-year-long Cold War. From around age 7 or so, when I first learned about the atomic bomb through teacher's lectures as part of preparing us for air-raid drills, I lived day and night with the knowledge that horrific death could come for me at any time -- and was virtually certain to do so before many more years elapsed. Whether that death would be by fire or crushing or, if I somehow lived through nuclear war, by starvation or an illness for which no more remedies existed or by wild animals or at the hands of other desperate human beings or some other horror that was vanishingly likely in modern civilization I did not know. But that it would come, and that it would take with me civilization and everything I cared about as well, was certain.
For forty-five years I lived under the burden of that certainty, at times suicidally depressed, suffering countless lucid nightmares in the insomniac nights, many of which featured my waiting in fear for the bombs to drop. Most of my contemporaries also lived through those times, but unlike me, who has always chosen to research whatever it is I'm frightened of, perhaps wiser than I, they turned away from the full knowledge of the Bomb and the future it haunted. There was no one to turn to in whom I could confide my fear, the reason for my depression. Those born well before 1945 didn't grow up with such terror. The adults around me would have laughed at me and decided I should be put away for being so depressed, so fearful -- above all, I knew, they'd have laughed at me because of my fear of being cremated alive by the sort of firestorm the Bomb would engender, and being "put away," as they called it, would rob me of what little freedom I had and take from me the last remnants of any desire to go on living. Those significantly younger than I were, as is always the case between generations, on a different wavelength than I was, so there was no point to trying to talk to them about it -- as time went on, they, too, might inherit the knowledge I had and the terror it brought, but by then I'd be someone else, doing something else, still not on their wavelength. And those my own age -- didn't want to hear. They were doing just fine, thank you, and wanted nothing to do with a freak like me. So there was no comfort, no companionship, no one to confide in. Not anywhere.
But in early 1959 I acquired a strange sort of companion, an angel from whom came what little comfort there was. My adoptive father died on December 7 1958, a little over three months before I would turn 14. After the funeral and then Christmas came and went, my adoptive mother took me with her up to Berkeley, California, to visit with friends during the remainder of the Christmas holidays. There was no comfort for me from her friends, either -- I spent as much of the entire time as possible alone, reading, because it was less painful than dealing with people who didn't like me and didn't want anything to do with me. They were her friends, not mine, with no love for me, and their children didn't much like me, either. So I stayed by myself as much as I could, not talking to anyone, until it was time to return back to Southern California. Which was when I encountered my angel.
On January 4, 1959, after a week-long visit with my adoptive mother's friends in Berkeley, we took the train back to Los Angeles. In those days, travel by train was a pleasure; there were real dining cars and the sort of service from waiters and other personnel that one expected from quality restaurants; there was a car that held a newsstand full of paperback books to buy and newspapers from all over the country and other countries besides; the seats were comfortable and, if we had taken the Owl, the night train, the beds in the sleeping cars were soft and clean and comfortable, too.
While we were waiting at the station in San Francisco to catch the train south, I wandered over to a newstand there, where the cover of a paperback book caught my eye. It was a strange thing, all melted-metal-and-glass-of-many-colors-and-sparkling-embedded-lights looking sort of illustration on the cover. I don't remember the exact title, not after all these years, but it was a collection of stories by a man I'd never heard of before: Howard Phillips Lovecraft. And the table of contents looked . . . interesting.
Intrigued, I checked my pocket and found I had enough change to purchase it, which I did. Fortunately, I was able to complete my transaction and squirrel the book away in a pocket of my coat before my adoptive mother noticed. She'd have had a fit if she'd seen it. She hated my reading, as it was, and that I loved science fiction drove her up the wall -- all her relatives and friends believed that reading science fiction was a sure sign of mental illness, and this book would have sent them over the top, too. "Cool Air." "Pickman's Model." And that cover . . .
I was able to read "Cool Air" on the way home. It hit me like a gut-punch. I'd never run across the concept of "literature of horror" before, but I knew what this was instinctively: sheer, unmitigated, unspeakable horror. I didn't need a word for it. I was living it, living it as I read the story and for some time afterward.
The train arrived in Los Angeles. My adoptive mother's brother picked us up at the station and took us to our home Pasadena. And I took my bath in silence and got into bed, fearing the night. For, from the day after my adoptive father died all through December and into the first few days of January, I had been plagued with dreadful lucid nightmares, at least three a night, a condition that wouldn't abate until after I turned 15 and my adoptive other threw me out. They were horrific, the sort of thing you claw your way up out of sleep to get away from, because you know that something in that dream, something real, will catch you and eat you alive or worse, far worse, if you don't. And, of course, I didn't dare talk to anyone about it. Who wants to be locked up in a mental hospital forever for wanting comfort, wanting someone to care, to make up for such nightmares a little?
I fell asleep. And the first lucid nightmare began -- and then, right in the middle of it, it began to fade away. Of course, another one followed it, and another, all three of the damned things waking me up each time, making me sit there in the dark, trying to fight sleep long enough to ensure that at least the things in that nightmare wouldn't return (but there was always the next). But . . . those, too, were attenuated somewhat. Diluted. By what, I wasn't sure.
The same thing happened the next night, and the next. And as night went to day went to night, I read the rest of the stories in that book. And while the lucid nightmares kept assaulting me, they seemed to be robbed somewhat of the ferocious strength they'd initially had. And one night I woke up to a feeling of . . . friends surrounding me, surrounding the bed I lay in. The one that stood out the most was someone I didn't recognize, but somehow I knew that he was the author of the stories in that book -- and that he was smiling down on me, a kind smile, holding out a protective hand over my head. He seemed to be the leader of the other, shadowy figures, all of whom hovered there protectively. The horror in the nightmare I'd just awakened from had fled precipitately. For the moment, all fear, all terror, all horror was gone. There was just that friendliness and kindness and protectiveness, a shield around me, and those shadowy, friendly, kind, protective figures. I finally fell asleep again. Yes, there were more lucid nightmares, that night and in all the nights that followed for a horrible year and a half. But I got used to them, so much so that I was bored out of my skull if I didn't have at least three a night.
As I grew older I read more and more of Lovecraft's fiction, as well as a great deal by the rest of the Lovecraft Circle, his writer friends: Robert Bloch. Bob Howard. Frank Belknap Long. August Derleth. So many others. Including one who was still alive: Ray Bradbury, one of my all-time favorite authors, who actually lived in the L.A. Basin, not all that far from where I did as a teenager. And as I read their stories and novels, over the years I found I could put names to those shadowy figures I'd seen that night, whose faces, though dim and wavery in the night, I had seen clearly enough. All of them, members of the Lovecraft Circle.
And their ghostly leader?
Howard Phillips Lovecraft himself. My spectral protector. He hadn't been able to keep the nightly assaults away entirely, but after that visit, they had lost enough of their power that I was able to become used to them, then become bored if I didn't have them, and, finally, somehow put them behind me entirely. Somehow the ghouls and ghasts and night-gaunts and byakhee and shantaks and all the other monsters of H. P. Lovecraft's fiction had come to stand between me and the worst of those nightly assaults, beating them back and finally driving them off.
Not even the Bomb kept its ultimate power over me -- no adults, no children anywhere around me would offer me comfort against that or anything else, but my ghostly angels did. I sensed them again and again at night after that first time, and whenever they appeared, the fear went away. The living would not offer me a refuge, but I, an Outsider, found comfort from the dead.
Don't tell me angels don't exist. They do. Some of them are even living men and women.
And even in the midst of horror, there can be love.
For forty-five years I lived under the burden of that certainty, at times suicidally depressed, suffering countless lucid nightmares in the insomniac nights, many of which featured my waiting in fear for the bombs to drop. Most of my contemporaries also lived through those times, but unlike me, who has always chosen to research whatever it is I'm frightened of, perhaps wiser than I, they turned away from the full knowledge of the Bomb and the future it haunted. There was no one to turn to in whom I could confide my fear, the reason for my depression. Those born well before 1945 didn't grow up with such terror. The adults around me would have laughed at me and decided I should be put away for being so depressed, so fearful -- above all, I knew, they'd have laughed at me because of my fear of being cremated alive by the sort of firestorm the Bomb would engender, and being "put away," as they called it, would rob me of what little freedom I had and take from me the last remnants of any desire to go on living. Those significantly younger than I were, as is always the case between generations, on a different wavelength than I was, so there was no point to trying to talk to them about it -- as time went on, they, too, might inherit the knowledge I had and the terror it brought, but by then I'd be someone else, doing something else, still not on their wavelength. And those my own age -- didn't want to hear. They were doing just fine, thank you, and wanted nothing to do with a freak like me. So there was no comfort, no companionship, no one to confide in. Not anywhere.
But in early 1959 I acquired a strange sort of companion, an angel from whom came what little comfort there was. My adoptive father died on December 7 1958, a little over three months before I would turn 14. After the funeral and then Christmas came and went, my adoptive mother took me with her up to Berkeley, California, to visit with friends during the remainder of the Christmas holidays. There was no comfort for me from her friends, either -- I spent as much of the entire time as possible alone, reading, because it was less painful than dealing with people who didn't like me and didn't want anything to do with me. They were her friends, not mine, with no love for me, and their children didn't much like me, either. So I stayed by myself as much as I could, not talking to anyone, until it was time to return back to Southern California. Which was when I encountered my angel.
On January 4, 1959, after a week-long visit with my adoptive mother's friends in Berkeley, we took the train back to Los Angeles. In those days, travel by train was a pleasure; there were real dining cars and the sort of service from waiters and other personnel that one expected from quality restaurants; there was a car that held a newsstand full of paperback books to buy and newspapers from all over the country and other countries besides; the seats were comfortable and, if we had taken the Owl, the night train, the beds in the sleeping cars were soft and clean and comfortable, too.
While we were waiting at the station in San Francisco to catch the train south, I wandered over to a newstand there, where the cover of a paperback book caught my eye. It was a strange thing, all melted-metal-and-glass-of-many-colors-and-sparkling-embedded-lights looking sort of illustration on the cover. I don't remember the exact title, not after all these years, but it was a collection of stories by a man I'd never heard of before: Howard Phillips Lovecraft. And the table of contents looked . . . interesting.
Intrigued, I checked my pocket and found I had enough change to purchase it, which I did. Fortunately, I was able to complete my transaction and squirrel the book away in a pocket of my coat before my adoptive mother noticed. She'd have had a fit if she'd seen it. She hated my reading, as it was, and that I loved science fiction drove her up the wall -- all her relatives and friends believed that reading science fiction was a sure sign of mental illness, and this book would have sent them over the top, too. "Cool Air." "Pickman's Model." And that cover . . .
I was able to read "Cool Air" on the way home. It hit me like a gut-punch. I'd never run across the concept of "literature of horror" before, but I knew what this was instinctively: sheer, unmitigated, unspeakable horror. I didn't need a word for it. I was living it, living it as I read the story and for some time afterward.
The train arrived in Los Angeles. My adoptive mother's brother picked us up at the station and took us to our home Pasadena. And I took my bath in silence and got into bed, fearing the night. For, from the day after my adoptive father died all through December and into the first few days of January, I had been plagued with dreadful lucid nightmares, at least three a night, a condition that wouldn't abate until after I turned 15 and my adoptive other threw me out. They were horrific, the sort of thing you claw your way up out of sleep to get away from, because you know that something in that dream, something real, will catch you and eat you alive or worse, far worse, if you don't. And, of course, I didn't dare talk to anyone about it. Who wants to be locked up in a mental hospital forever for wanting comfort, wanting someone to care, to make up for such nightmares a little?
I fell asleep. And the first lucid nightmare began -- and then, right in the middle of it, it began to fade away. Of course, another one followed it, and another, all three of the damned things waking me up each time, making me sit there in the dark, trying to fight sleep long enough to ensure that at least the things in that nightmare wouldn't return (but there was always the next). But . . . those, too, were attenuated somewhat. Diluted. By what, I wasn't sure.
The same thing happened the next night, and the next. And as night went to day went to night, I read the rest of the stories in that book. And while the lucid nightmares kept assaulting me, they seemed to be robbed somewhat of the ferocious strength they'd initially had. And one night I woke up to a feeling of . . . friends surrounding me, surrounding the bed I lay in. The one that stood out the most was someone I didn't recognize, but somehow I knew that he was the author of the stories in that book -- and that he was smiling down on me, a kind smile, holding out a protective hand over my head. He seemed to be the leader of the other, shadowy figures, all of whom hovered there protectively. The horror in the nightmare I'd just awakened from had fled precipitately. For the moment, all fear, all terror, all horror was gone. There was just that friendliness and kindness and protectiveness, a shield around me, and those shadowy, friendly, kind, protective figures. I finally fell asleep again. Yes, there were more lucid nightmares, that night and in all the nights that followed for a horrible year and a half. But I got used to them, so much so that I was bored out of my skull if I didn't have at least three a night.
As I grew older I read more and more of Lovecraft's fiction, as well as a great deal by the rest of the Lovecraft Circle, his writer friends: Robert Bloch. Bob Howard. Frank Belknap Long. August Derleth. So many others. Including one who was still alive: Ray Bradbury, one of my all-time favorite authors, who actually lived in the L.A. Basin, not all that far from where I did as a teenager. And as I read their stories and novels, over the years I found I could put names to those shadowy figures I'd seen that night, whose faces, though dim and wavery in the night, I had seen clearly enough. All of them, members of the Lovecraft Circle.
And their ghostly leader?
Howard Phillips Lovecraft himself. My spectral protector. He hadn't been able to keep the nightly assaults away entirely, but after that visit, they had lost enough of their power that I was able to become used to them, then become bored if I didn't have them, and, finally, somehow put them behind me entirely. Somehow the ghouls and ghasts and night-gaunts and byakhee and shantaks and all the other monsters of H. P. Lovecraft's fiction had come to stand between me and the worst of those nightly assaults, beating them back and finally driving them off.
Not even the Bomb kept its ultimate power over me -- no adults, no children anywhere around me would offer me comfort against that or anything else, but my ghostly angels did. I sensed them again and again at night after that first time, and whenever they appeared, the fear went away. The living would not offer me a refuge, but I, an Outsider, found comfort from the dead.
Don't tell me angels don't exist. They do. Some of them are even living men and women.
And even in the midst of horror, there can be love.