Alan Moore on Lovecraft, Providence, Ligotti

[ramonoski]

A new interview with Alan Moore in which he talks about his ongoing comic Providence, as well as the status of Lovecraft in our times.

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academics have stated to realise that there is something very serious, if not actually prescient, in Lovecraft’s writing that he has finally been welcomed into the canon of serious American literature along with Hawthorne and Poe. ( . . . ) Lovecraft, I feel, is one of the very few horror writers of his day whose relevance has not faded over the intervening decades, precisely because Lovecraft’s was primarily a horror of the present in which he found himself, and a horror born of the future which, as an intelligent man of his day, he to some degree saw coming.

Thomas Ligotti also gets a mention:

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Perhaps the most important of these post-Lovecraftian authors is the astonishing Thomas Ligotti: rather than progressing from Lovecraft’s notions of extraterrestrial gods and entities, Ligotti takes Lovecraft’s personal philosophy – a kind of pessimism that is cosmological in its reach – as his starting point and goes on to create a world of often unfathomable but always-haunting events that are redolent of those absolutely soul-paralysing dreams where you wake to clammy sheets and the knowledge that the simple facts of your dream, baldly recounted, would not convey the dreadful and lingering terror of your experience.

Read the whole thing here: Alan Mooret Believe What They Asked Him!! — The Beat

[Stu]

I love his description of Cthulhu as "a huge monster with a barely-pronounceable name and a face like a seafood salad."

[miguel1984]

Alan Moore on Providence and HP Lovecraft - Part 1 - YouTube

Alan Moore on Providence and HP Lovecraft - Part 2 - YouTube

Alan Moore on Providence and HP Lovecraft - Part 3 - YouTube

[Stu]

I take it that the collection of Fred Chappell's weird fiction he mentions is the Centipede Press one?

Quote Originally Posted by Stu

I take it that the collection of Fred Chappell's weird fiction he mentions is the Centipede Press one?

I would love to purchase one if they weren't so damned expensive, but the releases seem very high-quality so the price isn't unjustified.

I've heard that the "Masters of the Weird Tale" library is riddled with typos, though.

[Stu]

The Centipede Chappell collection is going for something like £150. I was hoping Moore was talking about some new paperback that I could pick up for about a fiver.

[bendk]

Centipede has opted to cater to the collector, which is fine. It is nice to see beautiful books being produced. Too expensive for me though. I sometimes buy something from their scratch and dent bin. I have the novelization of Herzog's Nosferatu and the recent paperback on Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth that had a pre-order price of $20. Well worth it. It is a great book.

[marioneta]

I am slowly collecting and reading the Providence series of comics. They are amazing takes on Lovecraft, and in true Alan Moore form, unsettling. Noncommercial comic book art with the edge of a Mayan Codex of undiscovered terror, makes Providence a new grimoire to be read and feared.

[singing flame]

The Courtyard and Neonomicon were mind-blowing in every sense. Can't wait to read Providence when I am no longer broke.

[miguel1984]

On this thread I created a while back you can find Moore's introduction to The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, an interview about Neonomicon and The Great Old Ones, from John Coulthart's The Haunter of the Dark and Other Grotesque Visions:

Alan Moore on Lovecraft - THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK

Also, Moore mentioned Ligotti before, in a GoodReads Q&A:

Alan Moore answers your questions — Ask the Author

He had this to say:

Is it harder to scare audiences these days? It seems like as a culture, we've gotten, if not more sophisticated, at least more jaded. Or is that just a facade, and underneath we're still the same superstitious, cowardly lot we've always been?

"I don’t think it’s harder to scare audiences these days than it’s ever been. Wherever we happen to be in our cultural history, it’s a safe bet that the things that scared our parents no longer possess the same frisson when it comes to ourselves. What is required of horror writing, then, is that it relentlessly moves forward and discovers new ways of frightening or disturbing its contemporary audience. Look at the work of Thomas Ligotti for a superb example. In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest that with our modern audiences programmed to only expect horror within certain established parameters – a kind of almost comforting state in which the audience can always pretty much predict where the horror is going to come from – then it might even be easier these days to genuinely scare one’s readers. I know that in Providence, where we’ve gone out of our way to come at our horrors from unusual angles and to present them using novel storytelling techniques, we have a few scenes coming up which I believe the readers will find genuinely frightening. It’s really all just a matter of being prepared to put in the innovatory effort."