Читать книгу Weird Tales #313 (Summer 1998) - Darrell Schweitzer - Страница 5
ОглавлениеSHADOWINGS, by Douglas E. Winter
sacrament \’sak-re-ment\ n {ME sacrement, sacrament, fr. OF & LL; OF, fr. LL sacramentum, fr. L, oath of allegiance, obligation, fr. sacrare, to consecrate} 1: a formal religious act that is sacred as a sign or symbol of a spiritual reality; esp : one believed to have been instituted or recognized by Jesus Christ. 2 cap: the eucharistic elements; specif: blessed sacrament.
Sacrament, by Clive Barker.
New York: HarperCollins, hardcover, $25.00.
Harper, paperback, 605 pp., $6.99.
Will Rabjohns, the protagonist of Clive Barker’s latest and best novel, is a controversial photographer of endangered and dying species. “For most of his adult life he’d made photographs of the untamed world, reporting to the human tribe the tragedies that occurred in contested territories. They were seldom human tragedies. It was the populace of the other world that withered and perished daily. And as he witnessed the steady erosion of the wilderness, the hunger in him grew to leap the fences and be part of it, before it was gone.”
That hunger is born of a hollow ambition that has driven Will since his youth: “He was not…designed for happiness. It was too much like contentment, and contentment was too much like sleep.” In the novel’s opening act, it brings him to Hudson Bay, where images of polar bears wallowing in garbage will provide a mournful conclusion to what may be his final book of photographs. In his forty-first year of life, he is lost to melancholy, the onset of middle age and a dire sense of things winding down. In a world that seems defined by death, his success seems meaningless, and the purpose of his photographs, and of his life, is unclear. “The less alive you were, the better chance you had at living. There was probably a lesson in that somewhere, though it was a bitter one.”
When a bear is wounded, a misguided sense of responsibility leads Will into its violent embrace. This is death, he thinks: “This is what you’ve photographed so many times. The dolphin drowning in the net, pitifully quiescent; the monkey twitching among its dead fellows, looking at him with a gaze Will could not stand to meet, except through his camera. They were all the same in this moment, he and the monkey, he and the bear. All ephemeral things, running out of time.”
It is not death, but epiphany. Ravaged and comatose, Will’s body heals while his mind returns to the thirteenth year of his youth in England. The second son of Eleanor and Hugo Rabjohns—a philosopher and domestic tyrant whose later scholarship echoes Julia Kristeva—Will grew up in the shadow of his brother, Nathaniel (who, like Barker’s own brother, Roy, seemed more truly his father’s son); but when Nathaniel died in an accident, Eleanor withdrew into polite madness and Hugo moved the family from Manchester to the Yorkshire village of Burnt Yarley.
There, in a ruined maze known as the Courthouse—a madman’s throne of judgment for those who would abuse animals—Will meets the man and woman whom he will learn to love and hate more strongly than his parents: “Jacob Steep, with his soot-and-gold eyes and black beard and pale poet’s hands” and glorious Rosa McGee, “who had the gold of Steep’s eyes in her hair and the black of his beard in her gaze, but who was as fleshy and passionate as he was sweatless and unmoved.”
This curious, unearthly pair join with Will in the most crucial of the triadic structures through which his life has been defined: Will and his parents, Will and his childhood friends, Will and his photographic team, Will and his lovers—a series of incomplete men and women united and transformed by the enigma that is his life. Steep is the “Killer of Last Things,” stalking the planet with knife in hand to put an end to each dying species. Once he had believed that, by recording each act of extinction in a journal, he could earn God’s forgiveness; but now, like the elder Will, whose photographs no longer seem sufficient, Steep doubts the purpose of his life; soon he argues that, without purpose, there is no God—and no bounds to violence: “We’re alone, with the power to do whatever we want.” His consort, Mrs. McGee, mingles desires both carnal and fatal, played out through her “rosaries”—strange ropes that cavort like viperous extensions of her flesh. Their odd coupling has spanned three centuries, and Rosa’s womb has carried eighty-seven children, all of whom died at birth.
Steep’s ennui is leavened by the young and inquisitive Will, who offers the prospect of a new companion. Steep offers his apt pupil a simple but lasting lesson: “Living and dying we feed the fire.” His secret knowledge of the darkness, and the need to hold it at bay, seems profound and seductive: “For an instant…Will saw himself at Jacob’s side, walking in a city street, and Steep was shining out of every pore, and people were weeping with gratitude that he came to light their darkness.”
Steep’s tutelage is swift and certain: Will learns to feed the fire—to kill—by casting a moth into a flame. When, wielding Steep’s thirsty blade, he butchers two birds, Steep asks him to imagine that they were the last of their species: “This will not come again…Nor this, nor this…” Such an act, Will realizes, could change the world.
When Will and Steep touch, the spilled blood summons something more, a vision of Steep’s past. In 1730, elsewhere in the bucolic English countryside, Steep was sent to confront the visionary artist Thomas Simeon, whose talents had succumbed first to debauchery and then to the patronage of a mysterious mystic and satyric sermonizer named Gerard Rukenau. Simeon had been brought to Rukenau’s retreat in the Hebrides to chronicle, in paintings, the construction of an arcane cathedral known as the Domus Mundi (literally, the House of the World). When Simeon left, Steep was dispatched to bring him home; but the painter committed suicide, poisoning himself with his pigments, rather than return to Rukenau. Before his death, he offered Steep the petal of a flower, and the meaning of the true sacrament:
I have the Holy of Holies here, the Ark of the Covenant, the Sangraal, the Great Mystery itself, right here on the tip of my little finger.…If I could paint this perfection…put it on a sheet of paper so that it showed its true glory, every painting in every chapel in Rome, every illumination of every Book of Hours, every picture I ever made for every one of Rukenau’s damned invocations would be…superfluous.
Steep blamed Rukenau for the painter’s death and rejected his teachings: “You gave him your genius; he paid you in lunacy. That makes him a thief, at very least. I won’t serve him after this. And I will never forgive him.” The rage of his apostasy translated into the zealous assault upon creation that became his life’s work: “If the world were a simpler place, we would not be lost in it.…We wouldn’t be greedy for novelty. We wouldn’t always want something new, always something new! We’d live the way Thomas wanted to live, in awe of the mysteries of a petal.” His passion for simplicity—and, in time, for absence—finds Steep, like the misguided forces of morality in Weaveworld and Imajica, seeking to cleanse the world: the building of a New Eden without error or imperfection—the ideal place to find God, to understand the purpose of his existence.
Steep’s memories, like his lessons, taint Will, transforming a lost child into a lost man who desperately chronicles the last of things: “He shaped you, Will. He sowed the hopes and the disappointments, he sowed the guilt and the yearning.” When, as an adult, Will looks upon one of Simeon’s paintings, he recognizes the horrifying relationship to his own photographs: “They were the before and after scenes, bookends to the holocaust text that lay between. And the author of that text? Steep, of course. Simeon had painted the moment before Steep appeared: all life in terror at Steep’s imminence. Will had caught the moment after: all life in extremis, the fertile acre become a field of desolation.”
When Will awakens from the coma, very little has changed since his mauling by the bear—or since his youth. “They were in a world of endings, or early and unexpected goodbyes, not so unlike the time from which he’d wakened.” He is living in the midst of death—of animals, to be sure, but also of friends, and especially his best friend and former lover Patrick, now dying of AIDS.
The past, once remembered, pursues Will with feral intensity. Lord Fox, an avatar of his guilt, haunts Will, forcing him to look upon the ravaged world with the unfettered eyes of his childhood: “God wants you to see,” Lord Fox tells him. “Don’t ask me why. That’s between you and God. I’m just the go-between.” The creature confronts Will with a conundrum, proposing that “the passing of things, of days and beasts and men he’d loved, was just a cruel illusion and memory, a clue to its unmasking.” This revelation only amplifies Will’s painful knowledge that he, like Steep, is a pretender: pretending to find purpose in life, pretending to be human.
Steep and McGee, awakened from their dire labors by Will’s memories, return to Burnt Yarley and assault the now-aged Hugo Rabjohns. Without family or children, Will is a race of one, and Steep plots his extinction; but Will, who can no longer grieve, offers the perilous pair their only hope: knowledge and healing. When he touches his nemesis again, the vision he sees is both frightening and enlightening:
This is what Steep saw when he looked at living things. Not their beauty, not their particularity, just their smothering, deafening fecundity. Flesh begetting flesh, din begetting din. It wasn’t hard to fathom, because he’d thought it himself, in his darkest times. Seen the human tide advancing on species he’d loved—beasts too wild or too wise to compromise with the invader—and wished for a plague to wither every human womb. Heard the din and longed for a gentle death to silence every throat. Sometime not even gentle. He understood. Oh Lord, he understood.
When Will tells Steep that God moves each of them, “the words, though he’d never thought he’d hear them from his own tongue, were true.”
God was in him now. Always had been. Steep had the rage of some Judgmental Father in his eye, but the divinity Will had in him was no less a Lord, though He talked through the mouth of a fox and loved life more than Will had supposed life could be loved. A Lord who’d come before him in innumerable shapes over the years. Some pitiful, to be sure, some triumphant. A blind polar bear on a garbage heap; two children in painted masks; Patrick sleeping; Patrick smiling; Patrick speaking love. Camellias on a windowsill and the skies of Africa. His Lord was there, everywhere, inviting him to see the soul of things.
Will’s journey home to Burnt Yarley and his childhood is but an arc of another and greater circle: he pursues Steep north to the most fertile of the Inner Hebrides, tiny Tiree—“the granary of the islands”—where Barker spent so many memorable days in his youth. There, hidden in an icy outcrop of rock, is the Domus Mundi, the legendary House of the World; but its interior is a grey darkness, lit with pale flames that disclose walls and floors made of filth and clogged with rotting trash, a sad mirror of the dying psyche of the world.
High atop an elaborate web of knotted rope and filthy woodwork waits the throne of Gerard Rukenau. Despite his serpentine looks, the mystic and messiah Rukenau is no satanic majesty, just a mundane man whose arrogance and pride have engineered his own prison and Hell. A step outside of the Domus Mundi would forfeit its gift of immortality; embittered and lonely, he has covered its glory with dirt and excrement, rigging the elaborate ropework to assure that he never has to set foot upon the House of the World again.
Rukenau was the bastard child of a church-builder. Rejected by his father, he determined to build a cathedral that God would so desire to visit that all of his father’s churches would be left empty. He studied architecture and magic, learned the sacred geometries, and finally enlisted the aid of the Nilotic, an angel who could construct a temple so profound that “a priest might see the Creator’s labors at a single glance.” But a glance was not enough for Rukenau; he needed an artist’s vision—the vision of a Thomas Simeon—to comprehend the glory of his labors.
When the outcast Steep, who had failed to return Simeon to the Domus Mundi, re-enters its halls, he greets his former master with the killing blade; but Rosa follows, scouring the filth from the walls and exposing the glories hidden beneath: a vast temple of life whose essence is “the throb and shimmer of living things,” the “glorious…madness” that is the glory of creation.
As Rukenau dies, he offers a final revelation: Steep and Rosa are one. They are the angel known as the Nilotic, divided by his necromancy. Each half, male and female, has adapted to the world of humanity through their experience of gender, embracing the most superficial impulses of man and woman: to terminate and to procreate. “Living in the world with stolen names, learning the cruel assumptions of their gender from what they saw about them, unable to live apart, although it was a torment to be so close to the other, yet never close enough.” Now, in the House of the World, a mere touch reunites them, Rosa’s bleeding brightness merging with Steep, marrying him, becoming whole…becoming one.
The Nilotic moves into the heart of the House, intent on undoing it, and Will follows. “The deeper they ventured the more it seemed he was treading not among the echoes of the world, but in the world itself, his soul a thread of bliss passing into its mysteries.…He did not grieve, knowing his life was a day long, or an hour. He did not wonder who made him. He did not wish to be other. He did not pray. He did not hope. He only was, and was, and was, and that was the joy of it.”
The journey takes him home again, to Burnt Yarley, where he walks the cold slopes of his youth, the forgotten places and faces that live inside him still, seeing them with sublime wisdom: “The creators of the world had not retreated to the heights. They were everywhere. They were stones, they were trees, they were shafts of light and burgeoning seeds. They were broken things, they were dying things, and they were all that sprang up from things dying and broken. And where they were, he was too. Fox and God and the creature between.” Finally his footsteps lead to the place where the birds had fallen and, in time, to San Francisco and Patrick’s house, where Will fulfills his promise to attend his friend’s final moments. But when Patrick goes gently into the night, Will feels an unaccustomed discomfort. For the first time in his life, the man who watched and chronicled the dying of so many breeds feels like a voyeur. “Maybe it would be better just to go, he thought; leave the living to their grief, and the dead to their ease. He belonged in neither tribe, it seemed, and that unfixedness, which had been a pleasure to him as he went through the world, was now no pleasure at all. It only made him lonely.”
At last, it seems, Will Rabjohns has awoken. He is no longer content to stand idly by, watching, waiting, for death to come. “The season of visions was at an end, at least for now, and its inciter had departed, leaving Will to take his wisdom back to the tribe. To tell what he’d seen and felt in the heart of the Domus Mundi. To celebrate what he knew, and turn it to its healing purpose.” There is only one place for him: “his only true and certain home, the world.”
It is a lesson for both the artist and the man. The act of creation, like that of existence, must be defined on our own terms, not those of others—certainly not those of parents or teachers, critics or readers, and certainly not those of politics, whether social or sexual—and in terms of sacrament. Creating and living, Barker reminds us, are acts as sacred as those of communion, signifying or at least striving to signify a spiritual reality; if not, they are as purposeless and as vile as murder.
* * * *
Sacrament is not simply the best of Clive Barker’s novels, but also the most directly and profoundly autobiographical of his fictions. It is his first novel with an openly gay protagonist (which, even in these “enlightened” times, hindered its commercial prospects); and it is one of a handful of contemporary novels in which the sexuality of the protagonist, whether gay or straight, is absolutely essential to its plot. There is, however, no sense of polemic. Just as the novel cannot be read as a p‘an to animal rights, its take on gay lifestyles is by no means a gentle, let alone an encouraging, one. In the very real world of Sacrament, gay and straight relationships are equally difficult, and troubled; Barker argues convincingly against gender stereotypes and roles, as well as warning of the dangers of defining oneself through them.
The plot is deceptive in its simplicity, a characteristic puzzle box of secret histories whose telling and retelling are the key to revelation. In these pages Barker revisits themes—notably, the urge for unity and transformation—that have been crucial to earlier works. It is no accident that Sacrament echoes another autobiographical novel, Weaveworld, at essential moments, but here Barker strips away the veneer of fantasy (which plays a minor role in the proceedings), finding the courage to create a metaphoric wonderland that cannot be ignored or dismissed as the stuff of escapism. Sacrament is remarkable, for Barker the fantasist, in its retreat from the elaborate mythologies of Imajica and the novels of “The Art” in favor of a subdued unreality whose most chimerical qualities are biblical in character. It is equally remarkable in its refusal to concede that unreality, to suggest that its tropes have anything but direct and vital meaning for the reader—and the writer.
Will Rabjohn’s profession as a photographer of dying species is an elegant and, indeed, inspired metaphor for the writer, the filmmaker, the artist of the dark fantastic—in other words, for Clive Barker himself. The truth is underscored in a telling aside about reviews: “The critical response to both the books and exhibitions had often been antagonistic. Few reviewers had questioned Will’s skills—he had the temperament, the vision, and the technical grasp to be a great photographer. But why, they complained, did he have to be so relentlessly grim? Why did he have to seek out images that evoked despair and death when there was so much beauty in the natural world?”
* * * *
Why, indeed? Darkness, Barker counsels, is very much in the eye of the beholder. The bloodthirsty scourge known as Jacob Steep is only the most recent of the light-bearing zealots who burn their way through the pages of Barker’s fiction. Steep fears the dark, and desires more than anything to hold it at bay; but Will Rabjohns, like Clive Barker, wants to know the dark, to embrace its mysteries, to rid us of the fear of the unknown and all that is done in its name. Sacrament is a testament to the explorers of that darkness, and a challenge to those who would write in its name.
At one juncture, Will offers a brief riposte, discussing a New Age spiritualist who comforts Patrick: “Oh, there’s light in my pictures…light aplenty. It just wasn’t the kind of illumination [she] would want to meditate upon.” [p. 306] Before the Domus Mundi, Will considered his photographs as a kind of bleak magic, one that, like his childhood killing of the birds, might work change in the world, but through negation and despair. But the light Will offers after entering the House of the World shines brightly: “Take pleasure not because it’s fleeting, but because it exists at all.” The light is one that his photographs, like Barker’s own work in so many media, cannot capture, but which, with wisdom and conscience, can suggest and, indeed, exalt: “This presence of all things, seen and unseen, around and about, remember. There will be days in your life when you’ll need to have this feeling again, to know that all that’s gone from the world hasn’t really gone at all; it’s just not in sight.”
EDITORIAL ADDENDA, by Darrell Schweitzer
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
edited by John Clute and John Grant
St. Martin’s Press, 1997
1049 pp. $75.00
We can recommend this massive volume almost without reservations. It is a companion to the similarly enormous tome, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and it will—we predict—sweep all the awards next year. It will also prove to be a definitive reference work for decades to come, and turn out to be even more influential than the science fiction volume.
At first glance, the entries seem to cover the usual: authors, magazines, films, themes, motifs, etc. But the reader notices an great deal of jargon, most of it in small capital letters, which means that each such term has an entry of its own. Thus we are referenced and cross-referenced and cross-cross-referenced to such entries as TAPROOT TEXT, POLDER, WAINSCOTT, LANDSCAPES, MYTH OF ORIGIN, GODDESS, THINNING, THRESHOLD, ACCURSED WANDERER, FOR EST, GNOSTIC FANTASY, SLEEPER UNDER THE HILL, and so on for some distance.
Ultimately it not only makes sense, but proves extremely illuminating. What’s going on here is something very ambitious indeed: an attempt to create an entire critical vocabulary for discussing fantasy literature.
You might ask why this is necessary. Fantasy, after all, is older than everything else. It is older than the written word. (See, in this book, TAPROOT TEXTS, FOLKLORE, and several more.) But fantasy as a genre is a relatively recent development (see GENRE FANTASY) created by Del Rey Books in the mid-1970s under decidedly sub-literary circumstances. And while there are any number of author studies (of Tolkien, Dunsany, Cabell, etc.) around, these often occur within the context of mainstream literature and are written by mainstream critics whose realist or post-realist biases may not leave them quite compatible with the subject matter. It is surprising, but true, that fantasy does not have the same rich body of critical literature that science fiction does. There is very little which addresses topics within the context of a (now inescapable) fantasy genre, which has its own archetypes, tropes, and cross-references.
For example, a great many fantasies deal with the loss of magic. The dragons and wizards go away at the end. The adventure may be glorious, but by the time it’s over we have a sense that this is the last time. Possibly a whole new age or cycle of history begins, as it does at the end of The Lord of the Rings. This can be a powerful metaphor for maturity, old age, the assumption of responsibilities, or other irrevocable change. It is not something found in just one book or one author, but recurrent throughout the genre. Clute and Grant call it THINNING. We need that term and a whole lot of others like it, which are unique to the discussion of fantasy. Such markers will trace the influence of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy for years to come.
The actual entries on individual writers, which range in time from Homer and Lucius Annaeus Seneca to Thomas Ligotti and Ellen Kushner (or, for that matter, Darrell Schweitzer), tend to be expertly done, with few exceptions. Only the Lovecraft entry (by David Langford and Colin Wilson) is seriously skewed, and even manages to cram several factual errors into a single sentence, as when we are told that “The Shadow Out of Time” was the Old Gent’s “last finished work, written about the time he learned he had cancer.” (Wrong on all counts: The story was written in 1934. Lovecraft did not become ill, see a doctor, or begin to express intimations of immediate mortality in his private letters—our most intimate, and often only, source—until well into 1936; besides which, “The Haunter of the Dark” was written later than “The Shadow Out of Time.”)
Any review of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy at this point has to be preliminary. The only way to honestly report on such a volume is use it for several years and then review it, which isn’t very practical. It is too massive to be read from end to end. Those cross-references are like little wormholes which weave in and out of the text, depositing us, sometimes, in surprising places, like a whole long section on Tarzan movies, which is better than you’ll find in most film books. We can browse endlessly. We can turn to our own areas of expertise (Lovecraft, Dunsany, the Weird Tales writers, Mervyn Wall) and find, on the whole, that the facts are sound, the analysis intelligent, and that the scope of the work as a whole is by several orders of magnitude more ambitious than anything previously attempted.
The Best of Weird Tales: 1923
edited by Marvin Kaye and John Gregory Betancourt.
Bleak House (an imprint of Wildside Press), 1997
129 pp. $12.00
It would cost you thousands of dollars to obtain the contents of this book elsewhere. All other considerations aside, The Best of Weird Tales: 1923, is a real bargain. It is the first of a projected series, each volume selecting the best from a given year of “The Unique Magazine.” Since 1923 issues of Weird Tales can easily cost you five hundred collars apiece (more for the first few), if you can find them at all, here you have, for a modest price and with good production values, the truly unobtainable.
Think of it as a core sample, drilled from the lowest sedimentary stratum of pulp horror fantasy. As such, it is of enormous paleontological interest, even if we have to admit that a good deal of what came up was mud.
It’s a deep, dark secret, hidden behind those astronomical prices for the fabulously scarce early issues, that Weird Tales did not make an auspicious start. Had the magazine only survived a year or two, it would have been no more than a curiosity, a failed first effort, for the most part poorly written, badly laid out, and wretchedly illustrated. Fortunately, the quality improved rapidly in just a few years, so that we may safely predict that the 1925 or 1926 volumes in this series will begin to show pure gold.
There’s no doubt that editors Kaye and Betancourt have indeed picked the best of 1923. All of the stories are at least readable. They’re fun, in a crude way, but only serve to remind us why the Weird Tales greats, Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry Whitehead, Robert E. Howard, and the rest seemed so electrifyingly wonderful at the time. Here’s what the competition was like. (Not surprisingly, Lovecraft’s “Dagon,” reprinted here to represent the October 1923 issue, is conspicuously the best of the lot.)
The other stories are of varying interest. “An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension” by Farnsworth Wright (the very man who, as editor of Weird Tales, would bring about the magazine’s amazing transformation a couple years later) is a pioneering, clumsy attempt at the sort of “funny alien” science fiction Stanley G. Weinbaum was to make popular in the mid-’30s. “The Two Men Who Murdered Each Other” stretches the long arm of coincidence outrageously, but has moments of effective description. “Beyond the Door” (one of the very few early Weird Tales stories Lovecraft liked) has a genuinely creepy atmosphere. “Lucifer,” by John. D. Swain, manages a cruel, surprising twist. Most of the others are anecdotes of madness, revenge, and rudimentary hauntings, by writers who did not subsequently become famous.
But this was the beginning. Here you can see how a great tradition started.
Mosig At Last: A Psychologist Looks at H.P. Lovecraft
by Yozan Dirk W. Mosig
Necronomicon Press, 1997
128 pp. $7.95
At the recent Cthulhu Mythos convention, Necronomicon, held in Providence, Rhode Island, at the very base of Lovecraft’s old neighorhood of College Hill (along the steep streets of which your editor conducted a somewhat breathless walking tour), there were two guests of honor. One was Brian Lumley, which is obvious and fitting.
The other was Yozan Dirk W. Mosig, who may not be a household name, but who is, in his own way, equally important. For the occasion, this volume essays was published.
It’s astonishing to discover how little Mosig actually wrote. The bibliography lists a total fifteen articles about Lovecraft, all published between 1973 and 1980. The present volume contains nine of them, plus what appear to be four short original pieces.
Despite this, Donald Burleson, Peter Cannon, S.T. Joshi, and Robert M. Price all attest in their tributes at the back of the book that Mosig is a seminal figure (“the Northrup Frye of Lovecraft criticism,” says Burleson), who raised Lovecraft criticism to the level of a serious discipline and paved the way for a whole new generation of Lovecraftian scholars, including Messrs Burleson, Cannon, Joshi, and Price. Dr. Mosig, a professional psychologist (who has added the Yozan to his name after having become, among his other accomplishments, a Zen monk; he also describes himself as a follower of Bertrand Russell and B.F. Skinner), applied a variety of psychological approaches, not to Lovecraft’s life, but to his writing. One dazzling piece, “The Four Faces of ‘The Outsider,’” explores a single story as autobiography, as Jungian allegory, as a Freudian and mechanistic nightmare, and makes them all work, each facet providing new and striking insights.
More than anyone else, Mosig was the first to show us Lovecraft as a serious thinker and an artist of almost infinite depth. That he wrote only a small amount merely shows that if you say something important enough, you don’t have to say it at great length.
(Available from Necronomicon Press, P.O. Box 1304, West Warwick RI 02893. Add $1.50 for postage.)