Interests in Art

Excerpt from an interview, dated 2016, by Séamas O'Reilly. A shortened version was published in the Irish Times. The complete interview is available HERE. I strongly recommend to read it!

Alan Moore: [...] To describe my interests in art when I was a kid, it would mostly fall under the genre of “things that didn’t happen”. So that would include science fiction, fantasy, myths and legends, superheroes, horror. Once I discovered horror, I began to seek it out ravenously and, from the age of about 7 or 8, I was reading at least mild horror and ghost stories as well as a few of the pre-code horror comic book stories that would show up in the old black and white English reprints. And when I was around ten, eleven, twelve, my tastes started to zero into things that I’d heard about — Dracula, which was a fantastic book and still a very modern read. Frankenstein I did less well with, I was too young for it. [...]

Still around ten or eleven. Also for about a year when I was say, eleven or twelve, I had a brief infatuation with the works of Dennis Wheatley. As Iain Sinclair has said, and I’d agree, that is about the only age when you can take Wheatley seriously. That’s the age before you notice all the creepy right-wing stuff, but that was part of my reading. Around about the same age as I was getting tired of Dennis Wheatley, I discovered Lovecraft, I forget exactly how, but I had seen books by him and I think that I’d read somewhere a brief description of his work that made him sound fascinating. I can remember picking up the Panther paperback edition, with the ugliest cover that I’ve ever seen, of At The Mountains Of Madness and the first book I read, I flipped through until I’d found the shortest one, which was The Statement of Randolph Carter which absolutely stunned me. I went on to read the whole rest of the book which I think included Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature essay, a brilliant guidebook to all of these authors I’d never heard of before; Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith — all of them, the whole bunch. It was a history of great supernatural and weird writing and that gave me a reading list that would take me through the next couple of years until an enthusiasm for the sword and sorcery of Michael Moorcock. That led to me picking up a copy of New Worlds when I was about 14, assuming it was going to be the adventures of Elric of Melniboné, and opening up instead to, I think, the first chapter of A Cure For Cancer with Jerry Cornelius, who at that time had black skin, black teeth, white hair and was a woman for at least part of the narrative.

The same issue had a brilliant essay by JG Ballard and I was instantly hooked on a new drug. That was my introduction to Modernism, which is what Mike Moorcock was trying to do with New Worlds. He liked Modernist writing but realised that there weren’t really any vehicles around for it, and he looked upon the science fiction genre as a potentially useful vehicle that didn’t seem to be serving any real purpose.

So, in the pages of New Worlds, along with JG Ballard, M. John Harrison, John Sladek, Hillary Bailey and all those people, he kind of reinvented what science fiction could do. He reinvented science fiction as a movement for Modernism. So, probably my relationship with horror, specifically, would have faltered in that time and it only picked up again with the new generation of horror paperbacks that were emerging in the 70s, where you’d got the magnificent Thomas Tyron, first with The Other and then with Harvest Hope. Big, thick horror paperbacks. Then, in the wake of that there was of course the book of The Exorcist, which was enjoyable. [...]

I haven’t read it for a long time but I remember it being better than the film. Then after that there was the emergence of Stephen King, perhaps inspired by these new big, thick horror books that had over the previous couple of years, and I was interested in King’s work at the time, for a few books there.

[...] I enjoyed them at the time. I noticed that it in a lot of it, it seemed to me, there was something missing in the endings and there was a possibility of formula creeping in there. But, there again, he’s done some remarkable works that have avoided that, so the thing is, Stephen King kind of kicked off a wave of horror writers trying to ride along his popularity and they were generally much, much worse. Obviously, there are huge exceptions, I mean Ramsey Campbell is one of the finest horror writers in the world. Full stop. Again, my tastes in the seventies, I actually was thinking a lot of the time, some of the Modernist literature that I was getting in Picador books seems more genuinely frightening. I think there’s more horror in Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman.
 

[...] Yes, and it’s timeless because it’s brilliant, original writing, which will be as good, and the ideas as strange, whenever you happen to read them. In many ways, culture still hasn’t caught up with O’Brien. I’d be looking at his stuff, and thinking that yes The Third Policeman is really funny, but it’s also a really frightening supernatural horror. Many people that I know find it difficult to read because they get to the bit where one of the constables is showing the infinite regress of tiny little dressing tables that are inside the drawer of a bigger dressing table. They’ll get to that point and feel vertiginous and a bit sick. I can completely understand that. It’s actually mind-warping stuff. But at the same time, I was reading other books during the seventies. Sadegh Hedayet’s The Blind Owl, which is absolutely terrifying. It’s this recursive fable that keeps going round and round and round. It’s completely different to the Third Policeman and yet you get that same chewing touch of infinity that really gets you in the bone marrow.

So, it was thinking about things like this that made me think that surely it would be best with horror stories to put other elements in, other than just horror. Try and make the horror do something different. I’ve recently come to the conclusion that using it to talk about something else is probably the only serious use of genre but a detective story that is just a detective story is not really something I’m interested in.

The complete interview is available HERE.