My introduction to ‘Charnel Glamour’ by Mark Samuels

  • Post category:Uncategorized
  • Reading time:4 mins read

The final collection of weird supernatural horror stories by the great Mark Samuels is now available from Chiroptera Press. I was honored to be asked by Mark to write the introduction to it. What I didn’t and couldn’t know when I accepted his invitation was that Charnel Glamour would end up being Mark’s last, and would be published posthumously, several months after his sudden and untimely death in December 2023.

With the blessing of both Chiroptera Press and Hippocampus Press (the latter of which will be publishing a paperback edition in 2025), I have shared the full text of my introduction at my Living Dark newsletter. It includes not just my introduction to Mark’s book but my reminiscence of our more than two decades of friendship, standing as my tribute to him:

Forbidden Transmissions: An Introduction to Charnel Glamour

Here are two passages from that intro:

When my instinctive move in reflecting on Mark’s new book is to think back to where his career began, and to remember our early acquaintance, and to consider how this informs my own reading of Charnel Glamour, maybe I’m just trying to explain to myself how twenty years can possibly have passed, and why the memory of Mark’s first book still resonates with me all these years later, and how it is that he writes weird supernatural horror stories that patch directly into my apprehension, amplified by the passage of time, of the strange fact that we live in a world of phantoms in which we ourselves, despite our presumed solidity, may be the very source of spectrality….

[T]he Samuelsian weird fictional cosmos…is a place where I can sense some of the most pointedly personal intimations of metaphysical fear from throughout my lifetime peering through the elements of the various narrative vehicles that Mark has constructed for conveying his vision. Readers of such stories—readers like you and me—find pleasure in this emotion of weird and numinous fear. At the same time, we also recognize that stories like this are about more than just delivering a few literary fictional pleasures. They carry the ring or scent of truth. They feel like revelations, like forbidden transmissions, like windows or doorways to something that is real, but that we are otherwise not allowed to acknowledge or talk about. In short, they feel a lot like the supernaturally potent books-as-carriers that show up in many of the stories themselves.

Three principles of anti-productivity

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:4 mins read
Living into the Dark

If you, like me, have felt the allure of endless productivity advice wear thin and grow cold over time, why not try something else? Why not experiment with anti-productivity? Here are two preliminary and interlinked suggestions, accompanied by a third item that expands on the accompanying outlook:

1. ON GOALS

Productivity says: “Always visualize your goals. Articulate them clearly. Start with the end in mind. Know where you’re headed.”

Anti-productivity says: “Embrace ignorance at the outset. Have no idea where the hell you’re headed. Let it reveal itself one step at a time. Welcome the darkness of unknowing.”

2. ON METHODS

Productivity says: “Have a clear, organized plan. Break your work down into manageable units. Arrange them in logical order. Proceed in sequence. Establish priorities. Use techniques to manage your energy (Pomodoro, time-blocking, whatever). Stick to a schedule.”

Anti-productivity says: “Abandon any pretense of a chosen plan. Dive in wherever the energy beckons you. Use any technique or no technique, whatever moves you. Let your schedule and sequence be to just show up and see what happens. Follow the Stephen King approach: Just flail away at the goddamn thing.”

3. ON ENDS AND MEANS

The most problematic thing about productivity is that it tends to become an end in its own right, and a suckingly hollow one at that. Its Apollonian allure strokes the ego by promising it the position of CEO in our creative projects. This leads us to exclude the possibility of transcendence in principle, to replace the holy fire of inspiration with an illusion of being in control and choosing our own meanings and destinations. There is nothing actually, intrinsically wrong with articulating goals, having a plan, or using time-and-energy-management techniques. Where these things go wrong is when they promise what they can’t deliver (meaningfulness, fire, inspiration) and substitute themselves as ends instead of means. One of the most direct ways to confront this is to dive deliberately into the sense of being at sea without a bearing, walking a lonely dark road at night with just a dim flashlight for illumination, following the road and the current wherever they take you, and using whatever techniques you have at your disposal simply to keep moving and avoid disaster.

I have sometimes called this anti-productivity approach “living into the dark.” It is, if you want to think of it this way, a strategy for meeting your muse and divining your daimon, for calling on invisible creative help by broadcasting the acknowledgment that the real ends and meanings you serve are beyond you—or at least beyond what you conventionally think of a “you.”

Horror from the inside out

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:3 mins read
A cosmic skyscape filled with stars, with a single glowing eye in the middle

Yesterday an online acquaintance asked me if I had any advice about horror for someone who’s just getting started. “Do you have any hard-earned nuggets of wisdom that you wish you had known at the beginning of your career?”

I started typing, and here’s what came out:

Advice on horror depends on which angle you’re asking from. Writing craft? Approaches to publishing? Philosophical perspective? Or recommendations for reading, viewing, etc.? From the craft and philosophical perspectives, I’ll simply offer my own riff on what Thomas Ligotti told Jon Padgett as Jon was undergoing his personal authorial mentorship under Tom’s guidance:

Zero in deeply, deeply, on what really frightens and horrifies you. Become absolutely clear on that. Use any writing or other creative activities that you do in this field to help you accomplish that act of inner knowledge. Seek the supremely perfect articulation of your personal horror, the summit of your private, individualized Mount Doom, the apotheosis in language of whatever naturally offers itself to you—and only to you, in your for-all-time uniqueness—as the absolute nightmare. Explore and perfect ways to describe this nightmare to yourself.

If you approach the writing of horror in this way, as the most deeply personal discipline of self-interrogation and dark epiphany that you can achieve, what you write will automatically, and paradoxically, prove magnetic to other people.

Additionally, and speaking solely as myself on a spiritual or philosophical note: Always remember that your horror is only as real as you are. This is both the way in and the way out.

Piano, private and public

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:3 mins read

For your listening enjoyment, here’s a recording of me performing New Age pianist David Lanz’s lovely arrangement of “Joy to the World,” which is a joy to play. Yes, I know it’s mid-February as I’m posting this, so a Christmas song is technically out of season. But it’s good music anyway, no matter when you hear it.

About thirty years of my life have involved playing the piano in public, including in a multitude of Protestant church settings, and also for public events like commencement ceremonies and choir concerts at my last college. The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to that. But I still play regularly for myself, and occasionally, when the mood strikes, I record it. That’s where this particular performance came from: I was playing some Christmas music in solitude in mid-December, and I decided to hit the record button.

If you’re already familiar with Lanz’s arrangement of “Joy to the World,” you’ll notice that I made a couple of minor, considered changes to it, including a different timing for the left-hand chords in the penultimate two measures.

If you’d like to hear more of my playing, see the following items, which I shared with readers of my Living Dark newsletter over a span of months. The first two are original compositions by me.

An old song for a new apocalyptic age

This morning I found my thoughts turning to an old song by Sting, “Love Is the Seventh Wave,” along with Sting’s rather profound comments on it. Both his comments and the song’s lyrics strike me as resurgently relevant to our current state of global conflict and crisis, and I was rather moved when I looked up the lyrics and reread them after all these years.

Sting wrote the song during the culminating years of the Cold War, when a sense of doom hung over everything (as I well remember, because I was 15 when the song came out). In an interview for the NME, he explained the song’s central metaphor and shared his intent when writing it:

In popular myth, if you count the waves on a sea shore, the seventh wave is supposed to be the strongest, the most profound. And I felt that at present the world is undergoing a wave of evil, if you like. The world’s never been as polluted. We’ve never had as many missiles pointing across the borders, or as many armies in waiting. We seem to be in the grip of this growing sense of doom. And the song is uncharacteristically hopeful, saying that behind this wave there’s a much more profound one. It’s love, beyond selfishness. And I think if there isn’t this wave, then we are finished. So it’s singing about something and hoping that by singing about it you’ll create it. The alternative, thinking that in five years’ time the world will end, isn’t that helpful. It might sell records, but it doesn’t help the people listening.

Here are the lyrics, which, as I said, come off as at least as relevant to our current global cultural moment of crisis and collective sense of impending doom as they were to the original context in which Sting wrote them:

In the empire of the senses
You’re the queen of all you survey
All the cities, all the nations
Everything that falls your way, I say

There is a deeper world than this
That you don’t understand
There is a deeper world than this
Tugging at your hand

Every ripple on the ocean
Every leaf on every tree
Every sand dune in the desert
Every power we never see

There is a deeper wave than this
Smiling in the world
There is a deeper wave than this
Listen to me, girl

Feel it rising in the cities
Feel it sweeping over land
Over borders, over frontiers
Nothing will its power withstand, I say

There is no deeper wave than this
Rising in the world
There is no deeper wave than this
Listen to me, girl

All the bloodshed, all the anger
All the weapons, all the greed
All the armies, all the missiles
All the symbols of our fear

There is a deeper wave than this
Rising in the world
There is a deeper wave than this
Listen to me, girl

At the still point of destruction
At the center of the fury
All the angels, all the devils
All around us, can’t you see?

There is a deeper wave than this
Rising in the land
There is a deeper wave than this
Nothing will withstand

I say love is the seventh wave

Every breath you take with me
Every breath you take, every move you make
Every cake you bake, every leg you break