In a 1931 letter to Frank Belknap Long, H P Lovecraft summed up what he was trying to do in his fiction as striving for “a form of non-supernatural cosmic art”, one that adhered to the new and increasingly strange ideas about reality that twentieth century physics was coming up with, yet still managed to convey the weird thrill and “sense of outsideness” of cosmic horror.

I couldn’t help but think of this when reading Benjamín Labatut’s collection When We Cease To Understand The World, in particular its third story, “The Heart of the Heart”. In When We Cease To Understand The World (a title with evident Lovecraftian resonances) and his subsequent novel The Maniac, Labatut focuses on the lives of the real-life mathematicians and scientists who formed the theories (relativity and quantum physics) that brought their own particular style of cosmic weirdness to the twentieth century. Mostly, Labatut deals with early-twentieth century figures, but “The Heart of the Heart” opens with a modern mathematician who is actually still living (Shinichi Mochizuki), and mainly focuses on another, from the second half of the twentieth century, Alexander Grothendieck. It begins with Mochizuki quietly publishing an enormous proof of “one of the most important conjectures in number theory”, known as the “abc conjecture”. It’s a proof so complicated that even when the world’s leading mathematicians pore over it, they can’t be sure it has achieved its aim. Sometime later, Mochizuki withdraws it. He has, Labatut writes, succumbed to “Grothendieck’s curse”, and goes on to outline the career of the man who (according to Wikipedia) is “considered by many to be the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century”. Grothendieck seems to have been a wellspring of new, complex theories of mathematics, finding immense depths and interconnections in even the simplest of notions. Behind it all, Grothendieck believed lay “the heart of the heart”: “a ray of light capable of illuminating every conceivable incarnation of a mathematical object”, but which was also “an entity… at the very centre of mathematics, which had completely unhinged him”. Something about this “entity” causes Grothendieck to retreat from mathematics—indeed, from the world at large, as he moves to a remote village and attempts to live on nothing but dandelion soup—and to demand certain of his works be removed from library shelves. He has, Labatut implies, glimpsed an idea so disturbing that it should remain hidden, “for the good of all of us”. The implication is that Mochizuki, a former disciple of Grothendieck, has glimpsed the same thing.

The imagery and language Labatut uses is rife with Lovecraftian resonances. That disquieting “entity… at the very centre of mathematics, which had completely unhinged him”, sounds something like Lovecraft’s idiot god Azathoth, “which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity”. More Lovecraftian still, Grothendieck, after his retreat, “came to believe dreams were not proper to human beings, but missives from an external entity he called Le Rêveur”—which also recalls, for me, Ramsey Campbell’s Incarnate, with its inhuman source of all dreams.

There are physicists and mathematicians throughout When We Cease To Understand The World dealing with strange and disturbing new insights into the cosmic order, many of whom find themselves driven to the edge of sanity, if not beyond. (Labatut’s fiction is full of madness, fevers and suicides.) His novel The Maniac (2023) opens with the tale of Paul Ehrenfest, known to such colleagues as Einstein and Bohr as “the Conscience of Physics”, but who suffers from bouts of extreme depression, and ends up shooting not only himself, but his mentally and physically disabled son. The main subject of the novel, the mathematician John von Neumann, is, however, a complete contrast. If Grothendieck is perhaps the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century, von Neumann is surely the most influential, certainly in terms of our daily lives. The list of areas he either pioneered or took a key part in includes the development of the atom bomb (von Neumann was the one who said it should explode before it hit the ground, so as to cause the maximum damage), the Cold War (after the bombing of Japan, von Neumann urged the US to immediately bomb Russia before they could develop a similar weapon, this being, in his mind, “the only fully logical decision to make”; afterwards, he advocated the idea that came to be known as Mutually Assured Destruction—the development of such an overwhelming stock of nuclear weapons that it could destroy the world several times over, thus, in a way, “ensuring global peace by taking us to the brink of Armageddon”), the subsequent development of the hydrogen bomb (five hundred times more powerful than the atom bomb, and described in the novel as “a true horror, something that could not be justified in any sense, an evil by any measure”), but also computing (“The DNA of the entire digital universe”—the von Neumann architecture—is still the basic structure of all modern computers), game theory (an apparently abstract mathematical idea that nevertheless informs all modern warfare), AI (a late obsession with self-replicating digital entities and the workings of the brain) and, to name one positive, weather-forecasting.

Unlike the subjects of so much of Labatut’s fiction, von Neumann is free of mental instability—at first, anyway. His “intelligence was playful, not tortured”; he was “Brilliant but childish, insightful yet incredibly shallow”. At first pursuing the logical basis for all mathematics (something that also forms the subject of one of my favourite graphic novels, Logicomics)—until Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem proved one would never be found—von Neumann then becomes “more practical and effective than before, but also [more] dangerous”, freely engaging in “so many top-secret projects that his suit pockets were overflowing with security cards”. Where Ehrenfest, though burdened with depression, was “the Conscience of Physics”, von Neumann, free of all doubt, seemingly has no conscience at all.

(He does, though, have his own ultimate date with mortality, when it’s discovered he has terminal cancer, in all likelihood caused by his exposure to radiation during the development of the atom bomb. Previously so sure of his own special status, this proves to be the one thing the genius von Neumann cannot comprehend: “He suffered,” one of Labatut’s narrators records, “from the loss of his mind more than I have seen any human being suffer, in any other circumstance.”)

And I can’t help but reach for Lovecraftian parallels again as, aided by an elite possessing abstruse and occult knowledge, something insanely destructive and utterly without conscience rises in a remote Pacific island: Cthulhu from his sleeping depths, the first hydrogen bomb explosion from the Enewetak Atoll.

Labatut writes with a feverish, propulsive style, a headlong rush of ideas, anxieties and desperation in his subjects’ lives. (Full of long sentences, and page-spanning paragraphs, it’s a nightmare to find your place again if your concentration wavers.) But, as the sort of scientific and mathematical concepts he writes about (very lightly—you won’t come away understanding Quantum Mechanics, let alone Inter-Universal Teichmüller Theory), are usually covered much more soberly in non-fiction, there’s something fresh about Labatut’s addressing them in such an emotionally inflated, even melodramatic style.

I found both the collection When We Cease To Understand The World and the novel The Maniac very readable, but I’m a bit torn about them. They use real-life figures (The Maniac has chapters narrated by Richard Feynman, among others) to tell real-life stories, but how reliable are they? This is a heightened, compressed version of events, foregrounding insanity, desperation and genius. It is fiction, and so not necessarily true—but, at the same time, I sort of want this, Labatut’s version, to be the truth. It fits so neatly into wonderfully Lovecraftian ideas about the cosmic dangers of forbidden knowledge. But the one case where he deals with a still-living figure—Mochizuki’s withdrawal of his massive proof—has since been undermined by real-life events: Mochizuki published his proof in 2021, a year after When We Cease To Understand The World came out. (But even if it does contain Azathoth in the form of a mathematical theory, who would understand it but the insane?)

Labatut’s stories appeal to something other than knowledge about the world, though. These are modern myths about the nature of knowledge and its consequences—myths that Lovecraft, too, addressed in his fiction, which was itself written under the influence of the shockwaves of those early-twentieth century notions such as relativity and quantum physics. Perhaps Labatut’s use of real people and events could be understood by another of Lovecraft’s ideals for weird fiction: “My own rule is that no weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax.” The ultimate hoax, then, is to use so much of the truth that the weird comes through merely in the embellishments: the facts are true, but the way they’re spun brings in the darkness and weirdness.

Back in the days of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds, aliens, with their “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” could be seen as a warning against one of the great threats of the looming 20th century: letting pure intellect dominate, and lead us into our own technologically-flavoured destruction. Midway through the century, an alien of a different type (Klaatu by name) turned up to issue a more direct warning against blowing ourselves up, as though to say, “You just don’t get it, do you?” Later still, in the post-Morning of the Magicians/Chariots of the Gods? 70s and 80s, when aliens came not to invade us, they were still often remote (2001), weird (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) or at least impressed by our capacity to feel emotions (Starman).

But here we are in the 21st century, and it’s a sorry state of affairs when aliens come along to remind us how to be human.

I went to see Disclosure Day the day after the current president of the United States hosted an Ultimate Fighting Championship night in the White House, so the opening scene of Steven Spielberg’s latest dip into alien lore—a wrestling match in which one contestant breaks a chair on his opponent’s head while the crowd eggs him on to further showy violence—couldn’t help but feel like a political statement. Is this, Spielberg seems to be asking, America today: a baying crowd driven to distraction by a trumped-up fight while the world teeters on the brink of environmental instability and World War III, and meanwhile a shady organisation that somehow blurs the distinction between a tech company and a government agency is responsible for incarcerating and mistreating immigrants (of the interstellar variety, but immigrants all the same)…?

If it needs to be made any more explicit, we’re told at one point (slight spoiler) that Disclosure Day’s aliens regard empathy as an important evolutionary advance—a direct riposte, I assume, to a certain [update: ex-]trillionaire’s assertion that the same quality is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilisation”. (Elsewhere, footage of dead or injured Close Encounters-style aliens, with their emaciated bodies and overlarge heads, surrounded by various flavours of the uniformed military, can’t help recall images of the victims of Nazi concentration camps…)

It’s a pity, then, that Disclosure Day is such a mess. The story (though not the script) is by Spielberg himself, and I can’t help feeling the “story” in question was more a wish-list of scenes and ideas, which had to be knocked up into some sort of a narrative. Can we have crop circles, please? Just the one. It doesn’t have to mean anything in the narrative, but just be there for a brief attempt at a sense of wonder (though it comes off more as a tired joke)…? It is, in this way, the film of a true believer, who feels he has to include everything, rather than pick only what serves a well-honed story.

On the way, Spielberg gets to fake some archival UFO/alien footage, which I’m sure is already, in some sectors of the internet, being claimed to be actual alien footage, snuck into a Hollywood film against the government’s wishes (the government, of course, never watching Hollywood films) while also being a government-sanctioned plot to prepare us for the real disclosure day (the government, of course, being in secret control of Hollywood films) which will happen any day now. (No, now. No… now. Alright, but soon.)

Ever since Klaatu assumed the name of Carpenter in The Day the Earth Stood Still, the line between aliens and angels/saviours/gods (or, as von Däniken would have it, Gods?) has been somewhat blurred, but here the blurring is more slapdash than subtle. On the one hand, Spielberg spends a rather contrived scene assuring his viewers that a belief in aliens isn’t incompatible with traditional faiths, then he undermines it by having people treat our touched-by-the-aliens protagonists with religious awe. (Why should technologically more advanced beings be thought of as spiritually superior? If my neighbour has a better iPhone than me, is he holier? Does being guided by AI make a war any more spiritual? Or make the Buddah, not having a digital watch, any less?) There’s too much demand on the aliens in this film to be everything Spielberg wants them to be.

But I don’t think it’s the point of Disclosure Day to make sense. Its point it to thrust a lot of stuff at us—Steven Spielberg sense-of-wonder stuff (though it’s nowhere near as sense-of-wonder-ish as Close Encounters)—while making a broad point about empathy at a time when the world could really do with a reminder that such a thing exists.

There’s a push to see Disclosure Day at the cinema, but I have to say, it doesn’t really do much in the big-screen wow-ing visuals department. Worth watching on your home TV (if for no other reason than you can pause it to take a loo break, because it’s over two hours long), but not, I’d say, if you’re up for a wholly satisfying story—more if you’re happy with a dip into the realms of conspiracy culture (or are a believer, in which case it’s probably a delight), plus an occasionally moving reminder of what it means for people to perhaps, maybe, sometimes, be nice to each other, have hope in the future, and get together to turn things around generally.

Subtitled “My Year of Fear with Stephen King”, this is not a memoir about being kidnapped by a world-famous author and kept in his cellar—nor, Misery-wise, the other way round—but the result of spending time perusing King’s archive of early drafts to learn about his writing process. In 2017 Caroline Bicks became the first Stephen E King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine (not an electric chair, presumably), though not because her own work had any particular relevance to King’s. A Shakespeare scholar, she had, for instance, written about how the workings of adolescent girls’ minds are presented in Shakespeare’s plays. She was initially told not to contact King, but out of the blue he contacted her, agreed to speak to her students, and later invited Bicks to make use of his archive. She took the opportunity to revisit some of King’s works (which she’d read, and been duly terrified by, in her younger years), then to trace the evolution of certain key (usually horrific) scenes via their earlier drafts. The works she looks at (which she does in reverse chronological order) are Pet Sematary (published 1983, written 1979), The Shining (1977), Night Shift (published 1978, collecting stories that appeared from 1968), Salem’s Lot (1975) and Carrie (1974).

Coming from a discipline which demands a close examination of the use of language, Bicks is well-placed to pay attention to an aspect of King’s work which hasn’t, I’d guess, been examined quite so closely before. As King said—or quoted Amy Tan as saying—in On Writing, “No one asks about the language.” Here, Bicks does.

For instance, looking at the sound of a certain group of words King uses in Pet Sematary, in a scene where the protagonist is disinterring a corpse:

When he revised the line, placing “grating” next to “full of dirt,” he created a word-cluster that echoes the book’s signature soundtrack to all of its awful acts of digging and burying: dirt/grit/gritting/grating/grave/gravel.

One thing I was interested to read is that the tendency, in King’s horror scenes, was for him to strip back the language and pare away the more egregious details, to focus the terror on certain key images. In some cases—The Shining, for instance—this involved removing the explicit appearance of the supernatural to leave as much room for a psychological interpretation as possible. This was particularly interesting to me, as I’ve always preferred King’s subtler horrors to his more overblown excesses of the supernatural (Duma Key really put me off, but re-reading It most highlighted the difference). If I thought about it at all, I’d have assumed the excess details came from tinkering with a scene once it was written, trying to milk it for terror, but it seems the opposite happens: King lets it all out on the page, then sorts through and refines the resultant splattery mess. (I can’t help thinking, at this point, of Pinhead searching through the remains of a recently-torn-apart Uncle Frank in Hellraiser, and re-assembling the recognisable pieces.)

Another, subtler, example of this is Salem’s Lot, where Bicks detects a slight but significant shift in the locus of the horror. In earlier drafts, a cosy small town is explicitly invaded by a foreign evil; subsequent drafts refine this to promote the feeling of the small town as having an evil potential of its own, which is brought to the fore by the vampire infestation:

All of these edits make the town an agent of its own destruction rather than a victim of an outsider’s malevolence. As King recrafts this series of scenes, he turns a more magnified, critical eye to the homegrown nature of small-town horrors.

Thus the town of Salem’s Lot becomes one of King’s many “bad places”, alongside the Overlook Hotel in The Shining and Derry in It, and the book itself picks up a little more thematic depth.

The most surprising change, for me, was in Carrie, where the burgeoning of Carrie’s psychic powers was at first accompanied by an increasingly grotesque physical transformation. In the earliest draft, as Carrie starts to consciously develop her powers, she feels bumps sprouting at her temples and her whole skull becoming soft. By the end of that version of the novel, she’s sprouted a full pair of demonic horns, her body has atrophied and her head become a transparent covering over a massively swollen brain. (King tells Bicks he was inspired by the 1957 film The Brain From Planet Arous.) Subsequent drafts removed this way-over-the-top image, thus pulling the whole novel back from what would, I’m sure, have made Brian De Palma’s adaptation more laughable than frightening (and, I’d guess, made King’s novel not as successful). It also has the effect of keeping Carrie empathetically human, rather than making her a literal demon.

Another evolution Bicks notes—and one that plays to her strengths as someone who’s studied Shakespeare’s presentation of adolescent “brainwork”, as she terms it—is how the character of Ben in Salem’s Lot ages from draft to draft, raising him from a five-year-old in the first to a nine-year-old in the last:

This maturation matters, because it allows King to sharpen his focus on what kids can do with their brains once they’ve made it past the most vulnerable years of childhood but haven’t yet become myopically rational (and possibly amoral) grown-ups.

King has always been drawn to capable kids as protagonists (It being the obvious example, The Institute a particular favourite of mind), and it seems this evolution of Salem’s Lot’s Ben was part of his finding the perfect age for these child heroes:

Only a kid of a certain age, King suggests, could combine the expansive imagination of a child (this monster is real) with the emerging rational abilities of an adult (and this is what you need to do to save yourself from it).

Bicks got to ask King some questions directly—via email mostly, which allowed him sometimes not to answer, but also via a video interview at the end of it all—and in one of his emails he highlighted another aspect of his work I’ve long noticed. I think of it as his use of catchphrases. Often not explicitly related to the action, they acquire, through repetition, a multiplicity of meanings or implications. Asked about it, King said, “I like repetition. Repetition = resonance.”

There are a few snippets of trivia about the books here, too. Carrie, for instance, was initially set in Massachusetts, not Maine. (A subtlety lost on me, as I know neither, and they don’t seem that far apart.) And the vampire Barlow in Salem’s Lot, was initially called Sarlinov—a more foreign-sounding, even Cold-War-evoking, name. (I can’t help wondering if the final name was taken from Lovecraft’s friend Robert H Barlow.)

It’s an interesting book, looking at King from an angle I haven’t read about before (not that I read a lot of King criticism, but I would like to read more). A perhaps more instructive approach might have been to look at works spread across the decades of King’s prolific output, to see if his methods changed; but, on the other hand, there’s something about these early works that seem that little bit more the essence of Stephen King, and this isn’t an academic study (nor a writing manual). There’s something of a fan’s self-indulgence about it, and I’m happy to go with that.

I’m sure there’s more to be uncovered in the King archive. Anyone writing a full critical biography has, I’d say, at least one lifetime’s work ahead of them. Perhaps, then, we’d better leave that task to Count Sarlinov…