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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.

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…

If you want to learn about the life of JG Ballard, there are plenty of sources. There’s Ballard’s own writings on the subject, which includes both memoir (Miracles of Life) and fiction (Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women), which might be grouped together as self-mythologising (which I don’t intend as a negative term). Then there’s David Pringle’s detailed chronology (currently spread across ten or so volumes of the Deep Ends anthology, and really in need of standalone publication), the John Baxter biography The Inner Man from 2021, and now The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J G Ballard by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan.

When The Illuminated Man was first announced (at that point, it was only to be by Priest), I felt there was a certain amount of relief that Ballard would be getting a respectable biography, as Baxter’s book had attracted a certain amount of criticism (not least from Ballard’s daughters) for factual inaccuracies and a general misrepresentation of Ballard’s character (as, Edmund Gordon writes in a review of The Illuminated Man in The New Statesman, “a racist, sexist, mendacious creep, beset by alcohol problems and ‘psychotic tendencies’”—though that wasn’t the impression I came away from it with). This, then, was to be a more acceptable, hopefully more scholarly—if less gossipy (though it’s good to have both)—biography, presumably to be written with the collusion of Ballard’s estate (and, crucially, his daughters).

(I have to say that, at the time, I was quite grateful to read The Inner Man—always taking its speculations about Ballard’s psychology with the same grain of salt I’d bring to any biography. It was, for me, the first take on Ballard’s life I’d read that wasn’t by Ballard himself, and so was a welcome second perspective. Baxter had, for instance, clearly spoken to many of the other people involved, so that second perspective wasn’t only his own. And I couldn’t help feeling its dips into gossip and anecdote were a welcome contrast, a circus tent set up outside the crystalline pagoda of Ballard’s own powerful self-mythologising. Where else would I have got to read the story of Ballard buying The Who’s “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” and saying he preferred it played at 33rpm (as opposed to the faster 45rpm, presumably)? I even think Baxter’s might have been a biography Ballard would have enjoyed—had it, that is, been written about anyone but himself! After all, Ballard had good things to say about Baxter’s biographies of Steven Spielberg—“Baxter is a shrewd, witty and very readable writer”—and Woody Allen—“astute and entertaining”.)

Sadly, though, that idea of The Illuminated Man wasn’t to be. Priest fell ill and died before the book was finished. His partner (and, later, wife) Nina Allan has finished it but made two crucial decisions that fundamentally affected its character. First, Priest’s version of the book has been left unedited, even when some chapters clearly feel like they were written by a man of flagging energies. Second, Allan has taken this opportunity to write about Priest’s final illness and death in some detail. Which is understandable, considering what she and he must have been through, but I have to confess I skipped those chapters. The result is an unblended mix of straightforward biography and memoir about two different people. (In fact, the book makes most sense regarding the biographical chapters about Ballard as materials offered to support the memoir covering Priest’s illness and death.)

Christopher Priest’s portions of The Illuminated Man seem strongest, to me, in their critical comments on Ballard’s fiction. For instance, this:

“‘The Voices of Time’, we soon discover, is a story that does not give up its secrets. If there is a plot, an underlying purpose, it constantly evades the reader. Instead, every page, every paragraph, seems charged with meaning, never clarified, never given the benefit of cause and effect. The reader is cast alone. If obscurity is art, here we find it—but ‘The Voices of Time’ is not obscure.”

That’s the sort of thing I want from critical writing: it makes me want to return to the story, and gives me permission to feel confused as to what it’s presenting. Accept the confusion and bathe in the meaning, Priest is saying. Good advice.

Allan’s are (necessarily) the more complete sections, whether biographical (thanks to her interviewing the people involved where possible) or critical (her comments on Ballard’s final novels, for instance, make me want to give them another—or in some cases a first—go).

Towards the end of the book, Allan asks, of biographies: “Are we reading to confirm that our hero really was a hero, or to discover that they were secretly a monster?” For me, it’s neither. I never look for writers I admire to be heroes—certainly not saints—because that’s plainly only going to end in disappointment. What I want is to get a glimpse of the human being behind it all. Ballard was, both in interviews and on the page, an impressive man, but not the sort to ever admit to, say, playing The Who at the wrong rpm, which is, frankly, the sort of thing I want to read! The Illuminated Man provided a better example though, when Allan looks at a rare Ballard notebook for a novel he never completed (he destroyed all such preparatory materials once a book was finished). Seeing him, in his notes, trying out ideas and asking himself questions, feels like a wonderfully humanising moment, a side of him that never comes through in his interviews and writing.

As I say, I think of Ballard’s own writing on his life as self-mythologising, but I don’t mean to imply he’s covering up the truth; rather, he’s coming up with the version of events that best expresses how those events felt to him—how he experienced them, what they meant to him—which is a crucial difference (especially when those events are so intimately entangled with his fiction). We all alter the facts of our lives to fit an evolving inner story—unconsciously streamlining them to bring out the meaning they have for us. It’s only when it’s someone gets a proper biography written about them that this really comes to the fore. In a sense, Ballard’s version of his own life, as presented in both the novels and the memoir is the core of his whole body of fiction, which might all be understood as a complex response to traumatic events and times, an attempt to make meaning out of often disparate events, ideas, experiences. Having this myth brought up against the facts does not invalidate the myth, but emphasises its artistry.

Ballard himself provides an example. In Empire of the Sun, young Jim is separated from his parents for the duration of his internment by the Japanese; in reality, as Ballard admitted, he was with his parents the whole time. But, he said, he made the change because when he was in the camp, his parents were no longer the ones who had control over his life—they couldn’t punish or reward, and were busy being revealed as all-too-human beings, in a sudden change from their former lofty distance. They were, in a sense, no longer parents (just as Ballard was abruptly shunted into no longer being a child). Jim’s being separated from his parents in Empire, Ballard said, was how it felt, hence the myth, the fiction. (Thus also fitting it into the standard fairy tale trope of children thrown out into the wild alone.)

I don’t know if The Illuminated Man can really be a replacement for Baxter’s The Inner Man. At one point Allan castigates Baxter for presenting unattributed information, but on the same page (p. 199) she has a block quote that is itself unattributed. (Maybe that was a publisher’s error.) She mentions Ballard’s family’s unhappiness with Baxter’s book, which was in part due to his sometimes overplayed speculations on Ballard’s psychology, but Allan then goes on to speculate whether Ballard would have remained faithful to his wife, had she survived, which seems, to me, on the same level.

But that’s what biographies do. I only know Ballard through his fiction, interviews, and other writings, and I like to learn about his life as a sort of accompaniment to the writing. I’ll keep The Illuminated Man on my shelves, but it’s probably The Inner Man I’ll refer to first when I need to, if only because it’s in chronological order. (The Illuminated Man, for instance, has a chapter on Ballard’s novel Hello America after the one on The Empire of the Sun, and a chapter on the early Vermillion Sands stories after the chapter on Crash. If nothing else, this leaves out the connecting tissue: what was Ballard doing before and between these books?)

Ballard was evidently a complex man—that sort of fiction wouldn’t come from someone who wasn’t. In a way, his fiction arrived pre-analysed (though in a distinctively Ballardian fashion), and it begs for other takes, going deeper, and seeing things Ballard himself didn’t highlight. It’s an infinitely rich body of work—as, no doubt, was the man himself, and the myth he created.

I’ll end with something from Nina Allan on Ballard the man:

“…listening to him talk—the tone of his voice, the clarity of his thinking, the whole vast hinterland of memory and intellect that lies behind the words he speaks has an immediacy and power that exceeds any number of pages filled with third party speculation and literary analysis.”

But it’s good to have the third party speculation and literary analysis all the same.