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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…

The Hungry Moon (1986) was the first Ramsey Campbell novel I read, and the second horror novel I ever read. (The first was Salem’s Lot, and I chose The Hungry Moon to follow it because I wanted something similar but set in England.) It evidently impressed me enough to lead to a lifetime of reading Campbell’s fiction, but when I came back and re-read it a number of years later, I remember being disappointed, perhaps because by that point I’d come to expect something more from Campbell and found it lacking. But on this most recent re-read, I really enjoyed it, and I think this was because by this time I knew what sort of a novel it was and how to get the most out of it. How best, then, to approach The Hungry Moon? (Carefully!)

It’s set in the isolated Peak District town of Moonwell, which is known to get the least sunshine of anywhere in England (some feat), and is also the home of one of the oldest druidic ceremonies in the country, as every year the locals “dress” a deep, fifty-foot-wide pothole with flowers. But along comes a young Californian Christian evangelist called Godwin Mann (based, to some extent, on Billy Graham) who announces his intention to stop this pagan ceremony and reclaim both the cave and the town for God. As anyone who’s ever read a horror novel can tell, ending an ages-old pagan ceremony is always a bad idea, particularly if there happens to be something like a nuclear missile base nearby—and, of course, with Moonwell, there is. But Mann’s evangelistic preaching catches on with the locals, and soon most of them are converted by his brand of public confession, forced joyfulness, and self-righteous piety.

The novel’s main characters are among the few holdouts, including Diana Kramer, a teacher who recently moved from America but has roots in the area; Geraldine and Jeremy Booth, who live in and run a bookshop from a deconsecrated chapel; postman Eustace Gift, who has ambitions as a stand-up comedian; and Nick Reid, a reporter based in Manchester, whose main interest seems to be in Diana Kramer rather than the story of a small town caught up in a religious fever, but who gets trapped in the town as things take a supernatural turn. There are also Craig and Vera Wilde, a pair of ex-nudists whose daughter, Hazel, and her husband (a somewhat useless local builder and security system installer) live in Moonwell and convert, much to the Wildes’ dismay, and eight-year-old Andrew, son of Brian and June Bevan, who run a camping equipment shop, and who convert after June is the first resident to publicly confess—not so much to her sins as her husband’s—when she tells the entire town about Brian’s interest in pornography and the sex games he drags her into.

Mann descends into the cave to oust the pagan evil, but after he emerges somewhat changed, the town finds itself trapped in a darkness so profound it actually prevents people from leaving. Meanwhile, people on the outside start forgetting Moonwell ever existed. (And so it joins the long tradition of supernaturally/science-fictionally isolated communities from Midwich to Milbury.) Because, as it turns out, what the druids did many years ago was bring down a vast, godlike entity from the moon, in a last-ditch attempt to defeat the Roman invaders. Somehow, though, it ended up being trapped there, in that dark pothole, and now, no longer held back by the propitiating flower ceremony, it wants out—and, what’s more, it wants revenge on the entire human race for its centuries of imprisonment.

I don’t think Campbell has written a novel since with such a large ensemble cast (and only Incarnate before it came close), though when I think of blockbuster horror novels in general, I tend to think of them as having ensemble casts (Salem’s Lot and IT being prime examples, but I’m also thinking of the few random novels by the likes of Shaun Hutson and Skipp & Spector I’ve read). But, while this could have been a commercial decision on Campbell’s part—to write a novel more like the sort of thing the booming horror market expected—I suspect it was more likely something he just wanted to try for its own sake (he says in his afterword that The Hungry Moon was “my shot at an extravagant supernatural novel splashed on a large canvas”).

One of the things that works about ensemble-cast, multi-plotlined horror is the way initially isolated characters slowly come together once they realise the nature of what’s going on. But the trouble I had on my second read of The Hungry Moon, I think, is that the nature of “what’s going on” is too diverse to really add up to one thing. Aside from the re-emerged Mann being possessed by the moon-thing, and its trio of attack dogs roaming the town (keeping people from leaving, killing the occasional—very random—individual), there are a number of other supernatural occurrences which are of such a different nature, you start to wonder how Campbell is going to bring it all together. Geraldine Booth, whose child died, has a vision of his gravestone in Moonwell’s churchyard, glowing with its own light; Eustace Gift starts to hear his internal comedy duo Mr Gloom and Mr Despondency talking outside his house. These are storylines that seem to fit more into Incarnate, where people’s private dreams and fantasies become real. (Critic Simon MacCulloch sums up this aspect of the novel best when he says that, here, “a Lovecraftian extraterrestrial monstrosity plays the part of Incarnate’s dream thing as the embodiment of the predatory morbid imagination”. That phrase—“the predatory morbid imagination”—is a good summing up of the supernatural in a lot of Campbell’s writing.) And although Campbell does make these disparate elements fit, in the end, into The Hungry Moon’s overall story, I don’t think it’s quite convincing. Is the moon-thing here simply for revenge on the human race? If so, why does it toy with some people’s dreams and fantasies in this way? And, for that matter, why do its attack dogs kill a policeman who is clearly on its side, but not the people who oppose it? Even more, why, after decapitating the local priest (who was thoroughly against Mann’s form of extreme evangelism), does it reanimate his corpse? Reading The Hungry Man, you start to suspect these are great moments, but they don’t necessarily add up.

One way to deal with this is to say that the moon-thing, being an incomprehensibly inhuman entity, brings along with a whole lot of moon-lit weirdness, and it’s simply beyond our ability to understand. But that’s a bit unsatisfying, particularly as Campbell does provide us with a backstory for the thing (via a cosmic visionary sequence that, as he says in his afterword, may have been unconsciously influenced by the long vision sequence in Hodgson’s House on the Borderland). Ultimately, what the moon-thing stands for is nebulous, almost wilfully primal. Somewhat like the catch-all evil represented by the cult in his earlier novel The Nameless, it stands for:

“Everything we’ve been afraid of since we lived in caves, maybe since before we were even human. Everything we tried to believe we weren’t afraid of any longer.”

In other words… fear itself. It, and the darkness it brings, are “a way of trying to reduce people to a primitive state”. And while, on the one hand, that sounds like a vague reasoning intended simply to get the horror underway, on the other it’s saying something about the novel’s core theme, which is the extremes of religious belief and, as Campbell says in an interview in Samhain 2, “this drive so many people seem to have—to have the urge to question taken away from them, to be told what to think”. (Or as one of the characters in the novel says, “The only way to believe in God is let Him rule your life.”) An atmosphere of fear leads to the need for easy certainties, and that is exactly what a superheated air of self-righteousness provides.

This, then, is why I found the novel just what I wanted on my first read, unsatisfying on my second, but thoroughly enjoyable on my third: it works on two of the three levels you’d expect a good horror novel of this sort to work. On the first level, that of simply telling an engaging narrative with plenty of supernatural incident, it works, largely because of the believability of the characters, which is always a Campbell strong point. On the second level, the level of narrative cohesion, it doesn’t really work, because the supernatural incidents are so diverse, and don’t add up to the entity having some single, meaningful and comprehensible nature. (It’s set up as a thing that’s here “to destroy us all and feast on our souls”, but Campbell isn’t interested in the simplistic sort of kill-scenes this monomaniacal type of monster requires… But, how fitting that a novel called The Hungry Moon should have an absence in the middle.) So that leaves the third, more literary level, which is on the thematic meaning of what’s going on. And it’s here that everything works again. That headless corpse of a Catholic priest fumblingly trying to perform mass in a darkened church makes no sense in terms of the moon-thing’s plans for revenge, but as a symbol of what religion can mean—that very priest, when alive, complained about Mann’s version of Christianity being “The notion that you mustn’t think your way to faith”—it’s a brilliant little vignette.

The Hungry Moon is a big bag of a novel (Campbell himself accuses it of “trying to be too many books”, while Keith M C O’Sullivan in his book-length study of Campbell says it’s “a text that is brimful of ideas”): it’s got folk-horror elements, it’s got Lovecraftian elements, it’s got dream-horror elements, it’s got moments of kitchen-sink realism and psychological horror, as well as moments of visionary fantasy. It also has moments of comedy (some dark—like when Eustace has to joke his way out of a confrontation with the murderous embodiments of his own inventions, Mr Gloom and Mr Despondency—an idea that could, frankly, make for an entire Campbell novel), and satire (as one of Mann’s retinue, encouraging little Andrew to pray, says: “Remember, God likes to look down and see you on your knees.”). The thing is, it’s not any one of these things. If you come expecting a full-on folk horror, or a full-on Lovecraftian horror, or even a full-on monster-takes-over-an-isolated-town horror, it doesn’t quite work.

If you like Campbell’s work, you’ll find plenty of what he does done well here: moments where the supernatural blends seamlessly with the psychological, moments of sheer strangeness or weird awe, glimpses into very real-seeming characters struggling with both normal life and its extremes. Campbell’s penchant for tricksy dialogue is scarily suited to the cult mentality on display here, where believers take everything a non-believer says as an invitation to get the idealogical upper hand, simultaneously tripping an interlocutor up with their own words while making themselves feel superior, as with this sort of logic:

“There will always be people who don’t want to listen to what God has to tell us, and that means they’ll hear the devil and do his talking for him.”

And there is, of course, some seriously good writing:

…the dogs padded out of the dimness.

They stopped at the end of the corridor and lay down. The moonlight through the window of the cell gleamed in their eyes. They were licking their lips, which were wet with a liquid that the light turned black.

Campbell is, in my opinion, quite harsh on the novel in his afterword, when he mentions “the amount of naked absurdity the book tries to contain”. I don’t really know what he means by this as, in a way, the absurd is one of the forms of horror he does so well. If he means the fact that the supernatural incidents don’t really cohere into one meaningful explanation (as Joel Lane says, “The second half of the book plays havoc with every rational expectation”), perhaps the best argument in support of this is that it is, ultimately, just part of its satire on religion: if you think God works in mysterious ways, just wait till you see what this cosmic-horror moon-thing does.