1970s, page 1 of 16

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…

As the 1970s moved towards the 1980s, and as punk rock replaced prog, it seems the inner city began to replace the countryside as the standard location for YA novels. Where formerly the natural world had been the more closely associated with childhood (endless summer holidays spent mucking around in fields), the inner city, with its more evident social problems, came to seem the more authentic, or at least relevant. Judy Allen’s first two YA books, The Spring on the Mountain and The Stones of the Moon, were firmly set not just in the country, but in the Earth Mysteries-flavoured country of Janet and Colin Bord’s Mysterious Britain—stone circles, ancient tracks, Merlin, Arthur, druids and so on. With her next two YA fantasies, Lord of the Dance (1976) and The Dream Thing (1980), the action moved to the town/city, and the fantasy element was no longer ancient forces in the landscape but dreams and the inner world.

(After writing on her first two YA fantasies a while back, I was hoping to review her next book, Lord of the Dance, but it’s been impossible to find a copy. Eventually, I gave in and read the ebook version that’s currently available, only to find something odd. It was originally published in 1976, but the ebook contained references to things like CDs and horror films on home video. I looked up some reviews for the original release, and even their brief plot summaries made me realise it must have been extensively rewritten at some point, presumably in the 1980s.)

The Dream Thing starts with its teen protagonist Jen sitting down to write a school essay about what matters most to her, and realising what she’s most concerned with is hate. Some gypsies have recently moved into a patch of unused land under a nearby motorway flyover, and she wants nothing more than for them to go away. She herself is half-gypsy—her father was a gypsy, though he was killed in a fight with his cousin before he could marry her mother, and before she herself was born—and now everyone at school is taunting her about “her relatives” having moved in, and asking if she’s going to join them.

She starts to have a frightening dream dominated by some monstrous thing, all sharp metal scales and a big tail spike. Convinced the gypsies (whom she early on confronts, telling them they’re not wanted round here) have put a curse on her—she also feels random sharp pains all the time, is convinced she’s going to die, and thinks she’s being followed—she draws this dream monster, in an attempt to work out what it might be. Having finished the drawing, she realises this dragon-like thing has no eye, so she puts one in, to finish it—and, like the old rabbi putting the final letter on the golem’s forehead, she feels something change, as though it has now come alive. Soon after, one of the gypsy caravans seems to have been attacked, with a large dent and suggestive scratches along its side, as though something big and rough had scraped against it.

Jen learns from her friend Tom (whose fascination with Native Americans, and his understanding of their persecution by European settlers, makes him sympathetic to the gypsies) that the land the travellers are on was bequeathed to the public over a century ago. Researching the exact wording of the bequest in the local library, she finds the land was actually given to the residents for their use, which, strictly speaking, excludes the gypsies; she brings the book to Tom’s and accidentally-on-purpose lets his parents (who are very much anti-gypsy) see it. Soon after, the police turn up in force to tell the gypsies to move on. They can’t immediately—one of them has recently given birth—so they’re given a week. Jen, weirdly open and honest about her dislike of them, takes the opportunity to let the head gypsy know that she was the one who provided the clue that meant they were going to have to move. But when she finds herself still gripped by nightmares of the dream-thing, her mother says the only thing to do is go to the gypsies and ask if they, with their knowledge of such things, can help.

Jen is plainly not what you’d call an entirely sympathetic character. Having decided it’s the gypsies’ fault she’s being bullied at school, she focuses entirely on wanting rid of them. In a way, the reader is left in the position of watching the car crash she’s making of the situation, how she’s letting this hatred of the gypsies take over her life, to the point where it acquires a supernatural life of its own. (And mentioning car crashes, I couldn’t help wondering if the patch of wasteland the gypsies occupy might be near the one where Maitland is stranded in Concrete Island, while Crash’s Robert Vaughan perhaps cruises by on the motorway above. Such hemmed-in remnants of the natural world took on a certain resonance in this time of cultural handover from countryside to city.)

But as an adult reader, I couldn’t help being aware of Jen as a troubled child (a teen, yes, but still a child) under serious pressure. The gypsies didn’t just kick off a spate of isolating bullying at school—which even her supposed friend Tom joins in with—their presence brings up Jen’s buried feelings about her father, whom she never knew, and his violent death. And all this is packed into the dream-thing: not only is it a scaly metal dragon-thing intent on attacking the gypsies, it’s also an armour-plated symbol of Jen’s own spiky self-protectiveness covering her emotional vulnerability. It’s also a thing that persecutes her, through nightmares and a sense that she’s being followed, just as this melange of hatred and fear is persecuting her. She’s a girl in serious need of guidance.

Her mother does make some attempts at help, but I can’t help feeling they’re woefully inadequate (though perhaps up to 1970s standards). Learning that Jen is being bullied at school, her mother says “they tease you because you rise to it”, as though it were basically her fault. In a midnight talk after one of Jen’s nightmares, after which Jen admits to feeling she’s going to die, her mother does at least talk about Jen’s father’s death, but goes on to say that Jen is too young to think about death and should just not do it. (Despite the fact that Jen’s father clearly died too young.) There’s a distinct sense of the adults giving one piece of cool advice, with an air of, “Well, I’ve told you how to deal with it, the rest is up to you.” (Jen’s best friend Tom, meanwhile, tells her “You share the Führer’s views on gypsies.” True—if exaggerated—but also perhaps a little unhelpful.) It’s the how of dealing with it that Jen clearly doesn’t have, and nobody guides her towards it.

Dream-fantasy like this, with a clear psychological grounding, can easily turn into straightforward allegory: Jen’s hatred of the gypsies gains a monstrous autonomy in the dream-thing dragon-scorpion whatever-it-is. Her hatred is monstrous, and the monster is her hatred. But that symbol, of the armour-plated spiky monster, has a lot more resonance than that—as I said above, it’s as much about Jen’s self-protection and self-persecution as it is her hatred. But I can’t help feeling that The Dream Thing resolves by treating it entirely as Jen’s hatred, and nothing else. The head gypsy tells her “Your dream… is born of your venom. It has nothing to do with us…” Which is perhaps a truth Jen needs to be told, but it’s also not the whole truth. The symbol of the dream-thing itself is far more eloquent than any of the reductive explanations, but there’s an air, at the end, of tying it to this too-simple explanation, and so leaving its many resonances unexplored. We’re left with a simple message: hate is bad, and it can take you over. But the roots of that hatred in fear and loss and isolation aren’t addressed.

(To give another example. Jen lives with her mother in a small flat, and the building is surrounded by a black metal fence with semi-ornamental spikes. The fence is only a short distance from the building itself, so what it’s protecting is a basically useless strip of land, and anyway, the fence can just be walked around, so its protecting nothing. It is, instead, an embodiment of the feelings people have about their homes, the need that they have a certain space around them, and an air of protection. In the limited space of a city, this has to be formalised into an ornamental fence and a tiny strip of land, but the psychological value is still there. The metal of the railings, and the spikes of the ornaments, clearly tie in with the metallic spikiness of the dream-thing, and bring out the feelings of self-protection rather than hatred in the dream-thing—though, such self-protection can also spill into hatred: the gypsies offer no threat, but so many people want them “not in my back yard”.)

I can’t help feeling that if the fantasy element had been given freer reign instead of being tied down to one interpretation, the ending might have been richer and more satisfying—a true resolution rather than a lesson only apparently learned. If, for instance, Jen had seen her own dream-thing in the metal/flesh, she might have seen herself in it, both her vulnerability and her spikiness. (A situation handled far better, and also with a dragon-sized thing of hate, disgust, and vulnerability, in William Mayne’s A Game of Dark.) But she doesn’t face it like that, it’s explained away. The fantasy loses its resonance, and becomes an allegory.

The Dream Thing’s ending does have a certain bleakness of realism. The gypsies are forced to move on. Jen’s friend Tom is no longer speaking to her, but she has a female friend in reserve, so it’s not the end of the world. It’s all part of the messiness of growing up.

It’s an interesting book, praised in its day for the realism of its characters, and certainly unafraid to take its main character through some uncomfortable emotions. It was reissued in 1990 (and, from a quick comparison of the text thanks to an Archive.org scan, it seems the same as the 1978 version, rather than being rewritten as with Lord of the Dance).

Begun while Carter was still living in Japan, and first published in 1972 (after her return to the UK), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is Carter’s most outrightly fantastic novel, and deservedly finds a place in Moorcock & Cawthorn’s Fantasy: The 100 Best Books and David Pringle’s Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels. (It was retitled The War on Dreams in the US.)

It begins in an unnamed city in an unnamed South American country. The narrator is Desiderio (“the desired one”), writing the memoir of his young life, when he was branded a hero for his role in ending the war that Doctor Hoffman launched upon the people of that unnamed city—and upon reality itself. Hoffman’s assaults warp time, space, and reason, causing people to sprout peacock feathers, warehouses to turn into palaces, and apparitions of the dead to appear. As Desiderio writes: “in the early days of the war, life itself had become nothing but a complex labyrinth and everything that could possibly exist, did so… the city was no longer the conscious production of humanity; it had become the arbitrary realm of dream.”

The Minister for Determination (to whom Desiderio is private secretary), constitutionally resistant to unreality (he’s convinced Hoffman has released a virus “which causes a cancer of the mind, so that the cells of the imagination run wild”) attempts to counter this encroachment of dream with a series of futile measures, from the use of radar to the use of torture as a means of forcing the unreal to differentiate itself from the real. Sensing they’re losing the war, the Minister gives Desiderio a secret mission: to find and assassinate the elusive Doctor Hoffman.

Desiderio leaves the city for the town of S, where the proprietor of a travelling peepshow is rumoured to be one of Hoffman’s disciples. Thus begins a series of picaresque adventures that see our young hero living with the native river people (with whom he, having part native parentage, seamlessly blends), working with a circus, travelling with a monstrous libertine known as the Count, stranded with a tribe on the coast of Africa and, finally, dwelling amongst a community of centaurs—before finally arriving at the “Wagnerian castle” of Doctor Hoffman. Throughout, Desiderio is haunted by, and often accompanied by (in a series of disguises he always sees through) Hoffman’s beautiful daughter Albertina, with whom he has, of course, fallen in love.

Just as Heroes and Villains was about the conflict between desire and need, this novel is about the conflict between dream and reason, or desire and reality. At first it seems the Minister (“not a man but a theorem, clear, hard, unified and harmonious”, who “had never in all his life felt the slightest quiver of empirical uncertainty”) represents reality and Doctor Hoffman dream, but when we finally meet Hoffman, he is an equally unimaginative patriarch (“cold, grey, still and fathomless—not a man; the sea”, who “had examined the world by the light of the intellect alone”). Both form a type with other such controlling paternal figures (which includes Doctor Donnelly from Heroes and Villains and Uncle Philip from The Magic Toyshop—what Lorna Sage, in her Writers and their Work volume on Carter, calls “Carter’s puppet-masters”). Contemplating Hoffman, this supposed unleasher of dreams, in all his disappointing rationality, Desiderio writes: “I did not think he knew what desire was.” (And, he muses, perhaps of Carter’s work as a whole: “Were all the potential masters the world held for me to be revealed as nothing but monsters or charlatans or wraiths?”)

If these are the dark fathers, balancing maternal figures seem absent—Desiderio’s mother was a prostitute who left him to be raised by nuns, Albertina’s mother (Hoffman’s wife) is dead (though she was, at least, a poet). Rather, the presiding maternal force is even more implacable and desire-less than those two male figures: mother nature, at her most arbitrary and indifferent. When the entire circus with which Desiderio has been travelling is killed in a freak natural event, he notes that “the landslide could only be a simple assertion of the dominance of nature herself”. On the coast of Africa (later revealed to be a fantastic coast, and an emanation of the monstrous Count’s desire for self-destruction), Desiderio meets a people who represent “Man in his constitutionally vicious, instinctively evil and studiously ferocious form—in a word, in the closest possible harmony with the natural world”. Mother nature, then, is no refuge from dark puppet-master fathers.

Desire and dream come across as perhaps the only humanising elements in a world otherwise caught between the polarities of cold intellect and a starkly uncaring nature. But even then, desire in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is no romantic fantasy. In Carter’s hands, it’s full of casual brutality, tragedy and the darker extremes of perversity. Desiderio’s story takes him through a series of episodes, in each of which he enters a period of narrative stasis, where he lingers among a group of people and experiences their way of life. When he’s with the river-people, we get a disquisition on their beliefs and customs (outwardly placid, they prove to include cannibalism and paedophilia); we learn the histories and nature of the various people who make up the circus, some poignant (as with Madame la Barbe, whose beardedness raised her from being an ordinary girl to being “immensely handsome, widely travelled”, but, nevertheless, “the loneliest woman in the world”) others grotesque (the all-male troupe known as the Acrobats of Desire, who are capable of exchanging body parts with one another, and who gang-rape Desiderio). As far as trigger warnings go, this novel should come with a submachine gun logo on the cover.

Perhaps the most notable episode is that of the Count, a figure I can’t help feeling is based on de Sade (and Carter would go on to write a study of de Sade a few years after The Infernal Desire Machines). So incredibly self-centred he never seems to speak to anyone but himself, the Count is “a connoisseur of catastrophe”, “a blasphemous libertine, a blood-thirsty debauchee”, who claims to have “devoted my life to the humiliation and exaltation of the flesh”. Perhaps it’s characteristic of all the male “father” figures in the novel that Desiderio at one point thinks the Count might be the Minister, then later that he might be Doctor Hoffman…

The Infernal Desire Machines has been called a Surrealist novel, but I think that though Hoffman’s efforts are creating a surrealist reality, the novel doesn’t have Surrealist fiction’s lack of narrative coherence. Carter isn’t just letting “psychic automatism” (as the Surrealists have it) take over; rather, her narrative is a balance between the strange images of Surrealism and a conscious engagement with the more nebulous forces of the human condition: desire, dream, imagination, cold reason. Unlike pure Surrealism, it comes with thought applied.

Set as it is in South America, it naturally feels as though it might be called Magical Realism, but I think it’s one of those novels that absorbs so many genre labels—Gothic, Fantastica, Picaresque—without entirely belonging to any of them. (It’s tempting to read the “War on Reason” as sourced in the same media-frenzied, accelerated 1960s as Ballard addressed in The Atrocity Exhibition. But Carter isn’t presenting a dystopia, here. Hers is a world in constant conflict, though the feeling is not of warning about how things might become, it’s about how, for her, the world simply is.)

Carter is generous with her references, and has obviously absorbed a lot of imaginative literature and cinema—far more than would have been admitted in your standard English literary novel of the day: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Rotwang’s laboratory in Metropolis get a mention, as does Gulliver’s Travels and Freud. And there’s a distinct air of Kafka, de Sade, ETA Hoffmann and Borges too. There’s a certain Moorcock-ishness to the Law-versus-Chaos conflict between Reason and Dream/Desire, though it’s probably not down to influence. To my surprise, Lovecraft gets a direct quote (“the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear”). And I’d even throw in the 007 films, as Hoffman’s castle, with its high-tech inner chambers, represents nothing so much as a Bond villain’s lair.

Me being me, I even suspected David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus might have been part of the mince fed into this particular sausage-machine, not just for their shared picaresque form which leads to a disillusioning/mind-opening revelation (which goes back at least to Apuleius’ The Golden Ass), but some specific details. For instance, shortly after meeting the monstrous Count, Desiderio says “His quality of being was more dense than that of any man I have ever met”, which instantly reminded me of Lindsay’s Spadevil, another larger-than-life figure met on the road whom the protagonist takes up with, and whose “body seemed to be composed of some substance heavier and denser than solid matter”. Later, Carter gives us a vision of nature at its most chaotically creative, mixing animal and plant forms: “nature had absolved her creations from an adherence to the formal divisions so biology and botany were quite overthrown and the only animals we saw… seemed more an ambulant vegetable than anything else.” Lindsay’s Matterplay (coming at a similar point in his novel) has a walking tree spontaneously forming from mid-air, before noting “Pure plants and pure animals by degrees disappeared, and their place was filled by singular creatures which seemed to partake of both characters.” Later still, Desiderio meets a hermaphrodite in Hoffman’s castle, with “a voice like a sexual ’cello”; Lindsay’s third-sex Leehallfae has an equally musical voice, “oddly suggestive of a mystical forest-horn, heard from a great distance.”

Throughout, Desiderio is led on by Hoffman’s Fah Lo Suee-like daughter—but is she like Muspel fire drawing Maskull on, or like Crystalman in one of his many deceptive forms? Their relationship is less fraught than that of Marianne and Jewel in Heroes and Villains—unless you read the messiness of that pairing as being externalised in all the horrors and brutality that surround them on their journey—but ultimately it ends as all such highly-strung desire must end: Desiderio tells us early on that Albertina is dead, and that he killed her, even as he loved her.

There is so much going on in The Infernal Desire Machines, it would be impossible to say it was trying to say one thing. It’s not saying desire is good or bad, or that reason is good or bad, rather it’s exaggerating both, and the conflict between them, and laying them out in all their messy, tangled complexity, with lashings of casual brutality, surreal imagery, and a lot of good writing. (My favourite line in the book is early on in the dream-beleaguered city, where Desiderio falls into “a sleep which had now become as aesthetically exhausting as Wagner”.)

From what I’ve read, there’s a lot more going on in The Infernal Desire Machines than I would be aware of: references to continental philosophy (are the principles of Hoffman’s philosophy to be taken as philosophy, or a satire upon such attempts to intellectualise the unintellectualisable?). At one point Albertina says: “the most monstrous aberrations are bound to flourish in soil once it has been disinfected of the imagination”, which seems the complimentary opposite of Goya’s “The sleep of reason breeds monsters.” Which is true? If both are, and the ideal is balance, then The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is not a book about finding a balance. Although, as Albertina says, “Love is the synthesis of dream and actuality”, The Infernal Desire Machines itself pursues both to the point of breakage, leaving poor Desiderio old and alone, living with the memories of the desires of the past, plus a hot drink at bedtime. Perhaps “the time of actualised desire”, as he calls the invasion of the real by dream, was simply his youth.

Lorna Sage notes that The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman was “ignored, or treated with incomprehension and contempt, by most mainstream critics”, perhaps because the taint of the fantastic—particularly in a novel that so evidently takes a glee in its own imaginative fecundity—wasn’t generally considered acceptable at the time by the British literary establishment.

Although I am ultimately impressed, I wasn’t always engaged by the book. When the narrative slowed to examine, at length, the lives of the river-people or the brutal centaurs, I was puzzled as to what it was doing. Maybe another read might make it fit together, but for now I have to think of such moments as sparks of imagination given free reign, jewels thrown into this bag of strange riches. It’s part of this novel’s character that it contains such a cornucopia of ideas, scenes, characters, and even longueurs.

(And the jewel image reminds me of Fritz Leiber on Clark Ashton Smith, who said Smith’s tales were “Innsmouth Jewellery; like strange ornaments, the metal elaborately inlaid and fired, studded with unknown semi-precious stones, from an unknown and timeless culture.” And Leiber, oddly, is another fantasist I found contained in Carter’s capacious novel, in the image of a night-time visitor to Desiderio’s rooms—Albertina, again, in yet another guise—a being with transparent flesh, so she appears as a “miraculous bouquet of bones”. Like the ghouls of Leiber’s Llankhmar. Had Carter read Leiber, too? Or was it just that her imagination was so wild, in this novel, it lapped on all these far shores of the fantastic?)