Dark Gods

"Dark Gods is a collection of four novellas. For a long time, Klein was known only for those novellas and a novel called The Ceremonies , which was published in the mid-1980s. Stephen King said The Ceremonies was the best horror novel since Peter Straub’s Ghost Story . Klein is very much a self-conscious student and descendant of such forebears as H.P. Lovecraft , and not just Lovecraft – lesser-known writers too, Frank Belknap Long among them. In these four novellas, Klein takes us through different horror scenarios which are rooted in some of the conceits of cosmic horror. Maybe the most famous story in the book is called “Children of the Kingdom,” and it’s about a race of monsters living in the sewers of New York City. It takes as a historical reference the great blackout in the 1970s, when at least one of these things makes an appearance. My personal favourite is the last story in the book, “Nadelman’s God,” which is about a guy who discovers that he may have accidentally created a god via a poem that he wrote for his college literary journal. Someone takes that poem a bit too seriously, and in the process, this entity is summoned or created in the world. There’s also a story in there called “Black Man with a Horn ,” which is an epistolary story somewhat in the fashion of H. P. Lovecraft, written by a man who is supposed to have been one of Lovecraft’s correspondents. It’s an example of creeping dread: a terrible thing is seen at a distance, which is steadily moving forward as we read each letter. And, finally, there’s a story called “Petey,” which is about a particularly weird social gathering in Connecticut (which is already a weird state), and which leads to certain terrible things happening… When I was thinking about what books I wanted to pick, my initial thought was, you have to talk about Lovecraft. And if you’re talking about Lovecraft, you really have to talk about Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen ; and you probably also have to talk about Robert E Howard and Clark Ashton Smith; and then if you’re talking about Lovecraft and Howard and Smith, you probably have to talk about Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber and C. L. Moore and Henry Kutner… There’s a whole genealogy. And instead I assumed, rightly or wrongly, that Lovecraft’s work – and also Blackwood and Machen for that matter – would be reasonably well known to a contemporary audience; or at least if I mention their names, it’s easy to go to Penguin Classics and find the Lovecraft or Blackwood or Machen edition. These things are widely available. And I suspect that if you were to do some type of cosmic horror search online, you would find those names popping up again and again. So I wanted to focus on works coming later in that tradition. It’s a tradition that starts somewhat self-consciously. Lovecraft is aware that Machen and Blackwood are two of his big influences. So are Lord Dunsany and M. R. James, but the others are most immediately his forebears. And Lovecraft famously opened up his creations and his invented universe to Smith and Howard, who do the same thing. So there’s a kind of open-source universe very early on – I suspect because no one was making any money off it, so it was fine, they could all play in each other’s sandboxes. Lovecraft was writing to Robert Block and also to Fritz Leiber, and encouraging them… So there’s a genealogy, a kind of tradition, almost from the get-go. I am very interested in writers coming along a little bit later who were reading all of that, and a lot of other things as well. Klein’s work meant a tremendous amount to me. In some ways, I was much more bowled over by Dark Gods than I was by The Ceremonies the first time I read it. Dark Gods lives on in my brain in a hideous way. It’s a particular achievement, in terms of stylistic grace, character development, and also the audacity of its imagination. And there’s a deep engagement with the substance of cosmic horror that leads these stories in some very interesting and innovative directions."