All literature, but especially literature of the weird and the fantastic, is a cave where both readers and writers hide from life. (Which is exactly why so many parents and teachers, spotting a teenager with a collection of stories by Lovecraft, Bloch or Clark Ashton Smith, are apt to cry, ‘Why are you reading that useless junk?’)
Stephen King, in his introduction to Michel Houellebecq’s study of H.P. Lovecraft, may have intended this as a defence of ‘useless junk’ — a charge often levelled at his own work, usually by those who have not read much of it. But it also describes an authorial motive that Orwell (whose categories were ‘sheer egotism’; ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’; ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’) seems to have missed.
King has published 63 books since 1974, which suggests a positively Paleolithic, or perhaps Platonic, enthusiasm for the cave.
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