a (lone star) state of consciousness
Don Webb interviewed
Don Webb's fiction inhabits that strange and enviable realm which lies somewhere between the mainstream accessibility of Barthe's concept of le lisible ('readable') and the literary game playing/experimentation of Pynchon, Coover and Gass.
It is his use of this narrative hybridisation - for the greater part imbued with his native Texan culture - that enables him to produce well-crafted stories of page turning quality that resonate with metafictional undercurrents.
His work has been published over three hundred times world-wide, ranging from short stories and novels to poetry and non-fiction.
Born in Amarillo, 1960, he still resides in Texas. Don
married Guiniviere, "the love of my life", on April 22nd
of this year.
You have previously cited H. P. Lovecraft as having
a profound influence upon your writing - for his ability to convey mood and
to fire the reader's imagination - what other qualities do you think his
work possesses?
DW: Lovecraft played some games with his fiction that are vastly entertaining. He tried to break down the wall between objective and subjective reality in ways that no other writer has done. Borges wrote about doing such things, Lovecraft did them. Let's look at four ways - and then consider why this has such an effect on readers/writers:
Lovecraft added his own creations to the manuscripts of writers that he revised. So (for example) readers heard of his dreaded grimoires under by-lines other than his, even in magazines other than Weird Tales. Thus one begins to believe in their existence.
Lovecraft freely mixed in obscure facts, like calling Tibet "Leng" when in fact that is the Tibetan word for Tibet - or using the Arabic ketul-hu "imprisoned" for the name of the name of the imprisoned god Cthulhu mentioned in the mad Arab's book (the Necronomicon). So, when in the course of growing up and reading things there are little factual time-charges that go off, deepening one's sense of wonder.
Lovecraft drew freely from others' neo-mythology and got his disciples to do so as well. So one may wonder if "Hastur" has some existence other than in the writing of Bierce (and one may wonder just what happened to Bierce . . . ). This makes the myth bigger than the writer.
Lovecraft allowed the contents of his dream world to glide directly into his fiction - which is why this fiction is often so bad and so amazingly striking at the same time. His dream image of the artist selling the figure of Cthulhu is one that once read - stays in your head forever because it has that pure intensity of the dream.
So having torn the veil between objective and subjective
realities a little bit - Lovecraft's fiction will work on you in ways that
Bram Stoker's or Stephen King's won't. It effects your dream life directly,
and it effects the periphery of your waking mind. Now anyone who has that
thrill either in the depths of their being, in their private R'lyeh
let us say - or on the rims of their awareness, their Yuggoth, is
expanded a bit as a person. Lovecraft stretches one's consciousness - and
if you like consciousness you want to play at the same game. The lesser method
of play is to read every bit of Lovecraftiana that you can. The greater methods
of play include active imagination - you try writing the stuff, role-playing
or even magic. You can stretch from your inner most space to your outermost
space of mind-stuff. This is the reason that most of us are drawn in SF/F/Horror
slipstream or Mutagenic fiction in the first place. Lovecraft, therefore
represents a quintessence.
What are your thoughts upon R. E. Howard, a fellow Texan
and contemporary of Lovecraft?
DW: Howard lived and died in Cross Plains, Texas - a city so small that you could blink and miss it on the highway. He lived during the Great Depression, when times were tough, and he was part of a very dysfunctional family. Howard needed to escape into his writing. God it's beautiful stuff too - I remember listening to L. Sprague De Camp reading the opening of Conan once, I still get shivers. Since Howard needed to escape, he built better worlds than most of us. He had to live in those worlds. There's a lovely movie of his life, The Whole Wide World. I saw it with Nikolas and Zeena Schreck when it premiered in LA. We all left the theatre in tears. Howard wrote out of necessity to get away from the bleak life he had, Lovecraft wrote because he was struggling with fear/wonder at the vast expanses of space and time and (Clark Ashton) Smith wrote because he needed to get away from the banal prose that ruled the world. Each in their need, immediately recognised the other. All have been imitated, but seldom surpassed. That is because their imitators seldom have the NEED that drove these guys.
There are a couple of worthy inheritors of Howard out there. One is Richard L. Teirney with his Simon Magus stories, the other is less well known Aaron B. Larson with his Haakon Jones tales. Both deserve a much wider audience than they have now, but heck that's true of me too!
Texas is a good place for writing speculative fiction. Story-telling is a prized art here. Both my mother and father were known for their stories. Texas was the first state to produce a state-only anthology, and certainly my own writerly upbringing amidst the Austin based Contrarians - Howard Waldrop, Neil Barrett, Brad Denton, Mary Denning certainly made for a strong connection with fantasy. Texas is a state of mind, and one of my jobs - whether I'm writing murder mysteries or Lovecraftian Horror - is to introduce mythic Texas to the world at large.
One of the ways I do this is to allow my stories to share
certain made-up locales - such as my town of Doublesign, Texas or Comesee,
Texas. This connects all of my fiction, which will ultimately be seen as
a huge meta-novel. Likewise I do incorporate the names of other Texas writer's
towns - from obscure Lovecraftian names like Milando (from Where Yidhra
Walks by Walter C. DeBrill Jr.) to Larry MacMurty's Thalia. I trust that
some of my names will show up elsewhere as well . . .
Read Don's essay "Why Science Fiction Must Get Weirder"
