Behind the beguiling

The cover of The Gothic Imagination depicts a futuristic city threatened by a glowering satanic figure framed against a starry night sky. While John C. Tibbetts may teach film at the University of Kansas and write often about classical music and theater, that painting - and several drawings scattered throughout his book - make clear that he's also a talented artist. Still, the key to this volume of Conversations on Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction in the Media can actually be found in Tibbetts's middle initial, C.

It stands for Carter.

Tibbetts's father was an early science fiction fan who named his son after Edgar Rice Burroughs's second great hero, John Carter of Mars. (The first, of course, is Tarzan, Lord Greystoke.) Unlike many sons, Tibbetts embraced his destiny and became a serious reader and collector of fantasy and sci-fi. The questions he asks in these far-ranging interviews - with H.P. Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, artists Maurice Sendak and Gahan Wilson, 1950s television actor Frankie Thomas (star of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet), the cast of Star Trek, and a half-dozen important novelists from Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury to Kim Stanley Robinson - reveal a deep knowledge of what fans call, quite simply, "the field."

The book opens with a preface by Richard Holmes, in which the noted biographer and historian of the romantic era attempts to define the Gothic imagination. Holmes points to "a quite old-fashioned notion: the inexhaustible wonder of the universe." A few pages later Tibbetts adds that the writers of fairy tales, horror stories, science fictional prophecies and steampunk novels focus on "terror and wonder" rather than "sentimental love and reason." Theirs, he adds, is a transgressive imagination.

Later still, Harold Schechter, an authority on the American Gothic, reminds us that "we thrive on the kinds of entertainments folklorists call 'wondertales': beguiling, gripping, swiftly paced stories that trigger a very basic and powerful emotional response in the audience: astonishment or terror, laughter or tears, suspense or erotic arousal." He insists that we all have a hunger for "violent spectacle, to feed that primitive part of ourselves that William James called 'the carnivore within.' " Even more simply, Stephen King says, "I just want to make commonplace things as unsettling as possible."

The English writer Ramsey Campbell notes that in his own horror stories he's actually writing about the decline of Britain, "about the frustration, meaningless, helplessness of seeing your environment change overnight around you." The dapper Peter Straub reveals that John Ashbery's The Tennis Court Oath inspired his own dark fiction: "That book made it possible for me to write. What staggered me about it and what really did change my life was that those poems seemed to make no sense at all! Yet, they were perfect. They had a sort of power and authenticity and rightness that was inexplicable to any of the means or techniques that I had been taught. . . . Well, my books are like these poems."

By contrast, when Suzy McKee Charnas decided to write about vampires, she realized that she loathed the creature's typically Byronic persona. So in her neglected classic The Vampire Tapestry, Dr. Edward L. Weyland is "not a Romantic hero, not a guy who's lonely out there in eternity all by himself," but is instead "a predator, a tiger, a sabre-toothed tiger - and we are the prey." According to novelist and historian of science fiction Brian Aldiss, movie director Stanley Kubrick once asked him, "What do people do who don't make films or write science fiction?" On the basis of Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Aldiss concludes that Kubrick was, in fact, "the great sf writer of the age."

Such insights and anecdotes mingle throughout The Gothic Imagination. Bob Kane, creator of the DC Comics superhero Batman, recalls that he was inspired by a Leonardo da Vinci design for man-powered flight using bat wings and by his childhood memories of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. as Zorro, "the most swashbuckling dare devil I've ever seen in my life." (next page »)