INTERIEW WITH T.E.D. KLEIN

by Dejan Ognjanović

 

First published in Vastarien, Vol. 2, Issue 3, Fall 2019

 

Theodore Donald Klein was born on July 15, 1947, on St. Swithin’s Day—by a strange coincidence, he shares his birthday with the protagonist of his novelette “The Events at Poroth Farm” (1972), his first major work. He studied literature at Brown University in Lovecraft’s Providence, where he got infected with cosmic horror. In 1975, Klein accompanied his friend and agent, Kirby McCauley, to Providence, where he watched as McCauley and local officials planned the first annual World Fantasy Convention, complete with a World Fantasy Award bearing Lovecraft’s visage.

He was the first editor of the new Twilight Zone magazine (1981-1985) and made it the premier newsstand magazine that published mostly horror fiction. The mid-1980s were his heyday: in 1984 he published his first and, so far, only novel, The Ceremonies, laureled with many blurbs, including one from Stephen King. It was on the New York Times’ bestseller list, got the award from the British Fantasy Society, and was selected among Horror: 100 Best Books (2005). Klein’s stellar collection of novellas and novelettes, Dark Gods, was published in 1985. The novella “Nadelman’s God,” original to the collection, brought him the World Fantasy Award. That same year, in Douglas E. Winter’s Faces of Fear, Klein was one of seventeen major contemporary horror writers interviewed.

He also wrote some entries for The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986), announced a new novel, Nighttown (still unfinished), and tried to make sense of Dario Argento’s treatment by writing the screenplay for the messy Trauma (1993). After that he basically fell under the radar, and the promises of his two excellent books sadly did not lead to more of those. In 2006 his second collection, Reassuring Tales, was published; the author’s introduction contains what is probably the harshest self-deprecation in the history of horror, but it is true that the stories, mostly early stuff, were not up to the highest standards of those in Dark Gods (with a strong exception in “The Events at Poroth Farm,” although it would’ve sat better in Dark Gods).

The incoherent and lugubrious “study” T E. D. Klein and the Rupture of Civilization: A Study in Critical Horror (2017) by Thomas Phillips is, so far, the only attempt at a book-length study of Klein’s contribution to contemporary horror. A far worthier and heavier volume appeared in November 2019: Providence After Dark and Other Writings, from Hippocampus Press, bringing together 600 pages’ worth of Klein’s non-fiction (essays, introductions, reviews, interviews). This excellent book, brimming with insights into all things horror (and more), provides a perfect occasion to talk to T.E.D. Klein and attempt to sum up his views on this genre.

 

Dejan Ognjanović: Please tell me about the shape and contents of Providence After Dark: Are these your collected or selected non-fiction writings, and if selected—who made the selection, you or Mr. Joshi?

 

T. E. D. Klein: It was S. T. Joshi who gathered and arranged the material—and he cast such a wide net that “collected” is probably more accurate than “selected.” Plus I added a few items that he didn’t know about, e.g., some letters, a few of them somewhat crankish, to various magazines.

 

DO: In your roles as a critic and especially as an editor of The Twilight Zone, you must have had a “yardstick” for measuring quality—for distinguishing between “masterpiece,” “excellent,” “very good,” “good,” etc. How did you make this distinction? What is it that distinguishes a masterpiece from, say, a very good story?

 

TK: I wish I could offer you the sort of yardstick A. E. Housman claimed to use as to whether or not something was successful poetry—that it gave him goosebumps, interfering with his morning shave—but the closest I can come is that, after reading the final words of a terrific story, I would literally hear myself say out loud, “Wow!”

 

DO: Have there ever been clashes between personal taste and publishing demands? Specifically, were there cases when you thought: “This is a wonderful story but is not right for the magazine”? Or, “This is average, but will be liked by the readers, or will it bring good sales because of a Name Author”?

 

TK: Yeah, I think that’s inevitable; an editor’s always making compromises. I know I’ve complained in the past about how the owners of Twilight Zone—who also owned, more significantly, Gallery, a sort of poor man’s Playboy—would urge me incessantly to fill the magazine with Stephen King, or at least to figure out a way to stick his magical name on the cover of every issue. They had no interest in what was inside; I doubt they did more than glance at the contents. But I really shouldn’t gripe, because that generally gave me the freedom to do as I pleased.

Ironically, when you ask about material “not right for the magazine,” it’s a story of King’s—”Survivor Type”—that immediately comes to mind. It was one of the few tales I wanted to run but was discouraged from buying (by Carol Serling, Rod’s widow, among others), because the subject matter—a shipwrecked doctor who survives by cannibalizing his own body parts—was, perhaps rightly, considered too grisly for something bearing Serling’s imprimatur.

 

DO: How come you never edited an anthology with what is, according to you, the very best in the genre—either classical or modern? I guess it has never been offered to you? But if it had been, would you have liked to try it?

 

TK: Good question. Well, first of all, there are so damned many anthologies already. I grew up on them; if you include science fiction and suspense, I must own hundreds—cheap paperbacks, big fat hardcovers. And the level of most of them is frankly pretty low. As TZ’s editor, I’d get hastily typed permission requests to pass along to writers from some of the greedier, more debased anthologists, guys who churned out these books on an assembly-line basis; they’d actually misspell the authors’ names and get the stories’ titles wrong, and would offer, say, all of $35 for the reprint rights.

And then, too, of course, by editing a magazine, I was essentially playing anthologist already, issue after issue.

For several years, with my good friend Jon White, I toyed with the notion of putting together an anthology of supernatural tales about books and bookshops. As you might imagine, there are a lot of them, and they’re great fun; and since readers themselves are by definition book lovers, the subject seemed a natural. However, we never got far with the project—in fact, we never even got to square one—because we were unable to think up a clever punning title, which seems to be a prerequisite for such books. I’m still open to suggestions.

P.S. The late Tom Disch reviewed books for Twilight Zone, and he and I used to joke about someday publishing an anthology titled Great Tales of the Supernatural That We’ve Never Had Time to Read. The introduction was going to say something like, “We still haven’t gotten around to any of the stories in this book. Could you kindly drop us a line and tell us if they’re any good?”

 

DO: Robert Aickman once said that there have not been more than about forty first-rate ghost stories ever written. Since you have read quite studiously the major works of this genre from its Gothic beginnings onwards, can you offer your own rough subjective estimate? How many first-rate horror stories are there?

 

TK: In many ways, Aickman’s estimate sounds reasonable. Really good stories are rare. It’s certainly been the case, all my life, that I’ve read many a horror anthology—or, say, a mystery digest of some kind—without finding a single story in it that truly impressed me. And I remember once searching the work of Algernon Blackwood for something of his that I could reprint in Twilight Zone: something considerably shorter and less famous than “The Willows.” Here was one of the acknowledged masters—yet what a hard time I had finding anything that worked! (Incidentally, I just checked; the story I ended up using was “The Occupant of the Room,” a fairly charming old tale, but far from first-rate.)

Conversely, however, I just mentioned above that good stories made me go “Wow!” and I’ve claimed through the years, maybe a bit extravagantly, that each issue of Twilight Zone could easily have been two or three times longer without any diminution of quality—which more or less suggests, if you take this claim seriously, that I must have uttered “Wow!” hundreds of times. Maybe, indeed, there really are hundreds of top-notch stories out there.

You know, there used to be joke in the film world about how it was really simple to cast the male lead: You just started with Laurence Olivier and worked down from there. In a sense, that’s a reminder that we tend to mark on a curve, and that as you descend in quality, the field of possibilities inevitably grows larger.

So I guess I’m dodging the question by acknowledging, in a roundabout way, that if you ask me for the Dozen Greatest Stories, I’ll come up with a dozen, and if you ask for the Fifty Greatest Stories, I’ll come up with fifty. Or even a hundred and fifty.

I did once take the opportunity to suggest thirteen of them, in a series Twilight Zone magazine was running. I’m afraid I was pretty conventional; inevitably I had to list “The Willows,” as well as a Machen (“Novel of the Black Seal”), a Lovecraft (“The Dunwich Horror”), and a James (“Casting the Runes”). I also mentioned Ramsey Campbell’s “The Trick,” John Collier’s “Bird of Prey,” Anthony Boucher’s “They Bite,” Richard Matheson’s “First Anniversary,” three s-f tales (John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?,” Michael Shea’s “The Autopsy,” Raymond F. Jones’s “Stay Off the Moon!”), a creepy psychological horror (George Bamber’s “Ottmar Balleau X 2”), and Jack London’s classic adventure tale “To Build a Fire.”

Of course, these things are so subjective. Aickman himself, the one time I met him, seemed to greatly revere a little Joseph Payne Brennan tale called “Levitation,” in which a hypnotist dies on a carnival stage in the middle of levitating a man, and so the man ends up sailing off into the clouds. I don’t know whether Aickman regarded that as among the forty “first-rate” stories, but he liked it enough to include it in one of his anthologies.

 

DO: Since you’ve written one very long horror novel and many short stories and novelettes/novellas, what are your thoughts on the connection between form and genre in horror? Specifically, do you agree with a pretty prevalent opinion that shorter forms are better suited to the horror genre, while, by contrast, it is pretty difficult to write a great, effective horror novel, because of length?

 

TK: It certainly makes sense in theory, and I’ve maintained, over the years, that horror is ideally a short form, one that’s hard to sustain over the course of a novel, much less a long novel. Which, of course, suggests—and I’m sure this is true—that The Ceremonies is far too long.

 

DO: Even more specifically, what were the difficulties you encountered while writing your one (for now) published novel? What was the process like of expanding your novelette into a novel?

 

TK: Sorry, Dejan, this would involve such a long, tedious, detailed answer that I’m just reluctant to go into it. Suffice it to say that the problems I had putting The Ceremonies together are, I assume, pretty much the same ones any first-time novelist has.

By the way, though, I have to tell you, perhaps to your annoyance—since you’ve only recently finished translating Dark Gods into Serbian—that I’ve just finished ever so slightly revising two of its four tales for eventual republication in Britain, and will soon begin revising the other two. (I learned of the British sale only last week.) My revisions amount merely to some word changes, a few lines of dialogue, and a couple of details. I’m congenitally unable to reread something of mine without wanting to make changes, even if it’s only to add or delete a comma. And this endless dissatisfaction is what makes my writing process so lengthy—which was also, needless to say, the case with The Ceremonies.

 

DO: Is it at least partially counterproductive to set horror stories in a very specific time, with a date (say, June 1977), or to link them to a specific historic event (say, the New York blackout), as you did in “Children of the Kingdom”? Remember how in older tales they used dashes (“It was in the year 18—”)? Can one read a story like “Children of the Kingdom” as a piece of “historical fiction” today, safe at a distance of more than four decades from its events, as opposed to some other story which takes place in a very vague “present”?

 

TK: Personally, I find it effective to mention real places in a horror tale—and sometimes, as in “Children,” even real events, like the blackout of 1977. For me, that was one of the things that made Lovecraft’s stories so effective: They were set amid actual Providence streets, even actual houses. As a young reader, I recall believing that the books Lovecraft quoted from might also be real. Classic stories set vaguely “in the year 18—” and featuring “Mme de G—” have always distanced themselves behind a pane of glass, so to speak, as in a museum; modern writers—is King the best example?—realized that it made for a better connection to say “He bought a Milky Way” than “He bought a candy bar.”

P.S. Reality, or a semblance of it, is so important to me, in fact, that I may have lost my ability to enjoy fiction. I remember how, at a friend’s recommendation, I tried reading Michael Chabon’s award-winning Kavalier & Clay. When I found myself slogging through page after page chronicling the history of some nonexistent New York comic-book publisher, I lost interest. It occurred to me, Why am I wasting my time on this imaginary corporation (and its imaginary line of superhero comics), when its main claim to our attention is that it more or less parallels the real ones?

 

DO: I was intrigued to find you calling the ultimate academic darling, “The Turn of the Screw,” “the most overrated ghost tale ever written.” Would you care to elaborate on that?

 

TK: Well, I simply maintain, after many attempts at trying to read him, that James writes in airy abstractions, when what moves me in fiction—and what presumably moves most readers—are sense details of specific concrete things. You know, there’s that William Carlos Williams line about “No ideas but in things”? That certainly doesn’t seem like a doctrine James would have subscribed to, or to the old creative-writing-class maxim, “Show, don’t tell.”

By the way, you’ve encouraged me to provide lengthy answers, which may be rather dangerous. I was actually tempted to quote a long passage from the opening chapter of “The Turn of the Screw,” describing how the governess wins over the little girl. I’ll spare you, but trust me, it’s amazingly vague and tedious, and gives you no sense of precisely how the two of them looked and sounded and behaved.

 

DO: Connected with it, but not necessarily, what are your thoughts on the dichotomy (or balance?) between suggestiveness and explicitness in horror fiction? Why is suggesting seemingly better than outright showing? And can one exaggerate with suggestiveness—making a tale that’s too vague, too open, as, perhaps, the case may be with “The Turn of the Screw”?

 

TK: Exactly. You know, a basic question in fiction is what to tell, what to leave out; it’s a perpetual conundrum. This is off topic, but I’m thinking of something that struck me when I read a couple of Raymond Chandler mysteries: how every time his detective enters someone’s house or an office building, we get tons of surprisingly unnecessary architectural description; or how, in The Book of Ebenezer Le Page (which, if you’re curious, happens to be The Great Guernsey Novel), we find similarly excessive descriptions of characters’ clothing, from boots to bonnet ribbons. I guess Chandler and G. B. Edwards were simply interested—maybe too interested—in architecture and fashion.

Now, James, too, has plenty of such detail—I just looked at his descriptions of a couple of country houses, and admittedly they’re way more specific than I’d remembered—but he’s awfully reticent as to other things (like where and how the narrator of The Aspern Papers has his meals), and his descriptions of human emotions are so abstract as to be, at times, almost impenetrable.

 

DO: In your essay Horrors! An Introduction to Writing Horror Fiction you write with disapproval about “Clive Barker’s wildly popular Books of Blood,” which for you typify “the current trend toward explicit violence and gross physical detail.” Do you still feel that way? Some might argue that they are about much more than mere violence and gross-out, or that the gross physicality is part of some purpose, idea, worldview.

 

TK: At the risk of affirming my fogeyhood, yes, I still believe that.

 

DO: You also worked on The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural. What was it like? Did you select the entries/authors you covered, or were you assigned without question? Who did you write about?

 

TK: Glad you mentioned that; I’d forgotten about it. It’s a handsome and valuable reference book, marred a bit by some unfortunate design. I’m pretty sure I selected the various writers I wrote about, and as usual I enjoyed the chance to air plenty of opinions—though I do feel a little guilt over the slightly snarky entry I wrote on Basil Copper; I’d met him in England and didn’t like him very much.

For the record, since you were kind enough to ask, in addition to Copper, I wrote about Arkham House, Charles Birkin (“For many readers, this genteelly tricked-up sadism is exactly what horror is all about”), William Peter Blatty, Anthony Boucher, Fredric Brown, Robert W. Chambers (“Early works such as The King in Yellow still create a powerful atmosphere of futility and doom”), John Collier (“Because Collier’s writing looks so easy, he is often imitated—almost always in vain”), W. F. Harvey (“The terror a creature inspires is often in inverse proportion to its size”), Robert Hichens, William Hope Hodgson, Jerome K. Jerome, Henry Kuttner, Jack London, my late friend and agent Kirby McCauley, Arthur Machen (“justly praised as one of supernatural fantasy’s great stylists”), John Metcalfe (“Metcalfe’s stories, typically, rely upon fragments of letters, snatches of half-remembered conversation, liquor-dulled reminiscences, murky dreams, fleetingly described photographs, and veiled references to messages never actually quoted”), Saki (“There’s absolutely no room for sentiment in a Saki tale; humankind is ruled not by love but by hatred”), Steven Spielberg, “Belief and the Writer,” The Twilight Zone, Edward Lucas White, the Rev. Henry S. Whitehead (“He seems to have treated ‘vodu’ with a kind of wary respect, as a rival religion that, for its practitioners, given the condition of their lives, makes very good sense”), and Colin Wilson.

 

DO: Would you like to bring your booklet Raising Goosebumps for Fun and Profit back in print? Have there been any motions in that direction by either you or some publisher?

 

TK: Well, this new collection reprints a Writer’s Digest article that was later expanded into Goosebumps, including a list of what I claim are the Most Familiar Horror Plots. Unfortunately, the book can’t reprint Peter Kuper’s striking illustrations; they’re the best reason I can think of for reissuing Goosebumps. It’s an appealing idea.

 

DO: Tell me about your “Anxiety of Influence,” if any, towards H.P. Lovecraft. You wrote a thesis on him; your first tale was a sort of homage to him and Machen; one of your most praised tales (“Black Man with a Horn”) was written specifically for an anthology of Lovecraftian tales. The latter even deals, explicitly, with a writer who lives in the shadow of a greater one. How did you feel about this shadow back then?

 

TK: Nothing new here; as a writer, you try to imitate something from the authors whose work you admire, yet you also struggle to find your own voice. When I first came upon Ramsey Campbell’s work, in a Lovecraftian anthology published by Arkham House, what struck me was how his tale—”Cold Print”—stood out because, in both style and content, it was the least Lovecraftian piece in the entire collection.

 

DO: Why do you think Lovecraft has cast such a big shadow to begin with? Why are so many authors, both his contemporaries and later ones, including the freshest ones, from the 21st century, so obviously inspired by him?

 

TK: I’ve always felt that what made Lovecraft so special, at least for me when I encountered him as a youngster, was the way he combined cosmic horror—not mere ancestral ghosts but extradimensional deities threatening all humanity—with specific quaint and colorful New England settings. I’d never seen anything like that before. And those books he’d quote from seemed to provide an additional authenticity; I was at a stage when there was nothing that excited me more than the thought of rare, dusty old books brimming with forbidden lore.

 

DO: In recent years Lovecraft-bashing has become popular, due to Lovecraft’s “racism” and “xenophobia,” his treatment of women and minorities, etc. How do you feel about this aspect of his personality and his writings? How much does it take away, if at all, from his greatness?

 

TK: It’s funny, racism has practically become the aspect of Lovecraft that fascinates people most. Looking through this year’s NecronomiCon program book, I noticed that every one of the guests of honor was asked about it.

Actually, there are two separate questions: whether racist elements within HPL’s fiction detract from it, and whether our opinions about the fiction are, or should be, affected by what we know of his personal prejudices. We could talk about these subjects for hours, but I’ll confine myself here to a few stray thoughts.

For several reasons, I don’t take Lovecraft’s racism all that seriously. And it’s hard to know, at times, just how seriously he took it himself. When, in early letters, this spindly, nerdy, pale, decidedly unmanly mama’s boy writes, with seeming gusto, about his sword-swinging Nordic ancestors who drank foemen’s blood from human skulls, this pose can seem so pathetic that you cringe, or else you may regard it with an indulgent pitying smile; but you may also sense that Lovecraft himself was smiling along with you, that his tongue was in his cheek, and that he enjoyed poking fun at himself.

This also seems to be the case when, in a notorious 1924 letter, he appears to work himself into a frenzy describing the populace of Manhattan’s Lower East Side: “They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely molded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of windows and doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities. They—or the degenerate gelatinous fermentation of which they were composed—seem’d to ooze, seep, and trickle thro’ the gaping cracks in the horrible houses… and I thought of some avenue of Cyclopean and unwholesome vats, crammed to the vomiting point with gangrenous vileness, and about to burst and inundate the world in one leprous cataclysm of semi-fluid rottenness.”

Sorry, but that’s basically a hoot, a performance akin to “the dozens,” demonstrating—as I suggest in my introduction to Arkham House’s Dagon collection—a schoolboyish delight in stretching language to exaggerated lengths.

Finally, I suspect that for some of us, racism in the abstract simply doesn’t count for much; what matters more is how we’re regarded personally. I have plenty of prejudices myself, but I’m always prepared to make an exception; in truth, I’m delighted when some prejudice of mine is proved wrong. So, okay (I tell myself), HPL didn’t care for Jews in general—but how would he have felt about me? After all, he married a Jewish woman and had a few Jewish friends. I’m vain enough to think that he and I would have gotten along fine.

P.S. Would I force “Herbert West: Reanimator” on a black reader? Definitely not. One doesn’t want to hurt people’s feelings—and that goes for what one writes as well. In my own story “Children of the Kingdom,” with its description of rioters during the ’77 blackout, I was torn between, on the one hand, a reluctance to offend, and on the other a desire to tell the truth about that night as I’d experienced it, and let the chips fall where they may. In the end, I followed what my old friend Kirby used to say: The book is boss.

 

DO: Since you’re one of the originators of the World Fantasy Award, and also one of its recipients, what do you think about the recent decision to take away Lovecraft’s visage (as re-imagined by Gahan Wilson) from it and replace it with an inoffensive stylized tree?

 

TK: I think what they did is shameful. So that’s what they have now—a tree?

 

DO: One of your powerful leitmotifs is inadvertently bringing “Evil” into the world: like the protagonist of “Poroth,” who does some strange signs (pointless and meaningless even to him) and thus invokes Something from the woods, or “Nadelman’s God,” where a piece of juvenilia comes to unexpected life in its author’s adulthood. Why did this specific trope appeal to you? Did you sometimes feel that you, as a writer, might bring some unexpected horror into the world through your writing?

 

TK: As I mentioned above, I admire Lovecraft’s ability to combine seemingly inconsequential mundane events with shocking preternatural results—and that sort of connection was very much on my mind when I wrote those stories.

Speaking of bringing horror into the world, I may be confusing two incidents, but I seem to recall that there was a murder in the woods years ago, possibly on Long Island, involving two or three teen cultists who may have taken The Ceremonies as, if not a guidebook, at least as nonfiction. And I also recall a friend informing me that a copy of my novel had been found among the books belonging to some cult broken up by police in the Puget Sound area. Obviously one doesn’t want one’s fiction to be misconstrued and cause harm; yet one also would prefer not to self-censor.

 

DO: One of constant complaints against horror is: “We have enough horrors in the world such as it is; do we really need more of it in books, films, comics, video-games…?” What do you think about that? Can real-life horrors and fictional ones even be meaningfully compared?

 

TK: I keep seeing variations on the idea—and it makes sense to me—that we try to lose ourselves in horror fiction as an escape from the real horror.

My father told me that as a combat soldier in World War II, in his foxhole, he would read a book of Sherlock Holmes stories—likely one of those armed forces paperbacks, made to fit in a GI’s pocket. As the war in Europe began to wind down, he developed a superstitious belief that if he finished the book, he’d be killed. So as he drew closer to the final pages, he would read just a paragraph each day. Fortunately, the war ended before the text ran out. It’s occurred to me that instead of Doyle, he might just as easily have been reading Lovecraft; there was a popular armed forces edition, The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Tales. And I’m sure that Yog-Sothoth and company, for all their monstrousness, would have afforded him just as much relief from the war as Holmes did.

 

DO: Should horror really be disturbing, which seems to be its sine qua non in order to be truly effective—or should it be reassuring, as you sometimes claim? But wouldn’t reassurance take away from its effect and make it powerless, inefficient?

 

TK: Good question; see above. I often, against my better judgment, check out the Daily Mail online. In print it was a typical British tabloid, but now it’s the go-to site for disasters, scandals, and lurid crimes. And almost every time I look at it, there’s some sort of murder or atrocity that makes me want to simply ring down the curtain on the universe. There’s been unimaginable horror throughout human history, and for millions of years before human history. There was unimaginable horror sixty-five million years ago, when an asteroid wiped out three-quarters of the life on earth, including all the dinosaurs. Each day something happens in the world, or merely within this city, so disturbing that, if I didn’t possess the ordinary human ability to put it from my mind, I’d want to blow my brains out (a sentiment that makes me sound like one of Lovecraft’s narrators). My own life has, I think, been lucky and privileged—quite sheltered, even coddled—yet I can’t forget that we all come to a bad end.

So I’d prefer, in what I read and what I write, to keep the horror down, if possible, to a civilized, mildly unsettling tingle.

 

DO: In his study The Modern Weird Tale, S. T. Joshi says that “Klein’s notions on the function of weird literature stand in antipodal contrast to his actual practice as a weird writer” (re: your predilections for happy endings, reassurance, horror as a light-hearted amusement, etc.). He also calls you “a sort of schizophrenic writer or, at the very least, a writer torn between what he wants in life and literature and what he is somehow compelled to do once he actually sits down to write a tale. Klein likes happy endings in literature, but where are they in his own work?” So, how do you explain this apparent division between your horror theory and horror practice?

 

TK: It’s an excellent point. Sometimes the tale just requires a bleak conclusion and you can’t get out of it, much as you’d wish to. In general, though, there’s nothing more satisfying than that seeming oxymoron, a horror tale with a happy ending.

 

DO: Describing the appeal of horror, you wrote, “It’s the pleasure of the carnival ‘house of horrors’—more commonly known as the ‘fun house.’ And fun is what this genre’s all about.” What do you think about this genre’s deeper and more serious potentials? Can it be subversive to dominant discourses? Can it be disturbing to the status quo? What about its spiritual aspects (questioning religious dogmas, offering alternative spirituality—even, sometimes, of a nihilistic kind, like in Lovecraft and Ligotti)?

 

TK: Stubborn as it may seem, I continue to regard horror tales as merely innocent entertainment. “Subversive to dominant discourses”? That sounds like a phrase overheard at some MLA panel. Remember, as Auden said, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” The same goes for horror.

 

DO: Recently you’ve been the subject of a book-length treatise called T E. D. Klein and the Rupture of Civilization: A Study in Critical Horror. Have you read it? How do you feel about it?

 

TK: Maybe someday I’ll have a chance to sit down and chat with the author, who seems, via email, an extremely affable guy. Meanwhile, I confess to having had a hard time getting through his text. But then, odd as it may sound, I’m clearly not that book’s intended audience; I never lasted even half a semester when going for a Ph.D. in English.

 

DO: How important is Jewishness to your personal identity? I notice that most, if not all of the main characters in your major tales are Jewish. Related to that (or not?), why did you choose to end “Nadelman’s God” in a synagogue? Although you seem to be an atheistic writer (and your character is patently atheistic), that ending might suggest the synagogue as a possible shelter from Evil which, at least temporarily, seems able to protect the protagonist.

 

TK: My Jewishness, or lack of it, is another subject I could talk about, and happily bore you with, for hours. My sister and I were raised in almost no religion—both parents Jewish but nonpracticing, father somewhat ashamed of his Jewishness and at times even antisemitic. I did not go to Hebrew school and was not bar mitzvahed; we had a Christmas tree, Christmas stockings, Easter eggs. The only religious symbols to be seen were not Jewish but Catholic.

In fact, you might say I grew up in a house filled with Catholic trinkets. For generations, the Klein family business was manufacturing rosaries. The firm was founded in the 1870s by, I gather, a Jewish street peddler from Bohemia. Both my father and grandfather worked for years as traveling salesmen, selling rosaries to churches, convents, and parochial schools up and down the East Coast. Until it went belly-up around 1960, the company’s headquarters was in downtown Manhattan, the factory in Providence. The latter is still there and still called the Klein Building.

Before I went off to Brown—where, incidentally, my father had been rejected, perhaps because he was Jewish—he bought me a three-piece tweed suit and warned me that when fellow students learned my last name and that I came from Woodmere, Long Island, I would immediately be despised. Needless to say, this filled me with dread, until I discovered that none of it was true. (P.S. I don’t think I ever wore that suit.)

Religion has never been a part of my personal beliefs. I once asked my mother if Santa Claus was real, at which point she divulged the terrible truth. I asked her some years later if God was real, but I don’t recall her answer—probably something like “If you want him to be.”

So, yes, I’m pretty much a lifelong atheist. However, I’ve always agreed with the philosopher Sidney Hook, who, though an atheist himself, noted that he would certainly not want to disparage the faith of a grieving mother comforted by the thought of being reunited with a dead child in heaven.

So you’re right about that synagogue in “Nadelman.” I think it’s basically a pretty typical horror story, one that, beneath all the digressions and complications, follows the classic pattern, in which a supernatural incursion is initially explained away by a rational protagonist until, in the end, he has to acknowledge the presence of the supernatural (and in many tales is overcome by it). Instead of noting the seeming disparity between my personal preference for happy endings and my stories’ unhappy ones, S. T. Joshi might have asked why, as an atheist, I’m attracted to tales in which rational heroes are forced to admit they’re wrong!

Although I’m often ashamed of my fellow American Jews, particularly of their politics, I’m quite proud today of being Jewish—I mean culturally, ancestrally—and am fervently pro-Israel. If I’ve identified some of my main characters as Jewish, it’s mainly because I think, Come on, this is me. Who am I trying to kid?