Category Archives: Literary Musings

Something interesting happened yesterday. I was perusing the reviews of Limbus, Inc. and I came upon one that was quite fascinating. It was a so-so review—three stars—but in reference to my story they noted that they were able to predict the ending because it reminded them exactly of a movie they had seen. In the interest of not spoiling the film for everyone else, they declined to name it. Intrigued, and unable to figure it out, I sent them a message. They were kind enough to respond, and they told me the movie that it reminded them off.

And I got to tell you, after they named it, I saw the resemblance. So much so, that I’m not going to name it here, either, lest I ruin the story for you. But the most interesting thing of all? When I wrote the story, I had not seen this movie. And even though I knew something of its plot, it never entered my mind. Not once. Not at all.

I think there’s a valuable lesson there for writers. Of course, you don’t want your work to be derivative. You don’t want it to be just like everything else that is out there. But when it comes to originality, you can’t worry about it too much. You can’t obsess over it. Cause no matter how original you are being, it’s probably the case that it’s been done before, at least in some way.

All you can do is tell the story you’ve got, and make it as scary or romantic or funny as it can possibly be. 

Came upon this recently on teachingdegree.org (so, you know, if you want to be a teacher check it out). Anyway, I found this interesting. Could be pro-real book propaganda  but it seems to indicate that print books can survive the e-pub revolution. What do you think? Are print books a dinosaur just waiting to go extinct? Or will they always have a place? (I’m hoping for the latter).

Other than the fact that it is my newest book (comes out on Friday!) . . .

Somebody once told me that the only review that should upset you is a three star where the review amounts to “eh.” Well, The Void is not that.  People either love it or hate it.  There is no inbetween.  So far more people love it, so that’s good. Most interesting criticism so far? Not the typos (it’s called an unedited advance copy for  a reason). Definitely the science. Scientists have been debating the gravitational effects of anti-matter for the last hundred years, and yet the number 1 criticism by people who didn’t like the book is the one sentence on anti-gravity and anti-matter. OK, guys, it’s a stretch, but it’s not THAT BIG of one.

Anywho, thanks to everyone who has already shared how much they love the book. I’ve included some of those reviews below.

“Talley follows Stoker finalist That Which Should Not Be with another tale of cosmic horror. This tale of aliens preying on humanity stands out from the crowd thanks to the strength of Talley’s prose and creative imagination.”  – Publishers Weekly.

“With THE VOID, Brett J. Talley guides us out to the vastness of space and deep into the landscape of nightmare. Talley gives us elegant prose that whispers unspeakable horrors. Highly recommended.” – Jonathan Maberry, New York Times best-selling author of ASSASSIN’S CODE and DEAD OF NIGHT

“A cosmically magnificent piece of dark science fiction. Talley is a gifted story teller. Every word is an inevitable piece derived from a past dream, and every sentence, a haunting insinuation of what might come next.”  – Benjamin Kane Ethridge, Bram Stoker Award winning author of BLACK & ORANGE and BOTTLED ABYSS.

“The Void is one of the best horror novels that I’ve read this year, hands down. It is a vast improvement on That Which Should Not Be and firmly establishes Brett Talley as an author to watch out for in the future.”  –  Starburst Magazine

I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.

Of all the authors I have read, three have had an indelible impact on me and my writing–H.P. Lovecraft, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ray Bradbury.  I will never forget the first time I read The Martian Chronicles.  If  in my entire career I write one thing even approaching the beauty of “Night Meeting” or the heart-rending tragedy of “There Will Come Soft Rains,” I will consider my life a success.

Fare the well, Ray Bradbury.  The greatest adventure of them all awaits you.

I AM.

I’ve noticed a common trope among writers that I want to point out.  It’s a cliché that I think most don’t recognize.  The following scenario has happened in just about everything I have read lately (in one book, it’s happened twice).  Somebody is religious.  X happens to them, something that is really bad.  The character decides that they don’t believe in God anymore, because what kind of loving God would let X happen.

Now maybe it’s just me, but I’ve known a lot of religious people in my life.  And I’ve known a lot of religious people that have had bad things happen to them.  And I’m sure that in the darkest hours of the night, they might have questioned God, or asked why.  But I have never known a single person who stopped believing in God or stopped being religious because something bad happened to them.  Not one single person.  In fact, most of the time, it’s made them more religious.

I get it.  Everybody who ever took a philosophy class has heard about the Argument from Evil.  If God is good and all powerful, why doesn’t he stop bad things from happening?  After all, we aren’t all powerful, and we try and stop bad things from happening.  It’s the ultimate preaching to the choir argument.  The only people who are convinced are already atheists anyway.  You see, religious people have this whole complicated belief system about the nature of evil and the way the world works.  The Book of Job is entirely devoted to the question.  So atheists walk into philosophy class and think they’ve heard the most profound explication of why God can’t exist ever formulated.  Meanwhile, the believers are yawning in the back.  They’ve been studying this stuff in Sunday school since they could walk and know that it’s nothing new or all that special.

So I think there are two types of writers who fall into this trap.  The first are the atheists who think that the first time something bad happens, the believers are going to wake up from their ignorance and curse God.  Then there are the guys who are trying to impress upon the reader the horribleness of the occurrence by showing that it would make someone give up their faith because of it.

Either way, I think I’ve seen enough of it.  If you are going to give your characters religious convictions, at least have enough faith in them to think that they would keep their own when bad things happen.

Conventional knowledge would tell you that copyright is a writer’s best friend.  To a certain extent, that’s true.  No one wants to see their story with another person’s name slapped on top of it.  Plagiarism is a real problem (and surprisingly widespread), and if copyright was limited to stopping it, that would be fine.  But copyright has been twisted in a way that hurts artist and the general public.  In fact, I’m not sure copyright helps anyone, at least as currently constituted.

The Constitution says that the purpose of copyright is “To promote the progress of science and useful arts.” Ideally, that’s what copyright would do.  It would ensure that artists are rewarded for their work while promoting the art itself.  In fact, artistic compensation is but a side effect of copyright.  Its primary purpose is the flowering of art itself.  How far we have gone from that ideal.

Have you ever wondered why there are a hundred different film versions of Dracula or Romeo & Juliet but there’s only one Star Wars? Copyright.  Current copyright is roughly the life of the author plus 70 years.  Given the way George Lucas handles Star Wars, that means that no one alive is likely to see another version of the trilogy.

Now, maybe you’re saying, “That’s fine, I hate remakes.”  And maybe that’s true of the original trilogy.  But what about the prequels?  You know that you and your friends have sat around and thought about how you would have done those prequels differently.  How there would be no Jar-Jar.  How the first movie would have been condensed into a ten minute prologue, consisting mainly of the final duel.  You will never see that version.  Nor will you see a Return of the Jedi with Wookies instead of Ewoks.

Jar-Jar, crime against humanity.

But it’s worse than that.  You also won’t see the hundreds of movies that could have been made in the Star Wars universe, each with stories George Lucas never could have imagined.  Think about all of the writers who’ve worked within the universe created by Lovecraft.  None of us could have done so without Lovecraft’s insistence that other writers could borrow and expand his work.

Lovecraft, copyright rebel.

But what if it’s bad, you ask?  Funny thing about that.  Under current law, I can’t remake Star Wars, but I can make fun of it.  So while you’ll never see a remake of Star Wars, you will see Space Balls.  Parody is exempted from copyright protection.  If you want to make a loving remake of The Matrix, you can’t do it.  But you can make fun of it till your heart’s content.

If I were reforming copyright, I would limit the protection to 15 or 20 years.  That’s plenty of time to have exclusive rights to the work in its original form.  After the period was up, I’d give the original authors a gradually declining rate of return.  George Lucas would still make money off of Star Wars remakes, he just wouldn’t be able to exert total control over the product.  We’d all be better off, and copyright would do what it is supposed to do—encourage the creation of amazing art.

NB:  There are spoilers galore in the below post.

I often admonish writers to avoid the temptation of responding to negative reviews.  Nothing good can come of it.  People like what they like, and reviewing is perhaps the most subjective business of all time.  But I’ve noticed an interesting trend in reviews of That Which Should Not Be (both positive and negative), and I wanted to address it.  This is the first in a series of posts I plan to make on the issue.

There’s been a diverse reaction to the presence and role of religion in TWSNB.  In Lovecraft’s writing, the Cthulhu mythos is a sort of forbidden knowledge, studied by certain scholars but largely unknown.  And while Lovecraft often discusses the ancient gods in relation to the mythos, he rarely discusses the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Probably a good idea, given the times he lived in.  The people of the 20s and 30s might not have taken too kindly to any implications that could be drawn from it.

It’s also important to remember that Lovecraft didn’t think of what we now call the Cthulhu Mythos as a religious tradition unto itself.  The pantheon of the Old Ones, as we now consider it, was never so well ordered by Lovecraft.  Much of what people now defend as Lovecraftian is, in reality, a creation of those who followed him.  The major contribution of Lovecraft is not the notion of a hitherto undiscovered or unknown set of gods seeking to wreak havoc on humanity.  Rather, it is the notion of cosmic indifference.  The universe is vast, in many ways unknowable, prone to chaos, and completely uncaring about the fate of mankind.  That great beings exist is simple fact.

Many Lovecraft scholars argue that this goes one step further.  They argue that the Great Old Ones are as concerned about humanity as we might be an ant hill.  Much of the horror Lovecraft created came from his protagonists’ realization of this fact, and the insanity and hopelessness that followed from that.  Once the truth was revealed to them, there was no purpose to continuing to live and suicide often followed.

I don’t deny that one can draw this conclusion, but I reject any notion that Lovecraft did not recognize the age old struggle between good and evil in his writing, or the role that humanity might play in that struggle.  It seems to me that Lovecraft was never entirely consistent in his view of the relation between cosmic entities and humanity.  I think a lot of Lovecraftians want to believe certain things about the mythos and are willing to ignore contradictory evidence.  (In my view, S.T. Joshi, the greatest living Lovecraftian scholar, falls into this trap with The Dunwich Horror.  I’ll discuss it in more detail below.  Widely cited as one of Lovecraft’s greatest and most important stories, Joshi considers Dunwhich “an aesthetic mistake on Lovecraft’s part.”).  In reality, Lovecraft was far less concerned with continuity across stories as he was in simply spinning a great yarn.

Frankly, story after story of hopeless humanity would probably get boring at some point.  In Lovecraft’s greatest stories, humanity is not only noticed by the Old Ones, but they do a pretty good job of keeping them at bay.  The fact that the Cthulhu cult exists and seeks to wake the Great Old One speaks to their need for human action, as do the consequences of Captain Johansen’s decision to ram the eponymous creature with his ship.

But The Dunwich Horror puts the lie to any notion that humanity has no role in Lovecraft’s cosmic play.  In many ways, The Dunwich Horror is the centerpiece of the Cthulhu Mythos, even more so than the short story that bears his name.  In Dunwich, we are treated to extensive quotations from the Necronomicon as well as an Old One conspiracy that comes nigh on close to succeeding.  And how, pray tell, is it stopped?  By the efforts of Henry Armitage and his compatriots who, by using the ancient knowledge contained in arcane texts, defeat the son of Yog-Sothoth and prevent the return of the Old Ones.  (It almost sounds like The Omen).

I don’t see how we can ignore the implications of The Dunwich Horror.  Dunwich clearly refers to a “strange evil so vaguely threatening this planet” and sets up a dynamic where good people can and do oppose the rise of the Old Ones.  S.T. Joshi may disapprove of Dunwich because it is a “stock good-versus-evil scenario,” but that does nothing to diminish the importance of The Dunwich Horror to Lovecraft and the mythos.  I take no issue with writers who have constructed stories based on Lovecraft’s view of cosmic indifference, but I also believe that the notion that you cannot have good and evil vying against each other in a Lovecraftian story is a product more of what the readers wish Lovecraft had done rather than what he actually did.

To be continued in a future post…