First impressions

[Lord Zombiac]

This is going to be a remarkable journey.

I might impress on you that since about 1996 I have been illiterate, in a manner of speaking.

During that time I re-read my Robert E. Howard and my Fredrick Brown. The only fresh thing I read could hardly be called a novel.

It was a novelization of Disney's "the Black Hole."

After re-reading the first and second chronicles, "the Runes of the Earth" is the first novel I have attempted to read since 1996.

I am hooked.

Once again, I am loosing sleep over the remarkable thoughts Stephen R. Donaldson puts in my head.

Aside from the powerful narrative and elements of great foreboding begun and relentlessly accelerated from the first paragraph onward, Jeremiah has become, in the span of a single chapter, the most intriguing character I have ever encountered in literature.

I can tell right away that his role is going to be pivotal-- but then again, who among Donaldson's vast array of characters is not pivotal?

He is, in fact, a character I myself conceived of when I had finished reading the entire series-- let me explain how.

Being young and impressionable, I wanted to immediately write my own fiction, not merely inspired by Donaldson, but derivative of his works.

I wanted to make my own version of "the Land," with an isolated misfit from our world mystically transported into it.

The concept for my protagonist was this: He would be my age, 14 or 15. He would be pathologically self absorbed due to a form of mental illness. What I had in mind, was in fact, some hybrid of hyperactivity and autism.

Jeremiah was, in fact, exactly what I would have conceived of had I been a seasoned writer with the immense understanding of human nature that comes only from experience and maturity.

This is how powerfully impressed I was by Donaldson:

Like a lover who knows exactly what his partner is thinking and finishes sentences for their beloved, I presaged the creation of Jeremiah by what? 25 years?

Needless to say, this is a little overwhelming.

This also causes me to contemplate my own past, involving, not surprisingly, the Land of Enchantment (New Mexico), the place Donaldson calls home.

I am re-examining some things I went through which are perhaps stranger than fiction, which have uncanny parallels to Donaldson's creations.

I'm speaking of the nameless cult which in this series Donaldson has now named, the Community of Retribution.

I moved to New Mexico fresh out of reading Donaldson. I used to put on a bathrobe, wear a ring, and carry a staff. I would wander into the undeveloped parts of Houston, where I lived, daydreaming that I was in the Land, and confronting Lord Foul with my magic.

From this unlikely place, overpopulated and full of chemical toxins and insufferable heat, I went to perhaps the most mysterious state in the union.

This is where mankind forged its deadliest weapon, the atomic bomb, and where we became capable, for the first time, of annihilating ourselves as a race.

This is where, at least in legend, and maybe even in fact, a spacecraft from another world collided with our planet and left remains so significant that reverse engineering them has yielded every modern technology we now take for granted.

The first conquerors from Europe came to this country and brought with them the first horses known in this hemisphere. When I drive down the road, I see wild mustangs every day. Each one of these animals is a direct descendant of these amazing creatures.

Into this country I arrived, and came to learn of a local incident involving a strange cult from the 60's. I also became involved with these people. My involvement included trying to find a passage to an alternate world.

Sound strange yet? It becomes even more unlikely, but it is all true.

Now I do not know exactly what happened, but in the 60's a cult was disbanded by the authorities and its leaders arrested for the ritualistic abuse of a dead body.

This was the "UFO Necrophile" cult of La Luz, New Mexico, a small town was practically a suburb of Alamogordo. I think, but am not certain, that they believed their harboring and desecration of this human corpse was done under the guidance of Aliens from another planet.

It was done to serve some dark purpose that none of them has ever revealed.

Enter Roberta, the daughter of a former cult member working as a nurse at the hospital and operating a business as the owner of a new age book store.

I was, at the time, beginning a lifelong pursuit of enlightenment through psychedelic drugs. Marijuana was unusually potent to my psyche, acting as a powerful hallucinogen.

The movie "Altered States" also introduced me to the concept of isolation tanks as a means to alter not only consciousness, but perhaps reality itself.

Roberta herself had issues. She believed that her mother, who openly claimed to be in contact with extraterrestrials, was up to something dark and dangerous. She also believed that I was some kind of spiritually powerful being, gifted with sensitivity that others did not have to "the other side."

She asked me to investigate, and I had my own motivation to do so.

You see Roberta's mother owned an isolation tank. I had convinced myself that if I combined psychedelic drugs and an isolation tank, I could perhaps find my own gateway to my own alternate reality-- the Land, or something like it.

So I ventured into the unknown, as high and confused as a 15 year old boy could be.

In the isolation tank I became aware of impurities occupying the water I was immersed in. Drug induced paranoia absorbed me into a horrific realization.

It was my belief, which dawned on me in the tank, that Roberta's mother, being a nurse, secretly collected amniotic fluid from the hospital's maternity ward and filled her tank, not with water, but with amniotic fluid.

Her purpose for doing this was to create an artificial womb in which to re-birth people as her own children. She would then become some kind of monstrous mother, able to exert a perverted form of the mother-child bond over people as power.

I got out of there and took a long cold shower. I left without saying a word to this strange person.

When I made my report to Roberta, she was not incredulous. To the contrary, she acted as though she had knowledge in this matter that I did not have and that everything I told her only confirmed her own suspicions.

What the truth is, I don't think I'll ever know. Some things are perhaps better left unknown.

But here I am again, wondering at the incredible and often horrifying mysteries that exist in this world, which is not so mundane as we imagine it is.

Reading this book brings it all back.

And I can't sleep.

[danlo]

You're freaking me out now dude, I'm beginning to think you're my little brother from another mother. Your SRD/TCTC trip contains a multitude of similarities to mine (except for this cult, which I am highly curious about). I have a feeling we'll freak the hell out of each other should we ever meet...

[Lord Zombiac]

We will meet! Elohimfest!