Like many kids, I devoured Greek mythology—starting with a children’s Odyssey and D’Aulaires’ Greek Myths, and slowly working my way up to Edith Hamilton. Somewhere along the way (probably Hamilton), I came across various divine epithets, and I remember puzzling over “Phoebus Apollo.” Was this an alternate spelling of “phobos”? Of course it was not. It just happened that “bright” and “fear” were near lookalikes. And why shouldn’t they be? Was that not the nature of divinity: awful and awesome brilliance, memorably captured at the end of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark?
We’re hardwired to fear the dark, of course, not the light. H.P. Lovecraft famously wrote that the oldest feeling is fear and the oldest fear is fear of the unknown—and primordial night was one vast unknown. That kind of absolute unbounded darkness is very hard to find now because of the bright lights of civilization. But I’ve come across it, and it’s deeply unsettling.
Once, driving on a country road in the night, I pulled onto the shoulder to look up at the stars. I turned off the engine and the headlights. For an instant, the beauty of the Milky Way and the clarity of the constellations were breathtaking. And then, suddenly, as I drowned in the darkness, there was a different kind of breathlessness. I became utterly convinced that a car would emerge from nowhere, swerve off the road, and run me over. Madness. I hadn’t seen another car in hours. I was convinced my own car wouldn’t start. Madness. That walking back to it, I would fall off a cliff. Madness. As I sank further into the darkness a thousand deaths swam up from the depths. Finally, trembling so hard I could barely manage the ignition, I got the car started and pulled back onto the road, safe under the blanket with the flashlight on, safe on a narrow spit of solid ground in the roiling sea of shadows.
But as terrifying as the dark is, there is a horror in light, too—not for nothing do will-o-wisps and eerie phosphorescence and glowing eyes and colors out of space haunt so many scary stories. And more horrifying still, I think, is that unnatural blue light of the airplane bathroom mirror, the light beneath which all our ugly flaws are revealed. Phoebus. Phobos.
There are plenty of scary experiences that are not, strictly speaking, horror. We have perfectly rational fears, and even irrational fears that are nevertheless responsive to some external stimulus (“phobia,” again). For me, horror is not that. It entails a looking inward: shining that blue light into the darkest recesses of our minds. The story, the film, the painting, the poem, the game—whatever the medium of horror—serves as the guide. We’re not losing ourselves in the tale; rather, the tale is leading us, Virgil-like, on a journey into the hell of our own psyche. In Stephen King’s IT, what terrifies me is not Pennywise (there are plenty of things to worry about in life, but alien spider clowns are not among them), but my own memories of childhood vulnerability and isolation onto which King shines his “deadlights.” King holds up a carnivalesque airplane mirror and compels us to look.
Strangeland’s themes can be developed best through the medium of horror. Other genres are certainly well suited to depicting loss (losing another; losing oneself) and rediscovery. But they come at the problem more obliquely. For my dollar, fantastical horror has the benefit of letting you come at those feelings head-on, to give them their full enormity. Grief can have a quiet dignity, but when I have grieved, any such quiet dignity is purely external, like an inverted eye of a storm. Whatever the outward calm, hurricane winds of annihilating force are blowing inside. Horror permits those internal states to be given external expression.
No one can express those states with more awful and awesome brilliance than Victor Pflug. His works are steeped in allusion and imagery, and every organic and inorganic form he depicts oozes suffering. From a decade of working together, I don’t know any longer where my symbols stop and his begin; our once-separate imageries have emulsified. Vic is an excellent guide in the journey through horror because he knows its landscape so well; he’s like a mountain man of the mountains of madness.
But that horrific journey, at least in the case of Strangeland, is not one where you are left stranded in some slough of despond. For me, there is a different kind of light that is as emblematic of horror as the harsh blue light, and that is the warm glow of the campfire, the living room, and the sunrise. To be sure, there are some horrors that do not end—in life as in literature. But my favorites are those that do; the tales that lead you on a journey down into darkness only to emerge in the end into the light, less afraid and with more self-knowledge. Both Vic and James Spanos have brought that warm light to Strangeland, visually and aurally.
I hope you let us guide you on that journey. We have found Strangeland a rewarding place to explore as we created it, and perhaps you will find it the same when you visit.