Re: Leonard Cline
Posted by:
Kyberean (IP Logged)
Date: 28 May, 2005 01:52PM
A little aside: CAS's comments on The Dark Chamber in the Selected Letters have always surprised and puzzled me. He claims to like and appreciate the work, but he criticizes it, in essence, as being insufficiently weird. Fair enough, I suppose, but I find it absolutely astonishing that CAS seems to have been tone-deaf to the extraordinary poetry of Cline's writing. (I should add that, next to CAS's work, The Dark Chamber has sent me to the dictionary more often than the work of any other author since I was a teenager reading the fiction of J.G. Ballard). Given CAS's hatred of the pared-down, modern style, I should think that he would have been in ecstasy to read such a magnificently poetic stylist. When he claims that the (in my opinion) mostly pitifully mediocre Frank Belknap Long has done "sounder" work, I hardly know whether to react with anger or laughter!
At any rate, that is very good news that there is to be a new edition of The Dark Chamber. Since information about the author is scarce, I hope that the person who is writing the introduction to the book will rememdy that situation, at least somewhat.