Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Requiem for a Website

Recently it has come to my attention that the website once known as Terror Tales (later Horror Quarterly) is no more. I find myself unexpectedly grieving at this discovery. Perhaps 'grief' seems too strong a word, but I’m not sure what other word would be more appropriate, and so I would like to hold a service here in its memory.

Since the death of Terror Tales online I have had occasion to look back and realise the exact extent to which this website, and the affiliated writers, have changed the course of my life. I am reminded of chaos theory – the stirring of a butterfly’s wing causes a rainstorm on the other side of the world.

Let me attempt to trace the tracks that Terror Tales has left in my life.

I first acquired a laptop computer soon after I graduated in the year two thousand. I was not at all confident in how to use the thing, but someone bought it for me because it seemed likely I would need it as a writer (incidentally, I still write the first drafts of all my fiction in longhand). The laptop seemed to me like a necessary evil, or possibly even an unnecessary one, intruding in my life, squat and black as a scorpion. I suppose I warmed to it a little when I discovered how to personalise it with wallpaper made of images pilfered from the Internet.



I mention this because it was not long after that that I was given a message board on the original Terror Tales. Terror Tales was the online incarnation of what had been a paper and ink magazine of horror fiction edited by John B. Ford, who has long been a half-secret dynamo behind the true underground horror scene in the UK. John B. Ford had read my novella ‘The Psychopomps’ in the Haunted Dreams series published by Paul Bradshaw as a sideline to his Dream Zone magazine (which is, alas, also no more). I tell a lie – Paul Bradshaw had passed the story on to John before it was actually published, and John had got in touch with me by e-mail asking if I had any more stories that he might read. I remember that I was still at university then, presumably in my third or fourth year, since I conceived ‘The Psychopomps’ during my second year, which was spent in Japan.

Unfortunately, because of a change of e-mail address, none of my correspondence from that time now survives (incidentally, if there is a future, e-mail will be the curse of literary biographers, who used to rely so much on letters). I cannot be sure exactly when the Terror Tales website came online and when I was given a message board there as one of the Terror Scribes. I only have the impression that I got the message board before my debut collection, The Nightmare Exhibition, was published by John Ford’s BJM Press. I certainly remember checking my message board when I was in Taiwan – where I taught English from November 2000 to August 2001 – and it was while I was there that The Nightmare Exhibition came out.

I was exceedingly lonely in Taiwan, since, for the first time in my life, I was in a country where I knew precisely no one. No one was waiting for me there, and no one had gone with me. It was a world populated entirely by strangers. The Internet became something of a lifeline for me then, and Taiwan, I discovered, had many Internet cafés. In fact, I believe Internet cafés thrived there before they did in Britain or Japan. Anyway, I remember that I would often sit in the Internet café with my zhenzhu naicha – a kind of cold tea with balls of jelly in it – and tap away at the keyboard, writing little diary entries on my message board for people to read. All those diary entries have, of course, been eliminated from the Internet now. It is, as we shall increasingly discover, a very unstable medium.

Anyway, I am certain that it was through the Terror Tales website, while I was in Taiwan, that I made the acquaintance of another writer called Mark Samuels. We shared an interest in the writer Thomas Ligotti and both had some of our work and message board on the website. Mark began to correspond with me by e-mail, and, by the time I returned to England to pick up a visa with which to go back to Japan, we were well enough acquainted to arrange to meet. I met Mark in London twice in the month or so I was in Britain before flying on to Japan. The second occasion was on the very eve of my flight to Japan, and Mark gave me a copy of his latest story, ‘The Impasse’, which was later to appear in The White Hands and Other Weird Tales. I was very impressed with it, and knew I’d found a bona fide master of the macabre.



I kept up my correspondence with Mark during the time that I was in Japan studying literature at Kyoto University. In fact, I don’t think anyone corresponded with me quite as regularly as Mark, and most of that correspondence, I am happy to say, is still extant on my computer.

I forget exactly how it had happened, but another publisher, whom I shall not name, had offered to publish my second collection, and whilst I struggled with depression in Japan, increasing my dose of anti-depressants and finally abandoning them altogether when they failed to help, the thought of this second collection gave me something to cling to. I won’t go into the details of my unhappiness during that time. Suffice it to say, I had given Japan a second chance and had found, once again, that it did not agree with me. For a long time I agonised over whether to try and extend my scholarship and attempt to take an MA or whether to give the whole thing up and return to Britain. It was a horrible decision to have to make, but I was so paralysed by depression that in the end the decision was made for me, there was no time left to apply for an extension or do the work necessary, and I had to return to Britain without the qualification I had hoped for to face the rat race that was my greatest fear.

Before I came back, something happened that increased my despair twofold – there was a problem with the publisher who were going to release my second book. It seems that the management had split, there were financial problems, and it looked like the publisher was about to expire. I gave them a deadline to publish my book before I looked elsewhere. They did not meet it. I withdrew my book.

Now there was only uncertainty in my future.

One of those who helped the future seem a little more certain for me was Mark Samuels. He suggested that I send the stories that had been intended for the collection to the publisher Tartarus Press. This I did upon my return to the UK. The result was success. Tartarus did not want all the stories, but they finally took on eight of them, which, in June 2004 became the collection Morbid Tales, for which Mark wrote the preface. Some of the remaining stories, plus some new works written while I was in Japan are soon to be published by John B. Ford’s Rainfall Press under the title Rule Dementia!

The year I came back to the UK was 2003, and that was the year that Terror Tales grew unsteady. John B. Ford was now too busy publishing with Rainfall Press to attend to the needs of the website. I was at the London pub, The Cittie of Yorke, where this duty was passed from John B. Ford and into the hands of Mike Philbin, then also known by his pen name, Hertzan Chimera.

The website had already been overhauled once, largely, it seemed, because of trolls invading the message boards. Now it was overhauled again, becoming a streamlined magazine with quarterly issues based on different themes. The first issue of the new-look Terror Tales was Body Horror. Mike had asked me to write something about Japanese body horror for this issue, and I did my best, eventually writing an essay so long that it needed to be spread over three issues. In this essay it seems that the experience of depression in Japan I had long kept to myself rose to the fore, creating what turned out to be quite a personal piece of work.

Issue two of the new Terror Tales was to be Fuck Horror. Mike Philbin (Hertzan Chimera) issued a challenge to all writers tired of hackneyed mainstream horror to write material that put the ailing beast out of its misery once and for all. Once again, Mike asked if I had anything to contribute to this. I sent a little tale written during the depths of my depression in Japan called ‘Asking For It’, about a man who tried to pick up girls on trains. Mike wrote back to say that it was not right for the Fuck Horror issue, but that he might include it in the next Chimeraworld anthology.

I wracked my brains to think of what I could contribute – and then it came to me. I could use this as an excuse to interview one of my musical heroes, Momus, whose next album was conceptually based upon the horror film The Wickerman.

The Momus interview is a long story, and I shall not recount it all here. For the purposes of this requiem I must recount only that I first encountered the word ‘blog’ in an e-mail from Momus after he had agreed (or possibly before he had agreed) to the interview. I didn’t want to look stupid, so I immediately wrote an e-mail to a young friend of mine who I suspected would know the lingo, and she wrote back explaining the nature of blogs. In fact, I think I had been reading one without knowing it – that of Momus. I was so taken with Momus’ blog that I decided to make one of my own. In fact, I modelled mine on his. Of course, my essays, such as they are, tend more towards romantic apostrophization, exclamation and so on. His are far more the product of a mercurial, media-savvy mind, I feel. Both, anyway, have something of the feel of Japanese zuihitsu about them.



The Fuck Horror issue of Terror Tales came online sometime in or around April 2004, I believe. There was to be one more issue of Terror Tales before it expired. That was the Blood Horror issue, containing the final part of my three-part essay. Then Terror Tales, for some reason, became Horror Quarterly. Then there were server problems. Then the site died. It really was a bit like that. The good ship SS Terror Tales/Horror Quarterly simply hit a rock in cyberspace and was wrecked. There are still a few pieces of flotsam and jetsam floating about. For instance, the last part of my essay still drifts forlornly in the electronic aether [Correction: since I wrote this, even this piece of flotsam has sunk]. But no doubt this too will sink without a trace. And as to what is lost, well, a great deal of archived material, including stories, poems, reviews, interviews. The first time I was ever interviewed was for Terror Tales. The interview I conducted with Momus was similarly consigned to Davy Jones’ cyber-locker. But there is much more material that is now sunk to the abode of krakens and lost. And with it a long history of something that may possibly be looked back upon one day as a seminal writers’ clique.



Terror Tales, as the last ripples smooth away upon the waves that have swallowed you, I salute you!

But what’s left for me? As any writer knows, magazines, publishers, forums, come and go. Divested of one home, I return to the wilderness I know of old. I may be lost, I may be wandering without aim. But I continue to survive until the next literary haven offers me some rest.