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And having a hell of a time keeping one eye on the skyline
Oh, right, and I read the trade paperback of Alan Moore's Neonomicon (2010), which did not impress me. It wasn't the rape scenes, although there is a substantial duration of them (the book opened to one when I picked it up). It was the fact that if I want Lovecraftian body horror—if I want sex with Deep Ones, unimaginable, mind-breaking violation, congress with things that are nothing so comprehensible as callous human predators and that leave their object waiting coolly for nothing more than the hastening obliteration of a world which allows these and so many other atrocities to occur—I can pick up any of a dozen issues of Sirenia Digest and get it done better. I'm not being shown anything I haven't thought of. Ditto the sex cult whose ultimate goal is the birth of the apocalypse, because I have seen horror films made in the '70's. If there was some kind of meta-commentary going on—an indictment of Lovecraft fandom, the reduction of women in horror to their sexual physiology—I missed it. Mostly I was left wanting to read some Caitlín R. Kiernan or Gemma Files. Or e-mail Paula Guran and ask her to edit, for real, that anthology of weird erotica that was batted around after the panel at Readercon 2012. The point here is not a-ha! I am too edgy for Alan Moore!; I don't have time for that kind of nail-buffing weirdo pride any more than I think I should get a British history pat on the back because I liked George VI before The King's Speech (2010). It was just the blank, slightly nonplussed feeling of picking up something acclaimed and putting it down in confirmed knowledge of the fact that there is better cosmicist fishsex in this world.
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Tangentially: this is so very, very true. I can see it in other people when they have violent, deep attachments to works of literature that just don't seem to bear the weight of that attachment--it's because it isn't the work, it's the jigsaw puzzle interlocking of that work with that person at some particular time. And I have experienced it myself, too: things I've loved that not many people love in the same way, and it's not because I'm this amazing tremblingly sensitive appreciator of genius that others don't get, but just that the book and I fit together perfectly.