This lecture formed the basis for the concept that became this book, A Thousand Years in His Soul: Nine Arуan Mystics at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Bowden put the idea in my mind that Lovecraft, Howard and others of the pulp era were essentially mystics fading into a cultural recess in the Western consciousness; echoes of a people's lost soul, like Merlyn or Black Elk.
Bowden is the right type of thinker to plum the essence of ‘low culture’ of ‘cult media’ and other popular art forms among adolescents and the lower classes, generally despised by the ruling class. His discussion of the use of a dream journal for generating horrific short fiction and tales of wonder is far deeper than anything that might be vomited up by establishment literary critics. Bowden is at his concise best revealing the modern dark fantasy novel for what it generally is in the hands of commercial writers.
Any reader or writer, or horror movie fan with an interest in phantasms, nightmares and ‘cultural displacement should get a lot out of this lecture.’ His discussion of the reconfiguration of death in the mind of the writer as a kind of shamanic exercise gets right into the field normally tread by comparative mythologists like Campbell.
Bowden summarizes and discusses the novella the Dunwich Horror, which I think was made into a movie in the 1970s. This segment is a lot of fun, and gets better up until the end.
