Every Universe, Our Own Included, Begins In

Literature, Like Magic, Has Always Been About The Handling Of Secrets, About The Pain, The Destruction, And The Marvelous Liberation That Can Result When They Are Revealed. If A Writer Doesn't Give Away Secrets, His Own Or Those Of The People He Loves, If He Doesn't Court Disapproval, Reproach And General Wrath, Whether Of Friends, Family Or Party Apparatchiks... The Result Is Pallid, Inanimate, A Lump Of Earth.

With Patience And Calm, Persistence And Stoicism, Good Handwriting And Careful Labeling, They Would Meet Persecution, Indignity, And Hardship Head-on.

Novelist Time Is Reptile Time; Novelists Tend To Be Ruminant And Brooding, Nursers Of Ancient Grievances, Second-guessers, Tuesday Afternoon Quarterbacks, Retrospectators, Endlessly, Like Slumping Hitters, Studying The Film Of Their Old Whiffs.

Horror Grows Impatient, Rhetorically, With The Stoic Fatalism Of Ecclesiastes. That We Are All Going To Die, That Death Mocks And Cancels Every One Of Our Acts And Attainments And Every Moment Of Our Life Histories, This Knowledge Is To Storytelling What Rust Is To Oxidation; The Writer Of Horror Holds With Those Who Favor Fire. The Horror Writer Is Not Content To Report On Death As The Universal System Of Human Weather; He Or She Chases Tornadoes. Horror Is Stoicism With A Taste For Spectacle.

There Was A Sort Of Irony In The Fact That These [superhero] Characters - Many Of Whom In That Period, The Golden Age, Had Been Evolved To Fight The Nazis - Were Themselves Very Much In The Nazi Ideal. The Idea That You Can Solve Problems Through Physical Strength, By Being Stronger And More Dominant And More Powerful - That Is Fascism. I Mean, That's It, That's The Essence Of Fascism. I Don't Think The Creators Of The Superheroes Or The Kids Who Were Reading Them At The Time Were The Slightest Bit Aware Of It.