memory returns on the outside staircase

[Sean McHugh]

Hi people

The names and books I tried to remember, and failed, last night.

James Blish A case of conscience

and Clive Barker - Liverpool born writer of Weaveworld series

"Q&A Clive Barker
By Billy Chainsaw, Bizarre, No 143, Halloween 2008

"I was in New York around the late 1970s and... I had no idea of the
New York subway system whatsoever, and by some means or other I stayed
on a train until it got to what I now know to be the very end of the
line: Far Rockaway. It was night when I got out and there was nobody
on the station. I thought, 'Fuck! This is a story, isn't it? Anybody
could be creeping up on me now and I wouldn't know it.' And it was
that unpleasant experience of frightening myself in the middle of the
night in some place I'd never heard of that led to me writing The
Midnight Meat Train. That and the fact that there were murders
happening on the subway!...

"So I put those two elements together with my homage to
H.P.Lovecraft's Elder Gods; the idea that there's a system behind the
system that existed way before us - like a sort of dark Illuminati,
the anti-Mason - to do harm. I thought the idea that this might be
going on was really interesting.""

Sean