Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 8, 1993 TAG: 9403190009
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Mike Mayo, book page editor
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
He chooses his words with care and speaks in neatly constructed paragraphs. Though he's from Texas, he's lost whatever Western accent he might have had. Recently, on his way to do the ``Larry King Show'' in Washington, he took time to talk about his work, particularly his new novel, ``The Forbidden Zone,'' dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft.
Like most of us, he first discovered those wonderful stories and novels as a teen-ager. When Strieber went back to reread Lovecraft recently, he found ``a much more interesting writer in some respects and a less interesting writer in others. He's not the most clever stylist in the world. He didn't really know much about literature, but ... But the man's imagination now seems to me to be even more extraordinary than it did when I was a teen-ager.
``With this book,'' he said, ``I really wanted to do something that would acknowledge Lovecraft and would enable me to explore some of the Lovecraftian themes. Can you make one of these big scary monsters from the depths of time real for a modern reader?''
For Strieber, horror fiction is ``serious fun. I wouldn't call it literature; I would call it at best artificial literature, but that's better than nothing. At its best a horror fiction allows you to touch deep fears. It is genuinely therapeutic in that sense.''
Over the course of his career, he has worked with most of the major themes in horror and science-fiction; the werewolf in ``The Wolfen,'' vampires in ``The Hunger,'' and ``alien'' contact in ``Communion,'' certainly his most controversial book. In it, he told the story of something that he experienced, and found himself at the center of the ``alien abduction'' phenomenon.
`` `Communion' was,'' he said, ``a tremendous personal disaster for me. On the one hand it's annoying because people say that jerk made a million bucks. However, in the frontispiece to that book, in great big letters it says, `when you look into the darkness, the human mind looks back.' It's a book about the human mind. I couldn't control the fact that it became a book about aliens. I became the premiere, leading alien-abductee in the world and I don't even believe in any of that stuff.''
Since he went public, though, he has received 77,000 letters from people claiming similar experiences. ``Most of them, 80 percent, are from Australia and the United States; very few from Canada, a fair number from the U.K.''
All right then, if he's not talking about contact with beings from somewhere else, what's going on?
Strieber isn't sure, but he has some ideas. ``I think what I was dealing with and have subsequently dealt with is an unexplored mental mechanism of some kind that is not hallucinatory in the conventional sense, and is not dream imagery. What its actual origin is is very mysterious to me because it has the structure and, to a large degree, the content of a dream. But there is a culturally-induced shared morph to it in the sense that the things all look the same to everybody, even if you're not expecting them as I wasn't. Yet, when it happens to a normal human being - at least this one - it feels real.''
The question then becomes, ``How does a supposedly normal mind generate a hallucination more vivid than a psychotic episode?''
If he's right, and this is a manifestation of a new psychological phenomenon, it might explain some other currently popular controversies that all seem to involve some kind of childhood trauma.
``I think that in the Satanic ritual abuse and in the alien abduction thing it's quite clear that the similarities from story to story are purely an artifact of culture. And that's easily explained. What's not so easily explained is why people are coming forward and insisting with such vehemence that this is real. It's not because they're deluded. It's because they have been exposed to a type of mental activity we have not yet defined. I'm living proof of it.''
But that doesn't change his public image. ``The maddening thing about it is that while I know I'm not a charlatan, I can't prove I'm not, and what happened around the book was a form of charlatanism that I couldn't control. But I did some good things with the money.
``We created the Communion Foundation and we gathered these reports and testimony. My wife and a woman named Laurie Barnes worked for five years on this, putting these 77,000 letters into computer-readable format and getting them scanned so they could be on computer discs. So they're available now if there's ever any serious research. It's the largest concentration of raw data about unknown experiences that's ever been assembled anywhere.
``It contains some truly remarkable stories - some of which I have carefully followed up - that are among the most startling things that have ever been written by anybody. And once you get into this, after a while you think to yourself, `My God, what is going on; what is happening to these people? I have no idea but it sure as hell isn't just some dream.' ''
by CNB