Continuing onward. I will refrain from adding any commentary to this, save to note that Mr. Savage has a refreshingly novel take on freedom of speech on the Internet, as evidenced by the opening paragraph of his letter.

I can only conclude from Mr. Savage's failure to endorse censorship that he is neither a feminist, a neo-Nazi, nor a spokesperson for the oppressed.

Dear Unequivocal:

You have nothing to apologize for: you are entitled to your view of BLAKE HOUSE, and you are entitled to express that view on your own web log.

As for as "jealousy" goes ... well, in writing circles, jealousy is as common as pimples among the pubescent; unfortunately, it is like a feral dog with a tapeworm--always insatiably hungry. Writers like Stephan King and John Grishham are jealousy of lesser known writers who get good reviews and have academic respectability, and the "respectable" writers are in turn jealous of their popular success. Jealousy goes right down the line, and it never ends.

Everyone in the writing world is always driven mad by the knowledge that, when all is said and done, everything about writing is always a matter of opinion and taste. Being published or being unpublished, being positively or negatively reviewed, getting good fan response, bad fan response or no fan response; selling well or selling badly, making it into the literary classes or fading into obscurity--none of these things are completely dependent upon the quality of your work. Every experienced editor, agent and writer knows that writers, like contestants at a beauty pageant, rise and fall on nothing more substantial whim, fashion and fickle fancy. One day, redheads; the next day, blondes. All just opinion.

I learned this one day, when what would become my first published novel was making the rounds and I got two rejections slips--one editor said he loved the story but hated the style, the other said he hated the style but loved the story.

Knowing this is one of the reason's that I am able to take your comments on Blake House, with a smile. It is just your opinion, based upon your taste. Of course, as a reader you're opinion is important. But among my published novels, Blake House received the most attention, and I have to put your individual opinion in perspective against that of those readers (including a well known mystery novelist, and a retired Philosophy professor who speaks several languages) and reviewers (including a respected, mid-level horror writer and two well respected horror critics and small press publishers) who liked the book. Their critiques, some of them quite detailed, have led me to believe that in Blake House I had accomplished what I set out to do--which is one of the ways that I evaluate the merits of my work. Most of the positive reviews--which, believe it or not, were the majority--praised the same aspects of the book, which led me to believe that these aspects really work. None of the few negative evaluations mentioned the same flaws, which led me to believe that those perceived flaws were more a matter of individual taste than objective fact.

I fully realize that everything I've cited above is also just a matter of opinion--they don't really prove that your opinion is wrong. Perhaps, after all, you are just one of those that can see that this would-be emperor is showing the full monty. Who knows? But I am sure that I am sure that you can understand if I put more weight on the views of those who have expressed supportive opinions or detailed, unemotional criticism that I can learn from. I'm sure it is what you would do if the shoe were on the other foot?

But even if I had reason to find your more negative views valid, you faulted me for failing at things that I only consider as means to ends and praised me for that which I consider a gift of the gods. As a lover of the Great Gatsby and the Alexandria Quartet, I live to read gem-like phrases. To be told that I have written one gem-like phrase (which my editor tried to delete, believing them pretentious in a horror novel) on every fifth or tenth page--when so many writers, many of them infinitely more successful than I, have never even written one--is a compliment beyond price, and I am surely in your debt for it.

You also, as I have allude to before, devoted more space to me than you have to writers whose work you like--and that, too, is a compliment. It is also something that can arouse curiosity--which makes it good publicity. That you claim to be a liar and that your negative comments can't be taken seriously adds confusion, which only deepens the curiosity. (Were I a cynical man, I would believe that you mean every negative thing you say but claim not to as a way of avoiding the consequences of those comments--a few buttressed by the fact that you call your nicer log "Equivocation" and your nasty log "Unequivocally Yours"--but I am not a cynical man.) Often, out of simple curiosity, people will as readily read something that has received wretched reviews as they will something that has been praised to high heaven--just to see if it is as bad as they say. And sometimes they come to the matter with such low expectations that, if the book isn't absolutely as bad as the reviewer said, they end up finding the work to be better than it actually is. That some people find your views repulsive and the way you express them obnoxious makes it likely that some of them will be favorably inclined to me, just to spite you.

So, you see, I didn't just reprocess your criticisms into unintended and unconscious compliments--which would have been a form of denial, and thus a weakness to avoid. I was speaking truth, as I perceive it.

You are, by the way, partial right about my statement concerning money and happiness. Like most aphorisms, in its effort to be striking it sacrifices complexity, and thus distorts the truth. I must, however with the way you re-phrase it. I, too, have been both broke and flush--and I definitely prefer flush; and I am perfectly aware that having money protects one from many causes of unhappiness. But simultaneously being rich and unhappy does not necessarily make one stupid. One of my neighbors has just lost her lover of twenty years, after a long, painful struggle with lung cancer. While I am sure that she is grateful that she is not suffering hunger or homelessness, she is suffering a pain no amount of money can take away--and this does not make her stupid or neurotic. I'm sure there millions of people just like her. As long as we haven't found away of curing old age, sickness, unrequited love, and unrealized dreams, suffering will be inevitable--and to blame a horror writer for making pessimistic statements is like blaming a fish for swimming--there will be those whose anguish no amount of money can ease. So the more precise reworking of my statement should be: "Money can't always guarantee happiness; it can, in most cases, guarantee comfortable places to suffer in". (By the way, you missed the opportunity to criticize me for writing as two sentences a statement that should have been written as a single sentence, its two independent clauses separated by a semi-colon or a dash. And you referred to it as a pretty, pointless ... statement, when I am pretty sure you meant to say petty, pointless ... statement.) I would add that money can't buy you love; it can only buy you a reasonable facsimile thereof. And then go further, and say: that in world where suffering is inevitable, having a comfortable place to cry and bemoan one's fate is no small comfort--think of how many are suffering right this very minute, and in uncomfortable circumstances to boot--and that the reasonable facsimile money can buy you often comes in a better looking package than the genuine love your money can't buy.

Be the same token, your statement about the non-existence of innocent victims also distort the truth. While it can be said, for example, that America brought 9/11 on itself by its foreign policy, and that the American's who died there made themselves complicit with their victimization by electing the leaders that created that foreign policy, I wonder if the foreigners who died there--particularly those from Islamic countries, some of them doubtless sympathetic to Osama and the Taliban, perhaps forced by business reasons to go to the world trade center--couldn't be described as "innocent victims?" And what about the first few people who went to pick-up a bit of petrol at their friendly neighborhood gas station at got their brains blown out by the sniper? It is, perhaps, more accurate to say that many victims unwittingly participate in their victimization.

I must also mention, while I'm pointing out misstatements, that Adrian Savage+horror and Adrian savage+novel come up respectively as the sixty-third and fifty-second entries on a Google Search. Adrian savage+pulp horror does come up as number one--which is no so surprising considering that we live in a world where the works of Jim Thompson and Chester Himes are taken seriously (not that they don't deserve to--they do) and therefore the word "pulp" is now only used to refer to works published in a certain kind of magazine at a certain period of publishing history; it no longer refers to the quality or the style of the work.

I have no objection to you using our correspondence on your log, as long as you don't mention me e-mail address--I have no desire to fight off computer viruses. Sorry you had to wade through all of this to get to this statement, but you can consider that my little revenge. Besides, denying the reader satisfaction until the last possible moment is one of those things they keep pounding into our heads at "remedial plotting class".

And please do not think of me as kind. Those who know me do not think of me that way; they think of me as sadistically honest--which is the truth. In fact, I often find that kindness is an overrated virtue; it often prevents us from telling others things that they really need to hear for their own improvement; it is often a way of avoiding the consequences that come from speaking truthfully; and it's also often a way of trying to convince the allegedly all knowing God that we are better people than we actually are. On the other hand, however, kindness and gentlemanly conduct can sometimes be the deadliest of weapons; I have seen these noble qualities destroy those who were impervious to the sharp retort and the witty slash.

I've had no luck finding anything on Raphael G. Duvall or Creatures of the Night--a book I might enjoy given our differences in taste. I have found some people who like Derleth's (a writer I never thought much of, one way or the other, since I'm not big on writers who work on worlds that have been created by others) Trail of Cthulhu. Opinion and taste once again.

Best of luck with your own literary endeavors.

Happy Samhain,