Hollow Earth Expeditions: Solid All the Way Through
“The audience knows the truth. The world is simple, miserable, solid all the way through. But if you can fool them, even for a second… then you can make them wonder. And you get to see something very special.”
The Prestige (2006)
The second of the two epigraphs in Notes from Underground comes from Christopher Nolan’s 2006 film about dueling Victorian stage magicians, The Prestige. It’s a flick I really love, even though I am often lukewarm on Nolan’s movies. There are quite a few reasons for this, besides that I am just a sucker for the trappings of stage magicians.
There’s very little to do with the Hollow Earth in The Prestige, but there is the above quote from the movie, which captures the other major theme that I wanted to explore in Notes from Underground.
If the Walden quote was about the Hollow Earth being a metaphor for our own interiority, then this one is about exploring the idea that it would be worth it to learn that there was real magic in the world, even if that revelation was frightening or painful.
For this, as I often am, I am indebted to a review that Joey Comeau wrote many years ago for Ti West’s The Innkeepers (2011) – another movie I love from a director I’m generally not so fond of. While describing the lure of being scared, and playing Bloody Mary, Comeau writes:
“There’s something really satisfying about that desire to terrorize yourself, because it also feels like it will be worth it if those bloody fingers come through the mirror and wrap around your throat. The world will be so much more magical and interesting, and so you kind of hope that it does work.”
As I’ve said elsewhere, if my fiction has a central thesis statement, that might be it.
In The Prestige, a similar sentiment takes a slightly different form as one magician explains to another that the audience wants to be fooled. They want that second of uncertainty, of wonder, because without it the world is “simple, miserable, solid all the way through.”
It was that “solid all the way through” that made me link this desire with the Hollow Earth. After all, what is the opposite of “solid all the way through” if not hollow? And, going back to my earlier statement about dinosaurs at the center of the earth, could I write a suite of stories in which the Hollow Earth exemplified that longing for a moment of wonder – even when it was painful, even when it was terrifying?
I think this was the initial building block that led to my own Hollow Earth being a place as much metaphysical as physical. A world that both exists and doesn’t, that is eternal and perishing, that touches all points in time and occupies none of them.
There are moments in my story “Hollow Earths” that explore another quote, this one from Clive Barker, explaining the “ambience [that] is essentially ‘Gothic’ in tone” of Hellraiser, where “even the most mundane environment may be transformed into an antechamber of hell at the tolling of a bell.”
For me, that has always been one of the most resonant aspects of the first Hellraiser film: the sense that the supernatural is not a separate thing, not an intrusion into the rational world, but rather a part of that world that is always there, just under the floorboards, just behind the walls, waiting for the right key to make its presence known. And that key, of course, is desire, obsession, longing.
It’s an idea that permeates so much of Clive Barker’s work – Candyman is, after all, just another variation on Bloody Mary. The transcendent power of horror is perhaps never expressed any better than near the end of Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities”:
“And if it killed them, this monster, then at least they would have glimpsed a miracle, known this terrible majesty for a brief moment. It seemed a fair exchange.”
Clive Barker might be the most unlikely of all my big inspirations, not just in Notes from Underground but in my fiction writing in general, as I rarely dabble in any of the things he is best known for – namely, sex and body horror.
But those aren’t the only things Barker did, and the transcendent elements of his work that I’ve been discussing here have left a huge impact on my own writing, and shaped my approach to the supernatural, the horrific, the grotesque.
For the most part, when it comes to Notes from Underground, it’s these themes I’m drawing from, rather than any particular tale, but for “Leandra’s Story,” the new novelette which ties the collection together, I had one very specific touchstone – one that I’ve visited before.
“The Last Illusion” is one of the stories in Barker’s landmark collection The Books of Blood. While not necessarily my favorite from those tomes, it might be the one I’ve sampled from the most often.
Adapted by Barker himself into the 1995 film Lord of Illusions, it concerns a stage magician who seemingly dies while performing a dangerous trick – a setup that will feel quite familiar to anyone who has read “Leandra’s Story,” although where I went with it is, I think, very different.
Elements (albeit different ones) from “The Last Illusion” also informed my story “Remains,” which originally appeared in Strange Aeons magazine more than a decade ago, and was reprinted in Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, my first collection from Word Horde.
Who knows how many more stories it will find its way into before I’m done?
