THE WILDCLAW KENNETH HITE INTERVIEW
Friday, December 12, 2008
Interviewer: Charlie Athanas

Kenneth Hite

"(Charley Sherman's) decisions sort of build out the city of Arkham and what’s going on, with the witch cult and the disappearing babies every May Eve and the whole rest of it. Giving it that sort of… what I told Charley - invert noir. Where you’ve got this dark secret that encompasses the whole town and the people who find out about it are literally the two least powerful characters in the entire play – Gilman and the girl. So, I thought that was structurally really interesting and obviously anything with blood and monsters and hyperspace is great fun to watch and they did a great job with that part too."

"On the other hand, some people come to Lovecraft for the sense of mounting dread and personal annihilation that Lovecraft does in his stories as well. Something like Gilman in Dreams in the Witch House and the play carries that off terrifically."

Charlie Athanas: Welcome to WildClaw’s BLOOD RADIO and our interview with Kenneth Hite. Ken is a role-playing game designer and Pelgrane Press published his award-winning game, Trail of Cthulhu this year. So, Ken, thank you for taking the time to talk to BLOOD RADIO tonight.

Kenneth Hite: Thank you for having me.

CA: Let’s start with something really obvious here. I understand you’ve actually seen WildClaw’s The Dreams in the Witch House.

KH: Yes, I was the Weird Tales designated driver for the premiere and Weird Tales was giving out free issues of the magazine and I’m the Lovecraft columnist for the magazine, so I showed up and did a little filigree of an introduction to the play about Lovecraft’s story and what it was about and got to see the play with everybody else.

CA: And what did you think of it?

KH: I thought it was very interesting and it was great fun. I thought that Charley Sherman, the writer, had done a very commendable and interesting job of opening the story out, because so much of what happens in Dreams in the Witch House is very internal to the character. His decisions sort of build out the city of Arkham and what’s going on, with the witch cult and the disappearing babies every May Eve and the whole rest of it. Giving it that sort of… what I told Charley - invert noir. Where you’ve got this dark secret that encompasses the whole town and the people who find out about it are literally the two least powerful characters in the entire play – Gilman and the girl. So, I thought that was structurally really interesting and obviously anything with blood and monsters and hyperspace is great fun to watch and they did a great job with that part too.

CA: Well, great, I’m glad you had a good time. So the obvious question here to ask in terms of Chicago is – could tell our listeners how Lovecraft relates to Chicago and is there any relationship to Chicago theatrical entertainment at any point in his career?

KH: Well, Chicago theatrical entertainment – probably the most direct connection to Lovecraft comes from Fritz Leiber who was one of his correspondents and who basically created the genre of urban fantasy. While working in Chicago he wrote the story “Smoke Ghost”, which was set essentially on the Chicago El. There are strong elements of Chicago in his great fantasy city of Nehwon and some of the other fantasies that he wrote. He was one of Lovecraft’s correspondents and his father Fritz Leiber, Sr., was a well-known Shakespearean actor who Lovecraft actually saw in performance. So that’s probably the direct connection to Chicago Theater.

The other Chicago connection to Lovecraft obviously is Weird Tales Magazine, which was published out of Chicago and edited out of Chicago starting in 1923. And Lovecraft, from very early on, was one of the dominant voices in that magazine. He was actually invited by the publisher to become its editor in 1924, but he couldn’t imagine a fate worse than having to live in Chicago. And given the fates he could imagine that really says something. He turned the job down and it went to someone who then made Lovecraft’s later career a living hell by rejecting his stories. So I’m not sure if he made the right decision on that level, but he certainly would have hated the weather. He is basically unable to take the cold in any format and I think that the first couple of Chicago winters would have driven him back out to Providence again.

CA: Horror, true horror… Well, here’s a question for you. Have any other attempts been made that you know of to stage Lovecraft live and if there were have how successful were they?

KH: Just in this city I’ve seen a puppet show version of “The Music of Erich Zann”, which was actually really good. It was Dramaton was the name of the theatre troupe and they did that very well and very interestingly. Erich Zann obviously is a very stagy story, because it all takes place fundamentally in one room. I haven’t seen or heard of a play as ambitious as Witch House being done. Witch House obviously a bigger story in a lot of ways, because it goes to hyperspace, for gosh sakes. And you’ve got the dream sequences, which WildClaw did with lighting and scrims and some other things really effectively and really, really well I think. And sound cues. And that’s the kind of thing I think you need to have a sort of bigger vision for and work a little harder at. I imagine that American regional theaters being what they are someone has done some Lovecraft stuff, but the only other thing that I’ve seen here has been that “Music of Eric Zann” that I mentioned.

CA: What exactly is it that Lovecraft fans take away from his stories? And the Part Two of that question is – was WildClaw remotely successful at achieving those kinds of things they’re looking for in a Lovecraft presentation?

KH: The answer to the first part of that answer is there are as many answers as there are individual Lovecraft fans. Like any great work of literature you get different things out of it. People who read Edgar Allan Poe or Shakespeare or Dickens or anybody else, some people read it for the language, some people read it for the concepts and the ideas, some people read it for a look into a time and a place and a mindset. For Lovecraft there are people whose biggest hit is what he calls the “cosmic dread” of the stories. Just the whole notion that mankind is an insignificant, meaningless speck in history and in space and that’s very hard to make a play about, because obviously plays generally are about human beings.

CA: Right.

KH: It’s tough to combine cosmoses and human stories effectively. On the other hand, some people come to Lovecraft for the sense of mounting dread and personal annihilation that Lovecraft does in his stories as well. Something like Gilman in Dreams in the Witch House and the play carries that off terrifically. So I think a lot of it is - what are you bringing to Lovecraft? What are you taking away from Lovecraft? And it’s almost a question of the medium. I mean some mediums can do some things that other media can’t. Lovecraft can do things in prose that no one’s ever going to be able to do onstage.

CA: Right.

KH: There are a lot of things being carried away from The Dreams in the Witch House play, so I think people were able to carry a lot of stuff. Like I said, there were blood and monsters for people who like that. There was compelling human destruction for people who like that. I think that tonally it isn’t as purely intellectual as Lovecraft’s story is, but again, how well would that adapt to a stage presentation? So if what you’re looking at is this sort of mathematical nature of the horror that some Lovecraft critics say that they want, that’s less prevalent, but then I think that’s an inevitable constraint staging it as opposed to reading it.

CA: Right. Do you see a current heir to Lovecraft in the horror genre today? Is there anybody you could say is filling his footsteps or able to claim his throne at this point?

KH: Well, I think everyone in the horror genre is in his footsteps, because there are such huge, immense footsteps. I mean everyone from Clive Barker to Stephen King to Dan Simmons, all those guys are basically plowing soil that Lovecraft explored and turned over and, in many cases, actually created. You know, Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, Caitlin R. Kiernan, all these people are basically still looking at things Lovecraft discovered. He’s the Isaac Newton or the Galileo of the horror field. And I don’t think there is any question about that, certainly for the 20th Century.

In terms of who is the one guy now who is the most Lovecrafty or the king of being that I think Thomas Ligotti has an excellent claim to that throne. The short story writer whose prose, if anything, better and more evocative than Lovecraft and whose concepts are, if anything, are wilder and almost less adducible just to explanation and understanding than Lovecraft. He doesn’t have Lovecraft’s patience with plot, I think, and he doesn’t have that sort of storytelling discipline that Lovecraft brought to a lot of his stuff, but his work is terrifying and brilliant and it’s just amazingly well written. So I think Thomas Ligotti is your man if you are looking for one guy writing now who is worthy of consideration in the same breath.

CA: Great. Well, we’ve got time for one more question actually. It’s gone really quickly.

KH: Sure.

CA: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your role-playing game, Trail of Cthulhu?

KH: Okay. Trail of Cthulhu is essentially an attempt to burrow into the question of investigating mysteries. In a procedural or a mystery story the problem is never - do you find the clue? It’s what do you make the clue mean to you. How do you interpret it? And in most role-playing games that has not happened. You have to roll to find the clue or you roll to get the suspect to talk or roll to follow the bad guys. In Trail of Cthulhu you automatically find the clues and then putting it together is what gets you into trouble and fights with Shagoth.

So fundamentally that was the approach. It takes the Cthulhu mythos and sets it in the world of the 1930’s against a backdrop of global depression and rising fascism and the rest of that. So I think thematically it’s very strong in that respect and then I tried to bring at the very least what the last twenty, thirty years of the Cthulhu mythos has been back into the game. It’s obviously based on Sandy Peterson’s masterpiece Call of Cthulhu, which is the greatest role-playing game ever. What this fundamentally is is Kurosawa’s Ran to Sandy Peterson’s King Lear.

CA: Okay.

KH: At best. It’s hopefully a remake that makes you look at the original source material. And that’s what we tried to do. And also to present mystery stories and investigative stories that are suitably terrifying and god-awful.

CA: Well, I really wish you luck with that. I hope you do really well with it. I notice you’ve already won awards for it.

KH: Yes, we’ve won two Silver Ennie Awards for writing and rules. Shared with my rules creator, Robin Laws, who built the engine on which I structured the game around.

CA: All right, well congratulations on that. Well, Ken thank you for taking the time to talk to us, I really appreciate it and we’ll talk again soon I hope.

KH: Okay, yeah, absolutely.

 

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