“Being chosen to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association is a good in itself. In a strange way it is also frightening. If you’re anything like me—and if you are, then you have my condolences—there’s an element of the uncanny to it, as if it were one of those things that happens only to other people. In summary, I accept this honor as a token that my labors were appreciated by others with whom I share a peculiar likeness.



I’ve been a member of the HWA off and on since the beginning, and the last time I joined was around the time that Rocky was president and in the sad process of selling off his Stephen King collection to deal with the progression of the ALS that affected his ability to physically function and then cruelly murdered him. I have a reputation for the pessimism that’s so conspicuous in my fiction and was the basis of my nonfiction title The Conspiracy against the Human Race. The origins of that pessimism are somewhat various, but perhaps the major reason is the suffering that life visits on people like Rocky Wood. I’m not bothered by criticism of my grim view of life, which is usually doled out by reviewers who seemingly haven’t experienced real suffering—or perhaps lack the imagination and compassion to appreciate the suffering of others—and believe that I’m an advocate for suicide. What I am is someone who’s pro-choice when it comes to both suicide and abortion, though I don’t think I can be accused of promoting the former, if only because it is invariably problematic in its methods. If anything, I’m an advocate of doctor-assisted euthanasia as for those who desire it, because for so many this option alleviates the fear of being abandoned to depend on their own devices, completely alone in the most profound sense of the word, and perhaps even unable to successfully escape the pain that has driven them to seek a way out of a world that’s going to evict us all at some point anyway. Undoubtedly, what I’ve found most gratifying in my writing life has been hearing from readers who express sincere gratitude to me for expressing a worldview they believed themselves to be alone in discerning and even embracing. Any number of writers might have provided them with the same consolation, but because their reading was focused on horror fiction I was the one who served as someone who assured them they were not isolated in how they thought and felt. This is how it was for me when I discovered Lovecraft, if only because his works most overtly and intensely confirmed, to reference H. P. Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu, that I wasn’t the only one to conceive and experience “terrifying vistas of reality,” which began in earnest during my teens. Since the advent of email, I’ve been amazed at how many readers and writers of supernatural horror fiction with whom I’ve communicated have lived with some type of emotional affliction. I’d like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation for the section on the HWA website that compiles some documentation on this observation in the form of essays and interviews on this subject.”