(urth) Charles Williams
Daniel Petersen
danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com
Mon Dec 17 07:51:06 PST 2012
Oh goodness, yes! In terms of sheer intensity and originality of
imagination, I put him up there with Wolfe and Lafferty and Lewis and
Tolkien (as a theological myth-maker). And I think he possibly veers more
into *weird* fiction (ala Lovecraft, Howard, Hodgson, Machen, etc.) than
the others. Some of his visionary passages are flesh-crawling in their
numinous grotesquery. He's not a great prose writer as a novelist and the
passages can come and go as to stylistic excellence. But overall
incredibly enjoyable to me. His tone is very middle-to-upper-class English
and and the settings are almost Edwardian - a bit like Chesterton or Sayers
if they were writing weird fiction. In fact, Williams is one of the early
practitioners of 'Noird' fiction (noir detective + weird), at least in the
novel *War In Heaven*. In some ways too he's a bit of a prototype for Tim
Powers's version of 'urban fantasy' or 'urban magical realism'. Lewis has
an excellent essay on Williams's fiction in the collection *On Stories*.
I thought I remembered Wolfe mentioning Williams favourably in an interview
once. Anyone know?
-DOJP
On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Antonin Scriabin
<kierkegaurdian at gmail.com>wrote:
> Hello! Is anyone familiar with the work of Charles Williams? From a
> brief look online, he seems to have some similarities to MacDonald, and I
> thought there was a good chance some of you Wolfeans (?) would have some
> input. Any suggestions for a novel of his to start with?
>
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--
Daniel Otto Jack Petersen
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