I was toying around with story passages from a few of my favorite weird writers on the I Write Like website, and its textual analysis generated some bizarre results. For H.P. Lovecraft, I chose the famous opening from "The Call of Cthulhu:"
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and i twas not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining it its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
The result? Lovecraft writes like Arthur C. Clarke! Though his Cthulhu Mythos stories are commonly associated with science fiction, Lovecraft never ventured toward the celestial concepts and prose of Clarke. Fortunately, I didn't have high expectations for these tests.
To see if the generator would do better with Arthur Machen, I submitted the following from
"The White People:" "Do you know," he said, "you interest me immensely? You think, then, that we do not understand the real nature of evil?"
"No, I don't think we do. We over-estimate it and we under-estimate it. We take the very numerous infractions of our social 'bye-laws'--the very necessary and very proper regulations which keep the human company together--and we get frightened at the prevalence of 'sin' and 'evil.' But this is really nonsense. Take theft, for example. Have you any horror at the thought of Robin Hood, of the Highland caterans of the seventeenth century, of the moss-troopers, of the company promoters of our day?
"Then, on the other hand, we underrate evil. We attach such an enormous importance to the 'sin' of meddling with our pockets (and our wives) that we have quite forgotten the awfulness of real sin."
"And what is sin?" said Cotgrave.
"I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?...
Curiously, Arthur's writing is compared to that of another Arthur...Conan Doyle. This is, at least, better than the comparison given with Lovecraft. Conan Doyle was roughly contemporaneous with Machen, and occasionally a slight Holmesian mystery resonates alongside the supernatural in some tales.
Testing out today's authors is just as interesting. For consistency's sake, I went with another American and a Brit. First, this opening from Ramsey Campbell's
"The Same in Any Language:"
The day my father is to take me where the lepers used to live is hotter than ever. Even the old women with black scarves wrapped around their heads sit inside the bus station instead of on the chairs outside the tavernas. Kate fans herself with her straw hat like a basket someone’s sat on and gives my father one of those smiles they’ve made up between them. She’s leaning forwards to see if that’s our bus when he says “Why do you think they call them lepers, Hugh?”
I can hear what he’s going to say, but I have to humour him. “I don’t know.”
“Because they never stop leaping up and down.”
IWL claims that Campbell writes like David Foster Wallace, if this very short snippet of his work is any indication. Not really being familiar with the late Mr. Wallace's work, I can't comment much, only to say that this seems like another mismatched match-up. It doesn't appear that Wallace is a writer of horror or the fantastic at all.
Then there's Thomas Ligotti. Surely, I thought, the website would have to return something obscure and entertaining after inputting this unforgettable scene from
"Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel:"'Now will you leave me?' she said. 'Even for myself there is nothing I can do any longer. You know what I am saying, child. All those years the dreams had been kept away. But you have consorted with them, I know you did. I have made a mistake with you. You let my angel be poisoned by the dreams which you could not deny. It was an angel, did you know that? It was pure of all thinking and pure of all dreaming. And you are the one who made it think and dream and now it is dying. And it is dying not as an angel, but as a demon. Do you want to see what it is like now?' she said, gesturing toward a door that led into the cellar of her house. 'Yes, it is down there because it is not the way it was and could not remain where it was. It crawled away with its own body, the body of a demon. And it has its own dreams, the dreams of a demon. It is dreaming and dying of its dreams. And I am dying too, because all the dreams have come back.'
Getting Dan Brown returned left me understandably confused and slightly shocked (and not in a good way). I decided soon after that these exercises are far more futile than they are fun. To call the technology "hit and miss" would be vastly overstating its power. But, hey, at least the machines are a long way off from being able to outwit mankind's analytical abilities in comparative literature.
-Grim Blogger
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