“As far as I’m concerned, all the literatures of the fantastic are related — perhaps in a parodic, perhaps in a dancing-dervish fashion — to the planet itself. They are planetary fictions. When I think of horror over the last 60 years since the end of World War II, it strikes me that the central function is not the traditional recovery that fantasy is involved in exemplifying and that so much literature necessarily gives us to believe is possible, but that the central function of horror is coping with amnesia. That the world we have been moving into is a world that has progressively evacuated most of the meanings that allow people to make sense of their lives. That the dissolution of the boundaries between privacy and the rest of the world is part of the same reduction of the capacity of memory to make sense, the capacity of our cultures not to create what I’ve called in a couple of pieces ‘cenotaphic fiction.’ Much of the world that has been created since World War II is a set of cenotaphs, monuments to that which is not there: vacancies, absences.” -John Clute