Pointless Philosophical Asides

The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath

2012-01-31T22:43:00.001Z

"The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath", first published in Beyond the Wall of Sleep, 1943.

This is the the thirty-third entry in my read-through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

Because of the way the Necronomicon volume is ordered – by publication date rather than writing date – this comes right at the end of the anthology, rather than where it fits in the story of HPL's development as a writer. On the one hand that's a bit of a shame – immediately after this he wrote The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and embarked on the run of stories on which his reputation largely rests, and this story is clearly a turning point.

On the other hand, it's an interesting coda for all the thinking I've done about HPL the man, and how much of him resides in his fiction. They're both interesting topics and I'll take them in turn.

This is HPL's first serious attempt to write a long, novel-length narrative. He's making use of his “Dunsanian” material here, trying to stitch it all together into something larger than the sum of its parts. It's a curious affair – while Ulthar and Sarnath have previously been hinted to have existed in Earth's distant past, they're now transplanted to an explicit dream world, entered through some kind of a trance or astral projection. The city of Celephais has a more dream-oriented origin – being the dream city of King Kuranes in the story of the same name, another typically poetical tale of a questing boy who seeks his lost youthful paradise – but here Kuranes becomes a waking world associate of Carter who offers aid on his travels. (This story of the same name is not included in this volume, a key omission as it's probably the best of the Dunsanian stories.)

It looks to me like HPL was attempting to create a fantasy world of the coherent type that Robert E Howard was beginning to make use of in the Conan stories. Randolph Carter comes across at first as an adventurer in a portal fantasy world, not a million miles from that other Carter, John, who sojourned so often in Mars – I suspect HPL had those stories in his sights as well. The time of writing is right – he was desperate to make money and must have been thinking hard about the sort of story that really sold – and there's a lot of adventurousness, in the beginning at least, that feels like HPL's trying to map his poetical style on to the burgeoning swords and sorcery genre.

He keeps the focus on excitement in this story in a way that we haven't seen in his other Dunsanian fantasies – it threatens at times to become action packed, even. The section that begins with Carter's kidnap by the mysterious traders (who turn out to be beast men from Leng) through to the final battle between the ghouls and the moonbeasts is pretty exciting stuff, and written with an eye for action that's rare for HPL.

Even so, it's not HPL's natural metier. There are frequent longueurs and its HPL's eye for the bizarre and outré that's the chief pleasure here. The exotic world of dreams is well-furnished with languid Orientalist fantasy cities, bizarre creatures and extraordinary happenings ladled on thickly throughout. There's some fine writing around threatening landscapes that approach “The Colour Out of Space”, and the creatures are as exquisitely grotesque as anything HPL has described elsewhere – particularly the abhorrent moonbeasts, which are quite wonderfully repugnant and come with all sorts of unpleasant hints about their habits.

HPL brings back his ghouls from Pickman's Model and adds brilliantly to the ambiguous portrayal in that story. He provides a fine balance between their role as stalwart allies and disgusting corpse eaters that really asks the reader to consider their own visceral reactions and the quiet dignity of the creatures of the night. He also uses them to tease us with the metaphysics of his portal fantasy world, as their tunnels seem to be another route between the two worlds. It's a puzzling idea that HPL toys with, throwing it out there without having to tell us how it works, which adds to the pleasing sense of general unreality.

Personally I'm not a fan of highly developed fantasy worlds of the Middle Earth, the Hyborian Age or Shanara type, but I find HPL's Dreamland really effective. It doesn't aspire to the kind of faux reality of other fantasy worlds, with “realistic” history, geography and philology (that are usually anything but). Instead, it acknowledges its own unreality and the fairytale nature of it all without quite tipping over into the completely allegorical as the other Dunsanian stories do. It's interesting to note that Brian Lumley wrote a series of more or less straight swords and sorcery novels in the setting (which I read long ago and didn't think much of – they're rather pedestrian compared to HPL's fervid and vivid imaginings).

It's a shame, then, that it doesn't quite work. There are a few problems with it, and they reflect some of the elements that make his contemporaries who did write successfully in this genre so effective.

For a start, despite his willingness to go for adventure, he has neither the talent nor inclinations of Howard in this direction. Carter is an HPL substitute and is thus never going to have the natural exuberance of any of Howard's action men. Carter relies on his allies to do the fighting, and it's usually seen from a distance of time or place. HPL just can't infuse the large scale action with the sort of energy that Howard brings to battles and wars, and it all seems a bit half-hearted.

Clark Ashton Smith, the other of the Weird Tales big three, was a master at the kind of dreamy, woozy exoticism that HPL's aiming for here. While HPL is arguably better at the simply bizarre (Smith has his moments!) HPL doesn't have the same appetite for louche sensuality that Smith brings to his own stories. Despite the weirdness, it's all a bit prim and juvenile. The rivalry between the zoogs and the cats, for example, smacks a little of the nursery and therefore sits uncomfortably with the charnel house horrors of the ghouls and the fleshy unwholesomeness of the moonbeasts.

The key missing element is eroticism – there are no harem girls here, none of the houris and dancers that populate Smith's stories, none of the doomed love affairs. In fact, typically for HPL, there are no females at all and in this setting they are really missed. Howard was like a masturbatory adolescent (only in fantasy fiction could that be considered a compliment!) while Smith's stories revel in an appetite for moth-to-the-flames doomed love. HPL's gynophobia and misogyny worked brilliantly for him in the context of his horror, but it's possible that he was just too uptight to let that out in this context. As a consequence, this story feels a little flat.

More cripplingly it's often quite boring. For all that there are effective passages, there's also a lot of turgid stuff description and flowery prose that does nothing. In fairness, HPL did give up on this story, and perhaps with another draft or two he'd have trimmed the dull sections of stentorian pretend history in the Dunsanian mode and been left with a leaner story, but he didn't and so this is sometimes a trial to read.

It looks to me (and I'm reading a lot into all this, I know) that HPL realises towards the end that this is going nowhere – perhaps at about the time that Carter's grabbed by a Nightgaunt and whisked off to Kadath to meet with Nyarlathotep at the tower of unknown Kadath itself. He abandons the adventurous tale he's been struggling to tell up to now, and instead plunges into an interior journey, articulating recent revelations about his life and his writing.

At the time of writing Kadath, he was in the process of leaving New York and his marriage to Sonia Greene and returning to his old stamping grounds in Providence. It's hard not to read the end of this story as a moment of self-knowledge articulated through HPL's complex scheme of fantasy. In the end, apparently doomed by Nyarlathotep, Carter realises that to escape his doom – in the heart of the primal chaos, Azathoth – he has to merely to wake up. When he does so, he finds himself back in his beloved Providence. He sees the quest for old gods and exotic places as folly and realises that he has everything he needs right there.

Here we have the questing boy truly fulfilled, saved from the horror that meets so many others and yet turning away from the retreat into childhood that they opt for elsewhere (and that, in fact, awaits Carter himself in The Gate of the Silver Key).

It's a hopeful to note on which to leave old HPL. He seems by the end of this story to be in a place that feels right, a man in the place he needs to be to go forward. It wasn't to last, of course, and HPL's demons were never far behind. He was never truly free from the lost childhood of relative prosperity, the scars of neurosis and shame piled on to him by his mother, the cracking horrible panic that gripped him in adolescence, the lingering feelings of self-loathing and his inability to reach out and love anyone or let himself be loved.

He had, by any accounts a pretty miserable life, deserved better, always was his own worst enemy in most respects. He poured it into his fiction, of course, using it seemingly unconsciously to fuel the horrors of his fiction. You've got to wonder if forty-seven years of unhappiness were worth a handful of stories, but I guess he made the best of the hand he'd been dealt.

I've spent a year with him, and I'm going to miss his self-deprecating presence in the months to come. Good night, dreamer – I hope you found Celephais at last!

All that said, I'll be back soon with a look at his essay Supernatural Horror In Literature for a final summing on what we've all learned... won't that be fun!

The header illustration for this post is the cover of a comics adaptation of this story by Jason Thompson which I haven't read but which looks really cool. You can find out more here.

Panoptica - two new reviews!

2012-01-22T17:23:00.001Z

Well, newish. I haven't perhaps been as on to it about this, time being pressing, as ever.

Anyway, over on amazon.co.uk Mike Davey gives it four stars saying "This book's style is Swift meets Dick with a dash of Vonnegut. A great first novel with satire thats cuts like a katana!"

Meanwhile, on amazon.com Jeffrey Hewitt (author of A Reflection of Glass) gives it another four star review. "This is an excellent first novel! The pace is insane - like a clown on a downhill slope riding on an out-of-control train greased with lightning, satire, and sharp British wit."

Panoptica has international appeal, and is good for what ails you! And a print-on-demand version is coming soon - luddites, watch this space!

My Reading Year 2011

2012-01-22T17:11:00.002Z

Well, all in all, 2011 wasn't quite as horrible as 2010. I have a new job and will be shortly moving house, so it's all change here. A change is as good as a holiday, as they say, although having cashed-in a week of leave at my old place before starting at my new job, I have to wonder if that's true.

At the end of the year, I self-published Panoptica as an ebook on amazon, thus surfing the breaking wave of publishing phenomenon or throwing my lot in with a passing fad, depending on which way the future goes. To be honest, it's hard to imagine the impact of ereader going away. Maybe it'll all be through more—sophisticated tablet computer things, but it's clearly here to stay and has some expansion yet to do.

It's nice, however, to have it out of my hair, buried in the torrent of slurry, so I can move on to the next project. I'm not sure if my own entry comes a little late, and publicity remains a challenge, but at least it's out there. If you're a regular reader of this blog, I urge you to buy a copy – I mean, at worst it'll sit on your hard-drive harming no one. You might even enjoy reading it, but if you do, don't forget to leave a review on amazon! (A hard copy version is coming soon!)

Okay, that's the sponsorship over with. Let's get serious. Let's talk about books!

Cutting to the chase, the best books I read in 2011 are:

Necronomicon: The Best Weird Fiction of H P Lovecraft
Supergods by Grant Morrison
The Immortalisation Commission by John Gray
The Big Knockover & Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett

This year my reading has been dominated by H P Lovecraft. In April, I bought myself a copy of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Fiction of H P Lovecraft, and decided to read all the stories, in order, to re-acquaint myself with his writing. It's not just Lovecraft I've been reading, though, as in my pursuit of understanding HPL, I've read snatches of M R James, Lord Dunsany, Poe, Arthur Machen and sundry classic (which is to say, out of copyright) spook writers that influenced him in one way or another.

I'm not sure what it's all in aid of, really, perhaps just satisfying myself that I understand such a great geek touchstone properly. He's one of those writers I've lived with for a long time, thirty years or more, and read sporadically, usually consuming and never reflecting, so I wanted a chance to chew it over and get everything I could from him.

I'm glad I did it. I've certainly come away with a better understanding of his work and it's challenged a lot of my received wisdoms (while confirming others!) I'm not quite done with him of course, I've still got Dream Quest for Unknown Kadath to write about, and then I want to read his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature and make my final comments. While my final analysis will stretch into the early part of this year, I definitely think that 2011 was my year of Lovecraft!

When I'm done with this, I suspect I'll do what I so often do with authors: place HP:L back on the shelf and probably never read anything by him again. As the years have gone by, I've noticed this pattern in my reading: I'll read something – a subject or an author – obsessively for a short time and then lose interest, more or less.

I did that with Philip K Dick, and on reflection I think I've arrived at that point with Jack Vance. It makes me feel a bit like a lightweight: after I've read the hits and a bit of commentary, I tend to start getting bored and drift away. It's the curse of the dilettante, I guess.

Grant Morrison

Another writer who's maybe heading that way is Grant Morrison. For a long time I wasn't much impressed with him. I enjoyed Zenith quite a lot and Doom Patrol mostly, but the first few issues of The Invisibles didn't impress me much, perhaps because I was beginning to lose interest in that kind of psychedelic conspiracy stuff that looked (and looks!) to me like it had been strip-mined in the 80s. I think I was also losing interest in the “straight and normal is wrong, kinky and freaky is right!” that was so appealing to me in my teens and twenties.

However, I think it was after reading DC's weekly 52 that I started getting more interested in what he was up to. After this I read Seven Soldiers of Victory and Final Crisis, in 2010 which got me really excited me about his work, so I followed his run on Batman, taking in Batman RIP and then the fantastic Batman & Robin.

I've bailed out of the Bat-books since (Paul Cornell? Seriously, that's like getting Wilbur Smith to write the sequel for Ulysses) and I kind of lost interest in Batman Inc, as I felt I'd had enough Batman by then (never a favourite character of mine anyway). I'm reading Action and waiting to see what else he's got up his sleeve, and I want to read his JLA run, but it could be I am done with Grant for now.

Part of the reason for this is Supergods, his book of comics history, autobiography and (for want of a better word) philosophy. Depending on how seriously you take his occult stuff, it's a sharp and insightful book into comics in general and into Grant's creative processes generally. As a history of comics it's maybe a bit contentious, and it's certainly no masterpiece of philosophy, but as an examination of the creative process it's one of the best literary autobiographies I've read.

It's the sort of book I really like, and is a symptom of the way I consume authors. Not only do I read their own works, I read biographies and accounts by writers of their processes and influences and views. I think I approach them like a puzzle I want to understand. A book like Supergods helps me (or Joshi's HPL: A Life, or that Divine Invasions by Lawrence Sutin on P K Dick) take writers apart and look at the elements that make them tick. It's a specialist interest, I guess, but one I seem to be quite avid about.

However, I now feel like Grant Morrison and H P Lovecraft are puzzles I've solved. I feel like the guy who can do the Rubik's Cube in sixty seconds – once you've mastered it, why would you even bother. It says a lot about the way I approach reading and fiction, I suppose, and maybe why I write reviews and a blog like this. I want fiction that I can engage with, the raises questions and challenges me. If the fiction is too simplistic, or if I've figured out the writer's trick then I'm not interested any more.

It's horribly self-defeating, of course! I'm compelled to “solve” books and writers as my main source of pleasure, but once done all pleasure is sucked out of them. Oh well, there're always more books coming along!

Ghosts and cops

Anyway, I also read a bit of non-fiction around ghosts, folklore and the occult. This began towards the end of 2010, with books like Black Sun, Night's Black Agents and the Penguin Book of Ghosts. I've been thinking long and hard about writing a ghost story, and I suppose I've been looking for ways in, the elements that interest me – I haven't found them yet, but I've enjoyed looking.

Most promising in this regard is The Immortalisation Commission. The tale of the aristocratic spiritualists' attempt to create a new messiah touched a lot of the things that have interested me about the ghostly idea. It touches on some of the issues raised by Madam Blavatsky's Baboon and Master of Mysteries, the biography of Manly P Hall. I can just vaguely feel a bunch of ideas coming together... something around the Golden Dawn lodge established in New Zealand in 1914 and... well, I don't know quite what. We'll leave it all brewing, then. Another few years and I might have something.

Perhaps one of the reasons I haven't found much creative inspiration there, is that my creative attentions are elsewhere. I'm currently writing a crime novel (albeit, a futuristic one, with satire and gags, so not a million miles from my usual territory) and so I've been reading a bit of classic crime, namely Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

These are hugely enjoyable writers, and have done a lot to help me out. The particular insight has been to not worry too much about the clue trail. In these books, the clue trail is often haphazard and entirely arbitrary because the clue trail is not what these books are about. I should have realised this, but it took some deep thinking for me to figure it out. I like to think that I would have gotten there eventually – after all, while writing Panoptica I finally understood out that great comedy comes from character rather than situation, or rather from particular characters in particular situations.

I've also been thinking about the role of the detective in these fictions. I'm writing a first-person private eye type character (I'm aware of the dangers cliché here – that's one of the reasons I've chosen it, in fact) and one of the early criticisms from my writers group on this current project was that the detective character seemed under-developed. I don't spend time going into who he is or where he's from and he doesn't really have much at stake in the mystery itself, except his fee and, occasionally, his life. This really bothered me, as it's true and this particular person is usually spot on with her critiques.

Then I read The Big Knockover & Other Stories. These stories all focus on “The Continental Op”, an unnamed investigator for the Continental Detective Agency in San Francisco. Unnamed! We don't even know his name! This answered that criticism for me: these books aren't about the detective, they're about the events around them. In fact, when they become about the detective themselves they become a different and altogether more conventional and less satisfying fiction – ie, the difference between Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and just about everyone who'e come after (the latest iterations on the BBC and the big screen being a case in point).

The problem of science fiction

One thing you might notice missing from my list is contemporary SF. I haven't read much SF at all this year, and in particular I've stayed away from new SF. One's moods shift and so there's nothing that unusual here, but I think one of the reasons my mood shifted on this occasion was the curdling of my interest in online fandom. After the initial thrill of being cleverer than everyone else wore off, online fandom sucked all the pleasure out of reading SF. SF fans have long flattered themselves for being intellectually open and having bigger and better imaginations than anyone else, but it's just not true. In fact, given their leash SF fans revel in shallow cliché and fruitless recursion; the idea of genre-as-conversation seems to free them from the need of original thinking at all.

In particular, the move of criticism to a large number of wrong-headed and self-regarding blogs (yes, I know...) and, worse still, the knee-jerk circle-jerk of twitter actively works against original thought and new ideas. It encourages a crippling professionalism where writers address the needs of fandom rather than... well, whatever mysterious thing it is that writers are supposed to address, that half-way house between pleasing oneself, pleasing the crowd and pissing everyone off that appears to generate truly great fiction.

My primary bit of evidence here is Lauren Beukes's Zoo City, which was a big disappointment to me. I feel bad banging on about it, because it's not really a bad novel, it just lacks the urgency of a story that needed to be told. Or perhaps more accurately, the urgent story that needed to be told is buried beneath a whole of dull crowd-pleasing genre stuff. It struck me as a novel that sought to please the parasitic structures that surround creativity, be they fandom or the mainstream publishing industry which couldn't give a shit about great books (let alone Great Books) in favour of shifting units. Moxyland was a great book (a Great Book, even) but Zoo City seemed to me a massive wrong step into genre silliness, exacerbated by the flashes of the book that might have been (and which perhaps would have put aside the fantasy elements all together).

This won the Clarke Award over The Dervish House, which I don't want to over-praise but is a better book in pretty much every regard. If the serious SF community really thinks Zoo City is a better book than The Dervish House, then I can't find much common cause. Still, I'm used to being out of step with the popular opinion, I should be used to being the lonely odd ball by now.

Or maybe it's just that I couldn't get Panoptica published without doing it myself – a plague on you, SF establishment!

Looking forward to 2012

Well, not really. Fuck 2012, fuck the future. Still, I feel compelled to comment on what the year ahead may hold. More disappointment, frustration and misery, most likely, but let's look on the bright side for a moment, as alien as that concept is.

It's been a busy year blogging. This was my first full year attempt at blogging about every book I read, and it's turned out to be a huge undertaking. When I decided to take this approach, I thought it would mean I'd blog less, and have more time for my own writing. In fact, although I've written fewer posts, they've been longer than the many posts of last year, and I've written at least as much for the blog in 2011 as I did in 2010. Taken together, these posts amount to a full-length novel.

Today's a good example. It's taken basically the entire productive hours of the day to produce this, and what for? Who's interested in this shit anyway? Even I'm struggling to raise much enthusiasm. That's why this entry's a bit rough – it all seems a bit pointless at the moment.

For this reason, I'll stepping back a bit from blogging this year. Faced with the failure of Panoptica, I need to (sigh!) saddle up and have another go. With all the demands on my time – job, kids, now a house move and massive renovation project – I need to devote this time to fiction. In the meantime, I'm going to try and write more formal reviews for other venues (well, the Zone) and maybe writing more general slurry of blithering opinion rather than addressing particular books. I hope you'll stick around, however meagre my output!

Happy Birthday David

2012-01-09T23:13:00.000Z

Okay, it's a day late, but I just found this awesome version of Life On Mars on youtube. Wow!

From the Parksinson show in 2002, apparently.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

2011-12-21T22:42:00.004Z

"The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", first published in Weird Tales, May-July 1941.

This is the the thirty-second entry in my read-through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

This story is told by one of those distant and all-knowing but unknown narrators that you find a lot in classic stories. It's the the kind of narrator that can say of “none of these colloquies were ocularly witnessed, because the windows were always heavily draped” with a seemingly straight face. It can pose rhetorical questions in rapid succession, like an interrogation:

“was it not of this that Mr. Ward was reminded when his son barked forth those pitiable tones to which he now claimed to be reduced? Who had ever seen Charles and Allen together? Yes, the officials had once, but who later on? Was it not when Allen left that Charles suddenly lost his growing fright and began to live wholly at the bungalow?"

It's a often a gossipy, larky tone, such as when it observes that the local stalwart President Manning attended a violent raid on his neighbour “without the great periwig (the biggest in the county) for which he was noted.” It teases us at times, especially at the beginning with implications of horrors to come:

“And now swiftly followed that hideous experience which has left its indelible mark of fear on the soul of Marinus Bicknell Willett, and has added a decade to the visible age of one whose youth was even then far behind.”

It's almost a character in itself, it reminds me most of all of the narrator in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Can't you just imagine Charles Gray making a meal of this?

“The true madness, he is certain, came with a later change; after the Curwen portrait and the ancient papers had been unearthed; after a trip to strange foreign places had been made, and some terrible invocations chanted under strange and secret circumstances; after certain answers to these invocations had been plainly indicated, and a frantic letter penned under agonising and inexplicable conditions; after the wave of vampirism and the ominous Pawtuxet gossip; and after the patient’s memory commenced to exclude contemporary images whilst his voice failed and his physical aspect underwent the subtle modification so many subsequently noticed.”

It's not only HPL who does this – M R James and William Hope Hodgson do it, too, and I'm sure there are many others using the same kind of observant third-person view-point on the action. It's the kind of voice used by The Crypt Keeper and Uncle Creepy and their dozens of horror comic knock-offs in horror comics, in Alfred Hitchcock trailers, and the those LPs of horror stories narrated by Vincent Price that they used to play on wet afternoons when I was at primary school and videos hadn't been invented.

It's a traditional horror voice for a very traditional horror story. It's got a vampire, old fashioned devilry, doppelgängers, grave robbing and a strong moral centre. To this, HPL adds his own special flavour of deep history, cosmic horror and some of his most exciting action writing. It's a great story of gradual revelations and suspense. It's hugely enjoyable and exciting, with a great mix of action, convincing detail and wonderfully dark supernatural imagination.

There are three basic strands that knit together across history. The closest to the narrator is the Dr Willett as he investigates the strange behaviour of the titular scion of the aristocratic Wards. We remain quite close to Willett, and when the story focuses down to specific actions it's always Willett that we follow.

Through Willett, we observe Ward's comings and goings, and hear about outward behaviour as observed by others, but Ward himself is always remote. We're never directly shown what he's been working on locked in his room nor are we privy to his travels in Europe, but we seem to have amazing access to all this evidence. The meticulous descriptions of family papers, news reports and stories told by gossipy neighbours – all specific and sourced – are so convincing that you can almost feel them passing through your fingers.

The third strand follows the career of the 18th century Providence eccentric Jospeh Curwen and his eventual destruction at the result of an apparent witch hunt in the 1790s. We get get all this at even greater distance than we are from Ward, in fragments of letters and diaries that Ward turns up in the process of his antiquarian delvings. It's the kind of deep history that HPL's so good at, anchoring the story in an intimate knowledge of the people and history of Providence, weaving a tale of witch craft around authentic sounding details about the Revolutionary War, blockaded ports and tax disputes.

Me at 140 Prospect Street, Providence, the model for the Charles Dexter Ward House

However, we're left to fill in even more of the blanks in the story. There's a lot more obvious evil going on than in the Ward case, but HPL uses the fragmentary nature of the historical record to add to the mystery and intrigue. We never really get a good look at exactly what Curwen's up to, but we see the consequences for those that went up against him.

These three elements weave together in a very intricate plot where Curwen's actions in the past give momentum to Ward's research, which in turn is the driver for Willett's investigations. HPL gradually unravels the history and consequences with forensic precession and a stately place. The Narrator is always dropping hints, things don't really start getting bad for Ward until over of a third the way through, and even then we're a bit away from his real mania and demise.

He is destroyed because he did not heed the warning that comes up four times in the story, to make sure we don't miss it: “do not calle up That which you can not put downe”. Ward is another of HPL's prodigies who cannot resist the quest for knowledge. Like Walter Gilman in The Dreams in the Witch House, Edward Darby in The Thing on the Doorstep, the nameless narrator of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and Robert Suydam in The Horror At Red Hook, among others, he's undone by his relentless pursuit of knowledge.

Ward and his compatriots are kind of questing boys, who naively think the world is rational and benign before finding out the worst is true, that they are themselves in fact tainted with an evil too hideous to bear. When they see what they've done, they always try and step back, but it's too late, the hooks are in too deep.

Curwen is the opposite sort to this. He's learned the truth and likes it; he actively seeks the cataclysmically forbidden. He never changes, never sees the error of his ways never experiences the note of horror at what he's become. His is a story of getting progressively more evil as time passes until he gets to the stage where he must be stopped. This usually involves some kind of fatal encounter, often in horrorific circumstances. Ultimately it works out just as badly for him. Ephraim Waite from The Thing On the Doorstep is a similar sort, and so, I suppose is Wilbut Whately in The Dunwich Horror, although I find him a rather more pathetic figure.

Not surprisingly, the story has many autobiographical elements for HPL. There's the topography of Providence, for example, described lovingly here in the present day 1920s and in across the 18th century. And of course, there are elements of Ward's character that have clear echoes of HPL. I've discussed this in the past, of course and as well as the usual antiquarian leanings, precocious talent and aristocratic roots, the character has the predilection for madness the afflicts so many of his subjects.

Ward's disturbance begins to manifest in his late teens, just before he leaves high school from where he's expected to go to college. He doesn't go, but locks himself in his room saying “he had individual researches of much greater importance to make.” He ignores his friends (as much as this lonely moody boy had friends) and pays no attention to appearance or his health. He becomes a virtual hermit.

Lovecraft himself of course, was seized by some kind of anxiety in his last years at thigh school and never graduated at all. In fact, the period 1908 to 1913 – the four years between ages of 18 and 23 – are a complete blank in HPL's life as he dealt with some kind of depressive illness. Joshi in A Life suggests that HPL wasn't doing much of anything in this period. Around 1914 he'd start writing for the amateur press, but in that period he was in his own words, a virtual hermit.

This time line fits Ward to a degree, as well. Instead of going to college, he pursues follows his search for “antiquarian matters” to Europe. He leaves in 1923 when he'd “come of age” and returns in 1925, aged about the same as HPL as he emerged from his shell.

It's the eventual fate of these two characters that intrigues me. HPL edged his way back out into the world with his writing. He seems to have deliberately constructed a diffidently conservative and backward-looking persona. He refers to himself mockingly in his correspondence as an old man; by many accounts he longed to be a Colonial era aristocrat, perhaps fighting on the side of the English.

When Ward emerges from his own madness, he is replaced entirely by a mysterious figure who resembles him, but adopts a curiously archaic manner and pursues relationships by post with contacts in distance places that he rarely meets face to face. He turns out to be what HPL always longed to be, a colonial era aristocrat.

Both characters come through their madness transformed. A similar transformation afflicts the other questing boys and turn is ultimately destroyed by their desire to know more: the narrator of The Shadow Over Innsmouth becomes a raping frog monster, Walter Gilman is made to kill a child and maybe sell his soul, and Edward Darby is forced to become a woman!

I think this is all metaphorical for the pain of lost childhoood. It's the disappointments of the adult world, the responsibilities and confusion. Curwen is the grown up Ward, up to no good in unimaginable ways. HPL imagines his post-madness self as the impostor Curwen, and the original, prodigious original is gone forever.

Interestingly, we get this horror of adulthood from the other end in the Dreamlands stories. Here the quest goes the other way: disenchanted with adult life, the protagonists find their way back to a half-remembered childhood ideal, quite literally in the case of Randolph Carter in The Gate of the Silver Key. There's other examples, too, like the unnamed protagonist of Celephais (not included in this collection) who becomes King Kuranes in his childhood dream city, and Thomas Olney who finds child-like bliss by leaving his inmost self swapping jokes with the Gods when he finds in The Strange High House in the Mist.

I'd almost be inclined to put Robert Pickman into this category, as well, even though there's more than a touch of the questing boy about him. There's no doubt of the horror of his final estate romping with the ghouls, but he never seems that disturbed by the idea. And he ends up on the fringes of the Dreamlands in The Dream Quest for Unknown Kadath, which seems to connect him more with the feel good transformations of the dream stories rather than the harrowing destruction of the horrors.

As it happens I'll be looking at this next. They come next to each other in ordering of writing, too, with Dreamquest first and then The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. He was was obviously trying to master longer tales at that time, and I think he really got it here.

The photo of Charles Gray comes from this site. There's no copyright info so I'm taking the incautious approach and using it. If you own this picture and and wants me to take it down, get in touch.

First review of Panoptica!

2011-12-21T21:11:00.000Z

Amazingly, I got a review on amazon! This one came from a facebook page friend like swap. There was no obligation to read, but I guess the swapper liked the look of it and gave it whirl. Forunately, she liked it!

The Rush At The End by Royston Ellis

2011-12-15T23:13:00.002Z

“To this frank, penetrating analysis of naked human relationships, where a pregnant girl cannot marry the man her father loves, Royston Ellis brings all the qualities which riveted readers of The Flesh Merchants.”

Ah, the 60s! It was a golden era when repression and freedom were mixed in just the right amounts to afford a real sense of liberation. It was it was a time when you really could kick against the pricks, and when there really were pricks to kick against. It was the days when being essentially juvenile, selfish and self-absorbed seemed like a radical act. How things change!

This is a novel about dropping out, turning your back on “the Grey Generation” and following your heart, all the things you ever wanted and denied yourself. It tells the story of Arthur Darby, a law clerk in City in his late fifties, who falls for a young man he meets on the train home one evening. Andrew is a young graduate in his forst job, but finding the conventional life stultifying. They bond over their dissatisfaction. It's not just Arthur's story – though it's mostly his – it's Andrew's story, too. They're both of them coming out and understanding their sexuality, facing the big decision of whether to knuckle under to the Grey Generation's rules and expectations or to follow their real feelings.

However, it's something of a disappointment given the lurid exploitation novel promised by the back-cover blurb and the naked lady on the front.

For a start, the whole idea of gayness has lost pretty much all of its power to shock, at least among the 21st century, post-liberated society I swim around in. I can remember a time when it was still somewhat subversive, when people like my mother thought that having a gay friend was taking some kind of a principled (and deliciously daring) stand. In fairness, my parents were young people before it was all legalised – before novels like The Rush At The End could even be published – and their own journey of accepting was probably somewhat different from people of my generation.

For me, and people of my age, it was just one of a range of post-60s liberal positions that was assumed, a set that included being anti-nuclear weapons and anti-war in general, pro-women's rights, anti-racist and pro-legalisation of drugs. None of these has been fully achieved in the thirty years since I started thinking about this stuff, but at the same time none of them are quite the contested ground they were.

Racism, certainly, was still a fairly popular stance when I was growing up. It's hard to imagine that it was actually debated, as if there was any doubt about right and wrong in the matter, but it was. It's now the soul preserve of the most marginalised or the hopelessly deranged and evil, and even the National Front (or whatever Nick Griffin's lot call themselves these days) try and distance themselves from the idea of prejudice and position themselves as a positive stance on English nationalism (and no, I don't buy it either).

Similarly, being against anti-gay prejudice is a nowadays a pretty mainstream stance. Far from being an exotic feature of one's social circle, gay friends are now entirely unexceptional. I even know gay D&D fans. As a consequence, all the raging against an unfair world the horrible fate that awaits those exposed as homosexualists looks more like a historical curiosity now than the the urgent agenda it might havce looked in 1967. This is not to say that homophobia doesn't still exist, and make life miserable for gay men and women everywhere (the developing world, in particular) but there's not much to expose any more in the middle class English world where you can buy gay porn on the high street.

This book isn't entirely about the misery of coming out though. When Arthur is finally exposed, his work is fine with it – providing he's discrete, of course – and his wife urges them to stay together and invite Andrew to live with them (Amy Darby is a bit wet, to say the least; she's pushed around by her daughter and husband and I was disappointed she wasn't given a bit more backbone at any point). However, Arthur rejects all this and elects instead to move to Ibiza and open a gay bar.

It is an act of genuinely dropping out, leaving bourgeois life behind, but then again the nature of acceptable bourgeois options has changed alot. From today's perspective, Arthur's Ibizan idyll is not so much a a flight to bohemia but rather the sort of lifestyle change that might be featured in Channel 4 lifestyle show of the Place in the Sun variety.

Despite the promises of the cover and the blurb, there's very little enjoyable sleazy camp here. It's all a bit earnest, to be honest, although there are a few feints at the type sensationalism I was hoping for. The novel opens with Arthur – somewhat bizarrely, given what comes later – engaging in a little tube-train frottage with a mini-skirted lovely, perhaps inserted at the start to draw in anyone scanning the first few pages in the book shop. Later, Andrew takes LSD and we get a bit of painful “I'm so out of it!” writing, and a freaked out hippy chick taking her kit off (she turns out to be Arthur's daughter, in a coincidence that betrays the novel's roots in moralistic melodrama, albeit the moralising is thoroughly topsy-turvied from the genre's origins).

The best bit of sordidness occurs fairly early on when Andrew visits Wendells, “a kind of country club for with-it youngsters”, with his hipster flat mate. It's a deliciously kitsch happening, with rock music, a far out dance floor in the basement with a stream running through (called “the Womb”) and clandestine groping in the shadows. “The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and all the popular folk heroes of the sixties visited Wendells from time to time,” we're told.

Even here, though, the author gets all serious on us. Far from being a flesh pit, it's sensibly run as a healthy release for energetic youngsters. “The police were said to look favourably on this phenomenal fun palace of the sixties. At least it provided an outlet for youthful energy which it was acknowledged was needed. … Real club activities took place under the supervision of trained youth officials.” Come on, that's not what we came to hear! And what the hell is a “youth official” anyway?

Fortunately, despite the presence of trained youth officials, Andrew picks up a bird and drives her to an isolated spot to have his way with her across the bonnet of this flatmate's “souped up mini”. This almost had the kind of pornographic thrill I was hoping for from The Rush At The End, but Ellis plays it a bit coy in the sex scenes, even with his protagonists' monumental and life changing experiences.

Maybe if I was a different kind of guy, I might have found some illicit pleasure in the story of Arthur and Andrew. Not inclined to find it thrilling, though, it read more like an issues-led drama than the sordid exploration of forbidden passion I hoped for.

I'd really love to write that sort of book, actually, if there was still a market for it. Not outright porn, that's kind of boring, but a something about suburban lust, the thrills and decadence going on just out of reach of the man on platform at Waterloo. Do they still publish those sorts of book? Sadly, I don't think they do.

I suppose the problem is that it would be trivially easy for moderately prosperous middle aged types to actually live that kind of life. It'd be fairly easy for me to track that kind of life down for real, if I wasn't too fussy. Perhaps the idea of running off with some lithe dolly bird (my equivalent of an Andrew) is less of an appealing fantasy these days because it hardly looks like an act of rebellion any more. Leaving my job and young family looks like the coward's way out to me, whichever way my libido leads me.

If I was in real psychic pain, I wouldn't hesitate to make changes to my life, and my friends and loved ones would likely support me if I did. But I'm not in any real psychic pain. I just suffer from the same muted malaise that afflicts us all. What would I be running from and to? Sure, my life is tedious, hateful and absurd, but a lithe dolly bird won't change any of that.

And I certainly don't have enough money to open a gay bar in Ibiza. Maybe that's part of it: the kind of dropping out that Arthur experiences requires a certain level of material wealth that I don't have. Just getting by still takes up most of my attention, and even at my relatively advanced age I'm still fighting hard just to get the things I want - I haven't had enough of them yet to get bored of them and throw them all away.

Or maybe I'm just dead inside. If so, I'm happy enough with that, and I'm sure the rest of me will follow in due course.

On another note, wikipedia reveals some interesting information about Royston Ellis (he also has his own website). He was a youthful poet, and something of beat generation pioneer in the UK, although British 50s bohemia has always seems like a rather genteel affair to me, not really much like the neurotic, obsessive and semi-criminal scene in America. Still, Ellis was an early fan of the Mersey sound and a friend of The Beatles, and apparently the inspiration of the song Paperback Writer.

Well, he got his wish!

Panoptica by Patrick Hudson

2011-12-04T15:33:00.003Z

Well, chums, I've been and gone and done it. My novel-length satire Panoptica is now available at amazon.co.uk and presumably in other territories, too. It's got a Facebook page, even.
Click the link for some back cover blurb!

In the future, CCTV surveillance and reality TV celebrity desperation collide to create a world where the lines between public and private, reality and fiction are utterly confused.

Titus Spring, a puritanical dissenter from the media-ocracy, finds himself starring on the game show justice system of the future when he is framed for the murder of the King of England, Hugh Grant the Fourth.

In a world where the camera never lies the only person who believes him is his barrister, fading popstar tribute act Robbie Williams the Third. Together they must prove his innocence or Titus Spring will face the biggest mega-super-bonus-prize in broadcast history – an all-star celebrity execution.

Panoptica up-ends every dystopian cliché you've ever heard. It's a technicolour cartoon version of Brave New World. It's 1984 with knob gags.

If you love sci fi satire in the best tradition of Pohl & Kornbluth, Douglas Adams and 2000AD, then Panoptica is the satirical novel of celebrity, surveillance and media manipulation you've been waiting for!

Buy it now!

Don't forget that you can read Kindle format books on your iPad, iPhone and PC and I'm sure all those other gadgets that annoy us all on the train - I mean, for fuck's sake do you have to be catching up on old episodes of Top Gear or beating your high score at Angry Birds all the time? Get a life! But first, get Panoptica!

Here's a small image of the cover, just for the hell of it:

Off the Grid by Dan Kolbet

2011-11-30T22:33:00.004Z

Well, I decided I'd like to read some more self-published ficiton on the Kindle, and feeling a little bit loath to pay for it (I am mean) I thought it might be better if I can get it to pay me. I got in touch with the Self Publishing Review after they made an open call for reviewers and signed up, and this is my first review for them. Just to get the link in the first para, it's here, FWIW.

The SPR (as it shall be called from hereon, whatever the danger for confusion with The Society for Psychichal Research) charges authors for a review. That's a bit of a strange arrangement, but it seems to be common in the self-publishing arena. SPR charges US$40, but there are some places charging much much more. Kirkus Reviews - a name I'd heard but I don't know much about - charges between US$475 and US$525 for a review.

$575!! Or all in caps a more expressive $%&%!!!

Paying for a review seems like an odd choice to me (who still thinks being paid to write them is a hilarious novelty) but it seems that in the vanity game there is no end to the queue of people waiting to take your money. At $40 it loooks more like a filtering system than a real money-making enterprise. A lot of the sites that will review what's now euphemistically called "indie ficition" have notices up saying they aren't accepting review submissions right now because they're so full up. I dunno if the bus has left on this one, but I have to say it's looking pretty crowded.

Desperate self-pity after the break!

I see a poster for a book everytime I come home that is offering one lucky reader the prize of a diamond. This is how it is in the real world: forget the damn book, win a diamond! I forget what it's called, which makes me wonder about the wisdom of this sort of gimmick (okay, it looks like this one), but has it really come to this? Win a diamond! Pay for reviews!

Well, good for Dan Kolbet for having the get and go to do his thing. I feel bad that I didn't like his book much. I looked at his blog and his seems like an ordinary sort of guy with dreams, but holy shit there are hundreds and thousands of us out there. Looking over the Kindle listings is pretty dispiriting. I feel like the guy in The Waste Land watching the dead shambling across London Bridge "I never knew death had undone so many."

I'm old enough have been disappointed a dozen times already. I've been on lazy money-grabbing courses where I felt I knew more about the craft and business of fiction than the idiots offering two days advice outside of their regular jobs as junior English lit lecturers and writers of bad poetry for small magazines. I've sat in the rooms with border-line mental cases and hopeless dreamers wondering if that's how they see me, just another sucker to fleece and forget about.

This combination of fraud and desperation gets me down. It'd not what I imagined when I first put pen to paper a quarter of a century ago, and there are times when I think of all the other things I could have done with the time and effort and emotion I've poured into all this. There are times when I think "why throw all this good money after bad? I could be playing Civ or watching Mad Men or something rather than sitting here weeping tears of frustration over words that don't come and when they do come they're wanted by no one."

But then the alarm rings in the morning and it's another fucking day getting the fucking train to the fucking office with the rest of the herd and I think that there's no way I'm going to let myself be like the rest of them. If I don't do it, I'll die trying and face my maker knowing I did everything I could to make it happen. I'm going to have some fucking questions for that arsehole, though.

And yes, since you ask. Very shortly, in fact.

The Thing on the Doorstep

2011-11-29T23:31:00.004Z

"The Thing on the Doorstep", first published in Weird Tales, January 1937.

This is the the thirty-first entry in my read-through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

This is how I'd like the main run of HPL's stories to be. It's a chewy story of a man brought down by his passions, it's well structured and takes its more obvious schtick (in this case the whole Ephraim Waite mind-swap deal) and trumps it with a terrific shock ending. It's not HPL at full tilt; he doesn't pull off that delirious amazing writing that characterises his best work, and passages in some of his not-best work, but it's an effective story that makes good use of his by-now familar elements – Arkham, Innsmouth and various bits of Yog Sothothery.

Unfortunately, that's not how the main run of his stories are, and this volume is clogged with hard to pass matter like Cool Air, The Unameable, From Beyond and The Shadow Out of Time, and that's even ignoring border-line juvenalia like The Nameless City and The Lurking Fear and forgiving him the utter turds like Through the Gate of the Silver Key or The Cats of Ulthar. As I come to the end of this read-through I can't help thinking that HPL's reputation rests on a relatively small number of stories, that he got it wrong more often than he got it right.

I guess I'll return to this in the coming months when I come to sum all this up. For the meantime, though, this story lifts the lid on on a matter rarely addressed by HPL, the fairer sex.

In earlier stories we've considered HPL's attitudes to race, which are a huge part of the narrative of who he is. If I had a British pound for the number of times I've seen amateur internet morality cops declare that HPL's racism puts him beyond the pale I'd certainly not be facing a life time of debt slavery just to buy house with an extra bedroom. Less often remarked on, though, are HPL's opinions on sex and women, probably because he largely avoids the topic. While he was happy to make sweeping jaw-droppingly racist declarations in his letters and amateur journalism, and to mine the topic in his fiction for good and ill, he rarely discussed women.

Significant female characters are few and far between. I guess there's Lavinia Whately in The Dunwich Horror, who acts is a kind of anti-mother. If we are to see Wilbur Whately as a perverse self-portrait, then she is the mother who declared her son had a “hideous face” and reportedly saw “weird fantastic creatures that rushed out from behind buildings and from corners at dark”. In this reading, I suppose that Yog Sothoth represents the absent father that one can sometimes sense in the background of HPL's stories.

An H P Lovecraft Encyclopedia suggests that The Thing on the Doorstep portrays some of HPL's feelings about his mother in the descriptions of Edward Derby's childhood, but that's not the most compelling thing about this story. “If Derby's youth and manhood are an amlgam of HPL and some of his closest friends, his marriage to Asenath Waite clearly brings clearly brings certain aspects of HPL's marriage to Sonia Greene to mind.” The Encyclopedia notes that like Asenath “Sonia was clearly the more strong-willed member of the couple,” but seems happy to leave the matter there. There's so much more going here, though.

Perhaps we see HPL's resentment of Sonia Greene, always encouraging him to get a job or spend time with her, when all he wanted to do during the time they lived together in New York was rub along with the other misfits in the Kalem Club, and spend the nights wandering the New York streets looking for colonial architecture.

Asenath is the ultimate “changer”, grabbing hold of Darby and re-shaping him into her own image of a suitable husband. She's places herself as an obstacle to the typically Lovecraftian homosocial relationship that Darby and the story's narrator Daniel Upton have established. Theirs is a world where women are otherwise entirely absent – Upton's wife remains entirely off-screen even while his son makes a few appearances.
But of course there's more to Asenath than just the old ball and chain. In fact, Aesnath Waite is a most extraordinary figure that dominates this story. Needless to say, her portrayal displays extraordinary levels of misogyny and gynophobia: as with HPL's racism it goes beyond mere bigotry to the level of almost psychedelic horribleness that only horror and HPL can take us.

And of course, she's not really a woman at all, but a shell unhabited by the body-hopping spirit of her father Ephraim Waite. This provides one of the stories better chills. Darby asks Upton, “what devilish exchange was perpetrated in the house of horror where that blasphemous monster had his trusting, weak-willed, half-human child at his mercy?” It's a peculiarly nasty image, with all sorts of creepy incestuous and abusive overtones.

The entry on this story in An H P Lovecraft Encycolpedia Joshi mentions “considerable misunderstaning” arising from Upton's remark about Asenath that “Her crowning rage, however, was that she was not a man; since she believed a male brain had certain unique and far-reaching cosmic powers.” As the Encyclopedia notes this is clearly uttered in character, and the editors further take pains to excerpt some somewhat conciliatory remarks that HPL had for the female of the species in the thirties.

HPL may well have had unkind ideas about the intellectual capacities of women at various times in his life, perhaps his entire life, but I don't think that's what's happening here. Instead, it's hard to avoid seeing a sexual element to Asenath's domination of the apparently naïve Derby.

By all accounts (well, A Life and The Encyclopedia) HPL was, at best, indifferent to sex. Sonia Greene states that he was a virgin when they married (HPL was 33) and was, to say the least, physically undemonstrative, although an “adequately excellent” lover which sound like faint praise at best.

Sonia and HPL's relationship has been subjected to plenty of prying by dirty minded critics like me, and it's clear that HPL was less inclined to express affection in any form than Sonia would have liked. Joshi quotes a letter HPL wrote to Sonia before their marriage (published by August Derleth as “Lovecraft On Love” which seems a rather cold act, in my mind, given that Sonia was still alive at this point) where HPL says of the sexual aspect of marriage:

“By forty or perhaps fifty, a wholesome replacement process begins to operate, and love attains calm, cool depths based on tender association beside which the erotic infatuation of youth takes on a certain shade of cheapness and degradation. Mature tranquilised love produces an idyllic fidelity which is testimonial to its sincerity, purity and intensity.”

This is where Upton finds himself with his invisible woman of a wife and long-ago conceived child and seems to be what HPL dreamed of from a liaison – think of Delapore in The Rats in the Walls, whose wife is long dead, or the sexless procreation of his master races the Old Ones and the Great Race.

Derby, on the other hand, finds himself being drawn into a world of mysterious new experiences: “Some of the experiments she proposed were very daring and radical—he did not feel at liberty to describe them—but he had confidence in her powers and intentions.” What starts as a bit of laugh, though, becomes more and more worrisome: “He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of Cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases lead down to abysses of nighted secrets.” Finally, all hell breaks loose:

“The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps... the abomination of abominations... I never would let her take me, and then I found myself there.... Iä! Shub-Niggurath!... The shape rose up from the altar, and there were 500 that howled.... The Hooded Thing bleated ‘Kamog! Kamog!’—that was old Ephraim’s secret name in the coven.... I was there, where she promised she wouldn’t take me.... A minute before I was locked in the library, and then I was there where she had gone with my body—in the place of utter blasphemy, the unholy pit where the black realm begins and the watcher guards the gate.... I saw a shoggoth—it changed shape.... I can’t stand it.... I won’t stand it.... I’ll kill her if she ever sends me there again.... I’ll kill that entity... her, him, it... I’ll kill it! I’ll kill it with my own hands.”

The fact that the story ends with Darby clubbing his bride to death seems to hint at difficult relations with the opposite sex, but it's always hard to tell, of course, and horror stories, in particular, require a writer to bring up the worst excesses of their imaginations. I don't think HPL's racism, for example, blights his fiction because for him it's the stepping stone to something more profound than mere race prejudice to an expression of elemental xenophobia that we all, to an extent, share regardless of race or creed.

What's more interesting, I think, than speculating that HPL might have been Jack the Ripper or the Grand Wizard of the KKK, is looking at the way that HPL's numerous neuroses fueled his writing. There's precious little in The Encyclopedia and A Life about his working methods, and the extent to which he was conscious of this stuff spilling out of him. I'd love to know if he ever looked into the mirror he made and saw himself staring back, mad, frightened and filled with self-loathing.

The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler

2011-11-27T16:40:00.000Z

Once again, circumstances have conspired to keep me from blogging in a timely way. My commitment to blog about all the books I read has been sorely tested in the last month or so by a new job, house hunting, a bad cold, some other writing missions and – perhaps worst of all – a desire to do the books I read justice. Well, something's got to give, and I can't quit my job just yet, so on this occasion I'm going to have to admit up front that I'm not going to do this one justice.

Which is a huge shame, because this is a terrific book. This and The Big Knockover are two of the best I've read this year. I read both as part of my education in classic private eye stories for the sake of a project I'm working on, and by “project” I of course mean novel, and by “working on” I of course mean largely ignoring. What I'd really like to do here, in particular, is take the plot to bits, because that seems to be what I have the most trouble with. It's been so long that I'm not going to be able to do this in details, but let's see what I can do from memory.

Warning: this is not just boring crap about me, but boring crap about my boring struggles with my boring muse.

I've read a few Chandlers now. One thing that really struck me early on – shocked me even! – is how often Marlowe is handed clue tokens more or less at random as a consequence of being in the right place at the right time.

The Lady in the Lake isn't quite so bad for this. Chandler does a better job of moving through the plot points, but there's still more than a few freebies laid out for Marlowe to pick up. Bill Chess, for example, is pretty free with what he says, to the point, in fact, where Marlowe himself remarks upon his garrulousness. How does he get away with it, then?

Well, he doesn't always: If I recall correctly, there's a scene in The Little Sister where he's in someone else's office (perhaps the caretaker at the apartment house) and the phone rings and the man on the other end of the line pretty much spills the beans over some particular point of the mystery where Marlowe had gotten stuck. Just like that! No attempt to give Marlowe agency, or have him follow the breadcrumb trail, just a big fat “Uh oh, we're stuck! Here you go Marlowe.”

The scene with Bill Chess, however, is made more palatable through some excellent characterisation. Chess is presented in a lot of subtle ways as a broken man, a drunk and emotionally all over the place. Marlowe gives him a drink to get him talking (it's a regular Marlowe trick; Hammett's Continental Op does it too, in fact), and it all just spills out of him.

All this makes Bill Chess something more than a plot dispenser. Chandler works hard to make him convincing and he becomes, in fact, a portrait of a certain type of guy at a certain time in his life. Not too bright, a quick temper and poorly treated by life he's a tragic figure in many ways, the sort of guy that Tom Waits used to write songs about during the Atlantic years. In fact, Chess's wife is called Muriel, and there's a song “Muriel” on Foreign Affairs that could almost be about Bill Chess's feelings of loss and regret when he talks to Marlowe.

There's a few less subtle clue hand-outs while Marlowe's up at the lake – the lady journalist who pops up to offer some timely observations, the night clerks at the hotel – but even here he gives these characters enough substance to give them a motivation and a reason to talk.

These episodes, and the less subtle plotting in The Little Sister, lead me to wonder if I've got this mystery thing all wrong. Most of the sorts of things I write (or want to write) have a mystery kernel, and now I wonder if I'm being over-punctilious, making a rod for my back by wanting a super-tight breadcrumb trail that'll lead from A to B to C, all the way to Z with each step being logical, consistent, properly fore-grounded and so on and so forth.

Thinking about that in the context of this book, and The Big Knockover earlier in the year, a couple of things now strike me. The point of this type of fiction isn't the breadcrumb trail at all, the point is the people. The Hammett stories just use the context of the crime to reveal the lives of the characters within them, lives that are driven by conflicts and trouble. The mystery is the pull that drags the protagonist through, and they'll usually develop a push as well as the story goes on that propels them forward with equal power, but the story is really about the people involved in the mystery, the decisions they make and the consequences that fall from these.

That's probably why the central characters have so little back story. Marlowe has no past, barely seems to have a home to go to, and the Continental Op doesn't even have a name. They don't need any background, because the story isn't about them, it's all about the people around them.

That's all very nice, but what does this mean to the way I write my own stories? Well, Chandler novel in particular feel like he's making it all up as he goes along, in fact that he's enjoying making it all up. He is, after all, the man who said “When is doubt have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.”

I always feel paralysed when I don't know what's happening next, even though I understand that if I don't sit down and write it I'll never find out. I tell other people all the time in workshops that you can plan and make character sketches and ponder and think all you like, but you'll never know for sure what's going to happen without sitting down and writing it out.

Maybe the reason I'm so fond of giving out this advice is that I recognise my own inability to take it. It's all that crossing out, all that watching hazy idealised plans turn to solid crap that gets me down. The only answer is to keep bashing away at it until the dam breaks and it all floods out. I've seen it often enough in other writers I know; I've done it before myself, plenty of times in fact. But at this early stage it's like pulling teeth, and then having to put have of them back in and pull them out all over again, and again and again.

Who'd be a writer, eh? Based on the evidence so far, not me.

The Haunter in the Dark

2011-11-15T22:06:00.001Z

"The Haunter in the Dark", first published in Weird Tales, December 1936.

This is the thirtieth entry in my read-through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

This is HPL's last story. Just over a year after finishing this, he was dead from cancer of the smaller intestine and that was that. He seems to have spent those last months in a doldrum, unable to work and convinced his fiction days were over, even before it became clear he was dying. Joshi quotes him in A Life: “I may be experimenting in the wrong medium altogether. It may be that poetry instead of fiction is the only effective vehicle to put such expression across.”

Maybe he was right: I've often commented here that his stories have magnificent passages of brilliant writing, but they are often don't quite work due to structural issues. He seemed to be getting there for a while at least, but by this time he was a couple of years out from the incredible streak between 1926 and 1933, and I know only too well what it can feel like when everything else you touch seems to turn to shit (I haven't written anything worth a damn since 2009). Maybe he just needed to work it out, find a new creative direction; we'll never know.

I suppose it's fitting that his life end on this note of despair – he seems to have been only fitfully happy at the best of times, which were few and far between. Joshi doesn't give us much information on his interior like in the final months or what he made of his own life as he faced the end. I wonder if he felt he was a success or failure, if he achieved any of what he had set out to do?

HPL didn't know he was dying when he wrote this story – or at least, any more than we're all heading to the grave one step at a time – but even so, it has an elegiac quality. HPL indulgences his architectural impulses and provides numerous call-outs for his friends. The history of the Starry Wisdom cult and the Shining Trapezohedron are tied into his existing mythos, although perhaps with less enthusiasm than the previous few stories. However, I think it demonstrates once again how the mythos had moved on from being a collection of mysteriously allusive details to a more substantially concrete setting.

Perhaps it was this self-imposed mundanity of his creations that was beginning to pall for the writer of dream narratives? There are signs of a re-emergence his more poetical mode of storytelling in this one. Blake's quest to gain egress to the mysterious church on Federal Hill has a yearning quality that is particularly dreamlike. It's that mood, the eternal middle of a dream wrapped in sensation and atmosphere never intended to reach a climax.

“Nowhere could he find any of the objects he had seen from afar; so that once more he half fancied that the Federal Hill of that distant view was a dream-world never to be trod by living human feet.”

It's like Randolph Carter's search for Celephais, or the land of his youth, or Thomas Olney's attempts to reach The Strange High House in the Mist, but here it ends not in a rhapsody of joy, but a terrifying death. Both are a sort of annihilation, a theme that was picked up decades later by Clive Barker. Blake is a portrait of Robert Bloch, of course, but he reminds me a little of Clive. Both are sensitive writers and painters of the weird and macabre, and Blake is swept in to the strange geography of Arkham that seems to trap time in its meanders in the way that Barker's protagonists get lost in puzzles and patterns that lead to revelations both horrible and wonderful.

In good horror story fashion, Blake records his own moment of death in his journal, and HPL meets it with a typically baroque flourish. I wonder what he saw as he passed beyond the wall of sleep? A vision of rapture like Randolph Carter? Or something like the final fragmentary visions of Robert Blake?

I see it—coming here—hell-wind—titan blur—black wings—Yog-Sothoth save me—the three-lobed burning eye...

Next: The Thing on The Doorstep

Photo of HPL's gravestone is by flickr user strangeinterlude and used under the terms of the Creative Commons license.

Fain the Sorceror by Steve Aylett

2011-11-07T22:41:00.001Z

A weird monster not featured in this book

This is another one that came to me on the Kindle, the only other version being a long out-of-print version from PS Books. This another good thing about ebooks: as well as the long list of out-of-copyright classics these types of hard-to-find gems are coming back in to circulation.

This is a more glittery gem than most. Steve Aylett is ruthlessly parsimonious with words: he's not keen to spend them unless he really thinks he's getting his money's worth, and so while this book is short it contains all the glister of a dozen longer works from more profligate writers. Some times you have to read a sentence twice not because the meaning is unclear, but because it has so many shades of meaning, in so few words, that it takes time to process them all.

Alan Moore sums up the problem with this style in his introduction: “If we loved Steve Aylett, really loved him in the way he deserves, a selfless love that genuinely wanted nothing save his happiness and comfort, we'd lobotomise him.”

Alan's point is that if he just dumbed down, Steve could be a super-star. If that talent for the ridiculous and the absurd and the profound and hilarious could be slowed down to a speed that could be absorbed through the stupor of the morning commute or boozy summer-holiday once-a-year read then he'd be a best seller.

I think his biggest weakness – related to the above, I suppose – is that he's a genre of one. He doesn't fit easily within any particular group. His work is too weird for the usual genre humour crowd, and too silly for mainstream literary types. There's no point of reference when you read Steve Aylett, no set of expectations to hold on to and tick off as you go through.

Steve ignores traditional narrative structures, even the satirical ones of the innocent abroad or the farce focused on a nest of rogues. Each of his stories follows its own path, regardless of where any other piece of writing has gone before. The closest he's written to a recognised form is the pseudo biography, Lint. He's more concerned with a more abstract progression of ideas that's more familiar from poetry than from the novel.

Fain the Sorceror is based around a series of cyclical movements in plot and theme, ballooning backward and forward in time but getting precisely nowhere. It's a string of encounters with the self, a kind of spiralling black hole of recursion that made me think more of a ballad than a story.

I found the language here, too, more poetic than usual. There's no doubt that Steve's got a great control of language, but here he gets quite profound.

“You were fortunate to blunder upon time travel as your first gift. Do you see how your thin life has changed and grown richer? Time is central to life. Anything that is a process requires the dimension of time. Flowers require it, for instance. Only something which is fixed and finished does not. Is it coincidental that when a thing is fixed, as in a museum, all life goes out of it? You will know when someone has manipulated time, because the day misses a beat.”

He's skirted around wisdom before. His aphorisms sometimes look like their heading somewhere meaningful before spinning off into the higher realms of punning metaphor that tweaks your brain in a way that maybe only a few writers can – only Spike Milligan at his most penetratingly off-kilter comes close, and he lacks Aylett's jaded hipster carapace.

“Life is a quantum entanglement of delays and repeated perplexities.”

I've seen this book described as “Vancian”. Fain is a Vancian hero, starting out motivated by Cugel-like self interest, but developing wisdom in the end. The challenges he encounters have that allegorical fairy tale feel that Vance sometimes approaches, but Aylett doesn't have the pulp writers' ballast that keeps dragging Old Jack's eyes down from the clouds.

Aylett takes vivid fairytale elements that similar to those in The Dying Earth (especially the titular first volume) and throws them in the air like petals: the rivalry with Hackler Thorn, his ongoing attempts to rescue the princess and claim the kingdom, his Odysseus-like time dalliance with the mermaid. Like the best myths, though, they refuse easy interpretation, but send you back inside to consider the interior point of it all.

I read this in the same week that we got a new Tom Waits album, another genre of one. That's what I look for, I guess, those artists that are genres of one.

Carnacki the Ghost Finder

2011-10-31T22:21:00.002Z

Yes, that's the one...

This is one of those titles I've heard bandied around a lot for many years, but never been able to track down a copy in print. It seems to have been an influence all over the place, and Hodgson tends to get mentioned alongside M R James and Algernon Blackwood as one of the early masters of the ghost tale. There is, apparently, an edition in the estimable Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult – if I was going to choose a hard copy edition to own, that would be the one!

However, the world has moved on and it is now available free as a .mobi file for Kindle from Project Gutenberg. It's fair to say that people of Hodgson's generation wouldn't have been able to imagine the mighty corporate effort that makes these possible. The heroes of the early pulp era, before the First World War, were individualists: they were embodiments of the belief that one rational man could effect change in the world by simple of virtue of wits, pluck and persistence.

Carnacki is a hero of his times. As well as a courageous and clever detective, he has an assortment of personal discoveries and inventions to hand, like a mix between Harry Houdini and Thomas Edison. It's a fascinating era when the supernatural and the scientific were still not yet fully separate. This is the era of the Society for Psychical Research, when even Edison believed he could build a telephone for communicating with the dead.

Carnacki reflects this amalgam of science and superstition. He is the inventor of the Electric Pentacle, and uses advanced photographic techniques in his spook hunting. At the same time, however, he's the owner of the ancient Sigsand manuscript with its helpful chants and rituals to banish the supernatural.

What's more, Carnacki's cases admit both supernatural and real-world solutions. It's about an even split between ghostly and mundane goings on, and a couple of the stories – The Horse of the Invisible and The Searcher of the End House – have a mix of mundane and supernatural causes. I think I enjoyed the full-on ghost stories the best– like The Gateway of the Monster and The Whistling Room. All the “solutions” are somewhat arbitrary, but in these two there's a real sense of a malign supernatural presence that tests Carnacki's will and wits.

The stories all feature the same theatrical framing device: Carnacki invites a group of friends and tells them the story of his latest adventure. The frame is a first person narrative, as is the boddy of the story itself. In fact, outside of a few prefatory remarks about fine meals and smoking pipes, the frame narrator (called Dodgson, rhymes with Hodgson) seems to be present only to transcribe what Carnacki tells him.

It's a device used by a lot of writers, of both mystery and horror: there's Holmes, of course, and Lovecraft's stories are thick with it, from true nested narratives like Hodgsons to extended passages of first-person narrative from secondary characters (Zadok Allen in The Shadow Over Innsmouth or the long letters from Akeley in The Whisperer in Darkness, eg), and it's often a part of M R James's work. In fact, I think that The Turn of the Screw and Wuthering Heights are both nested narratives of this sort, as well.

Thinking about this commonality of form between early mystery and ghost stories makes me think of a series of fat hard backs from the thirties and forties that my grandfather had, Tales of Mystery & Suspense that mixed Holmesian capers with Jamesian-style spooks. Maybe, back then, the genre split was a little different. There's a common thematic thread between them: both feature a kind of backward story-telling, where the reasons and perpetrator of a crime are sought, on the one hand to see justice done and on the other to settle the restless dead.

This link persists today, and the influence of these stories in particular – despite their relative obscurity – can be seen in the modern fad for supernatural detective like Harry Dresden and Felix Castor, for example (not, I admit, my own specialistic subject!)

For all that, these aren't really great stories. They're a bit straight forward and it's often Carnacki's equipment that provides the vital clue, rather than anything he works out through the clues presented. These aren't puzzle stories: the focus is on Carnacki's pluck and the creepy thrills along the way. However, this is a short book, and a piece of genre history, and entirely appropriate for Hallowe'en ... and it's free, FFS – so what are you waiting for!?!?!

The Shadow Out of Time

2011-10-18T22:46:00.002+01:00

"The Shadow Out of Time" first published in Astounding Stories, June 1936.
This is the the twenty-ninth entry in my read-through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

In an An H P Lovecraft Encyclopedia, S T Joshi notes that the period of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee's mental possession in The Shadow Out of Time – 1908 to 1913 – matches up pretty closely to the time that HPL's neurotic state led him to withdraw from high school, and from the world with increasingly hermit-like behaviour. He also mentions how the creatures inability to control their faces could even be linked to the facial tics that HPL suffered from in this period. I hadn't made this connection when I was reading the story, but I very quickly sensed that this was another of HPL's mental health issue stories.

Unfortunately, despite the possibility of this one being another febrile gem like The Outsider or The Dreams in the Witch House, HPL instead gets interested in his Great Race. The creatures who possessed Peaslee's body and imprison his mind for years in a hideous alien form turn out not to be invasive demonic figures like the Deep Ones or Brown Jenkin, but another dreary race of cosmic utopians.

Peaslee's belief that he was, for a period, possessed by an ancient alien entity sounds a lot like some kind of weird neurological disorder of the type that Oliver Sacks writes about. It's hard to read a passage like this and not think of some kind of dissociative affliction:

“My eyes gazed strangely at the persons around me, and the flexions of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar. Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learned the English language from books.”

After his “recovery” Peaslee starts to experience fits of neurotic body horror – “There was, too, a feeling of profound and inexplicable horror concerning myself. I developed a queer fear of seeing my own form, as if my eyes would find it something utterly alien and inconceivably abhorrent.” Soon his dreams are haunted by hallucinatory episodes that reminded me of a fever dream or the accounts of shamanic flight under the influence of datura and amanita muscaria mushrooms. Peaslee builds up an impressive pseudo scientific framework that rationalises his hallucinations as some kind ancestral memory: it's another false mask for the real world, and I like the way that “most doctors deemed my course, on the whole, an advisable one.” Boy are they wrong!

If you take doctor's view of things, Peaslee's visions sound a lot like theories from the more eccentric end of the occult spectrum, David Icke, say, or in Lovecraft's day Manley P Hall and Edgar Cayce. I think this is the only of the stories in this collection to mention “theosophy” by name, although I certain the Book of Dyzan gets a mention some where. He was clearly acquainted with popular New Age beliefs of his time, although he no doubt looked down on them with great disdain.

He is happy, however, to import some of their pseudo scientific ideas into his stories, not least the concept of degeneration. Madam Blavatsky describes great cycles of history, over which time the earth has been populated by a series of different dominant species which each falls finally into decline, triggering an apocalyptic shift after which a new race comes in to the ascendant. Each race, however, is a degenerate form of the last, ending finally with humanity (or, in some cases Aryan humanity, and I think you can see where this is going).

HPL's secret history of the world, sounds extremely similar to this kind of New Age utopian thinking that was circulating around the right wing during the 1920s and 1930s. These are the same types of big dreams, driven by overly trust in enlightenment values and overly literal applications of romantic philosophy. Given the history of the twentieth century following his death in 1937, there's something chilling about his visions.

The Great Race themselves are, therefore, not a great source of horror, despite HPL's efforts to freight them with dread in the beginning of the story through his usual gothic hyperbole - “Their actions, though harmless, horrified me even more than their appearance—for it is not wholesome to watch monstrous objects doing what one has known only human beings to do.” Or perhaps it's not the creatures themselves, just the sensation of remembering things you now are not true? “I cannot hope to give any true idea of the horror and dread contained in such echoes, for it was upon a wholly intangible quality—the sharp sense of pseudo-memory—that such feelings mainly depended.”

Despite the horror supposedly inherent in his experiences, Peaslee seems to rather enjoy hob-nobbing with a rather magnificent list of characters from the past, the future and the far reaches of the cosmos. (Another long quote, sorry!)

“There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live incalculable epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million years in the past. Of earthly minds there were some from the winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica; one from the reptile people of fabled Valusia; three from the furry pre-human Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid denizens of earth’s last age; five from the hardy coleopterous species immediately following mankind, to which the Great Race was some day to transfer its keenest minds en masse in the face of horrible peril; and several from different branches of humanity.

“I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan, which is to come in A.D. 5000; with that of a general of the great-headed brown people who held South Africa in B.C. 50,000; with that of a twelfth-century Florentine monk named Bartolomeo Corsi; with that of a king of Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar land 100,000 years before the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to engulf it; with that of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors of A.D. 16,000; with that of a Roman named Titus Sempronius Blaesus, who had been a quaestor in Sulla’s time; with that of Khephnes, an Egyptian of the 14th Dynasty who told me the hideous secret of Nyarlathotep; with that of a priest of Atlantis’ middle kingdom; with that of a Suffolk gentleman of Cromwell’s day, James Woodville; with that of a court astronomer of pre-Inca Peru; with that of the Australian physicist Nevil Kingston-Brown, who will die in A.D. 2518; with that of an archimage of vanished Yhe in the Pacific; with that of Theodotides, a Graeco-Bactrian official of B.C. 200; with that of an aged Frenchman of Louis XIII’s time named Pierre-Louis Montmagny; with that of Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian chieftain of B.C. 15,000; and with so many others that my brain cannot hold the shocking secrets and dizzying marvels I learned from them.”

All these jolly times with the lads (the Great Race don't seem too interested in ladies) rather undercut the supposed horror of finding out it's all true. It sounds pretty cool, actually. It's kind of disorienting, sure, and maybe the Great Race could do with some lessons in informed consent, but on the whole it doesn't seem that bad at all.

Perhaps in an effort to counteract this, HPL provides the great Race with a nemesis, the loathsome Elder Things. The Elder Things are the “predatory entities” who dwelt on the Earth before the arrival of the minds of the great ones. They are promising enemies, and HPL rises nicely to the occasion: “half-polypous, utterly alien entities”, “only partly material, as we understand matter” and with “minds of such texture that no exchange with them could be effected by the Great Race.”

The Great Race are obviously similar to the Old Ones in At the Mountains of Madness. Somewhat like the Old Ones, the Great Race inhabit a world of scholarly enquiry and benign communistic equality. Like the Old Ones they don't bother with the messy business of sexual relations, “but reproduced through seeds or spores which clustered on their bases and could be developed only under water.” They exercise a humane eugenics where “markedly defective individuals [are] quietly disposed of.” Like the old ones, they are haunted by a race of blasphemous horrors, but the Elder Things fail to be a worthy foe in the same way as the shoggoths as they just don't have the vital connection with their enemies.

The shoggoths were created by the Old Ones, and there is a history of rebellion and subsequent suppression in the story of their relationship, an interesting mix of rebellious slaves and technology out of control. This gives us real reason to fear how things might have ended up for the Old Ones; on the other hand, there never seemed to much more than rumours about the defeated Elder Things, and we know that when the end does come, the Great Race simply flee again to the future and endure. The shoggoths not only destroy the Old Ones, but they then act out a grotesque parody of their master's formerly highly refined culture. It's that hint of degradation and degeneration that makes the shoggoths so nasty. Without that, they're just empty monsters like the Elder Things in this story.

The Elder Things are further handicapped as a subject of fear by their secret weapon, wind. Aside from the fact that HPL lays on the creepy winds thing with particular lack of subtlety while Peaslee explores the ruins, I couldn't help smirking at the occasional accidental lavatory humour: “Though in my rear, that wind had the odd effect of hindering instead of aiding my progress.”

When the climax comes, HPL can't decide what the source of horror is in this story, the apparent return of the dreaded Elder Things or the realisation that what he thought was hallucination is all true. The ending involves a flight from both his own realisations and the Elder Things. The latter is quite effective, in that febrile way HPL has with unremitting terror, but it's poorly supported by the preceding material. The revelation about what Peaslee saw in the book comes so late that I had almost forgotten to be bored by the constant teasing.

Part of the problem is HPL's devotion to the traditional format of the shaggy dog horror yarn with the sting-in-the-tail ending; the sting here has been thoroughly blunted with constant unsubtle hints long before we reach the tail. The final line is so laboured and predictable it brings the rest of the story down. At the Mountains of Madness has similar problems, with the tacked on ending about the city in the clouds and the mountain of Kadath, and perhaps this is an attempt to to re-do that story. It falls well short, though; it's riven with repetition and HPL never gets inside the Australian desert with the same intensity he did the Antarctic.

So, despite some good moments, this one was finally a disappointment, doubly a shame when you think that this was his last major work. After this comes The Haunter in the Dark – a kind of gag story written for his friend Robert Bloch – and that's it for HPL. We've got a few more to get through, though, including the novels The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Dream-Quest of Unkown Kadath, as the Necronomicon collection follows publishing order rather than the order they were written. In fact, I'm only about three quarters of the way through this massive thing!

The Pale Queen's Courtyard by Marcin Wrona

2011-10-16T16:27:00.000+01:00

As I mentioned in my entry on The Big Knockover (and maybe in Dracula as well) I have a Kindle now, and as a failed writer, I am quite naturally very interested in the new wave of electronic self-publishing that has come in its wake. I have a few acquaintances who have had a go at self-publishing on Kindle, and one in particular asked me to review his book on here and for amazon.

This put me a tricky position! I'm only vaguely acquainted with Mr Wrona through an RPG message board, and I've read a little of his travails in getting The Pale Queen's Courtyard published (it was a finalist in a high-profile unsigned fantasy writers competition a couple of years back) and so I was confident that it met a certain basic level of competence but I was still a little hesitant – if I didn't like it, it would be socially difficult (in a low-key way) to piss all over his cornflakes, as it were.

I am a slave to social niceties like this: sometimes my inner monologue is like an episode of Seinfeld on permanent loop.

Consequently, I declined his offer of a freebie and instead bought a copy myself on the quiet so that if I didn't like it I could just not mention it again and get around the whole tricky business that way. Fortunately, however, the Pale Queen's Courtyard is really good.
The biggest barriers to self and small press publishing have always been, in my eyes, publicity and distribution. Yes, writing a good book is a problem, but I am willing to bet that there are hundreds of great books languishing in obscurity that have never been able to reach their audience. Some of this bookshop reticence to take self-published material, made worse by the advance of bookshop chains and decline in independent bookshops, but mostly its just a matter of the complexity of an industrial level supply chain – they are not for amateurs! The tale of the self-published writer that spends a fortune and ends up with a dozen boxes of unsold books in their garage is a cliché these days. With the Kindle, however, you literally pay nothing (aside from blood sweat and tears) and there's your book immediately available all over the world.

Okay, there is still the problem of marketing and publicity, which are also not for the faint-hearted, but there are success stories of “indie writers” (the new polite euphemism for self-publishers) such Amanda Hocking that must surely tempt even the most hide-bound among us. So, I've got myself a Kindle and while I'm pondering the possibilities, one of the first things I wanted to do was check what “indie writers” were up to. Amanda Hocking doesn't sound like my kind of thing, so I was kind of grateful for The Pale Queen's Courtyard as a great first steer.

This is a historical fantasy set in the Near East at the time of the Achaemenid Empire around about 500BC. We follow the fortunes of Leonine, a thief with sorcerous powers; Kamvar, a solider in a company of Hounds, warrior-priests whose mission is to track down and kill sorcerers; and Iasin, an eight-year old girl with extraordinary sorcerous power who crosses both their paths. The conflicts are well set out right from the start, and the characters have strong conflicting motivations: the thief just wants to take his money, but events in his past make him sympathetic to the girl's plight, while Kamvar is a good solider who comes to find the idea of executing small girl for the supposed sin of sorcery troubling.

The historical detail is totally convincing, and the somewhat mundane world of subsistence farming, toll collectors and imperial bureaucracy gives the more fantastic elements a solid foundation in a convincing real world. This makes the characters inner struggles more convincing, as they are rooted in recognisable, real-world concerns; Kamvar's ruminations about leaving his wife and child behind are made all the more affecting as it's easy to imagine them living in another part of the well-imagined world.

As well as this depth, though, it provides a useful hard line for the magic of the setting. There is a low-magic level with simple, and fairly restrictive rules as it can't be so powerful to destabilise the setting completely and lose the benefits of the historical angle. The tight geographical focus of the novel helps here: Wrona concentrates his story on the attitudes to sorcery in one limited region rather than trying to work through the consequences of sorcery on a global scale. We hear vague rumours of the sorcery-friendly kingdom far away (presumably in Africa) where Leonid and Ilasin hope to escape the relentless pursuit of the Hounds, but otherwise we are left to ponder for ourselves how the existence of sorcery might affect ancient China, Briton or Japan, eg.

This straight-edge approach to magic has the slight disadvantage of making the magic a little mundane for my tastes. I generally prefer my magic a little more colourful, more like Jack Vance, Michael Shea or Michael Moorcock than what's presented here, which is quite close to a kind of psychic power. I felt this most keenly when the ghouls attacked while the cast was fleeing from the swamp – I had hoped these monsters might be a little more than shambling corpses. However, the limits clearly work for Wrona, who sticks to his guns admirably. Personal tastes aside, the magic is consistent in tone and effect and the final climax is suitably pyrotechnic.

There is more focus on the adventure side of things than the magic, however, and in many ways this reminded me a little of Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road. I think I preferred this, though, as it has a little more conviction than Gentlemen of the Road, which was a bit larky for my tastes (and not a fantasy at all in the genre sense). The action in The Pale Queen's Courtyard is suitably gritty, and while the death rate isn't especially high (somewhat high, maybe) characters tend to get nasty but survivable wounds that mark them for life.

Wrona does a good job with his secondary cast so that these consequences of violence have real emotional weight. Aside from the main cast there are memorable characters such as the old warrior Ashok and Kamvar's best friend Tahmin. The story of Yazan, another of the Hounds in Kamvar's company, is particularly well-done, a kind of inverse of what Kamvar goes through that adds another layer to the theme of tolerance, peace and non-violence that plays lightly through the action.

Wrona goes perhaps a little astray in the final third. Up until then, the dual points-of-view of Leonine and Kamvar have been sufficient to get us through, but then a twist of the plot more or less forces him to include a section from Ilasin's viewpoint. It stands out as the only other moment where we get anything from any other character, and we don't return to Ilasin thereafter. It's not a badly written section by any means, but I just felt that it was unfortunate to lose the clarity and simplicity of those two voices.

Additionally, there's a plot twist in this section that comes a bit out of nowhere. In my Dune review I wrote about how I felt that the rivalry between Paul and Feyd Rutha felt very forced, and in a similar way the author's hand is a little to obviously behind the coincidence that turns Leonine and Barsam into dread enemies. This needed more foregrounding, and Barsam's drunken confession didn't quite ring true to me.

On the whole, though, I enjoyed The Pale Queen's Courtyard a great deal. It has none of the problems one associates with self-published fiction – there are no typos that I spotted and the prose is tight and clean, it's an original take on the fantasy genre with strong characterisation and able writing. If you've got one of these Kindle things, or a some other compatible device, I highly recommend checking it out.

I'm interested in reading more "indie published" Kindle novels. Bear in mind that I'm kind of picky, but if you know about something good let me know and I'll give it a whirl!

The Big Knockover and Other Stories

2011-10-14T16:12:00.000+01:00

Things have gotten a bit behind here at Pointless Philosophical Asides due to visiting relatives, other projects and my search for a new job. I finished The Big Knockover about six weeks ago, and so that's quite a gap between reading and blogging, but what can I say, events intervened.

This book is one I took with me on holiday in late August. I have a Kindle now, which I'd loaded up with holiday reading (although I read much less on holidays these days than I used to, a situation exacerbated this time around as we had my mother with me) but I took this hard copy book with me because I was a little nervous about the combination of a beach or pool, an expensive electronic device and my own general cack-handedness.

It was also nice, I suppose, to have an old fashioned book with me that I could turn to while I got used the New Age of Publishing. Perhaps this will be the last print book I ever review? Hm, that seems unlikely, given the growing pile of hard copy books that sits by my desk. In fact, the Kindle has just become a sort of portable pile as it fills up with bright ideas from Project Gutenberg, and sudden “oh yes, I'd love to read that!” moments on amazon.

Anyway, I've been turning to Hammett recently in my ongoing quest to get a good grip on the detective genre for a project I'm working on. Hammett's stories are great, with just the right mix of sardonic wit, real danger and human insight. It's been a while, so I won't address too much in detail, but there are few general observations that I think are helpful to me.

These stories all feature the same narrator hero, an unnamed operative for the Continental Detective Agency. It's interesting how little we learn about this guy, not even his name. A couple of times we meet an old stooge (as the plot requires) and he briefly mentions taking the night off and playing poker with his pals, all detectives or cops it seems. He also mentions, if I recall correctly, being over forty. He has little in the way of distinguishing quirks, as opposed to the eccentric savants of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, who still survived in the pulps, although perhaps these outlandish figures were slowly being replaced by the super-powered pulp heroes. This lack of pretension on the part of the protagonist is a vital part of being “hard boiled” I think – no silly waxed moustaches or fancy-pants violin playing here!

The stories are not about him, though, but about the characters who inhabit the underworld of San Francisco (and occasionally more far flung places). Each story builds up its own situation, sets up its cast and its up to the Continental Op to sort things out. He's very much a “competent man” figure, to borrow a term from from another genre, who is tough, and perceptive, whiles also somewhat humane and good humoured. He doesn't reflect a lot on what he does, although he does make judgements about the people he meets and their eventual fates, some deserved and some not.

He's like Sam Spade in this regard, although Spade is far more an agent within the plot. The Continental Op may exercise some latitude about who gets punished and who goes free, but his role is generally to unwind the problem that he's gotten mixed up in rather than to act on his own desires. It's tempting, also, to see Nick Charles in The Thin Man as the Continental Op five years or so down the line. He's got the same laconic voice (Hammett's own, surely) and tough guy competence, and the same easy alliance with the police (compared to Philip Marlwow's more difficult relationship with established law enforcement).

Fly Paper is a fairly typical tale, beginning with our hero being commissioned to track down the wayward daughter of a wealthy family, leading into the seedy underbelly of small-time shakedown artists and the grotty lives of petty crooks. There's something very convincing about it – the small scale, the stupidly unambitious and bungled capers, the sense of squalor and loss of hope. The realism comes from Hammett's own time as a private investigator with Pinkerton's (a big agency just like Continental) but the sense of degradation and misery comes, I think, from his socialistic beliefs. These people aren't glamorously wicked, they are waifs and strays living with a life of desperation and poverty. The Gatewood Caper has a similar theme.

Speaking of realism, The Scorched Face (another one that begins with wayward daughters) is quite interesting, as it felt a lot like a Dennis Wheatley devil thriller acted out in real life. Here there are no spooks or devils, just a lot of sordid goings on and jaded thrill-seekers. Somewhere between these two there's another interesting story to be told, perhaps, although maybe the twin poles of Wheatley's active evil and Hammett's social conscience aren't easily reconciled.

This King Business is slightly unusual, being set in a turbulent central European state between the wars, a kind of tin pot republic set up by the great powers after World War I (the Op is a vet) and tearing itself apart with corruption and power struggles. It's a great story with the sort of comic opera shenanigans you would expect, but there's a kind of democracy at work in the actions of the power players trying to establish a regime that suits them all without too much bloodshed, self-serving and corrupt, perhaps, but better than the unworkable balance of power they had forced upon them.

The title story forms a short novel alongside the story $106,000 Bloodmoney, probably almost as long as the Maltese Falcon. While it's short in length, it's a fairly substantial piece of work in regards to the plotting and execution. The gangsters' plan is carefully thought-through, and the consequences are played out with convincing precision. A lot of the stories, in fact, are caper stories (The Gutting of Couffignal and Dead Yellow Women, for example, and complicated capers lie at the heart of The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon) and Hammett is excellent at working the details of these schemes through and then finding and working on their weak points.

An oddity in this volume is the story Tulip, a fairly large fragment of an unfinished novel. Rather than the Op, the narrator is a writer more explicitly modelled in Hammett himself (although, as I say, the line between the Op and Hammett is not totally clear) but the main character (at least in this fragment) is really Tulip, some sort of dodgy character from the narrator's past. There's nothing explicitly crime-based here and this reads more like a mid-20th century mainstream, literary novel. The writing is good enough, but suffers from the lack of focus that the criminal plots give the other stories here and, of course, the lack of resolution. I suppose it would have been interesting to see what Hammett might have done away from crime, but this entry sits a little uncomfortably in this volume.

I've really enjoyed all the Hammett stuff I've read so far, but I've only got a few novels to go now, which inevitably makes me sad. It's the same realisation I had when I realised I'd read 99% of Philip K Dick's output, or all the stories of H P Lovecraft. Still, I've got quite a bit of Chandler yet to read, though (The Lady in the Lake is on the hardcopy pile) and then I'd like to read some of the Parker novels by Donald Westlake, and then maybe some Agatha Christie, just for a look at a different take on the subject matter. Arrgh, so many great books, so little time...

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

2011-10-12T22:16:00.003+01:00

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth", first published as a booklet with limited distribution in 1936, and subsequently in Weird Tales, Janaury 1942.

This is the the twenty-eighth entry in my read-through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

If I had to choose a single story that shows the very best of HPL, it would have to be this one. In The Shadow Over Innsmouth, all his various quirks and ticks combine to produce a story of sublime rising horror, and where all the individual elements come together to a genuinely disturbing climax. It features some of his finest evocative writing and focuses on his favourite themes of xenophobia, degeneration, superstition and the spectre of madness that hangs over all HPL's first person narrators.

More than any of the other stories, the (unnamed, again) narrator is a distinctly autobiographical figure. The travelling antiquarian with a dilettante's knowledge of local history and architecture and boundless curiosity instantly brings to mind HPL's own frugal travels around the north-eastern USA; Joshi points out in A Life how he used his own observations and real locations as a basis for the fictional coastal town of Innsmouth.

The narrator's particular interests provide him with a clear motivation throughout the story, unlike a few otherwise effective tales – like The Shunned House or The Lurking Fear – where one is forever wondering what suicidal instinct it is that keeps the protagonists in the midsts of the action. In fact, there's an element of tragedy here, and his need to know is a fatal flaw that leads inevitably to his undoing.

The narrator's interests give HPL a great opportunity to play with the sort of fictional history and geography that he clearly loves so much, and he does a particularly good job in this story of building up weird details. From the start, before he even gets to Innsmouth, HPL tempts us with dark hints and local gossip. All the locals know enough to keep away from, but the narrator is drawn irresistibly towards the mysterious town:

“Any reference to a town not shewn on common maps or listed in recent guide-books would have interested me, and the agent’s odd manner of allusion roused something like real curiosity. A town able to inspire such dislike in its neighbours, I thought, must be at least rather unusual, and worthy of a tourist’s attention.”

His curiosity is particularly piqued by the queer jewellery associated with Captain Obed Marsh, an example of which he sees the Newburyport Historical Society museum, and has an intense emotional reaction. He “literally gasp[s]” when he sees it and the longer he stares at it the more fascinated he becomes. However, the tiara's exquisite alieness soon begins to disturb him, not least the horrible pictorial motifs:

“Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity—half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion—which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudo-memory, as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral. At times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was overflowing with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil."

This immediately brings to mind the descriptions of the bas releifs found by the (unnamed!) narrator of Dagon - “human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall.” – but is far more detailed and nuanced. It's the work of a writer with twenty-five years' experience imagining and describing the creations of his imagination behind him, almost clinically precise while dripping with malevolent atmosphere.

This sense of evil and wrongness suffuses the descriptions of the “Innsmouth look” as we come to know it, which we first meet in the person of the bus driver Joe Sargent:

“a narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. … long, thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease.”

As the bus approaches Innsmouth, HPL really pours on the atmosphere:

“We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in varying stages of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed in the broken windows and shells and dead fish lying about the littered yards. Once or twice I saw listless-looking people working in barren gardens or digging clams on the fishy-smelling beach below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged children playing around weed-grown doorsteps. Somehow these people seemed more disquieting than the dismal buildings, for almost every one had certain peculiarities of face and motions which I instinctively disliked without being able to define or comprehend them.”

Innsmouth is one of HPL's most vividly imagined settings, with a detailed and consistent geography that HPL describes with febrile precision. It's the narrator's inquisitiveness that leads us through this: another sort of character might just travel from A to B, but here the narrator wants to observe the town with scholarly interest, and his intense observations are what make the surroundings so convincing.

The character's desire to know is also what drives him to get a detailed description of the town and a map from the clerk in the local store (an out-of-towner), who leads him to the town drunk and bean-spiller in chief, Zadok Allen. I suppose the loquacious local dipsomaniac was something of a cliché, even in HPL's day; such figures turn up in Dracula, for example, and Allen's not a million miles from Ammi Pierce, who relates the story of the Gardners in The Colour Out of Space. It must be said that Allen's willingness to tell all, and the detail in which he does so, strains credibility somewhat, not helped by the thick yokel patois that HPL furnishes him with. But once again, the narrator's intense interest in local history provides at least a fig-leaf of context to matters, and more importantly the detailed and disturbing history he relates is amongst the most chilling in HPL's canon.

These are not just weird creatures with an eccentric perception of time and space, but horrible things with an unnatural interest in human beings. After a group of concerned citizens try and stop Obed Marsh and his pagan worship, the creatures invade the town and murder anyone who stands against them. At this point, things take an unsavoury turn: “Obed he kinder takes charge an’ says things is goin’ to be changed ... others’ll worship with us at meetin’-time, an’ sarten haouses hez got to entertain guests ... they wanted to mix like they done with the Kanakys, an’ he fer one didn’t feel baound to stop ’em.” HPL's too much of a prude to spell it out, but it's surely clear what's happening now: “It wuss araound Civil War time, when children born senct ’forty-six begun to grow up.”

In other stories, I think, the idea of cosmic horror can be a little abstract. While both The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness have some personal danger, and in The Call of Cthulhu a bloody great monster, HPL's views of cosmic horror – the black gulfs nihilism, or the triviality of individual existence in the face of abyssal time – seem a little remote in comparison to raping, murderous monsters.

It's a such a clear retelling of the racist myth of primitive lubricity and pollution of the blood, that HPL must surely have been drawing, perhaps not consciously, on the racist narratives of his times. I don't think this necessarily means that HPL intends this story to have a racist message, but that it explores an element of horror that exists beyond mundane racism, even if that is the expression of it with which we're most familiar. Even today, when we can easily recognise the hatefulness of the racist undertone, this story of sexual aggression and degeneration has a disconcerting power. Alan Moore brings this aspect of it up to date in his brilliantly nasty horror comic Neonomicon (the cover of which I have used for the image this time around), where all that's implicit in HPL's tale is made horribly explicit.

This revelation is the story's first shock, but it's one we've been prepared for. The jewellery, the weird look of the locals, the mysterious hints of dark deals made – these all established the elements that are brought together here in classic HPL style. In other stories, HPL struggles to get past this stage: The Whisperer in Darkness and At the Mountains of Madness both suffer a little because HPL feels obliged to deliver more conventional chills than these types of existential horror. Here, though, he totally excels himself by taking the story to not one, but two more terrific horror climaxes.

The first is the chase. This is a handy bit of action writing, the best we've seen since The Dunwich Horror, definitely and perhaps as far back as Under the Pyramids. There's great short-term suspense and dread as he escapes from the hotel, franticly turning keys and smashing in doors, and when he's trying to keep to the shadows as he escapes from the town, pursued by half-glimpsed monstrosities. The time spent earlier in the story establishing the strong presence of Innsmouth pays dividends here as the shadows and streets are maddeningly believable. It climaxes with the narrator's first clear glimpse of the Deep Ones, another great passage worth quoting:

“And yet I saw them in a limitless stream—flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating—surging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal ... and some were strangely robed ... and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man’s felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head... .”

The second climax comes at the end, when the narrator learns of his true identity. In this case, it's the historical background that gives the horror its profound effect. Here he matches a second fictional history not just with real history, but with the fictional history of Innsmouth, which bolsters all three. When the final reveal comes, we have all we need to know to underline the horror: we know the twisted history, we have been to decaying Innsmouth, we have seen the degenerate people and we have fled from the bestial inhuman creatures that he is destined to become.

It's easy to miss at the beginning the narrator is also engaged in genealogical research on his travels, and so this sudden swerve into his family history can seem a bit odd, but it actually puts a great deal of his actions in a different light. His fascination with Innsmouth, and the affect that the jewellery has on him are suddenly understood in the context of his being a Deep One himself. There's an inner conflict going on is the story: his escape from Innsmouth is an attempt to outrun the corruption within himself, even as he is drawn to his own kind.

The final lines are all the more chilling for their suggestion of blissful contentment:

"I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever."

I'm reminded of the Dagon again, where the narrator almost seems to relish the return of the ancient deep sea creatures, or Castro's ardent description of the world to come when the stars are right in The Call of Cthulhu. More than these, though these lines make me think of the final lines of Clark Ashton Smith's Necromancy in Naat:

“But in the gardens of Vacharn the dead people still labored, heedless of Uldulla's passing; and they still kept the goats and cattle, and dived for pearls in the dark, torrent And Yadar, being with Dalili in that state now common to them both, was drawn to her with a ghostly yearning; and he felt a ghostly comfort in her nearness. The quick despair that had racked him aforetime, and the long torments of desire and separation, were as things faced and forgot; and he shared with Dalili a shadowy love and a dim contentment.”

There is a kind of joy here, a dark delight that gives a final, deliciously perverse twist, the driest possible flourish of black humour.As in all great horror, the natural order is left broken and evil is victorious. The final horror is the last act of corruption, a denial of humanity and an embrace of all that is morbid, bestial and depraved.

Next: The Shadow Out of Time.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

2011-09-27T22:52:00.005+01:00

A wealthy East European wishes to relocate to London, a city he has read about and long admired from afar. Following a period of political instability in his home country, he finds himself rich, and decides to make his dream come true. The source of his wealth is... well, he doesn't want anyone prying too deeply into that, so he contacts several law firms in regional parts of the UK to move various of his assets from his remote postage stamp sized republic in the Carpathian mountains and acquire assets in Britain immediately.

He hires a private yacht to sail him around the coast of his homeland and out through the Black Sea into the Mediterranean and on to Whitby in England. When he gets to London, he buys property: a big pile out in Essex backing on to a mental hospital and a few choice properties around greater London to live in or rent for an income as he sees fit.

He endeavours to make his way in British society, making the acquaintance of a couple of ladies in a church yard and this is where his troubles begin. He is something of a lady killer, and begins an affair with one of the women, who undergoes some kind of attack shortly after making his acquaintance. Well, these English ladies, eh? So lovely and so fragile!

Shortly after the attack, she is spotted abducting young children from Hampstead Heath, and our gentleman – who has aristocratic roots, might I add – finds himself under suspicion for causing her mania. Soon, the lady's former lover, the chief doctor in the psychiatric hospital that abuts his new home, contacts one of his old school teachers, an eccentric conspiracy nut who has a thing for blaming East Europeans for the world's evils. They recruit the dead girl's friends to form a kind of posse to drive the new immigrant out of town.

What follows is a dark farce as the naïve Count is pursued across London by the outraged locals. Even when he flees back to his homeland, they pursue him and finally murder him in his own home. So much for British hospitality!

We always retell this one for our own era. The story has a metaphorical vacuum, where various interpreters can put in – or take out – what they want. It seems to reach deep into us, to contact fears and worries that are so familiar and recognisable that it's hard to remember sometimes that it was only written a hundred and fifteen years ago.

The xenophobia, the sexual tension, the grave-yard taboos all seem to come from somewhere – that keeps it at the front of our minds. It's a portrait of alienation or a reactionary villification of the other; it's a tale of the sexual license out of control or of the dangers of suppressing natural desire. An AIDS metaphor, or something about imperialism or Nazism or racism or whatever -ism you want, it seems. I'm a long time Dracula movie fan – especially when I was a kid – but this is the first time I've ever read the original – I'm not really a big fan of non-20th century fiction, probably post war fiction, really, and had thus never gotten around to it until now. What I discovered is that perhaps my caution was justified, and that despite the power of its central imagery, most of the movies take big liberties with the story presented in the novel. And with good reason!

I was not entirely surprised to find that large stretches of Dracula are quite boring. There are long stretches were not much happens, and a great deal of repetition and excess chat. Early on, Lucy and Mina encounter a comical yokel at the graveyard in Whitby where Mina Harker staying with Lucy (while Jonathan is away, of course). If I recall correctly, we get three scenes of this before the annoying old stereotype is torn apart by Dracula in wolf form (off stage, NB).

In fact, comical working class characters crop up again in the form of various navvies who have to interrogated regarding the deliveries of coffin-shaped boxes filled with earth. To a man they find themselves unable to assist the heroes due to “the dusty nature of the consequent thirst engendered in the operators.” Once this situation has been seen to “through the medium of the currency of the realm” they suddenly, and helpfully, wax loquacious on the required subject, usually in the form of a verbatim cor-blimey-missus transcript.

These stock characters remind me of the sorts melodramas that Stoker no doubt knew well from his work in the theatre. There's a very heavy dose melodrama in the entire story – the numerous coincidences that connect the characters, the simpering love plot, Harker's disappearance and re-discovery convalescing in a French nunnery, the inclusion of Qunicey Morris the wild west adventurer for no readily apparent reason. There's a heavy lathering gothic as well, of course, but it's essential form is a popular one, not an artistic or literary one.

There's also a lot of apparent padding. The search for the London coffins seems to be included simply to fill up some pages, and the trip up the Danube to Castle Dracual for the final confrontation is precisely twice as long as it needs to be as the party splits in two and we hear about both journeys in detail. Perhaps Mina's ambiguous state, between human and undead, is supposed to drive some of the tension here, but it's thin stuff.

The most effective bit the opening sequence, where Jonathon Harker is trapped in Dracula's castle. There's a bit of travel log stuff at the start, but once he's on the carriage for the Borgo Pass, things get creepy quickly. Harker's gradual realisation that something really isn't right is nicely timed, from the nervous locals handing him blessings and crucifixes, to the mysterious black carriage that carriers him over the mountains through the Pass and the strange decrepit Castle Dracula, filled with piles of treasure, the seductive (“voluptuous”) brides, and the mysterious Count himself.

It's an intriguing mystery that makes you curious about Dracula's nature, even if you know the story from the movies. Harker's can-do approach provides plenty of action, and makes him a very engaging character: he's level-headed and makes several considered attempt to escape, but he is also in no doubt about the danger he faces. I suppose it's the classic horror movie protagonist, trapped and terrified but determined to survive.

Because I have seen versions of the film where the Harker and Renfield characters are combined, I was genuinely uncertain what Harker's fate would be and so I found this whole section genuinely thrilling. The Count is an implacable foe, too, dominating Harker with a combination of cunning and the force of his malevolent personality. The scene where Dracula throws the brides a baby is genuinely unsettling.

After this great beginning, though, it begins to get bogged down, and it's interesting to note that this is only section where the count has a significant present and any meaningful dialogue. The rest of the novel mainly concerns his actions off screen, and while he remains a cunning foe he is an entirely enigmatic figure from then on. The action focuses instead on the doings of Seward, Quincey Morris, Lord Godalming, Mina & Jonathan Harker and Van Helsing and I think it's this absence of the villain that makes the novel suddenly lose its forward momentum. Dracula needs to be in there gloating and dominating people, just as he does in the Harker sequence. The jolly heroes on their own turf are a far less appealing – I kept thinking of Bulldog Drummond's Black Hand Gang as they hounded the East European immigrant out of London.

In my experience, the movie adaptations greatly increase the role of the Count, usually at the cost of one of more of the investigating team: there are certainly a few too many brave young chaps around in the original. For me, the definitive Van Helsing was always Peter Cushing, with that cool Holmse-like precision and resolve. In the book Van Helsing is a far more eccentric kind of a figure – he struggles comically with English and overflows with compassion and overly demonstrative emotion. Closer to the book is Anthony Hopkins's lip-smacking portrayal in the Francis Ford Coppola version, in all its leering, lip-smacking glory.

The Coppola movie's probably closest to what's here in many respects, but I'm not a fan of that movie and having read the book I think Coppola does it something of a disservice. The tortured soul searching for his lost love robs Dracula of a lot of his psychotic allure. It's a weak spot, I suppose, that Dracula doesn't have in my favourite portrayals. Stoker's Van Helsing is convinced that Dracula is something akin to an animal, his soul trapped inside him somewhere while the body is used by an instinctively malevolent spirit.

It's this unaffected animalistic element that makes the myth of the Count so very powerful. Like an animal, Dracula is a kind of blank screen onto which other creators have projected their own concerns, or the concerns of their age. If it was a great book, then movie makers might be more concerned to “get it right” by attending to the details and themes in the original, with respectful dialogue and attempts at spurious authenticity. Since the book is one of modest achievements, then no one feels too bad about taking a bit of ownership and doing away with the extraneous matter. In this way, maybe, they get closer to the original than the original itself.

And I can't possibly post about this without including this, one of the greatest songs of all time!

I downloaded the opening image from here. I can't tell from this site whether it's OK to use these images or not, but I'm to err on the side of lack of caution and use it. If anyone wants the image taken down, let me know. I mean, I figure it's surely public domain by now!

At the Mountains of Madness

2011-09-07T22:36:00.001+01:00

"At the Mountains of Madness", first published in Astounding Stories, February-April 1936.

This is the the twenty-seventh entry in my read-through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

This story is shorn of all pretence of belief in the supernatural. It swaps the impressionistic, poetic description of the cosmic gulfs from The Whisperer in Darkness and eerie immaterial paranoia of The Call of Cthulhu for the straight-edged scientific vocabulary of the geological record. Lovecraft lays his obvious real life scientific knowledge on as thick as he does the fictional histories that support so many of his other tales. The field of deep geological time was relatively new at the time HPL was writing, when plenty of people still believed the world was just a few thousand years old – the Scopes monkey trial was just 10 years before the story came out.

The details of the expedition and their progress are also meticulously depicted. HPL was an enthusiast of polar exploration – Scott and Shackleton pursued their own doomed expeditions during his childhood, and in A Life, Joshi notes that he followed them with great interest. We've seen this age-of-adventure stuff before in Under the Pyramids in particular, and a great theme is strange horrors turned up in rediscovered lost or ancient places. The details of the expedition and geology bring great conviction to this story when he comes to fit the history of the Old Ones within this entirely convincing world. The meticulous level of factual detail in the story the plot and part of the horror in the story – the devastating gulfs of time and the fact that n entire race with a millennia ling history had risen and fallen millennia before humanity had even crawled down from the trees.

As usual, HPL drags in his other creations: Cthulhu, Tasaggothua, the Mi-Go and the usual quotations from the Necronomicon, as well as his Arkham setting, including the Miskatonic University and even the folklorist from The Whisperer of Darkness, Albert Wilmarth. This last suggests a closer connection between the stories than the seemingly random sprinkling of unpronounceable proper nouns and gnomic snatches of text from ancient tomes we get elsewhere. It all adds up to a kind of continuity with the long history of Earth, as articulated through the ups and downs of the Old Ones' dominion, connecting all these elements into a more concrete mythos (as it were) than we've seen before.

Joshi says, in An H P Lovecraft Encylopedia, “In terms of HPL's work, the story makes explicit what has been evident all along – most of the “gods” of this mythology are merely extraterrestrials and that their followers (including the authors of the books of occult lore to which reference is so frequently made by HPL and others) are mistaken as to their true nature. Robert M Price, who first noted this “demythologizing” feature in HPL, has pointed out that At the Mountains of Madness does not make any radical break in this pattern, but it does emphasize the point more clearly than elsewhere.”

I think, however, it is an important break. Previously there has clearly been an extraterrestrial element to his entities, but always more ambiguous than here. In previous stories, the distinction between what is a god and what is an alien is never clear; an extraterrestrial could very well be a god. HPL tells us that they are made from different states of matter from earthly things, that they come from remote points of space and time where the laws of reality are somewhat different. Contact with them is toxic to sanity; even with relatively mundane entities such as ghouls and the degraded remains of the Martense clan. However, things are different this time, because the Old Ones are ultimately sympathetic figures: “Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn – whatever they had been, they were men.”

The Old Ones are HPL's grotesque imagination tamed; his vividly elaborate aliens serve him as well as ever, but without the atmosphere of paranoia, psychic threat and vertiginous insanity, they become rather dull. He has a go, with the shoggoths always threatening, and Danforth's oft-promised revelation, but the shoggoths are just more (once again, crazy and vividly described) monsters and Danforth's revelation is an underwhelming glimpse of Dreamlands-ish gothic surrealism.

Consequently, although the story is written as a warning to another expedition planning to explore the region, it's hard to see the real import of the warning. The shoggoths are horrible but they don't seem like much of a threat really, as Dyer and Danforth escape with relative ease, and in fact it's the humane Old Ones that actually kill – and dissect! – members of the human party.

This devotion to scientific rectitude changes the nature of the story immensely. Joshi's assertion that it's been “evident all along” that these entities were extraterrestrials rather than gods – which is to say natural rather than supernatural creatures – implies that HPL had this fixed idea of his entities all along which doesn't look like the case to me. My feeling is that each story exists within its own distinct set of parameters, and the scientific explanation given here is no more the ultimate truth of his creations than any other story. The suggestion that the eerie monstrous presence of The Call of Cthulhu is the leader of a race of intergalactic space frogs diminishes that story, and I can't accept that HPL had that in mind.

The real strength of this story is the act of creation in the Old Ones and the wonderful evocation of the frozen Antarctic environment. It's an effective story of theme, expressing HPL's nihilistic obsession with degradation – even the noble erudite Old Ones, who live in a kind of arid intellectual utopia, finally succumbed. The elements of the setting and theme come together far more effectively than the more conventional horror stuff that threatens mankind.

In common with a lot of HPL's tales, however, this is not the story of the fate of the Dyer expedition, and that's why Danforth's ravings and the uncanny nature of the Old Ones are such damp squibs. The horror in this story is not the threat to the Dyer expedition; it is in what the Old Ones who are revived by the Lake party discover when they awaken. Their world is dead; their people have vanished, to be replaced by creatures that were lower than vermin when they ruled the world. All that remains of their existence are their hideous servants, the shoggoths, blobs of barely conscious protoplasm that live on, mindlessly aping the manners and culture of their long-dead masters.

Up next: The Shadow over Innsmouth

Top image: Inside an ice cave from the Hintertux glacier No.3 by flickr user AVI Foto (Arjan Visser) and used under the conditions of the creative commons license.

Supergods by Grant Morrison

2011-09-04T20:43:00.001+01:00

I have reviewed Grant Morrison's book Supergods over at the Zone. I knew I was going to have a lot to say about this, so when Tony asked me if I wanted to review it, I said yes. Making it a review means I have to focus it a little more than I might if I did it here, so I thought that might be a benefit, as well.

The review was an interesting one to write because the book engages three of my favourite topics: comics, cranky beliefs, and authors writing about their own fiction and process.

Grant Morrison is part of what I consider my generation of artists and writers. He's one of those 80s guys I first encountered in 2000AD and Warrior, who stormed America and beat them at their own game. He's the same sort of age as me, and clearly has had a lot of the same cultural influences on his life. When I was a kid, there was a section of the book shop called “cult”, which covered everything from Aleister Crowley and the Marquis de Sade, to William Burroughs and Hugh Selby Junior, to underground comics and Robert Anton Wilson. I read deeply from that shelf, and so, apparently, did Grant Morrison.

Unlike Grant, I was never really a believer. I wanted it to be true, I still do, but it never seemed to work for me, and I found the jargon and convoluted philosophies confusing. When I do puzzle it out, it always seems a bit platitudinous and mundane to me: work hard and you'll do well, listen to your inner voices and go where they suggest, visualise your problems away. It looks to me like a variation of mental training, a way of focusing and organising one's mind, a sort of motivational manual for self-improvement. That's fine and all, but I don't think there's anything supernatural about it.

While I was reading it, I wondered about the relevance of this material to the decline in political activism among my generation. This kind of cranky stuff – and similar material on conspiracies or UFOs – reframes the world in terms of cosmic concerns that make the day-to-day worries of dreary politics seem drab and banal. How important are the state of care homes or the treatment of asylum seekers when compared to the hard work of contacting your archetypal self?

More mundanely, we seem to be a generation that simply pushed the hard questions aside in favour of hedonism and fruitless introspection. As Grant puts it, in relation to grim, realistic comics that confronted political themes, “I could see all that on TV and longed for mind-expanding tales”. I don't except my self from blame. I'm a perfect example of the de-passioned, hyper-ironic, media jaundiced generation who has been watching kids die on TV since I was old enough to hold my own head up. We've got the governments we deserve, because we have voted for ourselves, patting ourselves on the back for being so well-adjusted, “clever and classless and free”, for having a historical perspective that we have confused with simply giving up.

Ah well, maybe the next lot will do better.

A review of State of Change!

2011-08-22T10:42:00.001+01:00

Well, some kind soul has reviewed my free pdf novel, State of Change, over on the Cover to Cover reading blog. It's a very fair review, so go ahead and read if you have been interested in reading but never taken the plunge. You can read it online or download a pdf version right here.

This might be my first fiction review EVER! I swear to God it's not a sock puppet!

Through the Gate of the Silver Key

2011-08-04T22:43:00.001+01:00

"Through the Gate of the Silver Key" first published, Weird Tales, July 1934.

This is the the twenty-sixth entry in my read-through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

Image by pavelrybin and used under the terms of the creative commons license.

Well, I haven't had much luck with these Dunsanian tales so far, but this one really takes the cake. This story completely abandons narrative tension in favour of a series more-or-less unconnected encounters with distinguished metaphysical entities, crowned with a feeble “shock” ending.

HPL is not entirely to blame here, as this is a collaboration with his friend, E Hoffman Price. In A Life, Joshi states that HPL became “unwillingly involved” in the project, when staying with Price who, on his own initiative, undertook the task of writing a sequel to “The Silver Key”. HPL completely re-wrote it, but it was beyond his own unreliable skills at plotting to bring Price's ideas to life. HPL does lend the story the products of his greatest gift – a fabulous imagination for queer and grotesque aliens and creatures – which provides the only meagre pleasures this story presents.

Aside from these momentary flashes of interest, it's just page after page of droning rhetorical flatulence:

Randolph Carter my manifestations on your planet extension, The Ancient Ones, have sent you as one who would lately have returned to small lands of dream which he had lost, yet who with greater freedom has risen to greater and nobler desirer and curiosities. … What you wish, I have found good; and I am ready to grant that which I have granted eleven times only to beings of your planet―five times only to those you call men, or those resembling them. I am ready to shew you the Ultimate Mystery, to look on which is to blast a feeble spirit. Yet before you gaze full at that last and first of secrets you may still wield a free choice, and return if you will through the two Gates with the Veil still unrent before your eyes

The mix of self important appeals to dubious honorifics, sci fi psychedelia and opaque wisdom sounds a lot like the channelled wisdom of the Ancient Masters one sometimes reads in New Age and Theosophical magazines. Maybe it has its genesis in the rambling of Edgar Cayce and Manly P Hall, a mix of pulp era sci fi and transcendental occultism that found find its purest expression in Scientology.

The story is framed around a sequence where Carter's executors gather to divide up his estate in the years following his disappearance (in The Silver Key). It shares that story's snobbery, but while HPL was typically happy to ignore the prosaic types this story presents us with Ernest B Aspinwall, Carter's cousin, by marriage (and therefore “naturally not a Carter”), a broad blustering stereotype of grasping, middle-class mundanity.

Aspinwall's grotesque mendacity is contrasted with the poetic curiosity of Carter's executors, a New Orleans mystic Ettienne-Laurent de Maigny (based on Price) and the elderly New England intellectual Ward Phillps (guess who), and their visitor, Swami Chandrarupta, a mysterious Hindoo (sic!) who relates the events of Carter's journeys beyond the titular egress. When the Chandrarupta reveals Carter's final fate, Aspinwall drops stone dead, his silly, prosaic imagination unable to conceive the soul-destroying secret.

I think there's only one more Dunsanian work to go in this volume, the short novel set in the Dreamlands, “The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath”. I know this one quite well, as it happens, and I'm looking forward for another read. It has its faults, but there are some excellent extended section.

Anyway, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Next up is At the Mountains of Madness, which is quite long, so I may be some time.

Dune by Frank Herbert

2011-07-31T15:23:00.002+01:00

The definitive Dune cover illustration!

I haven't read Dune since I was a teenager, deep into my personal golden age and reading up everything I could lay my hands on. Dune is still a classic, but back then it stood out even more distinctly in the field that wasn't quite so crowded. By the time I got to it, there were already two or three fat sequels, which was still a remarkable feat. I remember stories in Starlog and Starburst about the abortive Jodorowsky movie, and there was a board game that I never could quite fathom.

When I actually read it, though, I was a bit disappointed. I found it a bit baffling and a bit dull. I couldn't work out what everyone wanted, and there was a lot of talk compared to action. I liked bits of it – the imperial backdrop was really cool, and the weird powers and strnage magic mixed with high tech appealed to me, but because I didn't quite “get it” it left me a bit cold. My impressions were further confused by the David Lynch movie, which I also found hard to follow (and I haven't seen since except in snatches on TV, but inevitably, it is available on youtube).

I can't help thinking that I didn't do Dune justice; maybe I was a bit young, and I read it in a concentrated blast in the week before the movie came out (demonstrating even then my particularity about reading a book before seeing the movie). It's been on my vague re-read list for a while, but I never picked it up. However, when I came across this marvellous old New English Edition at a book sale, I knew the time had come! This is the same edition I read back in the 80s: who can forget those thrilling Bruce Pennington covers? They were definitely a big part of the series' appeal, suggesting all sorts of of exotic fantasies within!

This time around, I found it much easier to follow, and in fact I was quite impressed by it in many ways. The eco-system of Arrakis and the history of the galactic empire are detailed and consistent, and the economy based on the vital spice provides the necessary impetus for the slightly histrionic story. The various factions and their rivalries are cleverly developed and the story has a momentum gained from the trade off between these clearly identified conflicts and mutual interests.

It's steeped with a wonderfully weird blend of mysticism, super-science and high adventure. The messianic plan of the Bene Gesserit to breed a super-human through selective breeding and strange mental disciplines strikes a brilliant balance between far-future plausibility and just plain bonkers. The social and planetary engineering projects are like mega-technology of the social sciences, a kind of applied super-anthropology and ultra long-term environmental planning. Herbert gives all this a swashbuckling twist by making knife fighting ubiquitous as the personal shields render conventional guns and projectile weapons useless.

Mix in a bit of old fashioned imperial pomp – with dukes and barons and princesses and empresses – and it's easy to see why it's such a hit, and it's influence has been huge. It's an obvious source for a lot of the unpinnings of the Star Wars universe. Both feature orphans who seek a greater destiny in conflict with a galactic empire, and both have that mix of super science and a mystical hero's journey. Both take the pulp approach to world building, considering planets as a mono-culture dominated by ecological concerns – even Luke Skywalker's home of Tatooine recalls Dune, with its moisture farming and masked and tubed-up “desert people”. Arrakis is like one of those planets brought into sharp focus, with a wealth of history and particular circumstance building it up into a credible setting.

Dune's other big influence was on SF/F publishing. It's a pioneer of the open-ended multi-saga series, having four sequels already by the time the David Lynch movie came out, and since then having spear-headed the field of post-humous collaboration. On the back of the New English Library edition, Arthur C Clarke says, “Dune seems to me unique among SF novels in the depth of its characterisation and the extraordinary detail of the world it creates. I know nothing comparable to it except THE LORD OF THE RINGS.” (Capitals in the original!)

The comparison with The Lord of the Rings is obviously a reference to the exhaustive conception of Arrakis and the intricately detailed galactic history of which the events of Dune are a kind of culmination, as with the destruction of the One Ring. Like The Lord of the Rings, it's one of the inspirations behind the modern fantasy series, with its map and appendices of invented history, natural history and language. Althought I haven't read the Dune sequels, my instinct, which has yet to be proved wrong in practice, is that long-running series like these inevitably become inward-looking, losing sight of the thematic push that got them going in favour of tittle tattle about the lives of made-up people. The novel Dune itself, however, is clearly engaged with quite strong themes.

It is highly didactic, and few of the characters can resist dropping aphorisms or fictional proverbs (which also add texture to the setting) into conversations or the their thoughts, most famously “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.”

There's an underlying rumination on human perfection, how it could be achieved and what it means. The mentats are described as human computers, an engineered mind trained to do the work of the artificial intelligences that have been (for reasons somewhat obscure) deemed illegal; meanwhile, the mysticism of the Bene Gesserit masks a highly materialistic view of humanity where the human form can be manufactured through genetics (via selected breeding, as the idea of direct manipulation of the human genome never comes up, presumably beyond Herbert's scientific scope at the time). For a novel concerned with prophecy and a coming messiah there is very little talk of God. The appendices mention the general universal belief in a divine being, but most of the sacred aspects of the setting revolve around Paul Maud Dib.

Paul stands as the pinnacle of human perfection, and his conflict is how to use his power or destiny wisely, standing in contrast to the heir of the Harkonnen family, Fey-Ruatha. They are both groomed for the same role, to rule Arrakis, and both are products of the Bene Gesserit breeding programme.

Paul's ambitions for peace are contrasted with the violent nature of the Harkonnen heir, such as where Paul 's duel with Jamis and his regret at Jamis's death are contrasted with Feyd-Ruatha's delight in killing the psychically incapacitated slave. Because the Bene Gesserit have controlled their breeding, it's strongly implied that the differences between the people stem from differences in their backgrounds. Paul is instinctively good and decent and brave, thanks in large part to his father and his teachers, who have shaped the man he is. These teachers are contrasted with the Harkonnen house, a place of murder, deceit and greed taken to its most appalling extremes.

The climax of this rivalry, at the denouement of Paul's plans and the end of the book, is actually a bit of a let down. The book has a few structural problems that undermine what should have been the highly satisfying sticky end of the matter. I think the problem is partly that Feyd-Ruatha doesn't get enough time in his few appearances to develop anything more than a shallow impression, but crucially, I think, that the two don't appear to have met before the duel. If they'd had a sparring relationship, a more personal hatred, this would have been much more satisfying.

This could have happened during the long campaign to take Arrakis, but in the last third of the book, we start skipping through events rather more quickly. Weeks and months, even years pass, between encounters. Paul's sister Alia is born, and he has a son who never appears on screen as far as I recall, and is rather cruelly despatched in a Harkonnen raid, perhaps to give Paul's final revenge a bit more savour but, once more, because we lack a personal connection with the child it's hard to feel to much about him.

The first two-thirds of this is pretty solid, if a bit talky and written in a somewhat shallow third-person omniscient style, but the last third rather lets the whole show down. What should have been a the action climax is reduced to a few vignettes, and then what appears to be a hurried climax. Without the dense texture of the earlier sections, the melodrama lies a bit threadbare and the trial by combat comes across as cheesy rather than cathartic.

While I was reading it, I kept thinking of Vance. Vance was a friend of Herbert's and, as he recalls in this (audio) interview with Starship Sofa he didn't think much of it. However, it's lot like some of Vance's own planetary romance work, and the story of the boy who loses everything to cheats and bullies, and then fights his way back to the top is pure Vance, even if the mystical element is not something he would admit in his own work. I thought in particular of Durdane, written, in the early seventies, just when Vance's friend Herbert was doing so well with Dune, and in three volumes probably not a great deal longer than Dune itslef. Maybe Herbert's success is what made Vance attempt his own longer narrative? Compared to Vance, though, Herbert doesn't have quite the ability to infuse Paul's battle with the kind of vitality Vance gives Gastel Etzwane, and the Harkonnens can't match the teasing despicableness of Vance's villainous characters.

I'm glad I read this again, and it's an enjoyable book, but like a lot of half-decent SF books, I walked away kind of unsatisfied. I liked the trappings, and the set-up was full of excitement, but the way it played out worked against these pleasures. This vague feeling of semi-satisfaction is similar to what I felt as kid, I think. I liked the atmosphere of it then, too, but something about the story didn't click. I suppose I might articulate my dissatisfaction more clearly, but it's about the same, I'd say.

From Beyond

2011-07-24T14:09:00.003+01:00

“From Beyond”, first published in The Fantasy Fan, vol 10, No 1, June 1934

This is the the twenty-fifth entry in my read-through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

. . . . I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness. . . .

This is another of the weaker “shocker” style stories, where HPL tries hard to give a shocking weight to something we all figured out pages ago using the mighty power of italics. Once again the climactic line depends on a revelation that's painfully obvious from the start. I'm finding this a surprisingly common weakness in these stories.

"The Dreams in the Witch House”, for example, keeps going after Gilman's final attack to the “OMG It Was All Real” moment. In “The Whisperer in Darkness”, the real climax comes with the arrival of Akely's final letter, but Wilmarth continues on against all common sense. In “The Dunwich Horror” the problem is slightly different, in that this is more like two stories stitched together, but even so the revelation that Wilbur and the thing in the attic were twins has already been made clear and so the italicised final line can't help but appear bathetic.

Perhaps HPL pursues objective horror at the expense of the subjective terrors that make his stories so vivid. Looking at "The Dreams in the Witch House", for example, again, HPL thinks he's writing a story where – OMG! - the witch legends are true and malignant forces slowly destroy poor Gilman. What I saw, though, was a powerful portrait of mental disintegration, leading eventually to infanticide. Gilman's grisly final fate is the climax of the story, where the subjective and objective worlds collide in a moment of gory catharsis. The story ends at that point, and HPL probably has a paragraph to leave the image in our mind and get out. Instead, he goes on for three pages (and another false ending) before the story finally peters out in a sift of dusty bones.

This is a shorter story, and so the weak ending occupies just a couple of paragraphs. I'm not sure where the story should have ended, but surely nothing could match the promise of Tillinghasts's magnificent demented rant. Imagine this delivered by Vincent Price, Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff, or even Sam Neil, Jeffrey Coombs or Jeremy Irons (sorry for the extended quote, but it's a beauty):

You think those floundering things wiped out the servants? Fool, they are harmless! But the servants are gone, aren’t they? You tried to stop me; you discouraged me when I needed every drop of encouragement I could get; you were afraid of the cosmic truth, you damned coward, but now I’ve got you! What swept up the servants? What made them scream so loud? . . . Don’t know, eh? You’ll know soon enough! Look at me—listen to what I say—do you suppose there are really any such things as time and magnitude? Do you fancy there are such things as form or matter? I tell you, I have struck depths that your little brain can’t picture! I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down daemons from the stars. . . . I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness. . . . Space belongs to me, do you hear? Things are hunting me now—the things that devour and dissolve—but I know how to elude them. It is you they will get, as they got the servants. Stirring, dear sir? I told you it was dangerous to move. I have saved you so far by telling you to keep still—saved you to see more sights and to listen to me. If you had moved, they would have been at you long ago. Don’t worry, they won’t hurt you. They didn’t hurt the servants—it was seeing that made the poor devils scream so. My pets are not pretty, for they come out of places where aesthetic standards are—very different. Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you—but I want you to see them. I almost saw them, but I knew how to stop. You are not curious? I always knew you were no scientist! Trembling, eh? Trembling with anxiety to see the ultimate things I have discovered? Why don’t you move, then? Tired? Well, don’t worry, my friend, for they are coming. . . . Look! Look, curse you, look! . . . It’s just over your left shoulder. . . .

ETA: An H P Lovecraft Encyclopedia informs us that although this story wasn't published until 1934, it was written at the beginning of HPL's career in 1920. Some of the problems in this story, therefore, must spring from inexperience.

There is a movie of this one, from the makers of Re-Animator, but I recall being disappointed by it. I went looking for the trailer (which I found) and happened across this fun video called “From Beyond vs Mr Oizo”, which makes the movie look lots more fun than I remember it.Warning: Includes gore, sexual objectification and cauliflower.

Next up: Through the Gate of the Silver Key

The Dreams in the Witch House

2011-07-18T22:18:00.004+01:00

"The Dreams in the Witch House", first published in Weird Tales, July 1933.

This is the the twenty-fourth entry in my read-through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

HPL based his fictional Arkham on Salem, the New England town that is most famous for its seventeenth century witch trials. The history and testimony of the Salem witches follow a pattern that was common at about the same time in Europe among the same religiously non-conformist communities that had fled to the New World in search of a new Jerusalem. The religious atmosphere of the seventeenth century in America that led to the witch trials still marks something about the American character: puritanical, literal-minded and keenly aware of sin and evil.

Far from being the fevered persecutions that sometimes attend high-school productions of The Crucible, the accounts of witch trials were always aggressively rational and – in their own way- materialistic. Witch hunters sought objective, material evidence of diabolism, and wrote scholarly texts filled with tortuous rationalisations for the influence of the diabolical on an otherwise prosaic world; the witch trials themselves followed complex forms of law and precedent that leant the proceedings an air impartial judgement as well as theological correctness.

This type of rationalisation of the uncanny fits in very neatly with HPL's own method of creating pseudo-historical and pseudo-scientific support for his horrors, and so this combination of the two works extremely well. Keziah Mason and Brown Jenkin are immediately familiar from the testimony of witches throughout the witch trial period and fairy tales, but HPL ties these folkloric elements in with ideas of advanced, mind-bending mathematics.

We've seen this marriage of occult and technology before, in The Whisperer in Darkness, but the stories come at the idea from opposite angles. The fungi from Yuggoth are hyper-advanced aliens, but the more we learn about their world, it seems to intersect with a universe of horrible magic and mystical malevolence. In this story, we start from tales of Keziah Mason's magic and the more we learn about her, the more this ancient knowledge fits in with the advanced maths and physics that Walter Gilman is studying.

This slippery merging of the rational and irrational marks this as one of HPL's most powerful tales of madness. Gilman's sudden apprehension of meaning and significance in everything is actually a lot like a psychedelic trip - “he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their purpose.” As his paranoia grows he hears unidentified scrathing sounds in the walls and suffers acute anxiety and insomnia. Gilman's descent looks a lot like a stress-induced a psychotic episode, combined with a bad case of seasonal affective disorder.

HPL describes the symptoms with a conviction to reeks of personal experience.

“About this period his inability to concentrate on his formal studies worried him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations being very acute. But the exaggerated sense of hearing was scarcely less annoying. Life had become an insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying impression of other sounds―perhaps from regions beyond life―trembling on the very brink of audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the rats in the ancient partitions were the worst. Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive but deliberate.”

HPL suffered a massive anxiety attack in high school years and never returned to formal education. Joshi suggests in A Life, that it was a weakness in maths that led to HPL's breakdown: “My feeling is that Lovecraft's relative failure to master algebra made him gradually awaken to the realisation that he could never do serious professional work in chemistry or astronomy, and that therefore a career in those two fields was an impossibility.” (p82) Gilman also studies maths and is failing before the unholy influence of Keziah Mason and Brown Jenkin act as a kind of supernatural study aid and he suddenly masters “Riemannian equations” with ease. It's hard no see HPL's own anxieties reflected – decades later – in Gilman's breakdown.

That's the secret of fiction, though, of all art ultimately. We take the blind empty terrors that exist beneath the surface and give them life on the page, or through sound or in images. HPL doesn't seem to discuss his own work in this way. Although he acknowledges the importance of dreams in his creative process, he doesn't look to deeply for the sources of his dream inagery. His own explanation of his work is couched in the emerging narrative of genres – understanding the Gothic and it's key practitioners from the previous century, in particular. When I've finished with these stories I'm going to wrap my thoughts up around a reading of his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, and perhaps I'll look in more detail at what he has to say about this topic then.

Next up: From Beyond

The Invention of Murder & The Thin Man

2011-07-11T23:08:00.002+01:00

Annoyingly, I have misplaced my copy of The Invention of Murder. I finished it a couple of weeks ago, then put it down but I cannot recall where it is. It's a mystery, although one hardly worth the attention of any of the real and fictional sleuths detailed within. I feel like a should know where it is, I should be able to recall where I put it, but the information remains just out of reach. It's an incredibly frustrating feeling and yet it's a state of mind that I actively seek in puzzles and mystery stories.

I've always been somewhat partial to quizzes and puzzles, and to mystery stories. I learned cryptic crosswords from my Dad, who would do the crossword in the New Zealand Listener every week. It was a source of some pride to me when I was able to complete this on my own, and then I graduated to the daily Dominion cryptic, when I was working at Butterworths in the late 80s (for the benefit of you lousy kids, this was before the internet when we had to make our own time-wasting distractions during work hours).

These days I like to do the crossword in the Private Eye – I particularly enjoy the way that some of the clues are also topical (and often smutty) jokes. Typically I get this down to the last couple of clues before never quite giving it up, puzzling over the final handful of empty squares at odd moments before the next edition, trying to force the answer out by act of will.

I am, however, horribly bad at figuring at mysteries and “lateral thinking” puzzles. I can remember a series of books when I was a kid called Two (or maybe Five) Minute Mysteries, anthologies of short puzzle type stories, usually hanging on some ridiculous puzzle. In one I recall that the clue was a message typed by the deceased in his last gasp, supposedly revealing of the secret plans, stolen gem or something of that sort. He had typed the world “cane” but when they searched for a cane, they couldn't find one. Where was the maguffin actually hidden? The true location was a weather vane – the dying man had, perhaps excusably, mistyped, and the v key sits next to the v on a typewriter keyboard. Yeah, that's what I thought to: bloody smartarse.

Later, I discovered SF, which has always borrowed heavily from pulp crime traditions, and a lot of classic SF authors used to double up as detective stories. I remember in particular a series of detective stories by Isaac Asimov set on Mars, I think, and a lot of other SF seemed to feature cops and robbers.

It's only recently, though, that I've gotten interested in classic crime fiction. A couple of years ago I read a bunch of Raymond Chandler novels, and then I dipped my toe into Dashiell Hammet and Dennis Wheatley (perhaps not quite so illustrious as the others). In fact, I spotted a copy of The Thin Man – by Hammet – at the Amnesty International book sale and picked it up as it was only 50p, or something. (I got a whole bunch of interesting books at that sale, and I intend to do a “The Pile! Woe is me!” type post fairly soon.)

Myrna Loy, Asta the Dog & William Powell in The Thin Man movie (which I have not seen)

I might as well come out and say that I am struggling to write a detective style novel right now. It is in fact a sequel – of sorts – to my story “Insured... For Murder!” which appeared in Premonitions, and follows the classic private eye clichés pretty closely. I'm a little worried about it, as the world-weary sleuth is such a terrible cliché but I am trying to study plot to see if I can get a better handle on how to put one of these things together. The nitty-gritty of the mystery is one of the things I lile most about the genre, but I struggle a bit with plot. I want to write the sort of story I'd like to read, something surprising and thought-provoking, maybe verging on the satirical or surreal, but something that doesn't stretch my credulity. I've managed it a few times in the shorter form at least, so I know I can do it.

To this end, I've been reading these books with a critical eye, trying to get at what I like, and how I can do it. Here are some ideas I have gleaned so far:

Real crime is sordid and awful and tragic, and no one comes out of it unharmed. Good crime writers understand this, I think; even in something as apparently innocuous as A Peter Whimsey mystery, crime seems a sad, pointless and desperate business.
It's all about characters. The Two (or Five) Minute Mysteries I mention up thread werelike cryptic crosswords, based on very mechanical matters with a dressing of sleuthing. In both real crime and the best crime writing, it's all about the characters, their rivalries, their passions, their moral motivations and peccadilloes. This is what drives a plot ahead, what makes crime happen in the real, what motivates action and reaction. Strong characters provide strong plots.

I think this is particularly important in an SF context: the cool SF idea is just a concept without an interesting character to interact with it. A crime plot, in fact, works very nicely in an SF situation, because both genres are based around investigation: SF investigates a novel social or technological idea, while crime investigates human motivations and moralities.

Furthermore, crime asks its characters “how far would you go?” and the extremity this suggests is encouragement for a SF writer to explore all the logical consequences of an idea. Fuck sober and responsible speculation: that's the sort of boring stuff that scientists write when they try their hands at SF. Give me far out ideas, but also give me a serial killer, corporate and political corruption, envy, lust and greed. We can all imagine a sensible world of moderate liberality and control – we live in one, more or less – but what happens when all this shit gets in the WRONG HANDS. The sorts of books I'm thinking about inlcude Neuromancer, Altered Carbon, the best P K Dick novels, some of Jack Vance's best SF – the Alastor novels, for example, or maybe some elements in Durdane (the traitor within is a classic Vance plot move).
Crime is small scale. I suppose as a variation on the above, crime happens to individuals, not organisations or nation states or armies or anything like that: that becomes a thriller, I think, which has it's own rules. I'll have more to say about thrillers sometimes soon, I hope.
Don't let the mystery get in the way of a good story. I am amazed by the number times clues are dropped in the laps of the great detetctives quite by chance. Marlow will get a call from some hood connected with the case who'd heard that Marlow was snooping around. Whimsey will call in some contact to help in special analysis or surveillance.

All of them will providentially notice some small detail which unravels the entire plan. In fact, this is the origin of the word “clue” or “clew” - the ball of twine with which Theseus navigated the labyrinth. The string should be easy to follow: that's not the challenge. The challenge is killing the Minotaur that lies at the centre.
The detective character should be somewhat unwillingly involved. This isn't true of all of them, but Sam Spade and Nick Charles are not entirely happy to get wound up in the plots they finally unravel. Marlow forever gets dragged in a a little deeper than he expected. They are all pushed on, though, by a combination of necessity – often under suspicion for the crime they're trying to solve – and something in their character that won't let it got. Sam Spade hangs on for a possible pay out from the falcon, Nick Charles can't resist the mystery, Marlow is a white knight despite himself.

This also drives the plots in interesting ways. The detectives desire for a cautious life and the motivation to move on are forever in conflict, which leads to bad choices and half-choices which have unforeseen results. Whimsey is a little more distant from the events, however, more like the outsider detective and not quite as much part of the mystery as the classic pulp private eye.

EDITED TO ADD
6. Crucially, everyone has a dirty secret. Even if they didn't commit the crime, there's still something they want to keep out of the public eye. This is the basis of most of the red herrings. (I'm going to have to reformat this bit later...)

That's it so far, a work in progress, I suppose. This what I like to think about while I'm doing the initial plotting. It feels very deliberate and stodgy, hard going at this stage, before characters and setting properly take shape, and this helps form a back ground of my thinking and is as good a way to avoid actually working on the story as any other. I can in fact walk away from this feeling quite righteous, that I've made progress, without actually writing one word of novel tonight.

Sigh! I need to get my head down and get on with it. That's the hard part, as it goes!

The Strange High House In The Mist

2011-07-09T15:42:00.004+01:00

"The Strange High House In The Mist", first published Weird Tales October 1931.

This is the the twenty-third entry in my read-through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

We're back in a Dunsanian mood, this time in the made-up coastal town of Kingsport. The story is told in that archaic, declamatory tone that annoyed me so much about his previous ventures into the style. It clearly spoke to HPL, but it makes me cringe.

Here we have Thomas Olney, another sensitive soul whose mind is too beautiful for this harsh, materialistic world. He's a character in the same vein as the titular Outsider, Randolph Carter or the wee kitten that gets killed in The Cats of Ulthar. HPL seems to reserve this mode for a kind of mournful self-indulgence that always sounds a bit adolescent to brusque, stoic, kiwi old me.

Thomas Olney is also freighted with that great curse for the Truly Poetic Soul, a middle class job and a family: “he taught ponderous things in a college by Narragansett Bay. With stout wife and romping children he came, and his eyes were weary with seeing the same things for many years and thinking the same disciplined thoughts.” Olney prefers to ignore the blessings around his own table and instead goes to visit a scary old hermit that lives in a ramshackle hut on a cliff overlooking the sea. He has a psychedelic experience and – psychically, at least – drops out.

The story seems is at once old fashioned, harking back to the decadent rebellion against the buttoned-up morés of the Edwardian age, and also seems to prefigure the mid-life crisis narrative of the 60s and 70s, when middle-aged academics started to drop acid, join communes and screw female students, all in the name of spiritual emancipation. Instead, Olney psychically checks out, and his soul spends eternity toking bongs and listening to Grateful Dead bootlegs while his body goes through the motions:

And ever since that hour, through dull dragging years of greyness and weariness, the philosopher has laboured and eaten and slept and done uncomplaining the suitable deeds of a citizen. … The sameness of his days no longer gives him sorrow, and well-disciplined thoughts have grown enough for his imagination. His good wife waxes stouter and his children older and prosier and more useful, and he never fails to smile correctly with pride when the occasion calls for it. In his glance there is not any restless light.

These stories are an occasional indulgence for HPL, although I suspect there are more not included in this volume. These occasional melancholy outsiders are the benevolent versions of the actively evil types that HPL otherwise focuses on – most obviously Wilbur Whately, but also Robert Suydam, Richard Upton Pickman and the protagonists of The Hound. The ultimate outsiders in his fiction, I suppose, are the many creatures and aliens on which he lavishes such flamboyant imagination.

I suppose it's ever so that the devil has the best tunes. Maybe it's just my puritanical impulses, but Thomas Olney's efforts at taboo busting seem tame compared to the dreams of annihilation and moral destruction that appeals to even low-grade evils like the Martense clan and Dagon. Say what you like about the fungi from Yuggoth, as the saying goes, but at least they had an ideology.

Next up: The Dreams in the Witch House

The Whisperer In Darkness

2011-06-27T21:44:00.005+01:00

"The Whisperer In Darkness", first published in Weird Tales, August 1931.

This is the the twenty-second entry in my read-through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

While reading this story again, I have in the back of my mind, the gaming supplement Delta Green , which re-imagines the Fungi of Yuggoth through the lens of contemporary UFO mythology. The supplement takes in Majestic 12, Roswell, greys, Project Blue book and secret government UFO files and places them in the context of decades of contact with the Fungi to great effect. Even allowing for the cleverness of Delta Green, it's surprising how close the fit is.

The most important name in the story in this regard is that of Charles Fort, name-dropped at the end of the first section, while Wilmarth is still sceptical about the stories coming out of Vermont:

“Two or three fanatical extremists went so far as to hint at possible meanings in the ancient Indian tales which gave the hidden beings a non-terrestrial origin; citing the extravagant books of Charles Fort with their claims that voyagers from other worlds and outer space have often visited earth.”

I'm a bit of a Fortean myself, I have been since before I knew there was a word for such a thing aside from “weirdo”, “geek” or “loony”. HPL's writing is definitely part of something that I wouldn't call a genre as such, but an identifiable trend that I might call “Fortean literature”. Fortean literature is that which finds alternative explanations for the world. Fortean literarture includes Ayn Rand, Helena Blatavatsky, Philip K Dick and Thomas Pynchon, a range that includes writers who clearly mean it at one end, and those that just like to play at the other.

Alien contact is a big theme of Fortean literature, suggesting as it does that the world is at the mercy of powers we cannot comprehend, and The Whisperer In Darkness seems to pre-figure a lot of the contact narratives that have come from both the community of UFO believers and the fiction that addresses the subject. Like Adamski's Venusians, the Fungi claim to approaching people selectively to prepare human kind for greater contact. Like the Venusians, they take their agents for visits to their home world, although it's nothing as simple as hitching a ride on a flying saucer. The creatures hidden our midsts bring to mind the Invaders From Mars or the strange machinations of This Island Earth.

All that's missing is the kind of anti-nuclear or environmental warning that the fictional and folkloric aliens often bring with them. The Fungi are at best disinterested in human affairs, and in fact seem to have a malevolent curiosity about us and perhaps an interest in enslaving the human race to work in their mines.

HPL looks backwards to folklore and oral history for evidence of his visitors, associating them with mythical faeries and nature spirits (Arthur Machen also gets a name check), which is not far from the Atlantean speculations of Ignatius Donnelly and James Churchward but anticipates a strong current in UFO myth, typified by the work of Erich von Daniken.

I think these types of myth have the effect, not always unforseen, of undermining human agency in a way that's close to HPL's intentions of cosmic horror, and this story benefits from some of HPL's best writing on the subject so far. HPL lovingly describes the black empty abyss of space, the creatures that reside there and spaces beyond human perception that exist further out.

“The main body of the beings inhabits strangely organised abysses wholly beyond the utmost reach of any human imagination. The space-time globule which we recognise as the totality of all cosmic entity is only an atom in the genuine infinity which is theirs. And as much of this infinity as any human brain can hold is eventually to be opened up to me, as it has been to not more than fifty other men since the human race has existed.”

I also like the way HPL slips his manufactured occult figures into the back ground. The nature of the threat in the Vermont hills goes from folklore to sci fi and then back to magic and superstition as their nature passes beyond the ken of humans. This blend of science fiction and the fantastic is the distinguishing feature in weird fiction, those worlds of forgotten antiquity, the remote future or the depths of space where science and sorcery exist in parallel. It's quite a chilling moment that tips the Fungi beyond being mere aliens and hinting at an extra-dimensional nature inimical to humanity.

All of this is brilliantly expounded, and there's also some great landscape writing of the type familiar from The Dunwich Horror and The Colour Out of Space, but for all these great moments, the story as a whole doesn't quite work. Joshi notes in A Life that HPL had a great deal of trouble getting this one right, in particular making Wilmarth appear less gullible. Despite his struggles, Wilmarth's naivety in travelling to Akeley's farm after the last peculiar letter is hard to credit – it's so obvious what's happened that one wonders what he could have hoped to achieve. In many ways, Akeley succumbing to the Fungi is the big reveal, and the problem is not that this is too obvious, but that the story carries on as if it's not.

I feel as if HPL is too attached to a lot of the material that comes after Wilmarth arrrives in Vermont: the malevolent hills and forests, the description black abysses beyond space, and the image of discarded face and hands. None of this takes us any further than the final Akeley letter, as chilling as it all is, and Wilmarth has to be forced to behave in ways that defy credibility and ignore the danger that is plainly clear to the reader.

What would Wilmarth do if he realised the true meaning of the letter? Maybe this question takes the story in a direction that HPL didn't wanted go, something like the ending of The Dunwich Horror with the Fungi defeated for the time being at least. As with the latter story, Joshi criticises The Whisperer in Darkness as having an overly dualistic approach to good and evil, but I think that's less of a problem than the execution.

Of course, the end is only a part of the whole that goes up to make up a short story. We get addicted to a certain sort of ending, and when it doesn't arrive we feel cheated. HPL's clearly struggling for that sort of ending, but the real achievement here is the atmosphere along the way. HPL handles the pace of revelation about the creatures really well, and all the hooking up of the brain jars sticks just this side of the ghoulish thanks to an absolutely deadpan delivery. I'd say in this one the journey is well worth the effort, even if the destination is a bit of a let down.

Next up: The Strange High House in the Mist

The image for this post comes from flickr user ~prescott and is used under the terms of the creative commons attribution and non-commercial use license.

Posts of Note!

2011-06-22T22:39:00.002+01:00

I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the stats generated by hits here. I don't know why I thought that, and even as I type those words I wonder at the wasted time that has gone into this!

Still if there were blog regulators they would make you file an annual report like this one, and so I am getting in ahead of the New World Order crypto-fascists before they shut me down. Take a look if you are a connoisseur of boring crap about me.

You can read it right here on the Posts of Note page.

The Dunwich Horror

2011-06-12T14:55:00.005+01:00

"The Dunwich Horror", first published in Weird Tales, April 1929.

This is the the twenty-first entry in my read-through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

This is definitely the first HPL story I ever read, regardless of whatever else I might have previously said on the subject. I remember very distinctly the weird cover in an anthology called 11 Great Horror Stories that was in the book box in room six, Greenacres School in 1979. It made a big impression on me at the time. I can't remember the other stories in that collection – the internet confirms my recollection that they're stories by Poe, J P Hartley and the like – but this vivid and bizarre tale stuck with me long after I first read it. I found the image of the hideous Wilbur Whately and the last desperate attempt to banish his twin truly terrifying.

Reading it again now (I have read it many times since then, of course) it's still gripping and terrifying. As in The Colour Out of Space, the opening chapter lays on the atmosphere as effectively as anywhere in HPL's writing, and he then goes on to populate this vividly evoked place with a cast of almost caricature hill billies and, of course, the utterly grotesque Whately clan. The build up to the death of Wilbur is thrilling, mysterious and urgent, and the final reveal at the end of chapter six is fully the equal of the dark hints that have been dropped thus far.

After this, the story loses a bit of its momentum, and in fact it's almost a separate tale. The story of Wilbur Whately is a deeply personal one, shot through with considerations of class, otherness and the tension between the autodidact and the academy. The second part is more of an environmental horror similar to The Colour Out of Space or, perhaps more pertinently, The Lurking Fear. The change in atmosphere isn't entirely successful, but the careful build up of suspense through the clever use of the party line (HPL once more basing his story firmly in the contemporary world) gets things going again for a terrific climax.

Joshi is somewhat dismissive of this story. In The Annotated H P Lovecraft, he calls it “simply an aesthetic mistake on Lovecraft's part”, while in A Life he says, after describing the story, that “it should be clear from this narration that many points of plotting and characterisation in the story are painfully inept”. His criticism focuses more on the point that The Dunwich Horror doesn't fit with Lovecraft's stated aesthetic goals, that it's a a story of good (Armitage and chums) versus evil (the Whatelys) rather than cosmic horror, and that such a naïve premise is unworthy of HPL. It's hardly an aberration in his output, however; in many ways the final sequence is like a re-run of The Lurking Fear, and The Shunned House and The Horror At RedHook, have a similarly dualistic approach to good and evil.

Johsi quotes (and dismisses, somewhat unwillingly) a critique of the story suggesting that it's a parody on the basis that it is the Whately twins who “in mythic terms, fulfil the traditional role of the 'hero' much more than Armitage does”. It seems strange to make the jump from there parody, but I think it is correct that this is far more the story of the Whately twins than it is of Armitage, who is a pretty dull character all things considered, just as in The Horror At Red Hook, Robert Suydam is a more interesting character than the detective Malone. Like Suydam, Wilbur is a classic Lovecraftian outsider, and in many ways a dark reflection of HPL himself – a prodigy, an autodidact, haughtily dismissive of the common herd with pseudo-aristocratic airs. It's not a parody, but Wilbur seems to embody the reversal of many of HPL's values: erudition turned bad, a mockery of aristocratic heritage, and goatish, animalistic physicality – it tells us something, I think, that Wilbur's most appalling deformities are hidden in his trousers.

The horror here is not that inflicted upon the unfortunate residents of Dunwich, nor the potential destruction of the Earth by the arrival of Yog Sothoth, but the personal horror of Wilbur Whately and his twin brother. The world is entirely against them from the start; he's illegitimate and the subject of malicious gossip from the day he's born. He grows up in poverty dedicating his life to contacting his absent father boasting, in the way that fatherless boys will, that his absent dad is the biggest, toughest guy there is. The twin's final plaintive cry is highlighted by Joshi as a possible parody of the crucifixion, but it sounds to me more like the desperate cry of a fatherless child searching for their daddy.

The Dunwich Horror is also one of HPL's most popular tales. It was qucikly snapped up by Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales, and HPL received a healthy cheque for it. It was immediately popular with the readership and is one of the most anthologised of HPL's tales. It also has the dubious accolade of a movie version:

Hm, well, Dean Stockwell's always worth a look, but one has to wonder what Sandra Dee's doing in there! If you're looking for an interesting version of the tale, I'd suggest turning to the internet and looking out for David McCallum's audio version. Not sure on the legality – proceed with caution! - but it's a cracking recording!

Next up: The Whisperer in Darkness

The Dervish House

2011-06-09T23:06:00.000+01:00

I remember my Dad was partial to what you might call respectable thrillers. He liked Frederick Forsyth, Len Deighton, John le Carre, that sort of thing. He'd happily tear through one of them in an afternoon over a day of test cricket and two packets of Benson & Hedges, happy as you'd ever see him. Part of what he liked about those thrillers, I think, was the way they dealt in almost real-world events, the way they seemed ripped from the headlines.

It's a kind of a sci fi, thing, almost, with a speculative edge to it as it tries to imagine possible scenarios for the shift in geopolitics. Le Carre's novels seem to take place in what would seem like a nightmarish SF dystopia if we didn't know how scarily close to the truth is is. It's not far at all into a cyberpunk thriller if you push these stories a decade or two into the future. Authors like Bruce Sterling, Jon Courtney Grimwood, Neal Stephenson and Greg Egan kind of fit that niche, and Charles Stross has acknowledged the inspiration of Len Deighton.

Like my Dad and his thrillers, I love these near-future crime and espionage capers and The Dervish House is a particularly satisfying example.

Like the best of the respectable thrillers, MacDonald's novel draws on the real world and speculates intriguingly on global politics and their consequences. The technological aspects add another dimension to the thematic backdrop of the novel, thinking not just about the world as it is now, but the world as it might be.

MacDonald cleverly blends his futuristic imagination with the exotic setting of Istanbul, and I suspect that this provides a little cover from the clang of neologisms and the clash of new technology in familiar surroundings. Ceteps and bit bots and automatic cars and nano drugs fit easily into the exotic world of the Istanbul and Adam Dedes Square. The familiar rituals of day to day – having a coffee, crowded public transport, going school or jobs as security guards, or in marketing or finance – are just a little bit sideways from my non-Turkish expectations in both the culture and the futurstickiness. It's deftly done; one can't see the joins, and the richly authentic atmosphere is one of the major appeals.

The Dervish House tells its story through a range of viewpoint characters, each one covering one angle of a bigger story, with perhaps only the reader seeing how they join up. Each of the characters is firmly planted in their world, with friends and family (except, perhaps, for Can, a young boy isolated by the deafness imposed on him because of a heart condition). Their problems are rooted in their day to day lives and their histories, which makes for convincing stories and helps to bring the setting alive.

One might be forgiven for feeling that the plot lines all intersect a little too neatly, and that the conceit of all the characters living in the same disused sufi temple, the Dervish House of the title, is a little too meta, but that's part of the fun here. Another plot takes in the search of the name of God, written in code across the city, and another character is an economist who has been mapping the city to discover its patterns and true neighbourhoods. There's more than a whiff of psychogeography about it all, and pretty soon we visit the real article in our search for an ancient pasha preserved in honey.

There are a few bones that stick in the craw a little, of course. The sub-plot about the high-tech start-up never quite comes alive, and neither did the economist's story of lost love. In a typical fit of plot-denseness on my part, I have not been unable to fathom how Ayasa was set up by the cops outside of corruption – maybe it is as simple of corruption? - and whatever happened to the Mellified Man of Iskenderun anyway?

As we build to the climax, I did begin to wonder, also, about the amazing adaptability of the robot toy, but MacDonald turns the heat up very effectively as each of the stories reaches their denouement and was carried along by the momentum of the plot falling in to place. MacDonald lays his groundwork with great care in the earlier chapters and by the end it was almost undignifidely exciting.

However much I enjoy the setting elements of the near future thriller – the gadgets, the social change, the unique pressures these put the characters under, it's this thrilling pay off that is so appealing about respectable thrillers of whatever genre. Both those sixties and seventies thrillers that Dad used to read, and their modern cyberpunk equivalent have to deliver this kind of kick in the guts, and The Dervish House delivers it alongside a cast of intriguing characters in a richly evoked near future setting.

The Silver Key

2011-05-30T22:15:00.004+01:00

"The Silver Key", first published in Weird Tales, January 1929.

This is the the twentieth entry in my read-through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

This story sees the return of Randolph Carter, the narrator of The Statement of Randolph Carter (obviously) and The Unnameable. These two earlier stories form incidents in this longer-term narrative which examines the circumstances of Carter's life and describes his efforts to discover a purpose in life after he loses “the key of the gate of dreams” exiling him forever from a nocturnal revelling in Orientalist fantasies.

It's an odd sort of story, a new type for this anthology, although I have a vague recollection from other collections of minor stories of this sort, featuring a lost dreamer seeking a return to oneiric Nirvana. It's a partial return of the Dreamlands style, although this time limiting the fantastical elements mostly off-screen, in favour of recounting Carter's experience's in a world apparently unaware of the value of the marvellous.

One immediately wants to give the story an autobiographical spin. Lovecraft was in his early thirties when he wrote this story, and after his sojourn in New York might have felt – as well as the joy of returning to Providence – the weight of the real world, it's material worries and disappointments, pressing in on him. Could the key of the gate of dreams be a metaphor for some kind of loss that HPL feels, and Carter's eventual fate be something he longed for himself?

An H P Lovecraft Encyclopedia says that “Although Lovecraft clearly identified with Carter on many different levels, Carter is not as autobiographical character as many others in HPL's fiction; he is, instead, a construct representing various of HPL's philosophical and aesthetic views.”

I don't think he represents anything so abstract as that, though. On the contrary there is very little philosophical engagement – Carter's experiments in various lifestyles are given only the most cursory dismissal. We spend more time on Carter's mordant ennui than we do presenting philosophical and aesthetic points of view.

A simpler explanation of Carter is as a type of idealised version of HPL himself – aristocratic, worldly, sensitive, somewhat aloof and sufficiently wealthy to indulge these attributes. This type of character has turned up a few times – most clearly Delapore in The Rats in the Walls, but to a lesser extent the unnamed narrators of stories such as The Shunned House or Pickman's Model. Carter in particular is a man of significant achievements – he's a best selling writer, a distinguished record in the war, dabbles in the worlds bohemia and the occult – which seem to hint at the sort of person HPL wanted to be, and perhaps his fate is the sort of end that HPL himself desired.

It's not the end for RC, because HPL wrote a sequel with his friend E Hoffman Price, Through the Gate of the Silver Key, relating Carter's further adventures beyond the veil!

Next up: "The Dunwich Horror"

The Shunned House

2011-05-26T22:04:00.006+01:00

"The Shunned House", first published in an amatuer booklet that was printed but not distributed in 1924, then in Weird Tales, October 1937.

This is the the nineteenth entry in my read-through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

It's possible that to really know HPL, you must know Providence, at least in passing. Visiting gives you the scope of his territory, the physical constraints of his days, the shape of the streets and quality of the landscape that shaped his mind. The geography of a place defines it, after all, the places that are easy or hard to get to, the natural borders between districts or neighbourhoods marked by hills or valleys or streams and the agency of human civic planning.

Jane at The Shunned House, just about visible on the left

Places carry their history with them. They are constant and persist outside the scope of human lifetimes, even the changes we make to them persist for millennia, and old world cities are built around patterns set in place in time immemorial, perhaps all the way back to a circle of tents in the neolithic.

Beyond this material effect, though, our own experience of consciousness seems so intense, it seems impossible to believe that it does not impress itself on our surroundings like a finger print in putty. It's the basis of many tales of hauntings – a violent crime or horrific event, a place and personality somehow bound together for eternity.

Unfortunately, the evidence for this kind of psychic expression is pretty thin, but we do, of course, leave traces of a more mundane sort – historical records, official forms, newspapers, trails of ownership, a paper trail that's been building up since the discovery of writing. Many of HPL's stories are built around the process of piecing this type of material together, and The Shunned House feels like a real breakthrough in this regard.

The unpopular residence of the title is, as you probably know, a real house at 135 Benefit Street in Providence, Rhode Island. I visited it myself in 1998 (with my wife, see below!) and it recently went on sale, if you are interested.

In A Life, Joshi praises the build up from a curious story told by the narrator's uncle Elihu Whipple to a confrontation with fiendish horror. HPL achieves this effect by applying a thick layer of material and historical detail. The house is as HPL describes it, with the characteristic basement built right on to the footpath. The history HPL gives of road widening and shifted graveyards is also accurate, as is much of the incidental historical detail. Around these facts, he weaves a tale of mounting dread as the implications come together.

From this remove, and for many of his contemporary readers, this careful weave of fact and fiction makes no difference to how we react to the story, but that's not quite the point. HPL isn't trying to convince the reader, he's trying to convince himself. It's a vital part of the writing process, I guess: the first person an author needs to convince, the person they need to scare, or charm or amuse or sadden, is themselves.

The level of detail in the history – an almost obsessive recitation of dates and names covering two centuries or more – anchors the story to a convincing real world narrative. It rings true because it is, by and large, true; it sounds like history because it is history. For good measure, HPL adds a few paragraphs speculating on possible “scientific” explanations to make the vampire monster seem a little more plausible.

“To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter; existing very infrequently in three-dimensional space because of its intimate connection with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional manifestations which we, from lack of a proper vantage-point, may never hope to comprehend.”

An H P Lovecraft Encyclopedia says that this pushes the story into the realm of quasi science fiction, and makes the point that the horror is killed finally with sulphuric acid rather than a stake through the heart or holy water and crucifix. HPL definitely used the new language of science to make his horrors sound plausible, but it's the same way the scientific vernacular was applied to other genres like pulp heroes, mysteries and adventure thrillers.

It's not science as we know it, and nor is the narrator as rational as he asserts – his drive to investigate the house is driven by his own youthful fascination with the place, and his apprehension of a strange shape in the fungus on the floor. I get the sense that his story doesn't so much reveal the truth to him, as confirm what he has known all along. On the other hand, perhaps this is just a function “dread”? For the sake of suspense a story of this type must forever hint that worse revelations are to come – in fact, this happens in the opening paragraph where HPL invokes the spirit of Edgar Allen Poe to suggest how terrible the coming events will be.

It's a kind of dreamy sense of the inevitable that's enhanced for me by yet another unnamed narrator. It keeps coming up, and now that I'm aware of it, it seems as if every other story has an anonymous narrator. It adds another level of creepiness, I think, a kind of hallucinatory state atmosphere. It's not a story about some other person, but asks the reader in to the story to take the part of the narrator themselves, drawn inexorably to the heart of the nightmare.

Next up: "The Silver Key"

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

2011-05-22T14:41:00.001+01:00

The appearance of the detective in real life and in fiction seem to me to be entwined. The autobiography of the great French thief taker Eugene Francois Vidocq seems to have been an influence on both the establishment of the first detective unit in Britain and in Edgar Allen Poe's creation of what many argue is the first literary detective, Auguste Dupin in Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in 1841. The first detective department in Britain was created in 1843.

Detectives quickly started popping up everywhere – Dickens was a big fan of the real life and fictional detectives, and packed his monthly magazine All the Year Round with fictions and features on the new agents of order.

Something we crave from genre fiction, I think, is a validation of human agency. In perhaps the grandest genre of them all – the classical tragedy – the goal of the exercise is to show a man brought down by hubris, that is the man that challenges the world, that refuses to accept things as they are and takes his life in his own hands. It is this exercise of agency that will eventually lead to his destruction.

A crime story is usually a tragedy, too, with the same causes as the classical tragedies – envy, desire, greed, and vengeance – but the detective story introduces a counterpoint to the theme of the protagonist brought down by their own arrogance. I suppose it's a non-supernatural incarnation of Nemesis (no, not that one) pursuing the evil doer to their comeuppance, but they also form a force of order. Among other forms of transgression, a crime is a the breaking of taboo, and the detective is the one that ferrets out the source of the disturbance of the natural order and sets things to rights.

The Murder at Roadhill House features a lot of taboo breaking – relationships between the classes, the possible breaking of the marriage vow, the family bond. They are the sorts of tensions that might have bubbled up into expressions of supernatural as we see in historical cases of demonic possession or folk tales of ghosts and hauntings. The detective is a kind of rootless, stateless type able to cross the barriers imposed by class and propriety to ask the questions people would rather not address.

I suppose it's no surprise that these genres have mixed together in the form of the paranormal noir that is so popular these days. The breaking of taboo is extended into the metaphorical realm as it always has been in folklore, but we impose the same taboo-fixing powers to detective, now an almost blatantly shamanic figure.

Cool Air

2011-05-19T22:29:00.004+01:00

“Cool Air”, first published in Tales of Magic and Mystery, March 1928.

This is the the eighteenth entry in my read-through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

...for you see I died that time eighteen years ago.

Well, after that run, I suppose it was going to happen that we'd end up with something a little less compelling. It's another one of those “sting in the tail” type stories, like In The Vault or The Hound. It's a favourite HPL trick, and even a few of the better stories aim at this sort of macabre climax – The Rats in the Walls, for example or The Outsider - but I find this kind of shock ending cheapens a horror story. The italicisation of the last line also puts me off these – I have this vision of the narrator turning to me and shouting the punch line in my face while pointing at the scary thing with a big arrow. It could be Vic Reeves actually.

Part of it, I guess is the suggestion of “ghoulish humour”, that sort of EC comics story where the protagonist's fate is always a painful metaphorical pun on their actions, a PUN-ishment, if you like. When I was a horror movie-obsessed kid, it used to frustrate me that so many 80s horrors were more black comedies than real shockers (that's why Hellraiser was such a revelation). I like black comedy, too, of course, but these stories at their weakest descend into parody and slapstick. Horror and comedy share the characteristic that they are done best when they are played with a straight face.

An H P Lovecraft Encyclopedia points out that this story was rejected by Weird Tales, suggesting that perhaps the gruesome climax made Farnsworth Wright nervous about censorship. On the other hand, perhaps he felt this minor work was below HPL's usual standard.

The final horror of the story revolves around the doctor's de-coalescing corpse. In A Life, Joshi makes an interesting observation about the frigid Dr Munoz, saying “Munoz, clearly, embodies Lovecraft's ideal type: a man who belongs both to the aristocracy of blood and the aristocracy of intellect; who is learned and in his field but also dresses well.” It's another variation on the theme of hopelessness degradation that HPL's so fond of. Even the urbane Dr Munoz can could do nothing to prevent his eventual decline into, essentially, a pool of runny shit. Like the genteel degenerates Pickman and Robert Suydam, even a man as upstanding as he is doomed to descend to the level of the grossest form of matter.

Next: “The Shunned House”

The Call of Cthulhu

2011-05-08T14:24:00.007+01:00

"The Call of Cthulhu", first published in Weird Tales, February 1928.

This is the the seventeenth entry in my read-through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

This is one of – if not THE - archetypal “Lovecraftian” story. It has all the elements you expect from HPL: dreams; ancient myths; degenerate cults; and impenetrable and incomprehensible ancient horrors. The structure of the story is also typical of what we've come to expect from him: a distant, anonymous narrator; the aggregation of information from diverse sources, the slow build up of suggestion and dread.

The climax of the story where Johansen finally meets Cthulhu himself is essentially a kind of seaman's yarn (a lost island, ancient ruins and a sea monster) but the effort HPL has put in up to that point provides this encounter with a disturbing context that it's inconclusive resolution does nothing to dispel. Part of this effect rests with the material of the hints themselves – ancient cults, cosmic horror, the tentacles of an ancient conspiracy buried deep in the heart of human civilization – but much of the effect comes from craft. The a slow crescendo of horror that starts with the dreams of a few aesthetes, to the hideous ritual in the swamp and finally to Johansen's encounter gradually raises the scope and stakes of the story from the trivial to the Earth-shatteringly profound.

There's also the quality of the prose, which is magnificent here, exemplified by the perfect, chilling expression of cosmic horror in the opening lines: “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 it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in 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 deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

I was struck this time around by longing for chaos and destruction expressed by Castro the Cultist. I can almost see his eyes crinkling with glee when he describes the coming of the Old Ones: “The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.”

One wonders to what degree HPL might have felt a similar longing to be freed from the stifling constraints of New England society, to kill and revel and enjoy himself. If you think of the sort of chap HPL tends to admire – sober, well-rooted, pure-bred – then Castro is the almost direct opposite, a half-breed who has roamed the world revelling in exotic degeneracy. In some of HPL's stories, there's a kind of of Orientalist fascination for the other, that makes me think that he too might have felt the pull of exotic sights and ancient mysteries. At the same time he seems to fear letting go, and in Castro we can see what happens the man who doesn't supress his wanderlust and desire for novelty; Robert Suydam is another study in this sort of lack of continence. Once a man lets his baser desires rule him, he is lost.

I'm pretty sure I first read this one in the first edition of The Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game, back in about 1983 or so, but I admit that I am no longer certain if the story was included in that edition (my copy of first edition is possibly in a box at my mother's, or perhaps my brothers; I've got the fourth edition now). Whether I read it there or not (it would therefore have to be one of the Del Rey editions) this has become emblematic of the way a CoC adventure ought to play out, but it shows, I think, the weakness of this model for a game.

The narrator is entirely passive, so let's not pretend he's a player character, but he is the only one in the story whoever puts all the connections together. The PCs in this story are probably Prof George Gamell Angell, Inspector Raymond Legrasse and Gustaf Johansen, but they all operate in isolation from each other. They each have a single encounter with the mythos where they don't really have much to do besides sit around listening to the GM's descriptions – until recently this has been my typical experience with CoC, as a player and GM. Better models are probably to be found in The Horror at Red hook (although here I think “main character” is not Detective Malone, but the more compelling Robert Suydam), The Lurking Fear, Under the Pyramids and The Nameless City.

I want to enjoy CoC roleplaying – I bought the first edition as soon as it was available in NZ in 1983 – but it's very rarely lived up to the poorly articulated Platonic ideal I have in my head. I've had enough good experiences recently to give me renewed hope thanks to the new Trail of Cthulhu ruleset (which addresses some of the problems I had with the CoC system) but I don't think HPL stories themselves, and particularly the eponymous one, are especially good models for the game itself.

Coming next: "Cool Air".

The Immortalisation Commission

2011-05-05T22:38:00.000+01:00

The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 by a circle of serious minded Victorian intellectuals who wanted to explore the curious range of phenomena that had manifested across the West (in particular) since about the 1850s. It was an attempt (which still goes on!) to find some order in all those tantalising phenomena that seemed to suggest an invisible world of ghosts, seances, ESP, predictions, reincarnation and all manner of weirdness that hovers the border between science, superstition and mental illness.

Among the founders were the philosopher and fellow at Trinity College Cambridge, Henry Sidgwick, the Classical scholar F W H Myers, who both asserted that when they passed over they'd try and get back in touch. The first part of The Imortalisation Commission tells the story of this pursuit of reliable evidence of an afterlife.

What I found most fascinating about this book was Gray's consideration why the participants of this story might have been attracted to the idea of an afterlife. Sidgwick adhered to a form of moral philosophy that required an outside agency for validation. Traditionally, this had been God, but the after Darwin and Nietzsche he had lost his faith in the biblical account and was looking elsewhere for evidence that we were held accountable for our actions at some stage.

Without this authority, Sidgwick felt that there was no reason to do right. However he tried to reason it out, he couldn't convince himself that that a man might behave correctly as an end in itself. Gray ties this to Sidgwick's homosexuality: put rather crudely (it's a more nuanced argument from John Gray!) Sidgwick needed a reason not to act act on his desires, and the threat of post-mortem had provided him that reason to abstain. However, without that there was no reason for him not to follow his desires.

Myers had come to believe, via Freud, in a subconscious self that was responsible for a great deal of our behaviour. He felt that it acted on information not available to the conscious mind, such as certain memories but also telepathic senses not accessible by the conscious mind. By the time the SPR was founded, he was looking for evidence that this subconscious mind was an expression of a larger spiritual entity that survived death, growing and evolving into a perfected being as it passes through stages of life, of which the material world is just one.

Myers also lost an early love, a married woman – Annie Marshall – who killed herself while suffering mental exhaustion from coping with her spendthrift husband. After his death it was revealed that Myers had pined for Marshall throughout his life. After her death he rejected “sensual matters” and pursued spiritual enlightenment over the material world.

I've read a lot about this era of psychical research before, most of it fairly dry and factual, but this little book – this essay, really – provided a bit of insight into the characters of the people that set it up, the inner conflicts that expressed themselves, indirectly, perhaps, in the search for the afterlife. Both men were seeking a perfected state, away from the uncertainties of the flesh, perfected and united with one's missing parts, and Gray implies that these motives coloured, at the very least, the development of paranormal thought over the following decades.

Myers died in 1901, and there began a series of experiments in automatic writing that attempted to make contact. A handful of mediums were engaged – a few professionals and some society ladies with an interest – to produce the automatic texts, which the SPR researchers examined for what they called “cross correspondences”, consistent messages or clues that would confirm that it was a single voice that was speaking through each writer.

These experiments went on for decades and produced reams of text. A definitive moment came in 1912 on Palm Sunday, when messages were received that claimed to be from a certain Mary Lyttleton. Lyttleton was a real person who had been courted by the Conservative politician Arthur Balfour in the 1870s. Balfour was a former prime minister and was still active politically and had a life long interest in psychical matters. Balfour himself only partially accepted the validity of the contact, and then only at the very end of his life. For others, though, it was proof of an afterlife.

In 1912, the true authors of the scripts – identifying as Myers – instructed one of the sitters that she was to be mother to a messiah for a new age. This was all part of Myer's plan to keep improving the human soul by interveing from beyond the grave, the texts said. So, Winnifred Coombe Tennant – suffragette, delegate to the League of Nations and mediumistic psychographer – duly carried the child she created with Arthur Balfour's brother Gerald. The resulting child, Henry Coombe Tennant, wasn't told of his special role in life until well into adulthood, by which time perhaps the participants were feeling a little sheepish about it all. In between he served in World War II and in MI6 after the war. He died in 1989, having been a Roman catholic monk since 1960.

It all looks like a classic mix of cult and group madness. There doesn't seem to be anything that human beings can't encourage each other to believe, with the right motivations, hot house atmosphere and peer pressure. The intellectual prominence of the individuals involved with it all brings to mind the line from Orwell, “There are some ideas so wrong that only an intelligent person could believe them.”

There's always more to the search for eternal life than evidence and science, there's always a bit of faith and wishing thinking involved. The rest of the book pursues a similar theme. The second essay in The Immortalisation Commission concerns attempts to preserve the corpse of Lenin with an eye on later resurrection, while a shorter final essay discusses the philosophical and psychological impulses that drive the crop of transhumanist immortality hopefuls.

Of course, most of us don't of us don't have the time or the pressing need to explore the nature of the world beyond. We've got our hands full with this one and we're happy to take it all on trust, be that a promise of extinction or eternal paradise.

I don't have any faith in the idea of an afterlife myself. I find that liberating, really: there's only this life to work for, this is all the reward we get. It makes me value what I have today more than I would if I thought that this was just the green room for an eternity on the heavenly stage. Whatever one believes, though, the traffic between the here-and-now and the hereafter appears to be entirely one way.

Pickman's Model

2011-04-24T14:57:00.003+01:00

“Pickman's Model”, first published in Weird Tales, October 1927.

This is the the seventeenth entry in my read through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

1927 is a pretty good year for old HPL, and this is the third story he sold. I think it's fair to say that he's absolutely on fire in the period he's writing these. And there's more to come, with a run of stories in 1928 and 1929 that are among HPL's most admired.

Clark Ashton Smith

Most of the stories up until now have been explicitly or implicitly written narratives, but HPL goes the opposite way completely with Pickman's Model and has the the narrator -Thurber – addressing an old friend – Eliot – whose role that reader takes, however passively. Occasionally we're addressed by Thurber as “you”, but we have no agency or influence, no internal life is hinted at in the text. It's more of a dramatic monologue than a story, and Eliot's not a character, he's just the audience for Thurber's long anecdote.

HPL dwells on the contrast between modern Boston and the ancient horror of the ghouls beneath the city, the elevated railways and the dingy tunnels beneath the even the modern buildings that are slowly paving over the old town. The state of ghouldom seems to have much in common with the degradation of the Martense clan in The Lurking Fear or the mulattos in “The Horror At Red Hook”. This thing that's always there beneath the surface waiting to break through as soon as individuals drop their guard and give in to their most base desires.

Also nestled within the story is HPL's theory of uncanny and weird art, and at times the monologue dips into lecture:

Gustave Doré

“I don't have to tell you why Fuselli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost story story frontispiece merely makes us laugh. There's something those fellows catch – beyond life – that they're able to make us catch for a second. Doré had it. Sime has it. Angarola in Chicago has it and Pickman has it as no man had it before or – I hope to heaven - ever will again.”

It gets faint praise in from Joshi in A Life “From the cosmicism of The Call of Cthulhu [written before this, but published after] to the apparent mundaneness of Pickman's Model, seems a long step backward, and while this tale cannot by any means be deemed one of Lovecraft's best, it contains some features of interest.”

It is all somewhat undermined by the narrator's pompous tone. Thurber sounds like some old club duffer rather than an aesthete with a taste for the bizarre. He sounds like a hang over from the decadent era of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. The art he relishes as the purest cutting edge of horror also seems kind of quaint, even bearing the times in mind.

Henry Fuselli

When I think of the art of the 1920s, I think of cubists and futurists and dada getting started in France. These are inheritors of Doré and Goya and the horror artists of the 18^th and nineteenth centuries. In terms of revealing the real world that lurks beneath reality I think these guys got deeper and eventually to more disturbing places than Sidney Sime or Clark Ashton Smith.

This story does seem like a throwback after The Colour Out of Space and The Outsider and even The Horror At Red hook. Those stories had a genuine, convincing and , urgent voice, where this one sounds too much like pastiche of an older style like Poe, Wilde, Machen or James, and thus stuck in an earlier era.


Sidney Sime

Coming up next, “The Call of Cthulhu”.

The Colour Out of Space

2011-04-20T22:02:00.002+01:00

"The Colour Our of Space", first published in Amazing Stories, September 1927.

This is the the sixteenth entry in my read through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

Well, we're really into it now – this is three knock out stories in a row. This is one of my favourite HPL stories, right from the poetry of the opening line: “West of Arkham, the hills rise wild and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut.”

It just makes the hair on my neck stand on end, immediately inspiring images of a dark and malign landscape that looms and threatens. The opening paragraphs carry this theme through, outlining the history of unsuccessful settlement in the area which establishes man's weak grip on the Earth and the ineffable nature of the wilderness.

HPL was a bit of a rambler himself, who knew his local area well, and the descriptions of the land have the feel of direct observation. Joshi outlines some of the inspirational locations in the footnotes to this story in The Annotated H P Lovecraft. The story was inspired in part by his visit to the Scituate Reservoir in central Rhode Island which was due to be flooded. “I well-nigh groaned at the future destruction of exquisite old villages like Dana & its neighbours.”

It's a strange series of nested narratives, where the first person narrator seeks out Ammi Pierce, who tells him the third person narrative of what happened to his friend, Nahum Gardner, which is then related back to us by the narrator. Maybe this is significant of how these stories used to travel in the days before there was even wide-spread use of telephones or wireless. All information came via print or word of mouth. It's a classic friend-of-a-friend story – would you really believe a deranged rustic on this sort of thing?

There is a novel-length sequel to this story, The Colour Out of Time, written by Michael Shea. It picks up the sotry fifty years later, when the reservoir has become a popular pleasure spot. Two old professor types are their for their annual fishing holiday when something rises out of the waters. Shea addresses the theme of cosmic horror in a slightly different way to HPL, as the colour eats away at the resolve of its victims, revealing the hopelessness of life and hollowing them out from the inside.

I think that HPL is hinting at something similar killing the Gardners. He very vividly depicts their physical demise, but in the best gothic tradition, this outward affliction is just a metaphor for an inner dissolution. Perhaps it's just the IDEA of the impact of the meteor that causes the contagion; maybe this sudden intrusion of outer space into the lives of the modest, god fearing folk of rural New England gave them horrible insight into their own smallness, breaking their minds and bodies both.

It also forms the basis of the sequence from the movie Creepshow, the Lonsome Death of Jordy vale, written by and starring none other than Stephen King! Thanks to the magic of youtube, here it is (starts about a minute in, although the rest of the movie is worth seeing if you never have):

Next: "Pickman's Model"

The Horror At Red Hook

2011-04-19T21:38:00.002+01:00

"The Horror At Red Hook", first published in Weird Tales, April 1926.

This is the the fifteenth entry in my read through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

This is the first story so far that has what we might consider all the “Lovecraftian” elements in place: an investigative outline, references to ancient tomes and forbidden knowledge and febrile hysterical racism. It's this last quality that attracts the most comment, as this is probably the clearest expression of his dodgy views on race that HPL makes in his fiction.

Here's China Miélville with the case for the prosecution:

He's dead on with the phrase “fever dream of prejudice”, and in A Life, Joshi calls it “a shriek of rage and loathing at the 'foreigners' who have taken New York away from the white people to whom it presumably belongs”.

I think it's playing on a familiar note of discomfort for many of us, groups of “chanting, cursing processions of blear-eyed, pock-marked young men. … One saw groups of these youths incessantly; sometimes in leering vigils on street corners, sometimes in doorways, playing eerily on cheap instruments of music, sometimes in stupefied dozes or indecent dialogues around cafeteria tables.” They're the same groups of youths, of whatever race, that inspire such fear and loathing among the Daily Mail set, and can cause a thrill of alarm in even the most liberal breast when one is travelling home alone by night.

The inhabitants of Red Hook have descended to a state of animalism. Malone ponders how “...modern people under lawless conditions tend uncannily to repeat the the darkest instinctive patterns of primitive half-ape savagery” It has something in common with The Lurking Fear, showing humanity at its most debased and corrupt. In that story it's a kind of natural force that has to be actively resisted, a devolution that takes control when we stop acting according to rules of decent society; in The Horror at Red Hook, it is an ancient pervasive agency that grows malignantly in places of racial miscegenation and deracination.

It's also unstoppable. You can feel it in the landscape of Red Hook, in the teeming sordid tenements, in Robert Suydam's dilapidated mansion, and most of all in the tunnels and underground rooms that lie beneath. At the end of the story, after the bust is made and the cult broken up, there's a sense that the evil can never be stilled: “As of old, more people enter Red Hook than leave it on the landward side, and there are certain rumours of new canals running underground to certain centres of traffic in liquor and less mentionable things.”

Joshi doesn't think much of this one: “What strikes about this tale, aside from the hackneyed supernatural manifestations, is the sheer poorness of its writing.” I think I'm with China, though. For all its faults. it has real power as the purest expression of HPL's transcendent xenphobia.

Next up, "The Colour Out of Space".

Easter break

2011-04-18T22:49:00.001+01:00

Sorry, I've been away, school holidays and all that. Normal service will resume shortly...

In the meantime, might I recommend 3eanuts? This blog takes four panel Peanuts cartoons and removes final panel, revealing the pain and absurd cruelty of the world of Chalie Brown that is often hidden by the joke in the last frame. I remember the craze for Garfield remixes a few years back, and I think these are even better than strips where they blanked out the cat's thinks ballons.

The Outsider

2011-04-06T22:42:00.003+01:00

"The Outsider", first published in Weird Tales, April 1926.

This is the the fourteenth entry in my read through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

This one's brilliant! I really enjoyed the timorously self-aggrandising narrator, totally self-obsessed and with a naïve self-doubt that appealed directly to my sentimental nature. It's the voice of the well-spoken lunatic you might suddenly find yourself talking to at a bus stop, the kind of conversation that starts of sensibly enough but gradually slides off into slightly disturbing derangement. Crafty old HPL's playing a trick on us, building up our sympathy until we discover the truth.

I loved the eerie description of the narrator's nightmarish “castle”, “infinitely old and infinitely horrible, full of dark passages and having high ceilings where the eye could find only cobwebs and shadows,” a place permanently dark “so that I used sometimes to light candles and gaze steadily at them for relief”. It's surrounded by “terrible trees” that grow high above the highest ruined tower, and when he tries to wander away from his home, to see what lies beyond, he finds that “as I went farther from the castle, the shade grew denser and the air more filled with brooding fear, so that I ran frantically back.”

The climax is like a classic ghost visitation seen from the point of the view of the spectre rather than the spectators. An H P Lovecraft Encyclopedia notes an anecdote from R H Barlow, that this one originally finished at the reveal of the graveyard, then HPL wondered what would happen if people saw the ghoul and then what would happen when it saw itself. This is a classic rule-of-three structure, each episode satisfying in its own right, but topping the last perfectly.

Also wrote a story called The Outsider

As with The Unnameable, The Outsider is the English title for a famous work of the existential absurd, written originally in French. Maybe this is where the continentals get their ideas about H P Lovecraft the mad tortured artist? Joshi analyses this point of view in A Life, concluding the story's “large number of apparent literary influences seem to make it more an experiment in pastiche than some deeply felt expression of psychological wounds.”

Well, I don't know. We've already seen that HPL has a tendency towards self-pity in the awful Cats of Ulthar. I think he also has a weakness for this kind of doomed aristocrat stuff (as in The Rats in the Walls, for example) because that was how he saw himself, to a degree. I think he was attracted to all those dusty family homes and restless ancestors because they appealed to something in him for reasons of his character and background.

It's a bit gauche, I know, to psychoanalyse a writer in this way, and Joshi certainly presents a a selection of clear antecedents in Oscar Wilde, Nathanial Hawthorne, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and, especially, Poe. But Lovecraft was enormously serious about his writing. He derided hack work and analysed his own output relentlessly, honing and perfecting it, never satisfied. If HPL was the type of guy with a lot of inner turmoil and trouble expressing it (and let's not forget he never graduated high school because he took a fit) then these kinds of highly generic approaches, these pastiches of other persons' emotional expression, were the best ways for Lovecraft to piece together the mysteries that lay in his heart.

Next up, "The Horror at Red Hook"

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

2011-04-06T22:15:00.001+01:00

Moxy Land was one of my favourite books last year, and this new one from Lauren Beukes shares a lot of the characteristics that I liked about that book. I suppose it's Beukes's journalistic instincts at work: she homes in on the characters, the people with a story to tell. It's all in the detail: Moxy Land was a fairly standard cyberpunk dystopia, but due to the way she embedded the characters in the richly evoked South African background they had the feeling of real lives lived in a real world.

Zinzi December in Zoo City is similarly entwined deeply in her world. A former journalist who's reached rock-bottom after kicking a career destroying drug habit, she lives in a Johannesburg squat. She's slowly getting her life back together, partly thanks to her lover Benoit, a gentle former child soldier who has arrived in South Africa after following the trail of refugees south, after his life was destroyed in the Rwanda civil war.

However, her growing peace of mind is shattered when Benoit discovers that the wife and family he thought were dead, killed in the civil war in Rwanda, are alive and well. Both Zinzi and Benoit are living in states of suspended animation. They're kind of paralysed while they deal with different types of guilt and violent pasts. When he hears from his family, it kind of kicks them both back into life and suddenly all sorts of questions about their lives and futures that they had been ignoring are thrown into sharp relief.

This is the heart of the this novel, I think. It's where Zinzi's story really seems to begin, and it's the note on which the novel ends, but it's wrapped up in a whole lot of genre elements that do not, I think, bring much to the party.

First off, there are the familiar animals. The novel is set in the present day, but with the difference that in the 1980s or '90s people with some kind of guilt or who had committed some sort of crime (it's a bit unclear) began aquiring animal familiars, in a condition (we doctors call) Acquired Aposymbiotic Familiarism, or AAF. In addition, the afflicted also gain some kind of minor magical ability.

I never quite understood the moral logic of all this: if you kill, you get an animal, and a special power, but if the animal dies then you die too (snatched by the ominous force of hungry darkness known as the Undertow). And furthermore, shamanistic African magic (at the very least – we don't see much of the rest of the world) appears to work.

I had trouble working out the rules of this magic, and Beukes doesn't give us much to hold on to. We get a few snatches of journalistic coverage but not quite enough to see any pattern or scheme in it, and the whole thing never really coheres in the way as the twin cities of China Miéville's The City & The City (and the Undertow reminded me of the Breach).

The concept definitely needed a little more thought, but it's really brought down by the the AIDS metaphor. Beukes writes about the plight of the oppressed in the third world with clear eyes and righteous conviction, but the third world poor don't have super powers at their command. It's the old X-Men game, and Beukes doesn't really get much further with it than Chris Claremont and company, and it has the same arbitrary and random nature to it that the comics do.

I had a real problem suspending my disbelief that anyone with an animal – and concomitant special power – wouldn't be immediately snapped up and used by some corporate or state interest. I seem to recall some talk at the beginning stressing how most powers were rather trivial, but the actors we meet in Zoo City all have quite remarkable powers: Zinzi's ability to find lost objects, D-Nice can mess with people's minds somehow, Marabou & Maltese with the virtual invisibility and – crucially – Benoit with his ability to nullify other people's powers (at which point I immediately, and fatally, thought of Piers Anthony's The Colour of Magic).

I could believe the oppression – the ghettos, the open prejudice, the usual mundane exploitation that comes with second class citizenship – but I couldn't let go of the fact that the super powers seemed to barely have made a dent in how the animalled were treated. In a wider context, this is also a world where magic seems to work, and once more I found it hard to believe that this would be restricted to (or even available at all to) the poorest margins of society.

Some of this is due to the book's relentless focus: in the places where this stuff could be explained or perhaps contextualised more richly, we are instead pushed pell mell through the spine of the novel, a detective story, in breathless present tense. I don't know why, but I find these first-person present tense narratives a bit exhausting; The Quantum Thief was the same, forever thrusting forward at a million miles an hour without ever stopping to smell the roses. It makes it all a little hard to take in; there's no time to stop and ask questions, to pay attention to some trivial setting backstory or unwind some of the yarns that hold the remade world together. It was less of a problem in The Quantum Thief because the world was clockwork-tight, but here there are too many ambiguities and arbitrary events to let pass.

The detetctive plot was also a bit of a problem for me. Zinzi fit the hard-boiled private eye niche, and the tangled plot plot had a suitably Chandleresque air, but perhaps the fit was just a little too close. The subsequent twists and turns happened a little too regularly, like it was going through the genre motions. It's not that Beukes puts a foot wrong on the rhythm and way-points in the hardboiled noir, but, not putting a foot wrong is the problem.

Part of my problem with Zoo City is that Moxy Land set a such a high bar. Zinzi December and Benoit definitely compare in interest and complexity to Kendra, Tendeka, Lareto and Toby, but no one else in Zoo City ever really breaks away from generic roles – goon-squad, Mr Big, bastard ex, magical (literally in this case) clue token dispenser.

But, taken on its own terms, this is an enjoyable crime thriller with an interesting fantasy flourish and an extremely convincing eye for life among the dispossessed in South Africa. There's plenty of good stuff in here: the relationship between Zinzi and Benoit, the crazed Phil Spectorish record producer and the whole South African music scene, the many fascinating places and people in the sidelines, which Beukes paints with beautiful brevity and an eye for evocative detail. If it's not quite the sublime work of its predecessor it's still hugely enjoyable.

In the Vault

2011-03-28T09:17:00.000+01:00

"In the Vault", first published in Tryout, November 1925.

This is the This is the the thirteenth entry in my read through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

We have a kind of view of HPL as an outre outsider creating bizarre individualistic and perverse tales of poetic weirdness, but a lot of his output so far has been fairly conventional. There's no ancient cosmic horror or inhuman entities here, and this tale of revenants fits a very traditional horror story pattern of vengeful ghosts. That's not to say it's entirely artificial - George Birch's fate is winngingly horrible, and HPL revels in the gruesome nature of the funeral home setting.

An H P Lovecraft Encyclopedia says this was originally rejected by Weird Tales for being too gruesome (WT was shuddering from a recent censorship furore), and so HPL tried instead to sell it to a “true” ghost stories magazine. The story itself has more in common with the supernatural in literaterature than the way the supernatural is perceived in the outside world.

For all that spectral vengance is a common theme in ghost stories, I can't recall a single instance of revenge from beyond the grave in The Penguin Book of Ghosts.

A far more common pattern is that the evil are cursed to become phantoms, forever excluded from heaven, and having to walk the earth, either for an eternity or until the completion of some unacheivable task, rather than be brought down by vengeful revenants.

The jocular tone is common to lot of old or very trad ghost stories; generically, it's like the nervous laugh that we hope will keep fear at bay. Comedy and horror are structurally similar, as well: this type of poetic justice is a kind of a narrative pun, with a set up and punchline. Perhaps it's the protagonist's faults that let us laugh at his predicament? If he was a skilled and diligent artisan, however, the story would never have happened in the first place.

HPL's attempt at a more vernacular style is not entirely successful: the teller of the tale seems altogether too pleased with himself. Joshi suggests that this colloquial tone is what made Lovecraft think this story would pass for a true tale; it sounds more like the stories being related by one of those EC Comics horror hosts.

Next up "The Outsider".

The Unnameable

2011-03-24T21:44:00.003Z

"The Unnameable", first published in Weird Tales, July 1925.

This is the This is the the twelfth entry in my read through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

In this story, we see the return of Randolph Carter, him that gave the statement, and we find him in a graveyard with his friend again – does the man never learn! It's a new friend this time, though, after Harley Warren didn't return; I wonder if the his new friend knows about Carter's form in this regard? “So, tell me Carter, what did happen to old Warren?”

Also wrote "The Unameable"

The two are having a friendly debate about the immportance of the fantastic in art and literarure, which becomes a debate on the existence of the supernatural, and all this talk gives the first half of the story a bit of a didactic air, as if HPL is using Carter to communicate his own views the necessity of the fantastic in fiction.

In An H P Lovecraft Encyclopedia, Joshi tells us that HPL was reading Arthur Machen's literary theories at the time, and this is the source of Carter's arguments. I'm not familiar with Machen's critical work, but it sounds like the sort of thing that Oscar Wilde used to say. In fact, I think there's a touch of Edwardian decadence about HPL's theories on The Weird, that might have made his stories look cranky and old fashioned in the mid-twenties.

The story develops into a fairly straight-forward spook story and ends in a passage that would surely be an easy score on any HPL bingo board: “It was everywhere – a gelatin – a slime – yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes – and a blemish. It was a pit – the maelstrom – the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was unnameable!”

The general plot of this sounded familiar to me, and I realised that I have seen the film of this one:

Further to the horror movie addiction of my youth, I have John Stanely's Creature Feature Movie Guide Strikes Again (4^th ed) which has this to say about it:

UNNAMEABLE (1988). Another adaptation of an H P Lovecraft tale, falsely advertised as being in the league of REANIMATOR. Except for an offbeat female monster named Alyda (well-played by Katrin Alexandra and imaginatively designed by the effects man, R Christopher Biggs) this has nothing to offer but tedious haunted house clichés as four students from Miskatonic University are pursued from floor to floor by the demonic form, which enjoys (a) ripping out your heart (b) bashing your head against the floor until it cracks open like an eggshell and (3)[sic!] slashing your throat so blood gushes out. Another plot has to do with Randolph Carter (named after a Lovecraft character) and his nerdish companion seeking the answer to the mansion's mystery through the old mushy books and incantations which may have something to do with tree monsters – writer/director Jean-Paul Oulette never makes it clear. Unnameable, unless you're looking for a gore flick with a good monster is unnecessary. Charles King, Mark Kinsey Stephenson.

There is also an Unnameable 2 with John Rhys Davies and David Warner! Actually, it looks a little better than part one:

Next up, “In the Vault”

Under the Pyraminds

2011-03-23T22:16:00.003Z

“Under the Pyramids”, first published in Weird Tales, May-July 1924.

This is the This is the the eleventh entry in my read through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

As discussed with Tom in the comments for “The Rats in the Walls”, HPL and Houdini is one of the great pulp fantasy pairings. It's been addressed before, unsurprisingly, in comics, mostly, it seems including Necronauts, a series from 2000AD (I vaguely remember this one from my very late days as a squaxx dek Thargo) and I'm sure that wasn't their first fictional team up. It's a little ironic that these sorts of adventure always portray the protagonist against the supernatural, as Lovecraft and Houdini were avowed materialists.

HPL and Houdini did have some kind of acquaintance, according to Joshi in A Life and An H P Lovecraft Encyclopedia. A few months after the story was written Houdini introduced HPL to a newspaper man in hopes of helping him get a job, but no job was forthcoming. Later, he paid HPL $75 to write an article attacking astrology, and agreed to put his name to a debunking of spiritualism that HPL was to write. Before this could go ahead, though, Houdini died and and the project was called off. Something in all this makes me wonder if Houdini didn't see HPL a bit of a charity case, and perhaps Bess, now a widow, had to be a bit more careful with her deceased husband's estate.

Houdini was apparently well-pleased with the story, which was based on an obviously fictitious anecdote about being kidnapped in Egypt; maybe it was part of the patter for his show. HPL takes the route that writers will later take with him, and turns of Houdini's tale of derring do into an uncanny encounter with eldritch forces.

Joshi also praises the story, while admitting that it's slow to get going. That's an understatement, I would say. Joshi says it draws heavily on The Tomb of Penneb, published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which HPL owned, but especially at the start the long scene-setting paragraphs read almost like unedited copy taken straight from guide books and magazine articles.

The action's not bad when it gets going, with a particularly vivid passage where Houdini is lowered into the Temple of the Sphinx at the end of a rope, and I also liked the parade of mummies through the stygian depths with their horrible offerings. I found the twist at the end a little predictable, though perhaps because it reminded me a little too much of the end of Swamp Thing #50.

ETA: And today - March 24 - is Houdini'd birthday! He would be 137 had he not been so cruelly taken from us.

Next up “The Unnameable”

Inside The Wicker Man

2011-03-20T15:07:00.002Z

When I was a kid I loved horror movies. One of my most prized possessions was the book “Monsters and Vampires” by Alan Frank. I'd bought this with money from my birthday (along side a companion volume “Science Fiction Movies” by Philip Strick) from the London Bookshop in Porirua shopping mall when I was ten or eleven, so 1977 or 1978.

I loved this book, and subsequently bought many similar volumes. The great thing about these types of book was the overview of a genre they gave my young mind. By the time I was twelve, I had a pretty good sense of the evolution of the horror movie from the primeval form, in the German expressionists, and the foundational works of the Universal studio, Val Lewton, monster movies of the fifties, then Hammer and related out-croppings, and a smattering on European directors like Mario Bava and Paul Naschy, among others.

Yes, I was one of THOSE kids.

I graduated from those sorts of books – lots of photos, generally light on commentary – to deeper books on genre and the history and theory of movies. I did the two units on film criticism they offered at Victoria and joined the film society and all that sort of thing.

The Wicker Man was not actually mentioned in this book.

I was a proper movie nerd for quite some time, although the shift from NZ to the UK seems to have dampened my enthusiasm somewhat, perhaps because of the paralysing range of choice in London compared to Wellington, and of course, the competition from the huge range of cultural experiences on offer. In Wellington, you could only read about new music or the club scene or avant garde theatre; once I was here, I could get into all that stuff first hand and there was no need for the vicarious thrill of cultural commentary.

I picked this one up in the Amnesty International sale late last year. It's one of those books I had at the back of my mind for a while, after I heard the author on the radio or something like that. I wasn't quite ready to go out and find it, but when it presented itself, I scooped it up. I'm glad I did, because it provides a lot of interesting insight into the film, as well as the corporate shenanigans surrounding its release, which are quite a story in itself.

When I first saw The Wicker Man, I already knew – pretty much – what to expect, but even so I thought it was a bit different from the movies I'd seen before. It looked different, for a start. It looked real in a way that the usual horror fare never did, even when it was set in the modern day. The people looked like real people, and there's something alive about it where the Hammer films are always a little lifeless.

The usual comparisons are Hammer – perhaps due to the presence of Christopher Lee and ingrid Pitt – but it reminds me more of The Shout or House of Whipcord, a kind of surreal drama rather than a horror in the same way as Hammer or Universal. Interestingly, on first release it was doubled up with Don't Look Now, another one of those strange British symbolist dramas.

It's interesting how the world has changed, of course, since I first read about The Wicker Man in those old horror reference books. In those days I had to keep my fingers crossed that it would turn up on TV eventually, or as a revival at a film festival or as part of a Sunday double bill. Nowadays, the whole film is available on youtube, alongside many other horror classics. A little while ago I watched the Jerry Cornelius film The Final Programme for the first time, thanks to the magic of youtube.

I am reminded once again of the words of that prescient sage, John Taylor, bass player of Duran Duran, on the effect of the internet on the young enthusiast.There's much to be gained in cultural insight, I suppose, but I can't help thinking that something has been lost. It's the end of the cult movie, I think, perhaps the end of cult culture entirely.

The Rats In The Walls

2011-03-15T22:57:00.001Z

“The Rats In the Walls”, first published in Weird Tales, March 1924.

This is the the tenth entry in my read through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

Lovecraft seems to write a lot of characters that are just stand ins for himself, but up until now they have generally been the passive observers rather than the active characters – the narrators in The Statement of Randolph Carter, Herbert West - Reanimater and The Hound, for example. In this story, he not only puts himself at the centre, but creates for himself a kind of dream other life.

Walter Delapore needs some kind of background so that the reader can feel something about his eventual fate, but this kind of aristocratic set up seems to be a big draw for Lovecraft. Walter Delapore is the scion of a distinguished line of British aristocracy that has been settled in Virginia for many generations. He makes a fortune in business, marries and has a child but his wife dies in child birth, getting her handily out of the way. When the son dies as a consequence of injuries suffered in World War I, this allows the father to indulge his fascination with antiquities by pouring the family fortune (to which there is now no heir) into restoring his newly the family seat in the south of England.

Love craft saw himself as the scion of minor New England aristocracy, the last of a noble line. In Delapore's death and degradation, maybe HPL is hinting at his own father's fate and what he thinks might be in store for himself. All the stuff about the luxurious surroundings, well-padded chairs and Nigger-Man on his knee is cold comfort at the horror that lies just below the surface of his mind.

I enjoyed this one a lot, and HPL seems to have hit his stride. It's an excellent horror. Delapore's dreams add an atmosphere foreboding and the climax pays off on it with a really nasty, gruesome ending.

Like a number of the previous stories, it's set against the contemporary events of World War I. In A Life, Joshi notes that in this tale Lovecraft adds a very specific date in the first line: “On July 16, 1923, I moved into Exham Priory.” Lovecraft is clearly working hard to place his stories in the context of the real world. The Music of Erich Zann, by contrast, is the most successful of his dreamier stories, and represents a style he chose not to pursue. After this, his stories follow closer to this pattern – specific, detailed, placed expertly in the real world.

Joshi notes another interesting bit of trivia, that it was through this story that HPL began corresponding with Robert E Howard. Howard wrote to Weird Tales, querying HPL's use of Cymric in the stories final scene. Farnsworth Wright thought that HPL would be interested to read the young man's points and passed the letter on. This connects the story to the present day to me, as it's just the kind of obscure point that two colossal nerds would enjoy arguing about on the internet.

A couple of years ago I went to a concert by the Tiger Lilies, showcasing their album based on Lovecraft songs, and this is one of the songs I remember the most vividly. Thanks to the magic of youtube here it is:

I have to admit, my favourite part of that show was Alexander Hacke's readings from the stories, which were delivered with great conviction.

Next up "Under the Pyramids"

The Hound

2011-03-14T12:15:00.002Z

"The Hound", first publised in Weird Tales, 1924.

This is the the ninth entry in my read through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

A benchmark is reached here, as this is the first of HPL's stories to make it's first appearance in Weird Tales, the magazine with which he is always associated. Sixteen of the thirty-five stories in this colleciton first appeared there, and most his classic stories were published there first - The The Rats in the Walls, Call of Cthulhu, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Dunwich Horror, Pickman's Model (although with the significant exception of At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time, both first published in Astounding Stories).

Lovecraft was, in fact, offered the edsitorship of Weird Tales in 1924, but turned it down because he didn't want to move to Chicago. On the one hand, I can sympathise with people who were frustrated by this - on the face of it - wilful lack of concern for his own wellbeing. Lovecraft was never wealthy, and endured periods of genuine poverty, and so a regular wage like this was something he really needed.

On the other hand, though, it would certainly have detracted fromthe time he could write, and let his imagination roam free to find new stories. Lovecraft deliberately chose poverty and the life of the aesthete rather than moderate comfort and the toil of a wage slave. Had he been forced to knuckle down to the commercial realities of running a magazine I fear all his stories would have been lost. And as Joshi points out in A Life, he likely wouldn't have been much good as an editor anyway: "His fastidious taste would have rejected much that was actually in its pages".

The story itself is an uncharacteristically lurid offering about two thrill seekers that find more than they bargained for in their search for new experiences. In An H P Lovecraft Encyclopedia Joshi states he thinks it's a pardoy. I'd say it's less a parody than HPL writing with an eye for commercial demands of Weird Tales. He over the eggs the pudding, perhaps, and it's therefore hard to take the thrill seekers' cackling debauchery very seriously, but it's an effective little tale nonetheless.

Next up, "The Rats In The Walls"

A London Child of the 1870s by Molly Hughes

2011-03-14T11:26:00.002Z

When I was a kid, we went to stay at my grandparent's place in Napier every other school holiday or so. It being New Zealand, the country being small, it wasn't much of an effort to get up there from Wellington from time to time, and to be honest I used to enjoy the day-long road trips in the car, which were always punctuated by interesting diversions and treats of various sorts. I was less keen on staying at Nana and Granddad's. The house was something of a relic of the fifties, richly appointed in terms of 1950s small town New Zealand, but a little cold and eccentric by the terms of 80s teenagerdom, and they were a bit frightening for a wee kid, a little mad and alcoholics, too.

They had a pretty good selection of books, however. It's from granddad's selection of thrillers and popular adventure stories that I first read M R James, Sapper, Sherlock Holmes, John Buchan and Walter Scott. They also had an excellent selection of juvenile books from the teens and twenties, colouring and puzzle books with complex Victorian puzzles in densely printed engravings, occasionally adorned with either of my grandparent's childish copperplate.

They also owned a selection of at least half a dozen Boys Own and Greyfriars annuals, full of stories of japes and good chaps, of good being rewarded and wickedness suitably punished. There’s a courageous naiveté about Bob Cherry and his chums as they confront the world. It's an attitude of effortless confidence, heedless of the dangers of the world and ready to meet any challenge life throws you as an adventure to be enjoyed.

A similar sense of child-like pleasure in life's many curious twists and turns is one of the things that makes this book such a pleasure.

A London Child of the 1870s is the memoir of Molly Hughes, the youngest of five children, and only daughter, of a middle class family living in Islington in the 1870s. It starts with her earliest memories, and by the end she seems to be about twelve or so, describing in simple but evocative language the comings and goings of her daily life.

She lived an apparently idyllic early life. The younger boys were at day school, the older boys boarders, but she spent the day at home, helping with chores, visiting with neighbours and family and taking lessons in handwriting and French from her mother. She was clearly keen to learn, and we hear of her learning much history and geography second hand – sometimes comically confused – through her brothers, but she seems to feel no resentment or dissatisfaction with her lot, and when she's ten or eleven she does begin attending a ladies' finishing school nearby.

Her mother is born to moderately wealthy land-owning father in Cornwall, and so the family takes regular summer holidays near the Cornish coast in the bucolic ideal of Reskadinnick. Molly's reminiscences have the golden glow of a bread commercial, and it's impossible not to share her sense of longing for long warm days roaming among the apple trees, or running bare foot through the sand with the taste of picnic sandwiches and cider filling your sensorium.

Nostalgia seems a slightly decadent or self indulgent in the face of my own somewhat puritanical northern European cultural background. Through a coincidence of age and cultural milieu, I am inclined to view irony and distance as superior modes of expression than those which expect us to take strong emotions, particularly positive emotions, at face value.

We spend a lot of time denying that life is good. The essence of classical tragedy is a demonstration of how one's best qualities can lead to ruin and disaster - Oedipus is brought down by his dedication to bring a killer to justice, Antigone by her dedication to her brother; Hamlet sees his rationality curdle into indecision, while Lear's regality tips over into vanity. Aristotle said that tragedy should inspire pity and fear in the audience, as a form of catharsis. Catharsis, I suppose, allows us to change. Through catharsis we can move past difficult emotions, reassess priorities our our own commitments.

On the other hand, nostalgia is perhaps retrograde. It makes us long to go back to a simpler time when life, and especially social life, was navigable and easily comprehended. But I think it bolsters us too, in a different way from catharsis. While reading this, Molly's childhood becomes our childhood and her parents – warm, jolly and wise – become ours, and we too can find warm pleasure and comfort from it.

I suppose it's easy for me to feel this way, because I too grew up in a similar literate, liberal middle class household, with just one less sibling than Molly, although a century later. Her London days make me recall the time I lived in London as a child, while her holidays in the rambling family pile in Cornwall remind me of life at Titahi Bay.

I can remember bad times and unhappiness too, of course, but they seem trivial next to the great enjoyable adventure that was growing up. Reading this book reminded me of all that, of the sheer simple thrill of being young and enjoying the world around, moment by moment, fearless because you were surrounded by people who cared about you and were ready to catch you when you jumped off a cliff.

The Lurking Fear

2011-03-10T22:09:00.004Z

"The Lurking Fear", first published in Home Brew vol 2, no. 6, vol 3 no 3, January to April 1923

This is the the eighth entry in my read through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

I first read this one in the titular Del Rey collection, the cover of which accompanies this article. That's a great cover, that one, very fitting for this story.

We're firmly in Lovecraft country now. This one happens in the Catskill Mountains, and features inbreeding, grisly death and a general sense of misanthropy that pervades a lot of his work. Fans of the Call of Cthulhu RPG will appreciate the narrator's gradual slide into madness and the method he uses to finally resolve the problem of the Lurking Fear.

If this one has a problem, it's one that's common to the RPG: what is he doing at this scene of madness and why does he stay? In the first paragraph, he admits to a “love of the grotesque and the terrible which has made my career a series of quests for strange horrors in literature and in life.” That's his whole motivation, and it keeps it him here long after any saner man would have fled. I can hear any number of the guys I've played D&D with over the years frowning and saying “What are doing here again?” every time this character protests his urgent need to stay in the face of certain death. This robs him of a little sympathy.

Maybe it's just that I've read this before, but Lovecraft doesn't quite the tension going in this one. The cliff hanger for the first part is how could the Lurking Fear have snatched the narrator's colleagues (fellow players) while he slept, but it's kind of obvious that there's more than one creature, and the narrator seems a bit dense. The last scene is quite effective, because I think I was expecting a family group like in The Hills have Eyes, not hundreds of the things.

This is a four parter, another one written for Home Brew, the humour magazine put out by his amateur press acquaintance George Julian Houtain. An H P Lovecraft Encyclopedia tells us that, at Lovecraft's request, the original was illustrated by Clark Ashton Smith who “had some fun by drawing trees and vegetation in the shape of genitalia.” Some jokes are just timeless, aren't they?

As it happens, what do I find when I search for the book cover image? There's a movie! And it looks awesome!

Free trivia: “Frenzy's Jon Finch” is also The Final Program's Jerry Cornelius.

Next up "The Hound"

Puckoon by Spike Milligan

2011-03-08T22:59:00.000Z

Spike Milligan was a staple of my childhood. Dad was a big fan of The Goons, and used to play cassette's of their old shows on his stereo, and the script books hung around the house forever as part of the children's library of infinitely rereadable classics, alongside Asterix and Tin Tin. In the seventies and eighties he seemed to be forever popping up in old films and TV shows.

Mostly in New Zealand these were crusty old episodes of Parkinson and the like, but I remember watching the Q show in New Zealand on Sunday nights at about nine o'clock on the spare TV, a little fifteen inch black & white number with a telescoping aerial sticking out of the top, while my family watched some big-budget ITV drama on the colour set.

Badjelly the Witch, Silly Verses for Kids, Milliganimals and – a little later – Goblins, from which I can still recall the following little verse (which is after the jump...).

My name is Fred Fernackerpan, I walk about the town,
Sometimes with my trousers up and sometimes with them down.
When they were up, they were up,
When they were down, they were down
And when they were only half way up,
I was arrested.

Later on, I read his war memoirs, starting with Hitler, My Part in His Downfall, which are great, too, and then at some stage shortly thereafter after I finally got around to Puckoon. These were important books for me in my teens, and I remember thinking at the time that Puckoon was one of the funniest things I had ever read, so it's interesting to come back to this twenty years later.

It's still brilliantly funny and made me laugh out loud lots of times. It's Milligan at his best, wild and inventive but managing to stay in a reasonably tight focus on one – admittedly absurd and circuitous – plot line. It concerns shenanigans in rural Ireland around the time of the establishment of the Republic of Ireland.

The thin plot is there to string together a bunch of Milligan routines, and he's terrific of ladling comic effects on to his characters, like the description of an assistant in the room planning the border between republican and Northern Ireland as:

Immediately, Mr Neville Thwick, a thin veiny eel-like man with acne, deftly replaced the flags. He had volunteered for the job. Insignificant since birth, sticking pins in maps gave him the secret power he craved.

Thereafter follows a detailed account of Mr Neville Thwick and his life and hobbies, before we finally get back to the crucial plot element ofg the division of Ireland (which sees the graveyeard in Puckoon cut in half and triggers the plot, such as it is).

Some may question the depiction of Ireland here. Milligan's family was Irish, although he was born in India and grew up in South London, so I guess that gives him some dibs on the territory. It has an authentic sound, and Dan Milligan, the put-upon Fool who is intermittently the main character, and who enjoys a dialogue with the author at critical points, is a kind of self-deprecating clown figure.

As for the church, he has the kind of irreverent but somehow affectionate view of the Catholic Church that is familiar from Father Ted. Father Rudden is the same kind of put upon character as Ted Crilly.

Money! That was the trouble. Money! The parish was spiritually solvent but financially bankrupt. Money! The Lord will provide but He was behind with His payments!

He likes a drink and constantly worries about money and how to get it, but despite this, he's committed to his parish in and his parishioners still look to him for guidance. I guess that's how all good guys in comedies are – they are flawed as any one else except perhaps they realise it.

The bad, though, are appalling, and the world itself is absurd and probably malign. As is so often the case in the most cynical satire, it usually all boils down to arse holes:

As they packed, the tops of the red buses passed asnd repassed the windows with their never ending pageant of adverts. 'Beechams worth a guinea a box', 'Take Andrews Little liver...' 'Gynon Salts for the regular...' 'Exlax'

The motive seemed to be “Make people shit and get rich”. Strange, people won't believe in God, yet will swear by some blue pill that guarantees to rid them of baldness, bedwetting, distended kidneys, pox and varicose veins. Piles! A man with piles will believe any promise of a cure. Sitting on clusters of sore and distended veins, his mind goes awry and his judgement uncertain. Judge Jeffreys suffered from piles, and look at the havoc he wrought on the unfortunate followers of Monmouth. If it hadn't been for piles, Monmouth would have been alive alive today! Unaware of this historical truth, Barrington and Webster packed their cases.

As we always expected, the whole history of the world depends on arse holes and there's nothing we can do about it.

The Music of Erich Zann

2011-03-06T16:08:00.005Z

“The Music of Erich Zann” first published in The National Amateur, March 1922.

This is the the seventh entry in my read through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

Lovecraft is far from his usual New England haunts or the psychedelic world of the Dreamlands, as this story takes place in what seems to be Bohemian Paris. He does a good job of evoking the world of impoverished students and tortured artists. It's not scary, as such, but has a fine, febrile atmosphere that builds to a classic Lovecraftian freakout.

HPL rated this one among his best, according to An H P Lovecraft Encyclopedia, and it was the most frequently reprinted in his lifetime. Joshi notes that Lovecraft's appreciation of it shifted over the years, until he felt it that “it had a sort of negative value: it lacked the flaws – notably over-explicitness and over-writing – that marred some of his work before and after.”

Joshi asks if HPL erred to far on the side of under-explicitness, but I quite like the ambiguous nature of the supernatural threat. The suggestive atmosphere is never quite broken, which lends proceeding a nice edge of madness.

This story is kind of unique in Lovecraft's output, but highly influential in its way, I think. It looks the source for a couple of HPL's notable heirs, Thomas Ligotti and Jeff Vandermeer. Both those writers have addressed artists and composers as the source of cosmic horror, and many of their stories have same atmosphere of fin de siecle urban Bohemia – artists and models, actors, performers, composers of operas or masters of puppet shows. It's there in China Miélville too, in the cast of characters in Perdido Street Station and perhaps also in the superimposed cities of Besźel.

In the twenties, of course, Paris was the centre of the avant garde world, a magnetic for those of an artistic and decadent nature. Lovecraft's near-contemporary Henry Miller (born 1891) was living in in poverty, hanging out with Anais Nin and similar international ne'er do wells. I wonder if Lovecraft had any of this in mind? He wasn't much of a fan of modernist art and literature, but the cliché of Bohemian Paris must have been well established by then. In fact, I was watching An American in Paris on telly the other day and it occurred to me that this would have been a great scene, danced by Gene Kelly to music by Stravinsky.

Next up "The Lurking Fear".

Herbert West - Reanimator

2011-03-06T15:18:00.003Z

“Herbert West – Reanimator” first published in Home Brew nos 1-6, Feb-July 1922.

This is the the sixth entry in my read through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

I first encountered Herbert West in the Re-animator movie of the 80s. It's a great movie that I enjoyed a lot – I was just the right age for its gruesome sense of humour – but I remember that slight feeling of disappointment (like when I read the “Statement of Randolph Carter”) that it wasn't really “Lovecraftian”. By this stage I'd read a good chunk of the classic stories, and had an idea of what a Lovecraftian story ought to look like from the Call of Cthulhu RPG, and this gory, campy horror wasn't it.

At the time, I put this down to disrespectful the film makers, but when I can to read the story a few years later (it's in the Panther paperback of Dagon) and I was surprised at how close the movie is to the tone original. Of course, HPL never indulged the kind of sexual perversity that's in the film – in fact, the story (typically) has no female characters at all – but the film captures the feverish, fruity tone of the story exactly, and Jeffrey Combs is great as West.

I don't know if HPL enjoyed writing this, but there's something gleeful in its gory plots and ghoulish experiments. It's told in six, self-contained parts, each a few pages long, and it's like HPL set himself a challenge to outdo himself in every episode. The stories get gorier and more outrageous one by one until climaxing in spectacularly gruesome style.

My favourite segment is part five, where Herbert West and the narrator go to the trenches of world war one in search of fresh experimental subjects. Once again, I was struck by how contemporary this must have been for Lovecraft. Men of his generation would have been fighting in the war and come back injured, or with tales of horror.

An H P Lovecraft Encyclopedia tells us that this one was written to order for a humour magazine called Home Brew, apparently intended as a spicy humour magazine. Lovecraft grandly chafed at writing to order, saying, “Now this is manifestly inartistic. To write to order... reduces the happy author from art to the commonplace level of mechanical and unimaginative hack work.”

Despite his griping, I liked this story the first time I read it, and I like it still. It's comforting to know he does have some kind of sense of humour, and the crescendoing grisliness is deftly played out. Following on from The Nameless City, it's another great story that makes you think that maybe there's something to this Lovecraft guy after all.

Next up "The Music of Erich Zann"

The Nameless City

2011-02-27T15:29:00.003Z

"The Nameless City", first published in The Woverine No 11, November 1921.

This is the the fifth entry in my read through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

After the Cats of Ulthar, this one is practically a masterpiece. Lovecraft puts aside his Dunsany licks and – it seems to me – is trying to find a contemporary setting for the rarefied Dunsany style that he clearly admired so much. The tone is still somewhat affected and declamatory (Lovecraft never loses that) but there's less floweriness than in the last two stories.

The “Dreamlands” locations of Sarnath and Mnar get a name check, but this is clearly set in the real world. The explorer looking for lost ruins would have been a contemporary figure for Lovecraft – Carter was in Egypt, and major explorations and excavations were just getting started in South America and Asia and the Middle East. The possibility of lost, ancient cities was still a real one in those days, although it was the twilight of the gentleman archeaologist pursuing his own explorations without the support of any university or local authority that was more a figure of the nineteenth century.

More importantly, this story represents a real development in plot and character. The narrator faces genuine choices throughout the story, and expresses doubt about going forward, an element of agency that was signally absent from the previous four stories. Plot progression – of a sort – comes from the narrator's descent into the underground caverns of the city, allowing for a finely graduated graded increase in the eeriness until the denouement, which carries a nice uncanny charge.

An H P Lovecraft Encyclopedia tells us that “Although the tale remained among HPL's favourites, he said it was 'rejected by all the paying editors'”. Joshi seems to find this an inferior tale, saying in A Life that “The absurdities and implausibilities in this tale, along with the wildly overheated prose give it a very low place in the Lovecraft canon.”

That seems a bit unfair to me, and I think it's one of the more effective early tales, certainly the strongest so far in this volume. I'd speculate that HPL's enduring fondness for it perhaps comes from it being a bit of breakthrough piece. Compared to the previous stories here (which aren't all the stories he'd written up to this time, but represents the best known) this one reads more like a real story than an exercise in atmosphere and prose.

It's also notable for the first appearance of Abdul Alhazred, author of a terrible book on ancient witchcraft (which is not named here), and the first appearance of the nonsense couplet “That is not dead which can eternal lie/And with strange aeons even death may die”. I'm sure I'll have more to say on this character and his tome later, but this is where he pops up first.

Next up "Herbert West - Reanimator".

The Cats of Ulthar

2011-02-22T22:34:00.006Z

"The Cats of Ulthar", first published in The Tryout, vol 6 No 11, November 1921.

This is the the fourth entry in my read through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

Well, I've had enough of the “Dunsany” style for now. This one is really leaden – it's HPL trying to sound just like some other writer he loves and doing it badly. Sarnath was better than this one. Sarnath had a certain austere dignity about it, but this one is as syrupy as a bad ballet, and feels very self-indulgent.

It begins, “It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the River Skai, no man may kill a cat,” and goes on to explain why. Once upon time (as it might as well start) their lived in Ulthar two ugly old people who hated cats and would happily kill them when they wandered into their garden. A band of gypsies comes to town, including the boy Menes, a tragic orphan whose only friend in the world is a delightful black kitten.

Well, I think we can all see where this is going. When the inevitable happens, the child curses the the oldies, the caravan leaves town, and there is cat-based revenge. It ends, “...and in the end, the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed by travellers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.”

ETA: On reflection, this circular structure reminds me of the parody limerick written by the comedian John Clarke:

There was an old man with a beard
A funny old man with a beard
He had a big beard
A great big old beard
That amusing old man with a beard.

An H P Lovecraft Encyclopedia doesn't have much to say about it, except to note a number of names borrowed from Dunsany. “The entire scenario is probably inspired by the many tales of elementary revenge in [Dunsany's] The Book of Wonder.”

In A Life, Joshi says what we're all thinking: “One wonders whether Lovecraft was thinking of himself when he wrote with unexpected poignancy of the orphan Menes. … Is this a remembrance of Nigger-Man and all that lone pet meant to Lovecraft?”

Next up: "The Nameless City".

Image by flickr user felinest and used under the terms of the creative commons license.

The Doom That Came to Sarnath

2011-02-21T22:54:00.004Z

“The Doom That Came to Sarnath”, first published in The Scot, No 44, June 1920.

This is the the third entry in my read through of the commemorative edition of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft.

This story is very heavy with description of bejewelled thrones and ornate robes and Cyclopean towers of black stone, and very light on story. It's written more like a myth than the kind of character-led story that we enjoy so much these days, and the effect is a little like the kind of info dump that could be the prologue of a fat fantasy all in italics. Here we get the whole thousand-year story in the stentorian universal God like perspective of a movie trailer voice over.

I know that this story is set in H P Lovecraft's Dreamlands, because I've read the Call of Cthulhu supplement that tells me all about it – I've been there more than once in RPG sessions and once ran a short-lived Rolemaster campaign there. I've also read some of those fantasy novels by Brian Lumley set in the Dreamlands, but that was a long time ago.

Lovecraft never referred to these as his Dreamlands tales, of course. Joshi identifies the direct influence as Lord Dunsany, and calls these tales Lovecraft's “Dunsanian” works. I think HPL was trying to describe a certain sensation - a heavy sensuality – rather than a particular place in these stories, so that seems right to me. I've read a little bit of Dunsany, and I can hear a certain almost liturgical mode, that's clearly the source for this type of weird fantasy.

Howard was up to something a little different, more a kind of H Rider Haggard fantasy (although I don't know who Howard's great influences were); Clark Ashton Smith was much closer and better at this type of fantasy than Lovecraft. Lovecraft shares Dunsany's romantic inclinations and sly sense of humour, but Smith a better eye for plot. He peoples his stories with more dynamic characters, and his stories are just more interesting.

Ironically, hardly any of the “Dreamlands” stories were actually inspired by dreams, unlike the two earlier, non-Dreamlands stories in this collection. Perhaps it's the lack of connection with HPL's inner workings that makes these stories somewhat pale in comparison with his more urgent work. There's something very affected about this style that doesn't sit right compared to the (relatively) more contemporary, urgent voice in The State of Randolph Carter.

However, it's another example of undersea creatures rising up and usurping humanity. What is it that bothers HPL about these primordial depths so much? In this story, and in Dagon, he seems to almost admire the beasts. In Dagon, the protagonist almost wills the creatures to rise, while here the citizens of Sarnath clearly brought their own fate down on themselves. One way or another, we deserved it!

Next up: "The Cats of Ulthar".