Of Worms and Demons

 

Mysteries of the Worm: The Cthulhu Mythos Stories of Robert Bloch: edited by Lin Carter: (1935-1958; collected 1982): The first mass-market collection of all of legendary Robert 'Psycho' Bloch's Cthulhu Mythos stories from the early 1930's to the late 1950's. 

Like most writers writing in the Lovecraft vein, Bloch starts as a pastiche artist. Of course, Bloch knew and corresponded with HPL and engaged in a friendly game of killing each other's proxies off in stories (Bloch killing an HPL stand-in in "The Shambler from the Stars" and HPL reciprocating by killing 'Robert Black' in "The Haunter of the Dark.") 

Real-world poignance slips in as Bloch stops writing Lovecraftian fiction for a decade after HPL's death. When Bloch returns, he's much more assured and no longer writing pastiches in the last four stories in the collection. The best from this later quartet is "Notebook Found in a Deserted House" (1951), which is sort of like Huckleberry Finn vs. Cthulhu, if you can dig it. The collection takes its title from Bloch's most famous addition to the fictional books of the Cthulhu Universe, De Vermis Mysteriis. Highly recommended.

The Hollow Ones [The Blackwood Tapes Volume 1) (2020) by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan: As with del Toro and Hogan's previous collaboration, The Strain trilogy, The Hollow Ones seems to have an eye to becoming a TV series if it isn't in pre-production already. It's an enjoyable, fast read in the Supernatural Detective genre, pitting a young FBI agent and a mysterious British gentleman against supernatural shenanigans in and around the New York area. Recommended.

Aquaman (2018)

Aquaman (2018): Aquaman created by Mort Weisinger and Paul Norris; written by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, Will Beall, Geoff Johns, and James Wan; directed by James Wan; starring Jason Momoa (Arthur Curry/ Aquaman), Amber Heard (Mera), Willem Dafoe (Vulko), Nicole Kidman (Atlanna), Temuera Morrison (Tom Curry), Patrick Wilson (Orm), Dolph Lundgren (Nereus), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Black Manta), and Julie Andrews (Voice of Karathen):

Maybe nothing epitomizes better the odd, endearing, Frankensteinian assemblage that is Aquaman then the use of Julie Andrews to voice a giant sea monster and Dolph Lundgren to play a slightly pink-haired Atlantean King. The people behind Aquaman seemed to decide to throw in a wide variety of genres and tones in an effort to please everyone. As Aquaman approaches $1 billion in world-wide box office, the approach seems to have worked.

It's a weirdly likable movie with sudden shifts in genre and tone that recall DC Comics blockbusters of earlier times, especially Superman: The Movie (1978) and Batman (1989). In one bewildering 15-minute sequence, Aquaman riffs on Raiders of the Lost Ark,  The Da Vinci Code, the Jason Bourne movies, and the Roger Moore James Bond movies before doing a quick 'head in a toilet' gag and then jumping to Lovecraftian monsters before emerging in, well, Jurassic Park.

It works because while Jason Momoa is an, ahem, limited actor, he's a likable screen presence whom the movie allows to be likable (contrast this with Henry Cavill's dour Superman in Man of Steel). It also works because director James Wan, known primarily for horror movies that include Saw and The Conjuring, seems comfortable with a superhero movie that is visually more Lord of the Rings meets Avatar than Iron Man or The Dark Knight.

Vast undersea armies, weird creatures, and one really big creature (voiced by Julie Andrews!) don't need to look entirely 'real' for the CGI to work. Instead, they're colourful and strange and drawn in many cases from the comic art of people like Esteban Marato in the 1980 DC miniseries The Atlantis Chronicles. It's overlong and overstuffed and many of the 'comic' bits fall pretty flat, especially when they rely on Momoa's ability to deliver a line. 

Aquaman also has prestige actors in supporting roles, recalling Superman (1978) and those Irwin Allen disaster movies of the 1970's. One can imagine a movie poster with little boxes with actor's faces running along the bottom -- Nicole Kidman as "Atlanna", Willem DaFoe as "Vulko", and Julie Andrews as "Karathen." So much CGI work is done to de-age Kidman and DaFoe for flashback sequences that they almost qualify as visual effects.

Nonetheless, it's actually fun and weird and worth looking at -- easily the most 'comic-booky' of all of these attempts to create a DC Cinematic Universe to rival Marvel's, and all the more welcome for that sense of weird superhero mayhem and earnestness. Recommended.

A Vintage from Atlantis: The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith Volume 3

Voyage here... 

So Much Cthulhu

Black Wings of Cthulhu Volume 3 (2014) edited by S.T. Joshi

The Madness of Cthulhu Volume 1 (2014) edited by S.T. Joshi

A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (2014) edited by S.T. Joshi

Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper (2013) by Basil Copper, edited by Stephen Jones.

Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper: Volume 1 (2013) by Basil Copper, edited by Stephen Jones.

Once he turned to fiction writing in his late 30's, Basil Copper was pretty much a professional's professional. He wrote a lot of stories of horror and the weird, collected here in their entirety in three thick paperbacks by PS Publishing. He also wrote over 50 hard-boiled detective novels set in a Los Angeles he never visited in real life, non-fiction books, and several continuations of August Derleth's Holmes pastiche, Solar Pons. Like I said, a professional writer.

And as a professional writer who wasn't a great writer, he's a good study for aspiring writers -- especially those who start publishing relatively late. Copper may not be great, but he wrote several great stories and many that were very good. Keep plugging!

This first paperback volume covers roughly the first 15 years of his fiction-writing career.


Introduction  (Darkness, Mist and Shadow: Volume 1) by Stephen Jones.

• The Spider (1964): Creepy little gem involving arachnophobia.
• Camera Obscura (1965): Excellent period piece with more than a touch of Ray Bradbury. Faithfully adapted for Night Gallery.
• The Janissaries of Emilion (1967): One of Copper's most-anthologized works is a study in dreams and paranoia. You'll see the ending coming, but the details and vaguely dream-like quality of the story make it stand out.
• The Cave (1967): A fine ghost story 'recounted' in the tranquility of a men's club. The story owes a debt to M.R. James, as it riffs at the end on a bit from James' "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook."
• The Grey House (1967): The forgettable title is the only problem with this slow-building tale of misguided home ownership. Builds to a near-Grand Guignol finale with a touch of Jules de Grandin -- which is to say, flame-throwers versus the living dead!
• Old Mrs. Cartwright (1967): Almost reads as if Copper were riffing on Roald Dahl in this cruel tale of an old aunt and her disturbing young nephew at the zoo.
• Charon (1967): Less Bradburyesque than Serlingesque -- as in, a gentle fantasy that could have been an episode of The Twilight Zone.
• The Great Vore (1967): A delightful romp that's a self-aware homage to Sherlock Holmes that also works as a satire of detective stories.
• The Academy of Pain (1968): Cruel little story goes exactly where you expect, unpleasantly.
• Doctor Porthos (1968): A deft revisionist vampire tale.
• Archives of the Dead (1968): Solid tale of witchcraft in the modern world.
• Amber Print (1968): A nice horror piece about movie obsessives and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
• Out of the Fog (1970): The first of what I think of as Copper's 'Paul Harvey' pieces, in which the story builds to reveal that it's about a real, historical personage. This one at least has a nice twist.
• The House by the Tarn (1971): Straightforward, mysterious horror in the British countryside features another bad house.
• The Knocker at the Portico (1971): Psychological horror and obsession collide.
• The Second Passenger (1973): Over-long supernatural revenge piece seems like Copper's rewriting of A Christmas Carol at points.
• The Recompensing of Albano Pizar (1973): Refined tale of revenge with a bloody climax.
• The Gossips (1973): Chilling, very much M.R. Jamesian ghost story about a trio of very unpleasant Italian statues.
• A Very Pleasant Fellow (1973): A bit of a science-fictiony dud that could have been published in 1913.
• A Message from the Stars (1977): Twist is telegraphed in an unconvincing story about alien invasion.
• Cry Wolf (1974): Weak twist story involving werewolves.
• The Trodes (1975): See "A Message from the Stars."
• Dust to Dust (1976): Solid but unspectacular ghost story involving messages from the dead written in the dust on a windowsill. 

Overall: The strongest of the three Copper Collected volumes has a few duds -- though all of them solidly written -- and many greats. The volume also offers Copper at his most chameleonic as the stories riff on a number of prominent antecedents, most notably the great English ghost-story writer M.R. James. Highly recommended.

Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper: Volume 2 (2013) by Basil Copper, edited by Stephen Jones.

The second volume of PS Publishing's Collected Basil Copper is a solid effort with several stand-outs. Not as consistently excellent as the first volume, but well-worth buying for fine stories that include "The Flabby Men," "Shaft Number 247," and "Beyond the Reef."

Introduction  (Darkness, Mist and Shadow: Volume 2) by Kim Newman.

• The Flabby Men (1977): Sinister post-apocalyptic tale shares characteristics with Shaft Number 247 (1980) and Out There (1999). A combination of the Lovecraftian and the post-atomic mutant story.
• The Way the World Died (1978): Very minor sf story.
• The Treasure of Our Lady (1978): A throwback to tales of explorers searching for treasure in the jungle, unironically told. Wouldn't be out of place in a 1927 issue of Weird Tales.
• Justice at the Crossroads (1978): Ironic, non-supernatural tale of a 'real' vampire.
• Mrs. Van Donk (1978): Minor bit of Hitchcockian social satire/thriller.
• The Stranger (1980): A psychological horror story with a 'twist' you will probably see coming.
• The Madonna of the Four-Ale Bar (1980): See "The Stranger."
• Shaft Number 247 (1980): Copper's brilliant, vague novella written for Ramsey Campbell's New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. One of ten or at most 20 of the greatest post-Lovecraft Lovecraftian stories ever written. 
• The Candle in the Skull (1984): Fun, slight tale of a creepy child and Hallowe'en revenge.
• Wish You Were Here (1992): Excellent, slow-building ghost story doesn't quite have a workable ending. Still, the ride is a lot of fun.
• Better Dead (1994): A bit of marriage-based horror that satirizes the too-committed film buff (the title comes from Bride of Frankenstein).
• Beyond the Reef (1994): Neo-pulp follow-up to Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth." Fun stuff, though far better as an homage than as actual horror.
• Death of a Demi-God (1995): Weak, creaky story falls into the 'Paul Harvey' category enumerated in my review of Volume 1 -- Copper's 'Paul Harvey' stories eventually reveal that they're about a real, historical personage.
• Reader, I Buried Him! (1995): Fun little vampire story seems to exist for the sole purpose of its title's play on the last line of Jane Eyre.
• Bright Blades Gleaming (1995): Another 'Paul Harvey' story, intermittently interesting but with an extremely telegraphed ending.

Overall: Recommended, though the stories start to sag after 1980. 

Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper: Volume 3 (2013) by Basil Copper, edited by Stephen Jones.

The third and weakest paperback volume of the Collected Basil Copper does allow the reader of the previous two volumes to survey the writer in full, and here that writer is in decline but still intermittently strong and vital.

An Interview with Basil Copper by Johnny Mains 

Introduction  (Darkness, Mist and Shadow: Volume 3) by Christopher Fowler 

• When Greek Meets Greek (1997): Vague, disturbing slow-burn revisionist vampire novella.
• Line Engaged (1999): We've seen the twist more than once.
• One for the Pot (1999): One of those 'The killer is really...' stories, short and mostly sweet.
• In a Darkling Wood (1999): Absolutely loopy period piece involving black magic in the 18th-century English countryside. The last 20 pages are weird but utterly unconvincing.
• The Grass (1999): A piece of juvenalia written when Copper was 14.
• Riding the Chariot (1999): Psychological horror flips over and crashes over the last few hasty, unconvincing pages.
• Final Destination (1999): Technically, the final line makes this horror story a 'Paul Harvey.'
• The Obelisk (1999): Unconvincing tale of invasion from an alternate Earth.
• Out There (1999): Until the last three pages or so, "Out There" is up there with Copper's superior, earlier stories along similar lines, "Shaft Number 247" and "The Flabby Men." The last three pages are startlingly rushed and ridiculous, but the rest of the story is very satisfying.
• The Summerhouse (1999): A creaky tale of a child's revenge on a father completely loses its way as the events are explained to us over the last couple of paragraphs.
• As the Crow Flies (2002): Mildly interesting tale of a crow that hates a guy, but so long.
• Poetic Justice (2002): Almost a story fragment about the evils of vivisection.
• Ill Met By Daylight (2002): Fun, M.R. Jamesian tale of a graveyard haunted by... what, exactly?
• Charing Cross-Dover-Charing Cross (2010): Very much a Twilight Zone fantasy of revenge.
• There Lies the Danger ... (2002): A real time-waster about rejuvenation treatments leads to a real dud of a final line. 
• Queen Bee (2005): Mildly interesting tale of a bee that loves a guy, or maybe hates him..
• Death of a Nobody (2005): Yes, another one of Copper's 'Paul Harvey' stories that eventually reveals it's about a real, historical personage. Zzz.
• Reflections (2005): There's an evil mirror in this overlong story about... an evil mirror that belonged to a real historical personage!
• The White Train (2005): Holocaust revenge story is very, very familiar.
• Hunted by Wolves (2005): Science-fiction background adds nothing to a story about a guy hiding in a tree from some super-wolves.
• Storm Over Stromjolly (2005): Dud of a revenge story... with a twist!
• The Silver Salamander (2005): Very slow thriller about a man, his mistress, her husband, and a piece of jewelry.
• Voices in the Water (2005): Fine, building piece is technically Lovecraftian in its monsters. Not a bad story to finish a career on.

Overall: Lightly recommended, and best read after the first two collections.

Arkham - Scouse

Letters to Arkham: The Letters of Ramsey Campbell and August Derleth, 1961-1971 (2014): edited by S.T. Joshi: Essential, informative, and educational reading for any reader of horror, and especially for those who admire both H.P. Lovecraft and Ramsey Campbell.

August Derleth was a fantastically important editor and publisher in the realms of the weird. He kept H.P. Lovecraft in print, in book form, for decades until the rest of the world started catching up with the Cthulhu Mythos. And he also published the first book by Liverpudlian Ramsey Campbell after Campbell started corresponding with Derleth back in 1961.

In 1961, Campbell was 15. His first collection -- The Inhabitant of the Lake -- would come out from Arkham in 1964. And while the precocious Campbell's early works would be Lovecraftian pastiches not-dissimilar to some of Derleth's own work, Campbell's growth curve as a writer was startlingly steep. By the late 1960's, his voice was uniquely his own and he'd helped pioneer a new approach to visionary horror.

Derleth and Campbell carry on a lively, wide-ranging correspondence for ten years, though the last three years are a bit spotty because many letters have gone missing. While thoughts on horror are the main attraction, Letters to Arkham also offers a glimpse into the cottage industry that was Arkham House. We also learn just how prolific Derleth was as a writer. And a lover, though some of that may be taken with a grain of salt.

As Campbell notes in his afterword, he was something of a fan-boy in his early letters. But that element gradually slips away, leaving the reader with a dialogue between two friends who never met in person. Their debates on the merits of everything from Peter Sellers to Samuel Beckett are lively and fascinating. Derleth functions as a mentor figure for Campbell throughout their correspondence when it comes to writing and, more generally, living. 

And we find out that Derleth took to the Wisconsin woods where he lived every May to collect morel mushrooms. Thousands of them, their number dutifully reported each year. Fungi from Wisconsin. How Lovecraftian is that? Highly recommended.

Imago Cubed

The Imago Sequence and Other Stories by Laird Barron (Collected 2007) containing the following stories: Old Virginia (2003); Shiva, Open Your Eye (2001); Procession of the Black Sloth (2007); Bulldozer (2004); Proboscis (2005); Hallucigenia (2006); Parallax (2005); The Royal Zoo is Closed (2006); and The Imago Sequence (2005): 

Not the first, not the second, but the third time I've read this collection in the last four years. So I guess I like it. I'll add only that the third reading allowed the connections among the stories to stand out more in my mind. 

And Barron's generally-doomed tough-guy protagonists sometimes bring to mind some of Jim Thompson's characters along the same lines, though Thompson's characters didn't have to deal with screamingly awful occult menaces. I sort of wish Barron would write a story in which one of his tough, morally dubious protagonists beats a Shoggoth to death with a shovel. That would be awesome. Highly recommended.

The Campbell Mythos

Visions from Brichester (2015) by Ramsey Campbell; illustrations by Randy Broecker: containing the following stories and essays (dates are first publication, not composition):

• The Stone on the Island (1964): Campbell begins his transition from Lovecraftian pastiches to his own style of horror here, as he mixes an idea from M.R. James, a Lovecraftian island, and his own experiences at work. 
• Before the Storm (1980): Written in the 1960's, the story again shows Campbell mixing cosmic body horror and his own Lovecraftian deities with the daily grind at an office.
• Cold Print (1969): Campbell's first truly great short story by my reckoning. A quest for a particular form of (perfectly legal, now anyway) pornography by a Physical Education teacher takes him to a bookstore he never, ever should have gone into.
• The Franklyn Paragraphs (1973): Fun, disturbing metafiction about a mysteriously vanished horror writer.
• A Madness from the Vaults (1972): Really a deft riff on the sort of stories Clark Ashton Smith used to write, set on an alien world and involving all-alien characters.
• Among the pictures are these: (1985): Campbell describes a series of sketches he made back in the 1960s. Interesting.
• The Tugging (1976): Campbell suggests that this is a too-literal interpretation of the Lovecraftian chestnut about the "stars being right" to bring back certain deities. I like it a lot -- it may be literal, but the images are grand.
• The Faces at Pine Dunes (1980): A great, great story. Its imagery climaxes in something deeply disturbing and chilling; its 20-year-old protagonist is sympathetic and carefully drawn.
• Blacked Out (1985): Fun scare is, as Campbell notes, Lovecraftian primarily because it appeared in his previous Lovecraftian collection Cold Print because the editor wanted to include at least one previously unpublished story. Rarely has a Campbellian protagonist had a more emblematic last name.
• The Voice of the Beach (1982): Maybe Campbell's crowning achievement in writing a Lovecraftian story without any recourse to all the machinery of Lovecraftian terms for 'gods' and creatures and menacing books. It most resembles Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space." The imagery and situations are sinister, horrifying, vague, and often uncomfortably vertiginous and hallucinatory.
• The Horror under Warrendown (1995): Very funny pastiche turns a famous English children's book series into a source of cosmic body horror.
• The Other Names (1998): Very solid combination of a sensitive character study and a Lovecraftian menace.
• The Correspondence of Cameron Thaddeus Nash (2010): Funny, satiric examination of one very bad Lovecraft fan.
• The Last Revelation of Gla'aki (2013): Campbell's return to his Lovecraftian god Gla'aki manages to be both disturbing and weirdly soothing at points -- and it does a better job of showing why people might find comfort in the embrace of these terrible 'gods' than any story I can think of after David Drake's brilliant Lovecraft-meets-Joseph-Conrad novella "Than Curse the Darkness."
• The Successor (First draft of Cold Print) (2015): Fascinating look at the early version of a story.
• The Franklyn Paragraphs (First draft) (2015): Fascinating look at the early version of a story.
• Mushrooms from Merseyside (2015): Campbell's often hilarious salue to Lovecraft's sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth sees the writer summarize all of his Lovecraftian fiction in a series of... limericks.
• Two Poems by Edward Pickman Derby (2015): Interesting early poetry.
• The Horror in the Crystal (Story fragment) (2015): 1960's fragment; interesting.
• Rusty Links (Essay) (2015): A snarky Ramsey Campbell from the 1960's.
• Lovecraft in Retrospect (Essay) (1969/1994): A very pissy Campbell from the late 1960's gets critiqued by the lovable Campbell of the 1990's.
• On Four Lovecraft Tales (Essay) (2013): As good an explanation of Lovecraft's strengths as a writer as you'll ever read, this essay really caused me to re-evaluate certain aspects of Lovecraft's work. It's a concise piece that explains how much more complex Lovecraft's style and structure were than he's generally given credit for from even his greatest admirers.
• Afterword (Essay) (2015): Campbell contextualizes all the pieces in the book. Invaluable, but I want more!

Overall: The stories are great, the non-fiction pieces are great, and the illustrations by Randy Broecker are extremely enjoyable and often very much 'Old School' in an early 20th-century pulp magazine way. Highly recommended.

Close Encounters of the Cthulhu Kind

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: written by Paul Schrader and Steven Spielberg; directed by Steven Spielberg; starring Richard Dreyfus (Roy Neary), Francois Truffaut (Lacombe), Melinda Dillon (Jillian Guiler), Bob Balaban (Laughlin), and Teri Garr (Ronnie Neary( (1977): It's amazing how much Close Encounters of the Third Kind plays like a horror movie for much of its length -- indeed, like an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu." The film moves from location to location to show various strange events and mysteries that occur across the planet. There's a documentary feel to the location work and the narrative structure, as mysterious U.N. investigators led by Francois Truffaut and Bob Balaban travel the Earth to investigate UFO-related incidents. 

In the purposefully mundane domestic sequences that focus on dissatisfied husband and father Richard Dreyfus and single mother Melinda Dillon, we see Spielberg and uncredited screenwriter Paul Schrader ground the movie in the day-to-day life of working-class Americans. And then the UFO's show up and gradually change everything. And as with many of the characters in "The Call of Cthulhu," Dillon and Dreyfus are tormented by nightmares and visions as the alien arrival on Earth approaches.

I don't know that either Schrader or Spielberg ever read "The Call of Cthulhu." It has such a sturdy narrative approach to the creation of globe-spanning cosmic horror that it's more of a surprise that more film-makers haven't stumbled upon the approach before. The main difference here being that the story is ultimately about the arrival on Earth of friendly aliens and not all-conquering alien monsters. But the aliens do enough odd things along the way that a certain measure of fear recurs throughout the movie, most notably when aliens kidnap Dillon's young son for reasons that are as murky as anything else when it comes to possible alien motivation.

The arrival of the UFO's at the conclusion of the film stands as a high point of practical, non-CGI visual effects. It's a showcase of model work, cloud tanks, mattes, and an assortment of other 'tricks' honed to near-perfection during the non-CGI years. It's also a beautiful-looking climax, with its glowing alien spacecraft set off against the night sky and the looming stump of the mountainous Devil's Tower.

The Lovecraftian melding of documentary-style attention to detail and the unfolding of revelations to increasingly weirded-out protagonists serve Spielberg's vision well. The acting is solid throughout and, in the case of Truffaut's visionary, quite charming. What the aliens are doing doesn't necessarily make much sense, and there are some groaners in the dialogue towards the end (an exchange about Einstein is especially dumb). But overall, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is still a splendid movie, and one that probably would never be made in today's marketplace. Highly recommended.

The Call of Cthulhu: adapted by Sean Branney from the story by H.P. Lovecraft; directed by Andrew Leman; starring Matt Foyer (Narrator), Ralph Lucas (Professor Angell), Patrick O'Day (Johansen), and David Mersault (Inspector Legrasse) (2005): The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS)'s first long-form foray into film-making is now 10 years old and still dandy. An amateur film made for a pittance, it outshines most professional horror movies with far larger budgets both in its faithfulness to its source material and in its aesthetic pleasures.

Lovecraft's seminal Cthulhu Mythos novella saw publication in 1926. HPLHS adapted the novella under the conceit that it had been adapted for film in its publication year. Thus, The Call of Cthulhu is a silent movie that looks and acts like a silent movie, right down to the occasional defects in the viewing experience (dig that hair on the lens in the early going!). 

We do get an excellent musical score, so one can either assume that one is in a 1926 film theatre with live music or that The Call of Cthulhu has had a score added for its 'modern' release. Whatever suspends your disbelief. But The Call of Cthulhu isn't simply an homage to the film-making tropes of the late Silent Era: it's a compelling horror movie in its own right. 

Clever visual riffs on Van Gogh and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari seem appropriate to the subject matter; the stop-motion Cthulhu we see towards the end of the film is a terrific use of period-appropriate visual effects that actually manages to be disquieting as it lurches across the screen. Model and prop work are also beautiful throughout the movie, with a couple of different yet equally disquieting Cthulhu idols and a terrific approximation of Cthulhu's home/prison R'lyeh, risen from the waves for a brief moment.

It's a worthwhile expenditure of an hour to watch The Call of Cthulhu. Would that big-budget horror and fantasy movies showed this level of skill and artistry. Highly recommended.

Dragon's Domain

The Ceremonies by T.E.D. Klein (1984): The Ceremonies isn't the greatest horror novel ever written, but it may be the greatest horror novel ever written in which the stakes are the survival of the world. There were a lot of those apocalyptic and pre-apocalyptic horror novels in the late 1970's and 1980's, during the later nuclear-war-fear years. I'd probably give the edge to The Ceremonies over all of them, 1980's or otherwise, though Ramsey Campbell's The Hungry Moon and Midnight Sun would offer stiff competition.

T.E.D. Klein is a Top-Ten American horror-writing talent despite his meager output: this novel; the four novellas collected in Dark Gods (1985); the novella The Ceremonies is based on, "The Events at Poroth Farm" (1973); and maybe 200 pages of ephemera. Horror readers sit and wait, hoping that second novel announced in 1985 will some day see publication.

The Ceremonies looms large for a number of reasons. It's beautifully written. Its allusions, intertexts, and interpolations of what sometimes seems to be the entire history of horror fiction are fascinating, keenly observed, and essential to the unfolding of the plot. The plot itself is expertly machined, building slowly until the climax explodes in the last thirty pages or so. The characterization of players minor and major is deft and witty and occasionally heart-breaking. The novel follows certain tropes and conventions while exploding others along the way. It's structurally and stylistically complex in an unshowy manner -- its use of three distinct, linked narrative streams in three different voices and tenses, for one, has thematic significance that only dawns on the reader gradually as the novel and its voices accumulate in one's head to increasingly disturbing effect. And it's capable of both cosmic uneasiness and gross-out horror, the latter used sparingly but to great effect, especially in the climactic scenes.

To appreciate The Ceremonies fully, one should read at least some of the texts it interacts with. But if one doesn't do so, one of the main characters labours away on a graduate English thesis on horror fiction throughout the novel. Along the way, we get his thoughts on texts ranging from The Castle of Otranto to The Haunting of Hill House. Some of these texts are important to the novel as a whole. All of the observations are, at the very least, interesting. Some are even hilarious. Because one can certainly agree with the protagonist's view that The Castle of Otranto sucks, or that Dracula stops being interesting once the novel exits Transylvania.

The protagonist of the novel, Jeremy Freirs, takes lodging on a farm near the small New Jersey town of Gilead for the summer in order to finish his M.A. thesis. His landlords are Sarr and Deborah Poroth, members of a small Christian sect that settled in the area more than a hundred years earlier. The sect bears some resemblance to the Pennsylvania Dutch or the Amish, though the Poroths have a truck and indoor plumbing. But it's not the Poroths or their sect or even Jeremy that are the real problem. 

The real problem is something that waited in the surrounding woods for 5000 years to be born again, something that spent centuries clinging to a tree branch in the distorted heart of a section of the forest initially called by the adjacent Native Americans "The Place of Burning." No one ever lived there or near there until settlers started to encroach in the 19th century. Then the thing's waiting ended, along with its life, and the Ceremonies began. And even in the 19th century, the forested heart of darkness sat only about 50 miles from New York City. 

Something beyond all measure fell into or broke through or seeped up into our universe; the novel leaves the thing's means of entry a "mystery." But the novel also suggests that the thing somehow also broke through into human mythology, folklore, rituals, stories, and even folk dances. Fragments of the rituals needed to resurrect the being hide in all these things, waiting to be reassembled and used so that the thing can be reassembled and reborn. Even a Coney Island Ferris Wheel and a grumpy cat fit into the Ceremonies.

One of the keen pleasures of The Ceremonies is its combination of mystery and precision. We're taken through various rituals and preparations and signs and portents. Strange, tarot-like cards are read. Complex ceremonies that must be followed with an anal-retentive attention to detail are enacted. But the mysteries of what awaits, of what will be done to the world and how it will change, remain to the very end of the text. At no time does Klein feel the need to have the ultimate antagonist of the novel deliver an expositional speech. 

And even the acolyte of the antagonist remains vague and refreshingly unglib to the very end. And this henchman, Rosie -- this short, fat, seemingly jolly old man -- is one of the novel's many terrific creations. He's awful. He's also pitiful, but only in terms of what he was before he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, nearly 100 years before the main action of the novel takes place. The third-person description of his thoughts doesn't give us the exterior charm of so many antagonists, from Hannibal Lecter all the way back to Milton's Satan. We see Rosie from inside, a manipulative and remorseless engine of death. Well, death for all humanity. If humanity were lucky. Which it probably won't be if Rosie gets his way. There are worse things than death.

The indispensable references for the novel are several late-19th and early-20th-century stories by the Welsh horror-writer/mystic Arthur Machen. The novel's title refers to three sets of ceremonies named but never fully explained in Machen's (mostly) first-person tour de force "The White People"; Machen's novella is also discussed by Jeremy in the novel itself. A short, cryptic Machen piece called "The Ceremony" also adds to one's appreciation of the novel, as do Machen's "The Novel of the Black Powder" and "The Great God Pan." These are all in the public domain, and worth reading regardless of whether or not you read The Ceremonies. 

But you should read The Ceremonies. You really should. It's both its own evocative, poetic, ruthless piece of horror and a terrific act of play with what sometimes seems to be every major horror and Gothic work ever written, either explicitly or implicitly. The Ceremonies rewards close and careful reading. It rewards multiple readings. And it has a killer inversion of a horror trope that horror readers will probably associate most with Stephen King's The Shining, as creatures almost never associated with goodness nonetheless ride to the rescue by accident, driven by instinctual fury, even as Nature itself comes under existential assault. Highly recommended.

Lovecraft Ascending

The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death (1995) by H.P. Lovecraft, containing the following stories (Publication dates in brackets):

Introduction: Concerning Dreams and Nightmares by Neil Gaiman: Enjoyable but light on context and somewhat glib. The volume could really use a historical overview of its contents to establish a context for the stories, along with both composition and publication dates for all the stories.

• Azathoth (1922): Short prose poem/fragment.
• The Descendant (1926) : Fragment.
• The Thing in the Moonlight (1934): Fragment.
• Polaris (1920): It's an oddity all right, one that could be sub-titled 'Angry Man Yells at North Star.'
• Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919): A scientific romance of multiple personalities got turned into a mostly unfaithful movie.
• The Doom That Came to Sarnath (1920): Maybe the best of Lovecraft's short, moody Dunsanian horror stories. Introduces a precursor to the Deep Ones.
• The Statement of Randolph Carter (1920): The first appearance of the closest thing to a recurring protagonist Lovecraft ever created. Has one of HPL's two most familiar, quoted and/or mocked concluding lines.
• The Cats of Ulthar (1920): HPL loved cats and he let it show. And they would show up again to play a major role in the events of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
• Celephais (1922): Prose poem.
• From Beyond (1934): Short horror story of perception. Turned into a sort-of faithful movie.
• Nyarlathotep (1920): Short prose poem/fragment about the Herald of the Great Old Ones from ancient Egypt to a briefly imagined dystopic future.
• The Nameless City (1921): That would be the lost desert city of Irem, which also figures in the Cthulhu Mythos.
• The Other Gods (1933): Whimsical bit of Dunsanian fabulism and cosmic relativism.
• Ex Oblivione (1921): Prose poem.
• The Quest of Iranon (1935): Dunsanian fable.
• The Hound (1924): Fairly straightforward horror story features two decadents and an unusual-for-HPL setting of Amsterdam.
• Hypnos (1922): As much a nod to Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" as it is a Dream-Cycle work.
• What the Moon Brings (1922): Prose poem.
• Pickman's Model  (1927): A straightforward horror story with elements that would be re-used in the Dream-Cycle short novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, written the same year but published 16 years later. Has one of HPL's two most familiar, quoted and/or mocked concluding lines.
• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1943): HPL's oddest long work combines the soporific with the startling. Randolph Carter stars.
• The Silver Key (1929): Randolph Carter again, exploring the Dream-lands.
• The Strange High House in the Mist (1931): Demon-haunted Kingsport makes an appearance, though it's positively normal compared to its representation in "the Festival."
• The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1943): Unpublished for years after its composition, this short novel gave us "essential salts" and Lovecraft's most fully realized antagonist, Joseph Curwen. Certain sections approach a parody of overused tropes.
• The Dreams in the Witch-House (1933): Horror story has ties to both the Dream Cycle and to the Cthulhu Mythos. Somehow turned into soft-core-porn horror on TV anthology Masters of Horror.
• Through the Gates of the Silver Key (1934) by H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price: Price and Lovecraft collaborate on a continuation of the story of Randolph Carter, for whom friends and relatives now search. A lengthy section on four-dimensional, non-linear space-time is nearly essential to understanding where Alan Moore is coming from in similar sections in his Lovecraft-inspired Neonomicon.

Overall: Certainly not as strong a collection as one of HPL's later-period work would be, but still extremely strong at points, and necessary for understanding him as a writer. Highly recommended.

Looking for Kadath

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft (1927/first published 1943): The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath wasn't published until six years after H.P. Lovecraft's death. It's fascinating, poetic, uneven, and occasionally soporific. It's also the longest bridge between HPL's Dunsanian period and his mature Cthulhu Mythos work, having been completed after the publication of the seminal Mythos novella "The Call of Cthulhu." 

Lord Dunsany, far and away the most influential English-language fantasist of the first half of the 20th century, supplied a literary model for Lovecraft's in-between years. HPL's Dunsanian period moved him from verbose nods to Edgar Allan Poe and other horror writers to the cosmic horrors of the Mythos that would occupy Lovecraft from the mid-1920's to his death in 1937. 

The Dunsany stories, sometimes referred to as Lovecraft's Dream Cycle, aren't strictly horror. Instead, their lapidary prose and often surreal settings aim for a more nebulous form of the Weird and the Fantastic. They are indeed dream-like at even their shortest lengths, and many of the Dream-Cycle fragments are expansions of dreams set down by Lovecraft. From Dunsany also came Lovecraft's pantheons of strange gods with stranger names, and strange places with stranger names. Dunsany helped unshackle Lovecraft from real religions and traditional supernatural menaces. Dunsany helped Lovecraft fly.

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath follows the efforts of recurring Dream-Cycle character Randolph Carter to discover why he's been banished from a wondrous city he'd previously been visiting in his dreams. Yes, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is indeed set in dreams -- or "Earth's Dreamlands," as Carter would say. There are also Dreamlands on other worlds. There are also Dreamlands in the dark between the stars, but you probably wouldn't want to find out what lives there.

Carter seeks the fortress of Kadath of the Cold Wastes, where dwell the gods of Earth, who seem to have barred Carter from his Dream-City. Looming far beyond and greater than the gods of Earth are the Other Gods. These are versions of the alien 'Gods' of the Cthulhu Mythos, though only Nyarlathotep and Azathoth are named among them. 

Carter will have to deal with these gods along with various monsters, ghouls, night-gaunts, cats, Gugs, almost-humans, vampires, and moon-beasts in the course of his quest. He'll meet Robert W. Chambers' King in Yellow. He'll converse with Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, herald of the Other Gods. He'll make friends and allies of the Cats of Ulthar and the ghouls of the Dreamlands. And he'll voyage through strange and mysterious lands, over weird seas, and under strange ground.

And all without chapter breaks!

Those who would come to The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath seeking cosmic horror in the vein of "The Call of Cthulhu" and "At the Mountains of Madness" should steer clear. There are sections of weird, unsettling description. But this novella really works best as a lengthy prose poem devoted to evoking the weird, the surreal, and the logic of dreams.

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath has some tiring passages. Its diction and syntax would have been helped in stretches by serious, ruthless editing. And HPL really, really falls in love with the word 'pshent' (now generally spelled 'pschent') over the last 20 pages or so. Nonetheless, it's a rewarding text both for the devotee of HPL and the general fantasy reader. Listening to prog-rock while reading it might also be a good idea. It's pretty trippy. Recommended.

On the Road to Providence

Providence Book One: The Ancient Track: (Providence Issues 1-4): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Jacen Burrows (2015): Well, I say it's Book One because it took me longer to read the first four issues of Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows' 12-issue Avatar Press foray into (all) the worlds of H.P. Lovecraft than it normally takes to read 20 normal comic books. Maybe 30. 

Moore has said that he wants to save Lovecraft's work from its domestication in plushie Cthulhu dolls and jokey pop-culture references. Or at least I think that's what he means in his interviews supporting Providence. As in Moore's previous HPL comics, Providence makes explicit enough disturbing sexual elements that were implicit in HPL's original works to unsettle almost anyone who previously thought Cthulhu and friends were cute, cuddly, tentacled monsters who just need a little lebensraum on dear old Planet Earth.

Moore has also called Providence his Watchmen for the Cthulhu Mythos. This certainly works on a number of levels. As with Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, Providence proceeds as an investigation. It involves pastiches and homages to characters not created by Moore et al., characters reimagined and altered by Moore's sensibilities into new configurations and meanings from their source texts. And Providence contains lengthy text pieces at the end of each issue which expand our understanding of the narrative we've just encountered in the comics portion of the books.

One major difference between this and Watchmen is that Providence seems to aim at dovetailing back into H.P. Lovecraft's original stories by the (as-yet-unpublished) end of the narrative. Most of the post-WWI events of Providence occur before the events of Lovecraft's main horror stories, Mythos and otherwise. Though HPL was indeed writing by the time of this narrative, "The Call of Cthulhu" was still several years away. 

And so our protagonist is Robert Black, a gay, Jewish reporter for the New York Herald when we first encounter him. We don't know much about HPL's views on homosexuality, but we do know that he was anti-Semitic (despite the fact that he married a Jewish woman...oh, paradoxical HPL!). Lovecraft's stories and letters tended to avoid overt references to sexuality, though it was often implied. 

Black, though, is sexually active throughout the first four issues. Moore has set him up as both a Lovecraft proxy and an anti-Lovecraft. Like HPL, he's something of a snob when it comes to about 99% of everybody. But while Black has fled New York, just as HPL once did, he still loves the city, which HPL definitely did not. Given the title of the series and the structure of its protagonist's wanderings, I'd imagine that Black will eventually end up in HPL's beloved home city of Providence, Rhode Island. On Lovecraft's tombstone is the inscription "I am Providence," after all.

The desire to write a non-fiction book about odd rural traditions in New England motivates Black's wanderings first in and then outside of New York. He's also leaving the city for awhile to get over the death of an ex-lover. His initial investigation of a mysterious, ancient book and its lengthy, star-crossed history leads him to characters we've met before, under different names, in New York HPL stories that include "Cool Air" and "The Horror at Red Hook." Further explorations will send us to real-world towns that include Salem, Massachusetts -- only now superimposed upon them are creatures and situations from Lovecraft's demon-haunted, imaginary New England towns of Arkham and Innsmouth and Dunwich. 

But while some situations mirror Lovecraft's stories, Providence really is set Before The Play. And Moore's version of one of Lovecraft's most interesting characters, Wilbur Whateley from "The Dunwich Horror," seems to be aware that he's about to become part of the Story of that Play. And he's not all that happy about it when he meets Black.

Providence appears to be a prequel to Moore and Burrows' present-day Cthulhu comics The Courtyard and Neonomicon. But this may not entirely be the case. One doesn't need to have read those other works to enjoy Providence, though they do add an extra layer of cosmic horror to Black's investigation. He is from the Herald, after all. Or maybe he is the Herald, though of what, no one says.

I'm not sure how well Providence works for people who haven't read at least some of Lovecraft's work. However, Moore constantly puts his own revisionist, totalizing spin on things. What is implicit is often made explicit, and this often works quite well in terms of the horror in the text. The cosmic level of Lovecraft, that Sublime dread, is still absent from the narrative, though it certainly seems to be coming. 

As we end the comics portion of the fourth issue, Moore quotes a Lovecraft poem named "The Ancient Track." It suggests that worse and bigger things are waiting for our intrepid writer, whose conscious mind still hasn't clicked on to the supernatural horrors he's walking through. But the text pieces, journal entries 'by' Black, suggest that his unconscious mind is about one step away from shrieking and gibbering: as Black wonders in one journal entry, what if he wrote a novel about an investigator who doesn't know he's in a mystery until it's too late? And what would be a reasonable reaction to events of the supernatural for this investigator? Would he keep rationalizing what he's seen until it's too late as well? 

Moore's writing is sharp and mordant. Jacen Burrows' slick, hyper-realistic style works for Providence as it did for Neonomicon and The Courtyard. It supplies a sort of hyper-real documentary style that approximates the pseudo-documentarian aspects of Lovecraft's best work. When the horrors come, you almost believe in them. And Burrows really, really nails 'The Innsmouth Look' -- it's a comic-book-art triumph to make Innsmouthians seem visually unsettling again. Highly recommended.

Dark Gods Looming

Dark Gods (1985) by T.E.D. Klein, containing the following stories: Children of the Kingdom (1980); Petey (1979); Black Man with a Horn (1980); and Nadelman's God (1985): Despite his relatively small output, especially over the 30 years since this collection appeared, T.E.D. Klein remains one of our greatest living horror writers thanks to the novellas collected in Dark Gods, the early 1970's novella "The Events at Poroth Farm," and the epic 1984 horror novel The Ceremonies. One lives in hope that the second novel announced as being in progress in the mid-1980's will some day appear.

The novellas collected here are meticulous and cosmic, witty and horrifying, closely observed and broad in their ramifications. "Petey" is perhaps the most traditional horror work, a story about something wicked this way coming to a secluded house in the countryside. But it melds that horror with a conversational view of the upper middle class that owes more to writers that include John Updike and John Cheever than to H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe. The monster is coming -- to a house-warming party. 

Meanwhile, the house's previous owner gets more and more agitated in his new home at a psychiatric institution as the night goes on. It's a brilliant piece of work that rewards multiple readings (well, all four novellas reward multiple readings). There's something very droll yet grounded in the way that the horror gradually manifests itself, in the back-and-forth of the sometimes envious, often drunken conversations the guests have.

"Black Man with a Horn" is a triumphant piece of meta-Cthulhuiana, narrated by an elderly and somewhat self-pitying horror writer who still chafes at his description in genre circles as a "disciple of H.P. Lovecraft." It's 1980 and H.P. Lovecraft has been dead for 43 years. And then our narrator, mournful and sardonic, stumbles into what he ultimately realizes is a real-world equivalent of an H.P. Lovecraft story. The irony of being trapped in someone else's story doesn't escape him -- indeed, the horror of the situation lies partially in the fact that his literary fate of being subsumed into Lovecraftiana has now been replicated by his actual life's story being similarly removed from his own hands. 

"Children of the Kingdom" densely and deftly explores racism and urban decay in the rundown New York of the late 1970's. As with "Black Man with a Horn," this novella riffs on Lovecraft, though in a much more subtle fashion: blink and you'll miss the revelation of just what Lovecraftian race the strange, seldom-glimpsed underground invaders of Manhattan are based on. 

Klein's attention to an accumulation of telling, quasi-journalistic information as a means to create horror also owes a debt to Lovecraft (though HPL certainly didn't originate this sort of story-telling in horror circles). Klein, though, is a much better writer of normative characters than Lovecraft was (or intended to be). Here, as in all the novellas, cosmic horror infects the closely observed and described world of the ordinary.

Finally, there's "Nadelman's God." Klein makes brilliant use of the late 1970's and early 1980's media frenzy that hyped fears of Satanic rock bands and backwards-masked Satanic chants hidden on KISS albums. A comfortably numb New York advertising executive (pretty much all Klein's characters live in or near New York) finds himself pulled into the increasingly dire fantasies of a middle-aged heavy-metal fan who believes he can invoke the avatar of the true, malign God that rules the world. 

And that invocation lies within a poem written and published by the executive when he was in college, a poem a former friend of the executive handed over to the rock band (Jizzmo!) he manages when they needed a song to finish their recent album (royalties, of course, were paid, though the executive didn't know of the adaptation until after its release). So that avatar the fan constructs out of garbage and broken glass, that's just a pile of garbage. Right? 

But the executive, who has aged cynically out of all the things he once believed -- whether Judaism or marital fidelity or writing poetry -- is about to be forcibly reconnected with his past. It's like a tour down Memory Lane if Memory Lane led to Hell and involved a horrifying, ancient, cosmic evil that occasionally got its kicks from calling you on the telephone late at night.

Well, they're all brilliant novellas, aren't they? And it would be nice to have Dark Gods back in print after nearly 30 years, perhaps with "The Events at Poroth Farm" added to the roster. New novellas and novels would also be nice, but even if they never arrive, Klein has already established himself, permanently, in the first ranks of writers of horror. Highly recommended.

The Old Shoe of Cthulhu

The Mask of Cthulhu (1958) by August Derleth, containing the following stories: "The Return of Hastur" (1939);  "The Whippoorwills in the Hills" (1948); "Something in Wood" (1948);  "The Sandwin Compact" (1940); "The House in the Valley" (1953); and "The Seal of R'lyeh" (1957).

August Derleth's Lovecraftian stories can send some people into a rage. The rage seems to stem from Derleth's attempt to recast the Cthulhu Mythos (a term which he coined, not Lovecraft) as a conflict between Good and Evil. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories generally suggested that the ancient aliens/gods that threatened humanity were amoral, not immoral: basically, they just wanted their universe back, and humans were the ants that were getting in the way.

So it goes. A lot of writers have continued in the Derlethian vein of Cthulhu Mythos, though -- among them, Brian Lumley, Lin Carter, and Colin Wilson. It's a subset of Lovecraftian horror, and one that's no more or less legitimate than the far larger school of Lovecraftian horror that ends every story in absolute despair and defeat for humanity. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories ended with humanity still hanging in there, somehow, though his protagonists often took it in the chin. Both schools diverge from Lovecraft's vision, then.

But as to this collection of some of Derleth's wanderings in Lovecraft-land. Well, Derleth was superior to Lovecraft in at least one aspect: his depiction of rural life. His small towns and the countryside around them generally seem fairly believable, and his rural dialects aren't absolutely bananas the way that Lovecraft's forays into self-invented rural dialect in stories that include "The Colour out of Space" and "The Dunwich Horror" tend to be.

Beyond that, there's a sort of comforting nature to Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos stories. His monsters aren't particularly scary. Indeed, he goes to the well of the Deep Ones (from Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth") so many times in his stories that they lose all capacity to shock. 

So, too, one of Derleth's preferred narratives, in which a person moves into a house or a region and subsequently either gets possessed by ancient, resident evil or at least severely threatened by it. Five of the six stories in this volume follow that pattern; there are an awful lot of the same type of story throughout the rest of Derleth's work as well. It's an interesting psychological obsession: Derleth, working in someone else's milieu, again and again writes about people who end up... working in someone or something else's milieu. Lovecraft himself used this plot on several occasions, though not nearly as many times as Derleth did -- and in Lovecraft's case, the affected parties are related to the ancestors who plague them in the present.

The one story here that doesn't follow this pattern, "Something in Wood," instead has its doomed character gradually possessed by a statue of Cthulhu. I guess we're really six for six in this vein, aren't we? This subset divides into two categories: people who are related to previous occupants of the house and people who aren't. The subset that cuts across these are people who are overwhelmed by the evil in the house and people who defeat it. 

Another thing that happens several times in the collection is a scene in which it's discovered that someone has vanished somehow from inside their clothes, leaving an empty outfit on the floor or on a chair as if they'd been sucked right out of it. It's a nice image when used sparingly. I enjoyed these stories, though they're not frightening and some of the breathless, italicized concluding paragraphs seem almost intentionally self-parodic. Recommended.

Shiny Happy Lovecraft

The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson (1967): English writer Colin Wilson started off critical of H.P. Lovecraft. But after being challenged by Arkham House founder August Derleth to try to write a Lovecraftian piece of fiction, Wilson ended up writing at least three Lovecraft-tinged novels and one novella. 

However, what makes The Mind Parasites one bonkers addition to the Mighty Lovecraft Tradition is Wilson's own life philosophy, sometimes described as 'optimistic existentialism' or 'phenomenological existentialism.' Basically, human beings need to be positive. And we can map subjective experiences of the mind as if they were objective and quantifiable phenomena. And...

Well, Wilson pushes these concepts in The Mind Parasites into the realm of super-powers that the right person can attain, basically, by thinking real hard for a few days.

This leads to a lot of philosophical discussion, much of it bat-shit crazy, and all of it in service to a plot in which ancient 'Mind Parasites' have been keeping humanity from reaching its super-powered potential for at least 200 years.

Lovecraft gets name-checked along the way, his stories re-imagined as dream visions of the way the universe operates. Whatever horror there is occurs early in the novel, before people start developing earth-shaking super-powers. It's the early stretches that are most Lovecraftian, as details accumulate and parallels with Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" are most prominent.

The main events of the novel take place in 1997, 30 years after The Mind Parasites was written. Wilson gets a lot wrong about the then-future. Indeed, it isn't clear until the climax why the novel had to be set in the future. Then we find out. Oh, brother, do we find out!

The basic set-up of the novel -- in which a few plucky, intelligent men In the Know must band together against a massive menace -- recalls some of Lovecraft's works, as well as a lot of other science fiction (Robert Heinlein's Sixth Column, a.k.a. The Day After Tomorrow, much resembles this work, though there the menace is human and the super-powers used to combat it derived from new engineering and scientific discoveries). One also sees the echoes of Eric Frank Russell's Sinister Barrier, in which humanity faces hitherto unseen alien enemies. It's very much a science-fiction trope, and Wilson's heroic cadre of super-thinkers become that old stand-by, The Secret Elite, in order to save humanity.

Wilson's exposition can be heavy-going at times. And while ostensibly inspired by Lovecraft, the novel very quickly moves into the more optimistic Derleth Branch of Lovecraft-inspired fiction: these evils can not only be combated, but utterly annihilated. Brian Lumley's 1970's HPL-homages in his Titus Crow novels would go down this same path, turning Lovecraft's grim cosmos into a backdrop for zippy, pulp-fiction heroics. And while there's a lot more philosophical talk in The Mind Parasites than in Lumley's early work, the last fifty pages or so head straight to Pulp-land, Destination: E.E. "Doc" Smith. Surpassingly odd but lightly recommended.

Innsmouth Junkies

Shadows over Innsmouth: edited by Stephen Jones (1995/Rev. ed. 2012), containing the following stories: A Quarter to Three   (1988)  by Kim Newman;  Beyond the Reef   (1994)  by Basil Copper;  Dagon's Bell  (1988)  by Brian Lumley; Daoine Domhain (1992)  by Peter Tremayne; Deepnet  (1994)  by David Langford; Down to the Boots  (1989)  by D. F. Lewis; Innsmouth Gold  (1994) by David Sutton;  Only the End of the World Again (1994) by Neil Gaiman; Return to Innsmouth (1992) by Guy N. Smith; The Big Fish (1994) by Kim Newman [as by Jack Yeovil ]; The Church in High Street (1962) by Ramsey Campbell; The Crossing (1994) by Adrian Cole; The Homecoming (1994) by Nicholas Royle; The Innsmouth Heritage (1992) by Brian Stableford; The Shadow Over Innsmouth  (1936) by H. P. Lovecraft; The Tomb of Priscus (1994) by Brian Mooney; and To See the Sea (1994) by Michael Marshall Smith.

Innsmouth, H.P. Lovecraft's fictional Massachusetts port town, seems to have more of a claim on the imagination of writers and readers than most of Lovecraft's concepts. While mentioned in passing in an earlier story, Innsmouth didn't really come into its own until the publication of "The Shadow over Innsmouth" in a small-press chapbook in 1936. And as that publication sold very few copies, it wasn't really until the magazine publication of the story in the early 1940's that any significant readership got to visit this curious and unwelcoming New England seaside community.

This is the first in what will soon be a trilogy of Innsmouth anthologies edited by the prolific anthologist Stephen Jones (the third arrives in January 2015). Here, the writers are all British with the exception of H.P. Lovecraft and his original story. Some of the stories occur in the British Isles, some return to Innsmouth, and some are darned peculiar.

Once upon a time, Innsmouth was just another New England fishing village. But then, Captain Obed Marsh brought back something from the South Seas. Perhaps plenty of somethings. And gradually, as the years passed and new generations were born, more and more citizens developed The Innsmouth Look. To be succinct, as people aged, they looked more and more disquietingly like giant, bipedal frogs. 

Marsh and his businesses flourished. A new church set up shop in Innsmouth, dedicated to the Esoteric Order of Dagon. And out on the Devil's Reef in Innsmouth harbour, strange beings gibbered and frolicked in the waves. Normal people began to flee Innsmouth or to disappear mysteriously, never to be seen again. This is the point in the 1920's that Lovecraft's novella begins, its narrator a man with Innsmouth heritage travelling to the town for the first time and discovering horrors.

I don't think there's a real stinker among this array of first appearances and the occasional reprint. Neil Gaiman's entry is a bit too arch to be effective as horror and not really funny enough to be effective as humour. But it's not awful. Basil Copper's period piece, set in HPL's equally fictional Massachusetts city of Arkham in the 1930's, invests the bipedal amphibians (aka the Deep Ones) with just a few too many new and plot-convenient powers, but it's still a fun read.

The Ramsey Campbell piece, from his impressively early-career collection of Lovecraft pastiches, has only a peripheral connection to Innsmouth. Going further (and farther) abroad, Nicholas Royle's "The Homecoming" uses Lovecraftian terminology and imagery in the disturbing and disquieting service of a story about just-post-Ceausescu Romania. 

Recurring supernatural investigators battle ancient menaces in several of the pieces, including those by Gaiman, Newman, and Mooney. Brian Lumley contributes a nearly pitch-perfect modern-day pastiche of Lovecraft by way of August Derleth. Michael Marshall Smith's "To See the Sea," while not a stylistic homage to HPL, is nonetheless a fairly straightforward frightener that demonstrates once again that in horror fiction, you can go home again, but you really shouldn't.

Originally, this was one of the Lovecraftian anthologies that helped kick off the revival of publications that tipped their rugose caps to the Revelator from Providence. The Titan books revised edition is a nice piece of work, as have been all their Lovercraft entries over the past couple of years. And the range of fiction here demonstrates much of the range possible when dealing with Lovercraft's legacy: pastiches are but a small portion of the fictional spectrum available to those gazing upon Innsmouth. Highly recommended.

Back to Cthulhu

Black Wings of Cthulhu 2 (2012): edited by S.T. Joshi, containing the following stories: And the Sea Gave Up the Dead by Jason C. Eckhardt; Appointed by Chet Williamson; Bloom by John Langan; Casting Call by Don Webb; Correlated Discontents by Rick Dakan; Dahlias by Melanie Tem; Dead Media by Nick Mamatas; Houndwife by Caitlin R. Kiernan; King of Cat Swamp by Jonathan Thomas; The Abject by Richard Gavin; The Clockwork King, the Queen of Glass, and the Man with the Hundred Knives by Darrell Schweitzer; The History of a Letter by Jason V Brock; The Other Man by Nicholas Royle; The Skinless Face by Donald Tyson; The Wilcox Remainder by Brian Evenson; View by Tom Fletcher; Waiting at the Crossroads Motel by Steve Rasnic Tem; and When Death Wakes Me to Myself by John Shirley.

When it comes to both the general (horror fiction) and the specific (H.P. Lovecraft), S.T. Joshi's credentials are impeccable. His emendations and annotations to Lovecraft's fiction have been a gift to the reading public, as has his other work.

This is certainly a mostly enjoyable anthology with a somewhat misleading title forced upon Joshi by his publishers. The first of these anthologies was simply entitled 'Black Wings' in its original hardcover publication, a quotation from an essay by Lovecraft about horror. 'of Cthulhu' was added to the paperback release to grab the eye of the reader. However, the addition makes the title of the anthology somewhat erroneous. Writers riff here on all of Lovecraft's output, and on the more general aspects of his approach to cosmic horror. This isn't a Cthulhu Mythos theme anthology. So if you want a Cthulhu Mythos theme anthology, look elsewhere. It will probably also have 'Cthulhu' in the title. They're not hard to find.

None of the stories selected by Joshi are bad in the way that Cthulhu Mythos pastiches can be bad (though I'm definitely not alone in my enjoyment of even the most clumsy of attempts to replicate both Lovecraft's style and content). Really, none of them are bad at all. They do fall within a range that also fails to ascend beyond the level of, 'Well, that was enjoyable.'

But wait. Was I frightened by anything here in a cosmic, metaphysical manner? No. Steve and Melanie Tem's stories do disturb on a metaphysical level. John Shirley's piece is a delightful romp, but not a scary one. Jason Brock's "A History of a Letter" does a solid job as an epistolary work of mounting unease, though the jokiness of the footnotes cuts against total investment. Caitlin Kiernan's story does invest totally in its horrific elements, but it's a character study, not an exercise in terror.

Another problem shared by several stories is, well, an absent middle -- "Dead Media" and "The Abject" pretty much jump from detailed introduction to loopy conclusion. And the loopiness of both sudden conclusions works against horror. It doesn't help that "The Abject" has been critically overdetermined, starting with that title, which is actually attached to a large, scary rock in the story. I kept waiting for a Phallic Mother to appear and, you know, it sort of does.

Dire consequences await many of the protagonists of these tales, at a much higher rate of Dire than that found in Lovecraft's whole output. One of the things that you can count on in modern Lovecraft-related fiction is that down endings and cosmic disaster are the norm and not something that may arrive in the near future but does not arrive in the text itself. When the disastrous ending becomes standard, that standard becomes cliche.

It's an interesting development in horror fiction, suggesting that at least when it comes to the fiction they produce, an awful lot of today's writers are far more misanthropic and defeatist than the notoriously misanthropic and "futilitarian" Lovecraft ever was. Some of them make me long for the Derlethian deus ex machina that ended many (but not all) of Derleth's Lovecraft pastiches.

There may be a fairly high level of literary acumen on display here, but the endings too often echo the endings of the last twenty years of horror movies, in which supernatural evil always triumphs. And when evil always triumphs, as T.E.D. Klein noted in a riff on an earlier critic's musings, then I don't see what the point of the point is other than knee-jerk nihilism. Lightly recommended.