Where the Summer Ends: The Best Horror Stories of Karl Edward Wagner Volume 1 edited by Stephen Jones (2012): Centipede Press has done readers of horror and dark fantasy a tremendous service with the release of the two-volume collection of the late Karl Edward Wagner's best horror fiction. This is by far the strongest of the two volumes, collecting Wagner's longer short works, including his finest stories -- "Sticks", "In the Pines", "Where the Summer Ends", and "Beyond All Measure."
Wagner started his writing life as a dynamo, both in horror and in heroic fantasy, much of the latter featuring his time-jaunting anti-hero Kane. He also worked on his own short-lived specialty press (Carcosa), wrote a licensed Conan novel (The Road of Kings), and took over editorship of DAW Books' excellent Year's Best Horror series in the early 1980's, a job he'd hold until his death in 1994.
Along the way, something happened. It involved the consumption of astounding amounts of alcohol and the growth of an intermittent writer's block that would persist from the late 1970's until his death. Trained as a psychiatrist, Wagner must have known something was going on. But what? We'll never entirely know, and the prose pieces in these two volumes by Wagner's friends suggest that he was ultimately a mystery to them as well.
But we do have the stories, and more than ten years of the DAW anthologies. At his best, Wagner conjured up an extremely specific and detailed sense of place populated with psychologically complex characters and character interactions. While I tend to associate his best work with the American Southeast, "Sticks" actually takes place in and around the Hudson River Valley. The first half of that award-winning novelette represents Wagner's high point, a pitch-perfect evocation of horror centered around a hiker's discovery of odd-looking arrangements of sticks. If the second half moves into too-literal Lovecraftiana -- well, it's still a competent finish to a brilliant beginning.
"Beyond All Measure" gives the reader one of the more fascinating spins on vampires I can recall, while ".220 Swift" plunges into the backwoods of the American Southeast in search of creatures and situations that recall some of the tales of Arthur Machen. "In the Pines" is a harrowing tale of ghostly obsession, maybe Wagner's most sustained work, and one fit to stand beside similarly themed stories that include "The Beckoning Fair One" and "How Love Came to Professor Guildea."
I'm not as stuck on the two dream-odyssey stories included here -- Wagner's greatest strengths didn't lie in the surreal or the purposefully vague -- and one later novelette suggests a massive deterioration in skill. But the riches here, handsomely assembled and with generous accompanying prose pieces and illustrations, are worth your time. Highly recommended.
Fatal Error: A Repairman Jack Novel by F. Paul Wilson (2010): The penultimate Repairman Jack novel sees Jack and friends trying to unravel yet another plot to plunge the world into eternal darkness. Good times, good times.
With the Lady -- the physical incarnation of humanity's collective consciousness called the noosphere, per Teilhard de Chardin -- already seriously depleted by previous assassination attempts, the Earth hangs in the balance. Should the Lady be destroyed, the Earth's protection from the Otherness will be removed, and pretty much literally all Hell will break loose as local reality becomes hostile to humanity's continued existence.
There's a grand conspiratorial lunacy to the Repairman Jack novels that's quite engaging. While the previous volume (Ground Zero) folded many of the 9/11 conspiracy theories into a Grand Unified Theory that was much, much weirder than anything in our world, Fatal Error plays with doomsday scenarios that involve the Internet. Much of the action centres on New York, the locus for most of the Repairman Jack novels, along with Jack's home-state of New Jersey.
Jack and his allies try to stop the End of the Internet for reasons I'll leave anyone who wants to read this series to find out on his or her own. The arch-enemy of humanity, 15,000-year-old Rasalom, plots away at a variety of other schemes meant to usher in the Age of the Otherness. Wilson's cosmic schemata is vaguely Lovecraftian -- two vast and impersonal forces vie for control of individual planets in the multiverse.
It all makes for a fast-paced, occasionally thoughtful read. Wilson's prose is adequate -- he's a plot-and-idea man first and foremost. Jack is, as usual, extremely competent; his allies are less so, to varying degrees. Recommended.
Immortals: written by Charley and Vlas Parlapanides; directed by Tarsem Singh; starring Henry Cavill (Theseus), Mickey Rourke (King Hyperion), Stephen Dorff (Stavros), Freida Pinto (Phaedra), John Hurt (Old Man), and Luke Evans (Zeus) (2011): Depending on your POV, Tarsem Singh (The Cell) is either a visionary filmmaker who conjures up striking visuals or a guy who can turn any movie into a Chanel Number 5 advertisement. I think he's sorta both.
There are striking moments in Immortals, and there are moments of pure hooey from a visual standpoint. Note that I don't talk about characterization or plot. While the story makes marginally more sense than the remake of Clash of the Titans, the emphasis is on 'marginally.' And God help you if you try to learn Greek mythology from this movie, much less Greek history.
Theseus (Henry Cavill, practicing to play Superman in next year's Man of Steel) gets charged by Zeus with saving humanity (or maybe just Greece) from King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke, hilariously miscast in a period piece). There's a magic bow with which Hyperion can raise the Titans, who will then destroy the gods and humanity both. Or something. Why someone didn't just destroy this bow (or destroy the Titans, for that matter) is one of those questions that will occur to you as you watch the film. There won't be an answer.
The Titans are caged under Mount Tartarus, the interior of which seems to have been designed by the people who brought you Gotham City in Batman Returns. Freida Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire, Rise of the Planet of the Apes) plays Phaedra, a virgin Oracle who's seen a terrible future. At one point, Phaedra and her fellow oracles dress in what appear to lampshades. Mickey Rourke chews the scenery. The battle between Theseus and the Minotaur -- the one that pretty much defines him in actual mythology -- is treated here as something of a throwaway. So why call him Theseus? I don't know.
Nothing bears much relation to actual mythology, and the gods wear some pretty funny-looking hats. There's violence and some nudity. There's slow-motion fighting. I don't think this is in any way a good movie, but I stayed interested most of the time, for all its absurdities and missteps. Lightly recommended.
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H.P. Lovecraft (1928): I've come to share the beliefs of recent Lovecraft scholars who see this short novel as perhaps H.P. Lovecraft's funniest joke (its only rival in the HPL canon being "Herbert West - Reanimator"). For decades, readers pretty much assumed that H.P. Lovecraft was a humourless fellow despite ample evidence in his published letters to the contrary. Not so much any more.
The case for The Case of Charles Dexter Ward being satire rather than straightforward horror rests on two main foundational stones -- the wonky shenanigans that take place within, and Lovecraft's oft-stated antipathy to many of the tired horror tropes he nonetheless deploys herein. I mean, there's even vampirism in this novel, and Lovecraft really didn't play that vampirism crap.
Take it straight or take it with a large supply of essential salts -- either way, this novel deploys an almost manic daftness when it comes to supernatural shenanigans. Sorcerers chant ostensibly real spells from 'real' books of magic (and not the beloved Necronomicon or other Cthulhian magic books either -- these are the quasi-Christian spell-books of some of history's 'real' magicians and alchemists and court sages).
But the sorcerers also seek to reconstitute the dead by doing something to their "essential salts." A supernatural grave-robbing ring seeks to plunder the graves of history's greatest men (including Ben Franklin) so as to force the risen dead to tell them their secrets. Ben Franklin! I kid you not!
Things escalate in Providence, Rhode Island in the 1920's, as only an aging family physician ultimately stands between Earth and utter destruction. There are some terrific, moody set-pieces -- especially a nightmare tour through one of the worst hidden sub-basements in horror history. There's some stuff that I find deeply, intentionally funny (there's a running bit with various writers trying to set down what assorted creatures cry out in extremis, and on at least one occasion the writer really seems to be trying to solemnly set down what really is just a non-linguistic scream as if it were yet another mind-freezing bit of sorcery).
As well, there's the usual Lovecraftian documentary approach, and that attention to the gradual accumulation of telling detail. There are gambrel roofs. There's an evil twin. There's a bad guy who lives in Transylvania. There's a massive, pitched battle between Revolutionary era citizens and the sorcerer's monstrous legions. It's all terrific. Highly recommended.
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 2: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Kevin O'Neill (2002-2003; collected 2003): The second volume of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen begins a few days before the first volume ended, on Mars, as an army of fictional Martians and emigre humans (most notably John Carter and his Martian allies from Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian books and one of the Martian races from C.S. Lewis' John Ransom trilogy) push the blood-sucking, heat-beam-wielding 'Martians' of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds off Mars forever. Conditionally, they succeed -- but the 'Martians', who are not originally from Mars, launch their escape vessels towards Earth.
This second volume has a structure imposed upon it by Moore's choice of The War of the Worlds -- the Martian invasion of Great Britain proceeds pretty much as described in the Wells novel, though now we observe much of it from a new perspective, that of the League and the government trying to stop the invaders. Captain Nemo's revamped Nautilus submarine turns out to be a potent weapon against the Martians at first, but soon things become quite dire, as they do in the original novel.
Can Mina Harker and Alan Quatermain track down a mysterious scientist who perhaps has the only weapon that can defeat the invaders? Will one of the members of the League betray them? Will the Invisible Man discover that Mr. Hyde's bestial super-senses allow the beast-man to see the Invisible Man? Will Alan and Mina finally consummate their relationship? Will we get to see why Mina has hidden her neck within a scarf for nearly two whole volumes? Will Mr. Hyde get to dance while singing a jaunty tune?
Along with these pressing questions and some crackerjack cartooning from Mr. O'Neill -- Martian tripods have never looked so weirdly alien and baroque, nor Mr. Hyde so terrible and necessary -- comes a nearly 50-page prose piece on the historical geography of the world the League inhabits.
We learn more about previous Leagues (especially the ones led by Prospero and by Lemuel Gulliver), have our first meeting with soon-to-be major player Orlando (from Virginia Woolf), and visit the fictionally derived landscape of the League's world, in which the locations and characters and creatures of Herman Melville, Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft, Jonathan Swift, Daniel DeFoe, Mary Shelley, and hosts of others all share the same world. Lots of fun, lots of rewardingly heavy lifting. Highly recommended.
League of Extraordinary Gentleman Volume 1: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Kevin O'Neill (1999-2000; collected 2001): When it began, Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentleman (LOEG) looked like a worthy successor to the such predecessors as Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp's Harold Shea stories and Philip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton works. The literary and legendary characters of many different authors and cultures would turn out to live in the same world, where they could interact. Warren Ellis and John Cassaday were even working on a similar, contemporaneous project, Planetary, at the same comic-book company.
But things changed. Or things were gradually revealed. And coming back to the first volume of LOEG after reading the most recent volume, Century, I find that these changes were always indicated by plot points and lines that seemed like throwaways at the time. Nonetheless, the first volume of LOEG still reads like a somewhat sarcastic team-up of characters from different literary works of the 19th century. The really bizarre stuff was still mostly two volumes away.
So in 1898, Dracula's now-divorced Mina Harker (nee Murray), H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man, H. Rider Haggard's African adventurer Alan Quatermain, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Jules Verne's Captain Nemo are tasked by James Bond's grandfather Campion, who is working for the mysterious M., head of the British secret service, with stopping Fu Manchu from destroying England with the aid of the anti-gravitational Cavorite he's stolen from Professor Cavor (a substance and a character in H.G. Wells' First Men in the Moon). During the course of this adventure, we'll also meet and mingle with Pollyanna, Moby Dick 's Ishmael (he's Nemo's first mate), Sherlock's brother Mycroft Holmes, Poe's French private detective C. Auguste Dupin, and a host of other fictional characters major and minor.
Artist O'Neill is called upon to do a lot of things -- stage epic battle scenes, keep things light when they're supposed to be light, reimagine Mr. Hyde as a giant, Hulk-like grotesque, draw hundreds of cameo appearances -- and he does them all well. He's a cartoonist of real wit and subversive tendencies.
Plot-wise, things get hinky very fast because things, as usual, are not what they seem. The at-least-slightly less metafictional aims of this first volume make for a slightly less introspective feel -- one doesn't feel like the whole enterprise of fiction is being interrogated on every page, even if it really is. The prose piece that concludes the volume takes us into some of the history of the members of the League, as we discover what led Alan Quatermain to the dire condition Mina finds him in near the beginning of this volume. Highly recommended.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: based on the novel by John LeCarre; adapted by Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan; directed by Tomas Alfredson; starring Gary Oldman (George Smiley), John Hurt (Control), Colin Firth (Bill Haydon), Tom Hardy (Ricki Tarr), Mark Strong (Jim Prideaux) and Benedict Cumberbatch (Peter Guillam) (2011): The BBC made a highly regarded 7-hour miniseries out of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in the late 1970's. Starring Alec Guinness, it went on to be a big hit on PBS as well.
Seven hours seems about right for a relatively lengthy LeCarre novel about the intricacies of Cold War espionage in the 1960's and 1970's. This two-hour adaptation seems more like something made on a dare.
Most of the plot is still here. The acting is fine across the board, especially as the actors have to do a lot of heavy lifting with relatively few lines -- Gary Oldman probably did deserve his Oscar nomination for following Guinness in one of Guinness's signature roles and not embarrassing himself. And the details of Cold War espionage are generally fascinating. But...
Two hours? There are a lot of characters here, and only Oldman's George Smiley approaches being more character than character sketch. The movie looks terrific (the director previously helmed the excellent Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In), and the pacing is fine. But there's nothing and no one to care about here as a character one can feel much investment in. It's like a really high-toned adaptation of the Cliff's Notes for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Lightly recommended.
Rocketeer Adventures 2: based on characters and situations created by Dave Stevens; written by Marc Guggenheim, Peter David, Stan Sakai, Walt Simonson, Tom Taylor, Paul Dini, David Lapham, Matt Wagner, Kyle Baker, Louise Simonson, David Mandel, and John Byrne; illustrated by Sandy Plunkett, Bill Sienkiewicz, Stan Sakai, Darwyn Cooke, Dave Stevens, John Paul Leon, Bill Morrison, Colin Wilson, Chris Sprouse, Karl Story, Eric Canete, Kyle Baker, Walt Simonson, Bob Wiacek, J. Bone, John Byrne, and others (2012): Fun anthology series of stories about The Rocketeer, the great 1930's pulp-comic-book character created in the early 1980's by the late Dave Stevens. Most of the entries here strike the right note of light-hearted adventure as we follow pilot Cliff Secord's trials and triumphs as rocket-pack-wearing hero The Rocketeer. Recommended.
Hitman Volume 6: For Tomorrow: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by John McCrea, Gary Leach, and others (1999-2000; collected 2012): DC's renewed committment to collecting all of Ennis and McCrea's splendid late 1990's/early oughts comic-book series Hitman, about the adventures of super-powered gun-for-hire Tommy Monaghan, is a blessing. In this volume, more tragedy and high-octane violence hit Monaghan and his friends as Gotham City suffers through the end of the massive Batman: No Man's Land event.
Tommy has some good moments taking the piss out of a bunch of vampires last seen during Ennis's run on John Constantine: Hellblazer (like H.P. Lovecraft, Ennis thinks vampires are stupid, though he's a lot more fictionally pro-active in that stance than HPL ever was) and finally getting to see some real, honest-to-god dinosaurs. But Tommy's war with the Mob also takes it physical and emotional toll.
Penciller McCrea and most-of-the-time inker Garry Leach do a great job on the art as always, their violence stylized without being glossy or attractive, their characters cartoony when they need to be and fairly realistic when the story calls for such a thing. Hyperviolence was rarely this much fun. Only one more volume to go! Highly recommended.
