Review: "The Rim of Morning"

SLOANE, William, The Rim of Morning – Two Tales of Cosmic Horror, New York Review Books/The New York Review of Books, New York NY, USA, 2015.

Octavo; paperback; 464pp. (with 3pp. of adverts). Mild wear; some creasing to the spine and a small bump to the spine head. Else, very good.

Hot on the heels of Ligotti, I bumped into this guy and it’s probably an instance of unfavourable comparison that I’ve rated him so highly. Bear that in mind as we go through this. Conversations with friends about Ligotti have led me to think that his short stories probably weren’t the best introduction to his oeuvre – it’s a case of baroque language, nihilistic violence, rinse and repeat – but I’m not sure that his long-form writing is going to vary considerably. In the case of Sloane however, we have quite a different beast altogether.

William Sloane (1906-1974) was a bookman through and through. Princeton educated, he wrote, edited, published and reviewed books all his adult life. His writing is incredibly polished and beautiful to read – it conveys rather than striving for effect. His characters jump off the page and their conversations are a delight to eavesdrop upon. And there is humour: not dark, bloody, slap-you-in-the-face humour, but urbane wit and drollery; even slapstick in some places. It seems that Mr. Sloane realised something that has utterly escaped the anhedonistic Mr. Ligotti: writing is for pleasure and to entertain.

Nevertheless, the two stories presented here are tales that Lovecraft would have sunk his teeth into with delight. There is cosmic horror (as advertised on the cover) and it doesn’t pull any punches. Our characters face awful revelations and they sink into mires of dread. There are no grandiloquent passages of adjective-laden prose here; this is Lovecraft without obfuscation, without the language getting in the way. And unlike Lovecraft, Sloane doesn’t take himself so seriously.

First though, I want to explore the introduction to this volume. As is customary these days with collections or reissues of horror writing, Stephen King has been tapped to give us a walkthrough of the material to follow, and he does a reasonable job here, even giving us a “Spoiler Alert” heads-up to start. I don’t begrudge Mr. King his accomplishments but he has a tendency to unreasonably pigeonhole writing and force it to conform to his definitions. I suspect, at some point in his career, he’s been tagged with the “Oh, you write genre fiction? Have you ever thought about writing a real book?” comment and it’s stuck with him as an enormous chip that he carries around on his shoulder. For King, if it’s genre fiction, it must be aimed at the lower classes, the blue-collar milieu, the proletariat, and he’s eager to claim anything that passes before him as part of his clan. Whenever he pens an introduction therefore, he assumes that he’s talking to fellow travellers – I almost suspect him of wearing a beer-hat while pounding on his keyboard.

It doesn’t pay anyone to judge a book in this fashion. Writers produce pieces that they choose to write, or are compelled to write, and they set their plots, their characters and their events as they see fit. Obviously, writers also write best about what they know, but even then some others can elevate or lower their material vicariously – look at Lovecraft. No-one calls Joyce Carol Oates or Donna Tartt genre fiction writers, but that’s what they are when you boil things down. The line between literature and genre fiction is incredibly vague and tenuous, and nowhere near as defined as Mr. King would like us to think. The work stands on its own merit, or it doesn’t; only time will reveal whether something is ‘worthy’ or not.

Nevertheless, this particular intro. isn’t as bad as some of his others, and the axe-grinding is toned back to a quiet murmur in the background. Still, the need to write “Spoiler Alert” at the start shows that he thinks he knows his audience. I usually prefer to read these pieces before going in, just to get some context; in this instance, I would recommend leaving it until last. It doesn’t really add anything to the experience and the cat de-bagging is a little frustrating.

Now: let’s get into it. This is two novels in one volume, the only two novels – sadly -which Sloane wrote. The first is To Walk the Night (1937), while the second is The Edge of Running Water (1939). Both are set mainly on the North American east coast amongst relatively well-heeled folk, and both tales are, essentially, mysteries with startling revelations (Stephen King calls them “whodunits”, but I prefer not to go there). Given that they were both written in the time of Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner, there’s less of the exotic and the introspective about them and more of a Chandler-esque spotlight on the zeitgeist: to me, they feel a bit like P.G. Wodehouse, or Dornford Yates, trying their hands at something new.

To Walk the Night, when seen through a Mythos lens, is a story about psychic possession. It’s not, however, the carelessly-benign brain swap of the Great Race of Yith, but more in line with the Shan of Ramsay Campbell’s work. Unlike HPL’s “The Shadow out of Time” the story is told not from the inside out – from the point of view of the possessed – but rather, from the perspective of those around the affected individual, specifically Berkeley Jones, a recent university graduate and Long Island resident. “Bark” and his boyhood friend Jeremiah “Jerry” Lister, go back to their alma mater to watch a football game, and afterwards, drop in at the campus observatory to catch up with Jerry’s old professor and mentor, Walter LeNormand. They arrive to see him seemingly spontaneously combust, and are unable to stop him from burning alive. The resulting police investigation reveals that LeNormand, a confirmed bachelor, had married not a month previously, unbeknownst to our heroes; their meeting with Selena LeNormand is curious and an instant attraction between her and Jerry is the result. Soon Jerry has convinced her to move to New York and to marry him.

What follows are Bark’s observation of Selena and his mistrust of her and her goals. Selena is unusual: she is incredibly intelligent but completely unskilled in the ordinary processes of daily life. Although strikingly beautiful, she has no sense of fashion or style, until Bark’s mother takes her in hand. She is relentlessly coy about her past, which drives those around her crazy, especially in view of her upcoming marriage to Jerry (too quick for anyone’s liking). Bark mistrusts his views of Selena, not wanting to succumb to jealousy because this woman has come between him and his best bro’, but unable to dismiss certain evidences that she may not be what she seems: she exhibits powers of telepathy and clairvoyance, along with an ignorance of current events that seems unreal. (Sloane handles these instances very gracefully and delicately, integrating them seamlessly into the narrative; they don’t come off anywhere near as gauche as my description of them here!)

To be fair, most of what bothers people around Selena, is the fact that she doesn’t behave like other women. She’s “too intelligent”, too much an equal of Jerry, not willing to cook, not interested in art, literature, or fashion. She is, in other words, a modern woman in a world where such a creature is unheard-of. In reading this story, I had to periodically readjust my social lenses to work out what the fuss was all about. Once I had configured my internal “Way-Back Machine” to 1937, I could tootle along more easily. That being said however, Sloane isn’t just playing with a stereotype; he’s actually showing us that his characters have somewhat unrealistic expectations about this new person in their lives. There are no other characters in the book who are coloured-by-numbers; the fact that they all fall back on a type to try and pigeonhole Selena is a cunning trope to try and subvert that whole process.

By the end of the story, the scene has shifted to a desert area of “Arizona or New Mexico” called Cloud Mesa. Jerry and Selena have moved here so that Jerry can write a thesis and finish his PhD. Bark receives a summons from Jerry to visit and he arrives to find trouble in paradise: Selena is distant, aloof; Jerry is fraught with nerves, worried about something unspoken about Selena’s nature and, like a dog with a bone, unable to leave it alone. His research has given him glimpses of a possible answer to the ‘Selena question’ but, as the evidence crystallises around a final unspeakable truth, he commits suicide by shooting himself through the head.

The book is told in flashback, narrated by Bark to his adoptive father on the evening he returns to Long Island after Jerry’s suicide. They are both distraught and confused by the events leading to his death and so Bark lays out everything that has happened since the day of the football game to try and see some sort of cohesive whole. The story is punctuated by sections of italic text where Dr. Lister and Bark compare notes and clarify, and these passages help to massage the moments of the tale where the information being presented would be common knowledge between them. As the horrible conclusion emerges, Bark’s descriptions, not only of his slow-welling dread but of the universe around him, become hypnotic and vertiginous:

“Below us spread the gigantic sweep of the desert, tarnished gold where the sun still lay, and purple blue where the shadows from the western mountains were racing across it as the sun sank behind us. Watching that great tidal wave of darkness pouring across the valley, I suddenly realised how truly the earth was a ball, hung in gulfs of space and spinning around its axis with majestic precision and power. I almost thought I could feel the eastward surge of the mesa under my feet.”

Lovecraftian enough for you?

The final scenes of the novel are a slow burn, coming inevitably to fruition. Revelations take place and the conclusion is satisfying and grim. Not everything is revealed though; just enough to give us an idea of what’s happening. This is no Bellknap-Long story where there is no explanation (ooh! Spooky!), but rather a Blackwood drama, oozing with a slowly-manifesting psychological dread. I heartily recommend it.

*****

“A year ago it would have seemed to me ridiculous to assume that there are some facts it is better not to know, and even today I do not believe in the bliss of ignorance or the folly of knowledge. But this one thing is best left untouched. It rips the fabric of human existence from throat to hem and leaves us naked to a wind as cold as the space between the stars.

The fringe of that cold touched me once. I know what I am talking about.”

These are the final sentences of the first chapter of The Edge of Running Water. When I first read them I knew I was in for a treat. There are comparisons to be drawn here with Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”, but really, this book is its own creature.

The main thing that intrigued me when I got stuck into this was that it became obvious that Sloane enjoys writing female characters and that he likes to write about ‘difficult’ women. I don’t mean to open up any controversy here, but it’s become apparent from these two books that Sloane prefers complicated female personae, or rather women who live outside the parameters of normal expectation. There are three main women in this story: Twenty-year-old Anne Connor who, of the three, is the least complex or interesting; Mrs Elora Marcy, the cleaning lady and cook who comes from a poor background and a life of excruciating hardship; and Mrs Esther Walters, a spiritualist medium and a complex Chinese puzzle of motivations. In order, they represent the novel’s love interest, victim and villain, but even these labels are merely rough approximations – Sloane never really lets things get that easy.

Rounding out the pentacle of our character set are Dr. Julian Blair, an “electrophysicist” haunted by a terrible loss and a dark secret, and his protégé Professor Richard Sayles, a psychologist. As we come to explore these men’s background, we discover that previously, they had both fallen in love with Helen Connor and that Helen had chosen to marry Julian. Despite thwarted affections, the three remained on good terms and Richard had become the father figure in absentia to Anne – Helen’s younger sister – adopting a role of which Julian was incapable. Shortly after Anne’s fifteenth birthday, Helen died suddenly of pneumonia, Julian quit university in despair and Anne was sent overseas to boarding school. Richard struggled on with his studies to become a professor of psychology and a world-class lecturer.

(It’s obvious too, that Sloane enjoys writing about people in complex, broken, family units. In To Walk the Night, Bark’s mother is not Jerry’s mother, neither is Jerry’s dad Bark’s dad. They exist in a bizarre, informal adoptive arrangement which suits everybody but which is hardly quote, normal, unquote.)

Before departing out of Julian’s life, Richard makes a trite observation that “they will all meet again in the Hereafter”, and Julian blows his stack. If there is a ‘Hereafter’, he rages, surely men of science would have discovered it by now, or at least some evidence of its existence? He decides that he will not rest until he has discovered some means whereby he can penetrate ‘The Veil’ and speak once more to his beloved Helen. Richard is concerned for his friend and mentor but equally sure that this mania will peter out in due course. They part ambivalently.

Jump forward five years: Richard gets a mysterious letter from Julian, summoning him to a small town in coastal Maine. Having lost all contact with Julian, Richard catches the first train north from New York and wakes up in Barsham Harbour, a washed-up trading port whose best years were a century ago. He is left in no doubt as to the locals’ attitude towards “foreigners” or to the fact that this is a benighted backwoods that would be better left off the map than on. If it sounds a bit like Innsmouth, it’s not a bad parallel, but with less obvious inbreeding.

Once arrived at Julian’s new digs, Richard becomes acquainted (re-acquainted in two cases) with the inhabitants. The first person he meets is Mrs Walters, overweight, shrewd and affected. The dislike is instant and mutual. Next he discovers Anne, all grown-up and a young woman sure of herself and her capabilities. Julian is next to appear, but now shrunken and elderly due to overwork and constant strain: Richard’s first interview with him leaves him in no doubt that Dr. Blair has toys in the attic. Finally, we meet Mrs. Marcy, whose family built the crumbling edifice in which the story takes place but lost it due to the failure of the harbour and bad investments. We are told that her sunny disposition is a front to hide the squalor of her existence. At one point Anne discovers that her loser of a husband regularly beats her, an unexpected revelation for a novel of this genre and age. Just as Richard starts to find his own level in this strange household, a murder takes place and its resolution becomes the main impetus of what comes next.

Awhile ago I reviewed a book called The Ghost of 29 Megacycles, which claimed to be a report on the attempts by a ‘scientist’ to conduct experiments very similar to those taking place in this novel. Having finished this, it’s left me wondering if the ‘journalist’ who wrote that drivel in fact, read this book and made up the whole thing based upon it. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. Firstly, Julian’s work is all about radio frequencies and the modulation thereof, just like that other book; second, his premises are all based upon the presence of a practicing medium just as in the ‘real’ experiments. Once Richard gets the gist of what’s going on and exactly how Mrs Walters fits in, he realises that Julian is so far out in the tall grass, there may be no reeling him in again. I felt a great spiritual connexion to Professor Sayles at this point...

William Sloane takes us through the rest of the story at a breakneck speed. Once the death is discovered, the police are called in, the townsfolk rise in protest, and the questions fly. While the crime is being uncovered, Richard and Anne are also trying to find out what Julian’s up to. In the midst of everything is Mrs Walters, whose iron will and self-control impresses our heroes as much as she thwarts and exasperates them. They try a tactic to get her to reveal her hand; she counters and learns something that they were unwilling to reveal. Each time they lock horns with her, they find her more than equal to the challenge. By the end of the story, they (and we) are left in admiration of her skills (if not her ambitions) and they wish her well in retreat. It’s a remarkable accomplishment that Sloane undertakes here – to create a nemesis who, at the end of the day, inspires respect and credit for a good fight.

This, again, is where Sloane’s strength lies – the quality of his writing. His characters are sound and well-rounded, based in solid, if complex, psychological foundations. Even Anne isn’t a complete lightweight – there are nuances to her nature which make her intriguing (although, some of the shine does come off when things get a little schmaltzy). The scene in which she and Richard go swimming for the first time in the Kennebec River, is all but erotically charged as Richard discovers how much she has changed from the young girl he once knew; the creeping menace of Julian’s experiments pervade the narrative with an ominous tone, underscored by the run-down town and the wild, riverside setting; the revelation about what Julian has actually stumbled upon while messing about with Spiritualist fantasies has chilling repercussions and lifts the stakes dramatically at the end. This is not the writing of the pulps that Stephen King would have us believe it to be; it is, in fact, just damned good writing and deserves to be better known.

The full five Tentacled Horrors from me.

Review: "The Exorcist"

FRIEDKIN, William (Dir.), “The Exorcist – The Version You’ve Never Seen” Hoya Productions/Warner Bros. Ltd., 2000.

When this film came out in 1973, it was deemed the scariest thing ever to hit the silver screen. In fact, it was considered at the time, the scariest thing conceivable, which is saying a lot. People with heart conditions were told not to attend screenings, or to inform ushers of their condition before taking their seats. People came out of screenings believing that they had been possessed in the interim. Of course, this type of hysteria was nothing new: it had all happened when Hitchcock released “Psycho” a decade or so earlier, but in the disco-funk of the ‘70s few people remembered it from the first go-around. This wasn’t “Godspell”; it wasn’t “Jesus Christ – Superstar”; this was the God-squad on the back foot, struggling to go mano-a-mano with the Big D. There were no pretty songs and paisley shirts – this was the battlefield of Good versus Evil up close, personal and with all the foul language imaginable.

The origin of the book upon which the movie was based, was a series of events in which a young Maryland boy of about twelve manifested strange behaviour which led to him being exorcised by a Jesuit priest, the recipient of some upbraiding by the Church Powers because of his fondness for the bottle. William Peter Blatty chased the story and kept the essentials, changing just the window-dressing for his take on the events: the location changed to Georgetown in Washington D.C.; the family went from blue-collar to Hollywood royalty; the possessed had a gender-switch from male to female. Our priest became Damien Karras, a man experiencing a crisis of faith and looking to scientific rationalism for hope; his partner in battle is Father Merrin, a long-time exorcist with a heart condition and wise to the ways of the Evil One.

It’s hard to contemplate what the production company thought they were getting with this flick. Blatty was a limp biscuit with about as much personality as a dishcloth, while Friedkin was an out-and-out cowboy in filmic circles and hot off an Academy Award win for “The French Connection”. I suspect that Oscars were the last thing on the mind of anybody connected to the film – with the exception of these two guys. Between them they managed to lift the game from the comfortably B-grade, into the stratosphere.

Watching the film again, I was struck by how much of it is an aural experience rather than a visual one. In the opening sequence in Iraq, Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) is assailed by the ringing of hammer-struck anvils, haunting calls to prayer, the buzz of market conversations, the savagery of fighting dogs. We are beset by languages and symbols, mostly impenetrable, but underscored by the constant wind and heat: there is, we are aware, something going on, but neither we, nor Father Merrin, can quite put our fingers on it. This whole opening section of the film is beautifully constructed and masterfully sets up the mystery: there is a strange statue of the ancient god-demon Pazuzu (fresh from its inadvertent trip to Hong Kong from the US!); there is an old medallion; there is a misbehaving clock and tension in the air. What does it all mean? There are no answers forthcoming, but it gives us many intriguing possibilities to play with later on.

When we shift scenes to the US, the language and the symbolism are all more familiar, but there is a constant undertone to things which puts them slightly off-kilter. The fact that things seem to hark back to the Iraqi dig is disconcerting: Regan makes a Pazuzu-like orange clay figurine, for example, and the desecrated statue of Mary has some Pazuzu-like – appendages. I’m not a fan of the ‘70s film aesthetic where things are improvised rather than scripted and dialogue gets a little shaky, but here it works a treat. Regan, the twelve-year-old girl, peppers her sentences with strange trills and drawls, like she’s experimenting with her vocalisation: this seems typically bratty and juvenile until Karras plays a recording of it backwards and works out what’s actually going on. For the rest of the dialogue, it’s all edgy and erratic, half-heard and mis-heard as frequently as not, and usually fraught with emotion as a result. The goal seems to be to make the language of the movie alien and dangerous, at odds with the social milieu, in order to throw us out of our comfort zone.

The main characters all seem to be comfortable playing roles rather than being real people. Regan’s mother Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) is an actress and is constantly shifting personae throughout the film: actress, socialite, mother, employer, disgruntled ex-partner, battered victim, secretive witness. The beauty of this role is exactly this chameleon quality, because it elevates the character from that of a single note bewildered onlooker, to that of a possibly-knowing instigator of the events, or at least, one with vested interests. Along with Chris, most of the other characters are also wearing masks: the doctors are affecting worldly wisdom and unctuous bedside manners; Chris’s party guests and employees are all playing games; the movie director Burke Dennings is a complete dark horse with suspect motives at every turn. The only ones who aren’t playing games are the two priests involved in the exorcism.

Father Karras (Jason Miller) is suffering a crisis of faith. His mother is dying and is in need of care which he cannot provide. He relies on his powers as a psychiatrist rather than his connexion with God and stridently resists the notion of performing the Catholic Rite. Father Merrin – we are told – has had run-ins with demons before and, far from not advocating the exorcism, sees it as the only hope for Regan, but unfortunately not a process that he feels he will live through. Both these characters are direct and immediate; we see them as they truly are. Everyone else has something to hide. And it shows in how they speak.

The special effects of this film are a thing of legend. While other directors who were offered the chance to helm this film baulked at the apparent cruelty and exposure to adult concepts that the possessed child would be forced to undertake, Friedkin seemed almost eager to dive right in. Both Burstyn and Linda Blair were strapped into harnesses designed to throw them wildly about the room; both suffered lasting back injuries as a result. Jason Miller was startled by Friedkin secretly shooting a gun close to his head in the language laboratory scene, in order to gain an authentic shocked reaction from him. In fact, whenever you see someone in this film who is shocked, startled, in pain, bewildered, or lost for words, it’s generally because that’s how they’re really feeling at that moment, from Father Merrin’s discomposure at the language emerging from Regan’s mouth, to Chris’s anguish at watching Regan undergo various tortuous medical procedures. Friedkin, it seems, was keen to take “method” to the next level.

For the audience, this all strikes a chord: deep down, we can tell if someone’s faking an injury and here there’s none of that. Each time something terrible happens, there’s an ominous, loud sound-effect that signals it, from the grinding leather sound of Regan’s head swivelling around to the drumming of the bed legs on the bedroom floor. When the demon magically opens a bedside drawer to impress Karras, it’s the noise that makes us jump, not the movement: the action itself is far away in the background, largely hidden from view by Regan’s prostrate form. Friedkin sacked two composers while making “The Exorcist”: Bernard Herrmann demanded working conditions which were incompatible with the filming schedule (and which indicated that he would rather be doing anything else), while Lalo Schifrin kept writing material which was the direct opposite of what Friedkin was asking him for, to the point where – famously – Friedkin yanked the reels off the tape-player and threw them into the street outside the studio in frustration. The final musical score is almost innocuous, apart from two annoying instances of Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells”. Cobbled together as it is from various bits and pieces, it came back to bite Friedkin and his lawyers in a big way; but, for the purposes of the movie, it’s the best result.

Topping all of this though is the vocal performance by Mercedes McCambridge. Uncredited in the film, she plays the voice of the demon within Regan. In order to convey the exact rage and physical discomfort of the creature, she insisted on being tied up in the recording studio just as Linda Blair is bound on screen. She lived on a diet of raw eggs, cigarettes and whiskey (despite being a recovering alcoholic) to give her voice the right harshness and slurring quality, and when Regan vomits all of that pea soup, what you hear is Mercedes McCambridge actually losing her lunch. She had her own priest handy while recording and Friedkin is on record as saying that the scariest thing for him about the entire movie was watching her giving her all for the role. Legal squabbles about appropriate credit and opportunities for Oscar nominations have muddied the waters, but in light of the fact that this is a movie to hear rather than merely see, the mainstay of the piece is her bravura performance.

That the mavericks were clearly dominating the film shoot and that they had this almost adversarial attitude towards their cast (Friedkin actually belted Father William O’Malley across the face to get him in the right unsettled frame of mind to give Father Karras the Last Rites), is what makes the movie work. Just as the demon attacks the other characters, forcing them to react in confusion and bewilderment, so too did the ‘Friedkin-Blatty Team’ harass their players. The final result works a treat. Many of the actors have come out saying that they were made to feel angry, afraid, or ineffectual during the filming, but I imagine that most witnesses to demonic possession must feel much the same way.

“The Exorcist” is consistently rated among the top scariest films ever made and it definitely deserves a place in any fan’s top ten. Interestingly, the scenes which cause the most distress for audiences aren’t the ones where something supernatural takes place; they’re the ones where Regan is in hospital. I have a friend who is a doctor and he remembers being made to watch this film for its portrayals of the arteriogram and pneumoencephalograph procedures which Regan undergoes. While these procedures were not actually performed on Linda Blair, many people both on set and off thought they were. Nevertheless, they were recorded with such a high degree of accuracy that they’re used as training material for medical interns. (Interestingly, the bearded doctor who assists in the arteriogram sequence was an actual X-Ray technician who later confessed to killing seven men, dismembering them and leaving them scattered around Georgetown. He admitted to these deeds while serving twenty years for killing a film critic, but there was insufficient evidence to bring him to trial for the serial murders. He was released from prison in 2004. If anyone asks you if you’ve ever seen a real live serial killer before, now you can say “yes”.)

Getting back to ranking this film, in dollars - adjusted to today’s money - this is one of the top ten most successful movies of all time, coming in at number nine (and with a budget of only $8M!). It was the first horror movie ever to win an Oscar, followed by “Jaws” (1975), “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991), “The Sixth Sense” (1999) and “Black Swan” (2010). Again, famously, Hollywood director George Cukor threatened to resign from the Academy if “The Exorcist” won Best Picture, so it received technical nods, many other nominations and the Oscar for Best Screenplay Adaptation. Frankly, I think they should’ve called Cukor’s bluff.

Controversy about the film has dogged it from the start, with urban legends about it being haunted – Billy Graham went so far as to say that the film negatives were possessed by the Devil – to statements implying that actors were killed as a result of being attached to the project. English actor Jack MacGowran did die shortly after shooting wrapped, as did Vasiliki Maliaros, the elderly lady who played Father Karras’s mother, but this is within averages for these kinds of events. Friedkin actually tried to get Thomas Bermingham, a priest and the religious consultant to the movie, to exorcise the film set; however, he just laughed, performed a quick blessing and got out of the way. People have said various ludicrous things to raise publicity and, apart from causing a wave of “Exorcist busses” in England - which took people to showings of the film in cinemas which hadn’t banned the movie, from their home towns where cinemas had - have had very little impact. The net effect has been simply to prevent releases of the movie on VHS or DVD in a consistent format.

Much was taken out of the cinematic release, and this seriously annoyed William Peter Blatty. In England, biased censors and holdover ratings from the US, saw the film inevitably trimmed, or ruthlessly classified. In the year 2000, Friedkin released a DVD version which replaced much of what had been lost, including the infamous “Spider Walk Scene”. This was a painfully-orchestrated sequence of several seconds which fell apart because, no matter what the editors did, in 1973 there was no way to entirely remove the wires holding the actor aloft. In 2000, CGI technology came to the rescue and did away with those pesky wires for good. The 2000 release – sub-titled “The Version You’ve Never Seen” – has its ups and downs: Spider Walk - good; phantom faces superimposed on various background surfaces – not so good. I’m not sure what Friedkin was going for with these questionable additions but it’s sloppy and takes away from all of the good things that the film has going for it. There is, apparently, an even more recent release with still more returned to the screen; if this is just more subliminal superimposed images of Pazuzu, then I’m not interested and neither should you be.

To sum up: If you haven’t gotten around to this film, then you should. It’s top drawer. It’s deeply unsettling and strangely gratifying, if only because the next time you’re trying to convince one of your buddies to go along with some plan or other, you can begin chanting “the power of Christ compels you!” and you’ll have the pitch and tone down perfectly in order to persuade them. There are a bunch of sequels and knock-offs out there, all testimony to the fact that Hollywood has tried to hothouse this piece of art into a “franchise”, but this is the real deal – accept no substitutes.

Oh, and whatever you do, don’t read Legion, Blatty’s follow-up to the book he took $10,000 off Groucho Marx to write. As sequels go, it’s awful and will only ruin the way you feel about Father Karras. Spare yourself the grief – I wish I had!

Four-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.

Cannibalism in the Modern World...

In much horror writing the notion of people eating each other is often used as a means of generating thrills and shivers. In the “Call of Cthulhu” roleplaying world, whenever there’s a Tcho-tcho community around, or if there’s a copy of the Regnum Congo to hand, you know that the butcher knives will soon be out in force and that the beefiest person in the room is about to be sized up and marked with dotted lines using a magic marker. It’s an horrific notion indeed: that someone, intelligent and otherwise cultured to some degree, would resort to such an act. In the ubiquitous lifeboat scenario, we often rationalise the act of eating a person in order that the majority will survive as an unfortunate but necessary course of desperation; so too, the Andean ‘plane crash situation, often justified as a “waste not, want not” instance of the crime.

In our Twenty-first Century complacency, it’s easy to feel that instances of cannibalism are few and far between, or are the relics of a distant and unfortunate past. Indeed, when Daisy Bates went out amongst the Australian Aborigines in the 1800s and returned later having penned a book citing instances of cannibalism amongst remote tribes, the howling protest against her views led to many researchers investigating her claims and finding them to be, in fact, baseless. Such investigation leads to a comfortable certainty among the population that cannibals are simply bogey-men, meant to thrill and chill, but are not demonstrably real. In fact, for every instance of cannibalism reported throughout the world, most are followed-up by reports which strenuously downplay the impact of the events or relegate them to the actions of a slight few mentally-unbalanced individuals.

It has to be said though, that there is not a single culture on the planet which has not seen instances of the practise of cannibalism, or that do not have religious, litigious, legendary or mythological views concerning people-eating in their worldview. You can’t have a law forbidding cannibalism in a society unless the notion has been publically uttered at some point in time. The concept – if not the practise – is worldwide and is often referred to as the “Great Taboo”.

Popular fiction is replete with explorations of the sin: the serial-killer novel boom of the 1980s and 90s is well-known and there are probably few people who wouldn’t know what “The Silence of the Lambs” is all about. But with this examination of the subject, has art imitated life only to have life imitate art in turn? The genre launched itself off the exploits of such villains as Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer, starting with Robert Bloch’s bestseller Psycho. Fast-forward past years of Patricia Cornwall and Thomas Harris volumes cashing-in on serial killer chic, we start to see murder-cannibalism pacts being organised by e-mail in Europe, wholesale human consumption in outlying areas of Russia, and largely-unchecked acts of thrill-kill murder and ingestion by blue-collar workers in the US. It seems that, no matter how great the taboo, there are always those who are willing to break it.

One difficulty of pinning down widespread instances of cannibalism is that they tend to have carry-on effects over the local populations. In the 1920s and 30s there were several cases of cannibalism centred in impoverished Germany in the inter-war years when the economy of that country was running wildly out of control. As only one instance, Peter Kurten, the “Vampire of Dusseldorf”, seduced young men back to his apartment where he killed them, raped them and then chopped them into pieces. He disposed of their clothes at local second-hand clothing and rag markets; the physical remains, he minced and baked into pies or turned into sausages. These he sold readily to the local community who ate them and asked for more. In the investigation that followed the discovery of his crimes, few people came forward to claim having partaken of the smallgoods; investigators felt that, on balance, it was unlikely that Kurten’s customers would have had no idea about the source of the produce. The matter was allowed to rest.

It’s these instances where the crime filters its way through the local community that much of the detail gets swept beneath a rug of conspiratorial silence. If one person confesses to participation, then all suffer the light of scrutiny, and so a wall of conscious obliviousness descends.

In China, at the height of the Cultural Revolution – a state-sanctioned act of barbarism which despoiled the country from 1966 to 1976 – the residents of Wuxuan county in the province of Guangxi became embroiled in a wholesale act of cannibalism that stands as perhaps the worst instance of this atrocity in modern times. In order to understand it, one needs to examine the context.

In the late 1950s, Mao Zedong ordered the implementation of the Great Leap Forward. It was styled as a means of unifying primary and secondary production across China and maximising economic output. In fact, generated as it was by Mao’s half-baked understanding of economic theory, it was a dismal failure: crops failed while non-metal producing areas of the country tried desperately to meet quotas by melting nails, woks and farm tools into unwieldy blocks of useless pig-iron. China frantically exported what crops had been raised to bring money into the country and the people of China starved. The results were seen as a failure attributable directly to Mao’s leadership and his political power waned as others – who actually understood the economy – were drafted in to rescue the country from ruin.

In the aftermath, Mao engineered a cunning means of destabilising those who had replaced him as leader in all but name. Turning to Marxist-Leninist theories, he called for a “constant revolution”, embarked on a vicious newspaper campaign against his rivals and then mobilised the youth of the country to attack all authority in the name of removing the “Four Olds” (old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas) from Chinese life and eradicating counter-revolutionary agents from all governing agencies. These youths formed into cadres known as the “Red Guards” and were given tacit and not-so-tacit license to attack people, institutions and places which were felt to promote non-Maoist thought. Veneration of elders, once a mainstay of Confucian thought, gave way to young people openly attacking and ridiculing – even killing – figures of authority, from doctors to ministers to high-ranking members of the military. Academics – the hated intelligentsia - were particularly targeted.

Once society had been effectively ruined and all hallmarks of the past had been destroyed or defaced, Mao enacted a new decree – the “Down To The Countryside Movement” – which re-located the Red Guard bully-boys outside of the urban centres, allowing Mao to re-build his political empire in their wake. In essence, Mao unleashed a tiger in China’s cities that wiped out his opposition for him; he allowed the chaos to last long enough to do his dirty work before exiling his agents into the wilderness where their efforts, it was hoped, would cause minimal damage.

So far, so evil.

A feature of Maoist rule was a system of keeping party members in line with current ideology by calling out into open meeting those persons who had been seen to lapse into “counter-revolutionary ways”. Such people were “criticised” in open forum, their sins denounced and appropriate punishment meted out. Oftentimes, these sessions were based on nothing more than envy, ambition, or petty revenge for perceived past slights. Deng Xiaoping was forced to endure such humiliation several times before coming to power in China.

Amongst the Zhuang people in Wuxuan County, in the southern province of Guangxi, this procedure took a very dark turn indeed. The powers that were engaged in many acts of petty retribution upon local authority figures, at first calling their party adherence into question and then by falsifying evidence against them. In time, punishments moved from public humiliation to savage beatings, and finally, summary execution, often by brutal assault at the hands of the audience gathered as witnesses. At some point, things got even stranger, as Zheng Yi explains in his book on the subject, Scarlet Memorial:

“The great battle [of Wuxuan, a local engagement to purge the district of perceived counter-revolutionaries] was undoubtedly an important event in Wuxuan during the Cultural Revolution. It had led to the deaths of nearly one hundred people. Furthermore, along with the ‘meeting to blow the typhoon’ [a community meeting to openly criticise and punish malefactors in the district], it pushed creative cannibalism to its climax. The hearts, livers, and flesh of four victims had been devoured. The battle at Wuxuan, though, cannot be explained as the key to the outbreak of cannibalism or as its basic cause. In general, I thought I would agree with the views of the Wuxuan locals who believed that the spread of cannibalism was directly related to the cruelty in the battle and to the frenetic revenge mentality it aroused. However, after analysing most of the cases of cannibalism, I realised that they had nothing to do with the battle or its reverberations. Besides, many of the incidents of cannibalism cited later had occurred before, not after, the battle.”

He goes on:

“I personally think that the outbreak of cannibalism at Wuxuan originated from the movement to ‘blow a twelve-degree typhoon of class struggle’ that was promoted by the local regime of the Party, government, and military. On March 19, 1968, the first death by lynching occurred in Wuxuan County. Far from being punished, the perpetrators were actually egged on. Thus, the killing quickly spread. At the end of May and in early June a meeting to blow the typhoon was called by the head of the Liuzhou Military Sub-District, with Wen Longjun, concurrently the chairman of the Revolutionary Committee and director of the local Armed Police, and Pan Zhenkuai, the chairman of the Sanli District Revolutionary Committee, in attendance. On June 14, the Wuxuan Revolutionary Committee held a conference of high-level cadres from the county, district, brigade, and production-team levels. At this gathering, the spirit of the meeting to blow the typhoon was passed on. At the meeting Wen Longjun advocated that ‘a twelve-degree typhoon must be blown in the struggle against our enemies. The method employed should be: to mobilise adequately the masses, rely on the masses to carry out the dictatorship, and hand the policies to the masses. In engaging in class struggle, our hands must not be soft.’ Thus, Wuxuan, which had been quiet for a month after the great battle, all of a sudden turned into a killing field and a hell of human-flesh consumption!”

In effect, the local authorities ceded the identification, incarceration and punishment of suspected anti-Communist sympathisers to the local people. The floodgates were opened.

“The killer barber who had cut open Zhou Shian while he was still alive and the injured veteran volunteer soldier, Wang Chunrong, had both been quiet for a full month. During the meeting to blow the typhoon, called by the county Revolutionary Committee, the barber was reborn. Picking up his five-inch knife, he resumed his special contributions to the great enterprise of the proletarian dictatorship. At a criticism rally held in Wuxuan, victim Tan Qiou was beaten to death and Huang Zhenji was beaten into a coma. When Huang Zhenji regained consciousness, he begged Wang Chunrong, ‘Comrade, forgive me!’ Bearing the shiny five-inch knife, Wang Chunrong administered a twist of sarcasm. ‘We’ll forgive you for five minutes,’ he said. Wang then ordered cadres to drag the victim ahead to the Zhongshan pavilion where, once again, Wang took out his five-inch knife and this time stepped on the victim’s chest and cut out his heart and liver. The victim immediately died.”

After another such incident which started an impromptu carnival during which the flesh of the victims was handed out to the participants, a former director of the county court approached an army official who was looking on:

“‘Such indiscriminate killing cannot go on [he said]. It’s time you did something about it.’ The army office was Yan Yulin, deputy director of the county Armed Police and deputy director of the county Revolutionary Committee. This patriarchal official, who now held almighty power, simply replied, ‘This is a matter for the masses. It is out of our control.’ Naturally, he was not about to stand up and stop the killing and the cannibalism, since he had just come from the meeting to blow the typhoon, where he had occupied a seat on the podium.”

Several appalling instances made it to the official documents, like this one:

“After Zhang Boxun [a lower middle-class peasant and elementary school teacher] was beaten to death, his liver and flesh quickly disappeared, so that only his small and large intestines were left. The ruthless killer held up one end of Zhang’s intestines while the other end dragged on the ground, and with a manic glee he yelled, ‘take a look at Zhang Boxun’s intestines! How fat they are!’ Then, the killer took the intestines home to boil and eat.”

And it went on:

“...the masses simply went berserk in their cannibalism, like a pack of hungry dogs who feed on the dead after an epidemic. Every so often, some victims would be singled out ‘to be criticised’. Each criticism rally was followed by a beating, and each death ended in cannibalism. Once the victim fell to the ground – whether the victim had stopped breathing was irrelevant – the crows rushed forward, pulled out their cutting knives and daggers, and started cutting at whatever piece of flesh was closest to them. After the flesh had been cut away, they targeted the large and small entrails, along with the broken bones. I was told that a certain elderly woman, who had heard that a diet of human eyes helped restore eyesight, used to wander from criticism rally to criticism rally with a vegetable basket over her arm. She would hover about for the opportune moment to rush toward a victim. Once the victim had been beaten down onto the ground, she would quickly pull out her sharp, pointed knife and use it to dig out the victim’s eyes...”

Finally,

“The very last sense of sin and humanity was swept away by the mentality of following the crowd. The frenzied wave spread like an epidemic. Once victims had been subjected to criticism, they were cut open alive, and all their body parts – heart, liver, gallbladder, kidneys, elbows, feet, tendons, intestines – were boiled, barbecued, or stir-fried into a gourmet cuisine. On campuses, in hospitals, in the canteens of various governmental units at the brigade, township, district, and county levels, the smoke from cooking pots could be seen in the air. Feasts of human flesh, at which people celebrated by drinking and gambling, were a common sight.”

It must be said that Zheng Yi’s testimony of only the 120 or so cases he was told about, or read of in official records, was howled down after its publication, but mainly for its negative portrayal of the Zhuang people. Some said that Zheng Yi’s reliance on unpublished interviews calls his account into question, while others claim that, given that Party policy and its execution in the country regions was erratic, the instances of cannibalism in Wuxuan cannot be called either “organised”, or “consistent”. Semantics aside, given that some of Zheng’s accounts are taken from public records and that many of his interviews are corroborated by the same sources, not everything can be played down or ignored through wishful thinking. As is usual with cases of people eating each other, the authorities are keen to draw a veil over things...

*****

It’s chilling to think that all this took place only about 50 years ago. It sounds like something from the Dark Ages; but no, the very next year, people were walking on the Moon. And, while we’re at it, consider these other recent cases:

• Tamara Samsonova, a 68-year-old former hotel worker was arrested on the 28^th of July 2015 after the partial remains of a woman she lived with were found wrapped in plastic in a local pond in St. Petersburg. She told police that she had killed the woman – Valentina Ulanova, 79 – because of an argument over unwashed coffee cups. After her arrest, a diary found in her apartment was discovered written in German, English and Russian, detailing the murders of several men who had rented rooms from her and whom she had partially eaten, claiming to have especially enjoyed the lungs.
  
  
• In a spree lasting 28 months in Belinsky in the Penza Oblast region of Russia, Alexander Bychkov, aged 24, killed and butchered nine homeless alcoholic men with a knife and hammer. He was arrested by police for shoplifting but, during questioning, he confessed to the murders: a diary of the events was later discovered in a search of his house. He told police that he had eaten the livers of several of the men and in one instance had eaten one of the dead men’s hearts. He was imprisoned for life.
  
  
• A morgue worker in Russia’s northern Yamalo-Nenets region was arrested for killing and eating his common-law wife. During his trial he confessed that he had developed a taste for human flesh after years in his chosen profession (the purpose of which role he must have critically misunderstood). He was jailed for nine years in a central Russian labour camp.
  
  
• In 2011, two Pakistani brothers were arrested for desecrating graves and stealing body parts to take home and eat. 35-year-old Mohammad Arif Ali and Mohammad Farman Ali, aged 30, were sentenced to pay a fine and to spend two years behind bars – Pakistan has no specific legislation concerning acts of cannibalism so a relatively light punishment was imposed. The two brothers spent most of their jail time in a neurophysiology hospital being subjected to tests. A protest was initiated by the people of their home town in 2013 upon their release and later, in 2015, after reports of the stench of rotting flesh emanating from their house were fielded, police discovered the skull of a two-year-old boy hidden on the premises. The brothers confessed to having dug up the child in order to make a curry. They were imprisoned for a further twelve years.
  
  
• Ouandja ”Mad Dog” Magloire of the Central African republic took part in a retributive attack upon a minibus in the country’s capital of Bangui in 2014, during which a muslim man was dragged onto the street, stabbed repeatedly and then set on fire. Video of the incident shows Ouandja slicing a large portion of flesh from the man’s leg and eating some of it. He claimed that it was in revenge for the death of his pregnant wife, his sister-in-law, and her child, who had been killed by Muslim extremists the previous year. He returned to the site of the attack the next day and ate the rest of the man’s flesh between two halves of a baguette, with a side dish of okra.
  
  
• In Longwy, on the 22^nd of May 2014, an elderly French woman was arrested for having killed her 80-year-old husband by beating him to death with a heavy pestle. Police arrived to find her stewing his heart, nose and genitals in a pot and believe that they were able to prevent any consumption of the dish from taking place.
  
  
• 37-year-old Gregory Hale of Coffee County Tennessee, a self-confessed Satanist, was fired from his job in a slaughterhouse for performing rituals with dead animal parts. On the 6^th of June 2014, he took 36-year-old Lisa Hyder to his home and butchered her, putting her hands and feet in separate buckets. Two days later, he asked a friend for assistance in disposing of the corpse and the police were called in. He claimed to have sampled various parts of her body in the interim.
  
  
• Joseph Oberhansley, aged 33, was pulled over for driving erratically in Jeffersonville Indiana in July 2014. He was taken into custody and his then girlfriend, 46-year-old Tammy Jo Blanton, paid the bond to have him released. After he fell off the radar for a few weeks, police raided his home to find Tammy Jo dismembered under a tarpaulin in the bath tub: Oberhansley confessed to officers that he had eaten her brain, lungs and heart. However, during his arraignment when the charges were read out to him in court, Oberhansley declared that his name was “Zeus Brown” and that they had the wrong man. That might have been the case, but they did have the right man wanted in connexion for the attempted year 2000 manslaughter of Sabrina Elder (then 17) after she had given birth to their child...

Review: Thomas Ligotti

LIGOTTI, Thomas, Songs of a Dead Dreamer & Grimscribe, Penguin Books/Random House LLC, New York NY, USA, 2015.

Octavo; paperback; 448pp. Minor wear; creasing to the front cover. Very good.

I had been hearing this guy’s name a lot recently: every time I did an online search for something relating to the Cthulhu Mythos I invariably bumped into a reference. I began to half-heartedly look around but mostly all I got were gasping fan-boy exultations. I decided to keep things at arm’s length. Then, I discovered that Penguin had released Ligotti’s two short story collections in a single volume as part of their Penguin Classics range (along with Clark Ashton Smith’s oeuvre, but more of that anon) so I forked over my hard-earned and took a punt.

(Seriously, it helps to know people in this business: this book cost $33.00! With the discount extended to me by my friends-in-the-trade, it only cost me $19.00, so I pity any of you other saps out there without the proper connexions!)

Ligotti is a strange bird – Wikipedia told me so. I spent a while looking him up before I snaffled my copy of his writings, just to see what I was letting myself in for. Apparently, Mr. Ligotti is nihilistic, and suffers from a condition whereby he doesn’t receive pleasure from any activity, even those considered conducive to sparking the pleasure centres of the average human brain. His work is widely touted as being heavily influenced by HPL; I think, however, that if these two guys were somehow dumped into a room together they would not hit it off. I mean, Lovecraft enjoyed writing; he did it for pleasure and to entertain. If he brought a little cosmic indifference to the table, then that’s all to the good: it doesn’t get in the way of a good yarn. Ligotti? Not so much.

I’m guessing some critic somewhere read one of Ligotti’s pieces and thought “hey! The bad guys win! This must be that amoral cosmos that those Lovecraft fans always rave about!” It’s not the same thing. Ligotti, let me state it plainly, is bleak. No-one wins, apart from the ones who realise that no-one wins. There’s a large degree of 1990s serial-killer chic in his work: the dark underlying forces have us all in their sway and only those who can see these hidden motivations and act upon them have a true grasp upon the world. The guys who win are the ones who end up paddling through our entrails, out of their minds at the horror of it all. If this sounds like your cup of tea, then I heartily endorse this product and/or service.

Me, I find serial-killers dull. The average thriller wherein the sociopathic multiple-murderer is the target is boring in the extreme. The detective set against them has no material to work with and cannot anticipate the killer because - they’re mad. The killer randomly moves from event to event and is motivated solely because - they’re mad. Nothing definitive is stated about the human condition; no moral landscape is explored – the villain is just mad. On the one hand it’s police procedural dumbed down; on the other, it’s just lazy writing: he killed them - just ‘cos. Yawn! Agatha Christie wouldn’t stand for it.

This is the reason that I dislike Hastur as a Great Old One: madness for its own sake is tedious. Or rather, it has to be handled imaginatively, to make it effective. Very rarely have I encountered a Hastur-based Call of Cthulhu scenario which has been entirely satisfying. What’s happening? Oh, it’s just Hastur making everyone mad again. Oh, that Hastur! What a card! And - yawn. Awhile ago I reviewed a collection of Hastur-based fiction entitled Ripples From Carcosa as part of an overview of the Miskatonic River Press: it’s a badly-edited collection of sloppy splatterpunk - unfocussed, pointless, messy nihilism. Ligotti reads much like this collection, with the sole exception that he can write very well and is incredibly erudite. If that’s what melts your margarine, then I heartily endorse this product and/or service.

You see, the point that many splatterpunk writers and serial killer crime fiction types forget is that the goal of the writer is to entertain. That Hastur collection and this material from Ligotti both ignore this salient point: if you fail to entertain, there is no audience. With both of these collections, they lost me at the first pointless, amoral, sociopathic slash of the flensing knife against pre-pubescent flesh. I mean seriously – don’t these people watch the news? Don’t they pick up newspapers? Real life is appalling; it’s grubby, dispiriting and meaningless. If I want Ligotti, I’ll just pick up the Sydney Morning Herald, or download The Guardian. That’s free, by the way – not $33.00 from my local bookshop. If you enjoy overpriced, paedophiliac, serial-killing, however, I heartily endorse this product and/or service.

Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow – the main source of our understanding of Hastur - discusses the notion of bleak nihilism unto madness but rarely ever brings it to fruition. It’s a thing that happens in his stories; not the stories themselves. Ligotti seems to have gone that extra mile and tried to reproduce in fact that which Chambers only discussed in theory. This too, is what happened with Ripples from Carcosa – despite the editor (and I use the term very loosely) stating that he didn’t want a bunch of wannabe writers trying to draft their own version of Chambers’ eponymous play, that’s in fact what happens several times in the collection. Ligotti’s tales would fit seamlessly into that collection, with the sole distinction that they’re several orders of magnitude above that dreck in terms of skill.

Ligotti takes on vampires, dark fantasy, psychological thrillers – myriad different premises and each revealing him to be uncannily well-informed wherever the territory takes him. The results are invariably quite chilling and unsettling – “The Frolic” is the best of the offerings and is genuinely disturbing, (despite my anti-serial bias). Still, far from a connexion with HPL, I found myself being reminded more of Frank Bellknap-Long, whose tendency to just drop things without explaining what’s happening is a constant frustration: Ligotti too, tends to leave things hanging, unexplained. He approaches Algernon Blackwood in terms of infusing a psychological mood into his pieces, without actually getting there; but, if this stokes your fire, I heartily endorse this product and/or service.

In one tale – “Masquerade of a Dead Sword: A Tragedie” – Ligotti presents us with a thinly-veiled attack upon psychopharmacology. Set in a “Cask of Amontillado” type fantasy world, we are introduced to a devil-may-care duellist who has lost his frenetic disposition and has taken to wearing dark glasses given to him by a wizard. These spectacles remove the chaotic madness which had plagued our hero but they also have the effect of dulling his ability to take pleasure in his surroundings and also rob the world of its meaning for him. At the end of the tale, the swordsman’s madness comes calling for him in revenge, steals the glasses and throws our protagonist to the mob: in desperation he commits suicide by gouging his eyes out. It feels a little like Ligotti is drawing upon his own mental health issues here, and being unnecessarily negative about it to boot.

A repetitive device that Ligotti uses is the essay concerning supernatural horror. He starts writing an article about how to write horror stories, and each time subverts the expository style into a horror story in its own right. These are a thinly-veiled reference to HPL’s own useful essay on the same subject, but Ligotti uses them to display his own thoughts on the matter. Trivialising the groundbreaking work of others is hardly homage, but, if this fires your engines, I heartily endorse this product and/or service.

Thomas Ligotti is a far better writer than Patricia Cornwall or Thomas Harris; his writing has strong echoes of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. He has the ability to write something truly amazing; however he chooses to amble around in this puerile paddling pool. I’m amazed that Penguin has chosen to release this collection: maybe they saw it as a public service to warn people away – certainly the cover art won’t be attracting any casual readers any time soon. Still, if overpriced, bloody, amoral, psychotic violence is what you’re into – you don’t need my permission.

Three tentacled horrors and a bunch of Venlafaxine for this offering.

Rip It & Run! River Monsters...

For those who thought that this post was about something else, I apologise up front. In fact, it is a review of this television show (in that I pick it to pieces) but I’m not going to focus on any particular season or episode; rather, I want to demonstrate how this show is a great and handy springboard into writing your own scenarios for “Call of Cthulhu” (or any other horror-based roleplaying game).

For those who’ve never seen this show, it’s about a fellow named Jeremy Wade (an aptonym if ever there was one) who travels the world trying to find the biggest, rowliest river-dwelling critters and catch them. Then put them back. By training, Wade is a zoologist, specialising in fish, and by inclination he is a fisherman of over 40 years experience. His hobby has taken him around the world and back again in search of fishing thrills.

Some of the earlier episodes of this program involve Wade heading out into the wilderness in search of certain fish of wide renown, those game fish which anglers from all over the world are keen to stuff and mount upon the walls of their dens. These early shows set the tone of Wade’s approach but they are nowhere near as interesting as the later episodes, which unroll more like mysteries than bold adventures.

A feature of every program is Jeremy Wade chatting with the local people, especially the fisher-folk. Wade himself is a tall Briton, with rather scowly good looks, somewhere in his late 50s or early 60s. Everywhere he goes he looks like a finny specimen out of its element, chatting with villagers along the Amazon, talking with farmers in Suriname, even sauntering along a canal in Miami. He always looks like he doesn’t belong but this never sets him apart from those with whom he consorts. A fluent speaker of Spanish, and with a genuine liking for others who fish to survive or for sport, he always makes a connexion with those he encounters.

To be frank, the show strives for drama, and if you’ve ever been fishing, you’ll know that it’s a lot of sitting around with very little happening. To keep the viewers’ attention, the show heavily features reconstructions of fish-related human deaths and woundings, and Wade talks up the horrible realities of being eaten alive, or crushed, or drowned, with ponderously ominous tones. It’s all a little arch and overly-cooked, but it doesn’t fail to deliver on the monsters.

By the end of every episode, Wade has hooked and netted, weighed and measured, and then released some evil-looking critter that’s as often amazing for its sheer size as it is for its arsenal of teeth, jaws, spikes, thrashing tail, or scaly armour. And it goes back into the river. There is one episode where this doesn’t happen: after catching the Congolese Goliath Tiger Fish, Wade makes a present of the overly-toothy beastie to the local tribe. There is an unsettling sense, as the credits roll, that if he hadn’t handed over the fish, he and his film crew would have seen the business end of several machetes. The Congo has its own rules about these things...

Every so often, Wade encounters the local superstitions and beliefs concerning these monsters, generated by the people who have to live alongside them. To his credit, he never pooh-poohs these spiritual concerns, slapping on the holy oil given to him by the woman whose son was eaten by a huge catfish, or watching intently as the sadhu prays to Kali to beg her to make the enormous child-eating fish go away. Of course, these overtones of the supernatural certainly help the writers and producers to beef up the levels of drama.

Sometimes the histrionics get a little extreme. The episode where Jeremy steps into a pool of piranhas, after throwing in a bucket of blood, is somewhat alarming. So too, is the one where he goes diving in the Amazon to find a 27-foot long anaconda to play with. He doesn’t seem to have a death wish, but occasionally he does do something incredibly risky to prove a point.

So, why is this a good show for “Call of Cthulhu” players to watch? Well, for starters, it’s worthwhile watching how each episode is structured, especially the ones where Jeremy is researching a mysterious death and doesn’t really know who the culprit is (the anaconda episode is an especially good one to look at). The start of the episode is all about research: Wade hits the books and finds documentary evidence of the critters in action – eyewitness accounts, newspaper articles, wildlife census data. Then he heads out to the area in question and starts talking to the locals: in almost every show, he goes to the local fish market and talks to the workers there about their catches, their views on local matters and whether they’ve ever heard of a local something big enough take a man off a boat, or a jetty, or a riverbank. Then, loaded with gossip, he finds a local guide willing to carry him out day-after-day in their motor-boat while he dangles nasty gobbets of dead fish in the water on the end of a string. It’s all a twisty investigation with a monster at the end of it. Sound familiar?

Investigators in “Call of Cthulhu” don’t spend time in fish markets, dragging fish fillets out of buckets of ice; but they do trawl the locales where the information pertinent to their investigation is most likely to be found: bars, hotels, government offices. Also, they hit the library - although rarely to flip through books on fish biology. One of the really difficult things about writing a horror scenario is constructing a line of investigation, points of information leading to other points: in this show, you can see it happen and also see how it happens. It’s a revelation.

This is not to say, of course, that this is a horror show, or any kind of fiction. It’s a reality program all about a guy who travels the world fishing for very large freshwater creatures with a rod and reel. For me, I enjoy the big fish at the end of the hunt (especially the bit when the beastie goes back into the water) although the striving for drama and excitement do tend to make me roll my eyes occasionally. There are some very strange monsters out there in the world and, to be honest, I’ve already written one or two scenarios from the material that this show presents: giving your players a break from tracking Cthulhu by going on the trail of a missing friend taken by a huge catfish in Spain, or a saltwater shark that somehow seems able to swim in freshwater rivers, might be a nice holiday for them!