Review: The Perfume of Egypt...

LEADBEATER, C.W., The Perfume of Egypt, The Theosophist Office, Adyar, Madras, India, 1912.

Second edition: octavo; hardcover, with illustrated upper board; 306pp. (with 6pp. of adverts) with an illustrated half-title page. Very slightly rolled; boards rubbed with some inkstains; corners somewhat bumped; spine sunned and extremities softened; text block edges lightly spotted; flyleaf torn out; previous owner’s pencil inscription to the half-title and ink inscription to the title page; scattered light foxing throughout. Lacks dustwrapper. Very good.

It’s an interesting exercise to compare two works written by devotees of a spurious faith. In my last post it was Aleister Crowley, a pernicious little oik, who invented his own ‘belief system’ and pushed it mercilessly in order to grab all of the drugs, notoriety and ass he could wrap his slimy mitts around; today, it’s the work of Charles Webster Leadbeater, a staunch partisan of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and a fairly prolific writer of Theosophical texts. This – in order to compare it with Crowley’s ‘offering’ – is also a collection of short stories with a supernatural bent, albeit with Theosophical axes grinding in the background.

La Blavatsky – let me be clear – is no more or less a snake-oil salesman than Crowley. The codswallop that she shovelled during her lifetime stank no more or less than the crap Crowley dished out. The difference between the two of them is simply this: those around La Blavatsky took the essence of the rubbish she peddled and spun from it a belief system that simmered down to a philosophy, and then reduced further to an alternative lifestyle option. Once she was dead, the followers took a long hard look at themselves and stepped sideways, away from ridicule and condemnation. Theosophy is still practised today, but it is slowly going the way of other philosophical dodos and will most likely cease to be in a generation or so.

Rudolf Steiner enacted the biggest schism away from Theosophy. He dived into the faith headfirst in his early days and drank deep of the Kool-Aid; later, the scales fell from his eyes and he broke away, forming a splinter sect called Anthroposophy. His work – stripped of Blavatsky’s hoo-ha – lives on in Steiner Schools and other institutions across the planet.

Less lucky was Krishnamurti. This fellow probably felt fortunate at having been selected as Blavatsky’s “Chosen One”; after all, he grew up in a country where reincarnation was a given so why not? Prolonged exposure to La Blavatsky and her shenanigans must have left him feeling uneasy though: it became obvious to him that she was less a fakir than a faker, and he began to back-pedal furiously, parleying his ‘Theosophical godhead’ into something less over-the-top. His books on the meditative life and contemplative existence are worth reading – after all, he was wise enough to see where Blavatsky’s ship was headed and to jump off in time, so he must have known a thing or two.

Not so lucky were Blavatsky’s other disciples. Annie Besant clung desperately to the spurious truths of Isis Unveiled and kept the flag flying well after the hype had dwindled and the Spiritualist age had passed into a non-event. She wrote many erudite books on the nature of belief – albeit with a theosophical bent – chief amongst them Mysticism, which is still considered a cornerstone publication on the subject. Along with her was C.W. Leadbeater, whose publications for the cult at Adyar includes volumes one and two of The Inner Life and The Hidden Side of Things, among many other titles.

It’s not too much of a stretch to think that this book was probably something of a money-spinner for the Theosophists. For starters, it’s about ghosts and such-like supernaturality; in 1912, these collections were all the rage thanks to Charles Dickens and the scribblings of M.R. James. Add to the internal content, the Egyptian-style design of the front cover and this volume literally has ‘spooky’ written all over it. The coffers at Adyar must have been overflowing!

The stories in this book have a homey feel to them. Leadbeater introduces them as tales which he had heard personally and which he had gone to great lengths to obtain permission to reproduce. In some instances, he had been asked to change the names of those involved and in one, he confesses that the original teller of the story died before such permission was granted and – despite the fact that we would all certainly know the person in question and thereby accept the story’s authenticity - prefers, for honour’s sake, to retain a veil of anonymity. Some of the stories are his own experiences and one is a ghost story which he heard La Blavatsky tell one evening and which he introduces as his own poor attempt to retail her narrative. The final story is more of a novella, told in chapters and set in the back jungles of an anarchic South America: the narrator is unidentified and the verifiable details of the tale are sketchy at best; however, as an exercise in pulp fiction it has all the elements required for a rollicking yarn.

The stories run the gamut of post-death apparitions, from spooks with unfinished business  to vengeful spirits out for blood. Each one has its share of suspense and revelation and each one resolves nicely. Leadbeater takes pains to analyse each episode from a theosophic viewpoint, arguing in favour of astral projections, thought forms and karmic burdens, but this wrapping up is never intrusive or detrimental to the preceding narrative. His delivery is occasionally a little wide-eyed and ingenuous (especially when the story involves himself) but, since we’re here for the ghosts to start with, rounding out the meal with a side order of Spirituality is hardly an annoyance.

This is what Crowley loses sight of with his stories – the entertainment factor. While Leadbeater talks from a Theosophical stance, fundamentally he’s here to engage and divert us; Crowley’s every pen-scratch on a piece of paper is an exercise in self-promotion and the tearing-down of those whom he despises. Reading an extract from The Perfume of Egypt before bedtime will leave you entertained and ready for a good night’s sleep; reading an extract from The Drug & Other Stories will make you want to get up and have a hot shower with a wire brush. I know which one I’d choose!

Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors from me.

Review: The Drug & Other Stories...

CROWLEY, Aleister, The Drug & Other Stories, Wordsworth Editions Ltd., Ware, Hertfordshire, UK, 2010.

Octavo; paperback; 608pp. Minor wear. Near fine.

This book has been for sale at the store for awhile, and I’ve been circling around it with some trepidation. I can’t stand Aleister Crowley; just the sight of him, glooming out of a photograph, or staring wide-eyed while wearing some kind of stupid hat makes my blood boil. He was the biggest snake-oil salesman in a crowd of snake-oil purveyors from the last century. He preyed upon the credulous for the sake of sheer, unadulterated self-promotion and didn’t care who got chopped in the cross-fire. He represents the worst kind of elitist, racist, and sexist thinking of his, or any other, day. To put it very bluntly, he was the consummate wanker.

That being said, the preamble to this volume claims that his fictional writing, distributed as it is across a range of platforms in rare compendia and forgotten journals, has been overlooked as some of the best Edwardian storytelling around. The aim of the editors is to bring together the stories from these disparate sources and allow them to be examined in toto and judged on their merit. Let me say now, so that the wise amongst you can stop here and go about your business without having to waste any more time on this idiot, that there is, in fact, little merit here and certainly nothing to get excited about.

First – some background. Crowley came from an entitled family and went to Cambridge when the time came. There, he indulged himself and fiddled about on the edges of an academic career, meeting members of the literati who - largely – saw him for what he was and stayed clear. He secured the affections of those with money and an impressionable turn of mind, whom he could persuade to idolise him. He wandered in an out of society spending his time in half-arsed educative bouts, sessions of mountain-climbing, and overseas travel. Over time his personal fortune dwindled almost to nothing due to his wastrel ways.

He married, tying some hapless woman’s fortune to his spent one, and they had a child. When this daughter was two years old he took her and her mother on a gruelling overland journey from China’s eastern coast to northern Burma, along three roughly parallel rivers, in an attempt to map them and identify portage locations which would make the waterways a useful trade route. He succeeded. His crowing about the effort was effusive, and one wonders if the deaths of his wife and child even registered with him as a downside to this great achievement.

All through his life, Crowley depended upon the money of impressionable women to get him through. Even after the death of his wife in Rangoon, soon after the burial he flew off to Shanghai to conduct a “magickal working” with an old paramour who was not averse to spending lavishly upon him.

His greatest “working” was a brutal and gruelling session of sexual “magick” in Cairo during which he claimed to have summoned a demon. His partner in the ritual – a wealthy and impressionable young man – died during the event and Crowley wriggled clear of the legal ramifications which should have stopped him in his tracks, but for the haze of lies and misdirection which he spun in his wake.

The rest of Crowley’s life was a constant parade of duplicity, sensationalism, and indulgence. He bounced his way back and forth from America, to Europe, to Britain wasting (mainly other people’s) money and preying on those who swallowed the drivel he peddled. He wrote extensively in his on-again, off-again journal “The Equinox” for which he could rarely get people to write and so, inevitably, wrote most of the articles himself, under a plethora of pseudonyms.

He occasionally set about translating various spiritual works; however, each time he did so, he inevitably perverted the content of these books in order to accord more closely to his own philosophy of “Thelema”. Each translated work which he undertook approached the effort from a position of racial superiority, as Crowley openly and viciously despised all non-Caucasian peoples, and his translations are always patronising first, and self-promoting second.

I could go on.

This notion that Crowley could be a great short story writer, somehow unrecognised by the critics of his time, intrigued me. True, his work appeared mostly in his own journals for which he charged a hefty subscription fee, so his audience was necessarily limited. Also, his ruthless self-promotion as “The Beast – 666” distanced him from all but the most fringe individuals. Arthur Machen despised him, for example, although Crowley, for his part, gushed about Machen’s work. All this aside, he spent so much time writing in order to fill in the blank pages for which others were paying, he obviously had had a huge amount of practise. To my mind it would all come down to ego – could Crowley put himself to one side in order to create a written piece that would entertain and have something of value to impart? Apparently not.

From the first story in this collection right up until the last, Crowley uses the pieces to promote himself and to deride his ‘enemies’. In “The Three Characteristics” he tells the tale of a Buddhist saint (himself) attacked by an envious mage – a thinly-veiled caricature of Allan MacGregor Bennett, one of Crowley’s nemeses from The Golden Dawn movement. The ‘hero’ of the story ingenuously slips free of all attempts to thwart his spiritual progress, with gods and circumstances – even fundamental tenets of the Buddhist faith – bending to enable his attainment. This is Crowley at his most preening and insufferable, and it only gets worse from here.

The editors claim that “The Drug” is the world’s first attempt at transcribing a drug experience; well, this is patently not the case and I’m happy to strip that laurel off Crowley’s list of so-called ‘achievements’. As it is, the title story drips with archaic word-use efflorescing the paragraphs needlessly and thinly camouflaging the homo-erotic subtext. The ‘point’ of the story is clunky, obvious and heavy-handed, delivered after pages of indulgent trip descriptions upon which no-one should have to waste their life. This is adolescent tripe; only those already convinced of Crowley’s ‘stature’ would waste their time with it.

A common feature of Crowley’s stories is a tone of condescension and the assumption that he is talking to those of a less academic, or educated, turn of mind. In one tale (“The Wake World”), he provides footnotes to make his story clear. All the references are to his own made-up philosophy which, where it doesn’t derive from obscure grimoires of earlier centuries and mad scribblers, is pointlessly obscure, in an attempt to prevent any incisive examination. Then there is the story of “T’ien Tao”. Not only is the tale about funny little yellow people, he even gives us a picture, a racially-offensive caricature of a Chinaman! Yay!

Why, I ask myself, do people keep sniffing what this guy is shovelling? With each story I kept returning to the Foreword and the Introduction to try and gauge whether there was some touch of irony in the editors’ thinking. But no: apparently David Tibet and William Breeze (not their real names?) have drunk deeply of the Kool-Aid and are not prepared to diss the ‘Master’, despite the overwhelming evidence.

There are two points about which I feel that this book is a worthy publication and I’m giving it half a Tentacled Horror for each. First, it’s part of Wordsworth’s “Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural” series, which includes – among others – Lovecraft, Hodgson and Poe, placing it emphatically in a fictional category and allowing readers to compare Crowley to actual story-tellers of value and to draw the inevitable negative conclusion. Secondly – and this is particularly pleasing – Crowleyites maintain “The Master’s” writings in an abstruse and self-indulgently complex library system according to “value”, which Crowley dictated on his death bed; this publication breaks that format and throws everything into the mix regardless of its “importance” to Thelemites. That distant rumbling you’re hearing? It’s Crowley spinning in his grave.

It’s hard for me to be impartial about Crowley, and I freely admit that I’m probably not the best person to evaluate this book; however, it has to be acknowledged that – but for Twitter and Instagram – Crowley was the Kanye West of his day (keep spinning, Aleister!). In light of the recent discovery of HPL’s “The Cancer of Superstition” manuscript, we’re hearing all over again how poisonous a racist he was and, to be frank, I’ve had a gutful. To those people out there looking for poor choices of role models in today’s society, here’s your bull’s eye; try looking at this rather than dismissing Crowley as a quirky artefact of a distant time, simply one face among many on a Beatles album. Crowley still influences people across the planet – along with rest of his snake-oil pushing crowd – and has a possibly greater influence on the young and impressionable than someone like Lovecraft whose racist tendencies barely make it to print in comparison. No-one in this world is a saint, but criticise a writer on the content of their writing first before combing through their private correspondence to draw a foregone conclusion. Crowley is a nasty, grubby little cretin with self-adoration issues. It’s right here in black and white.

Thank you, Wordsworth Editions, for allowing us to see clearly.

Review: The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies...

SMITH, Clark Ashton, The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, Penguin Classics/Penguin Group (USA) LLC., New York, NY, USA, 2014.

Octavo; paperback; 370pp. Minor wear. Near fine.

I had very high hopes for this book after reading about it online. Sadly, it doesn’t quite live up to the hype.

Clark Ashton Smith wrote determinedly, if not compulsively, throughout his life and, like HPL, was driven to it by the demands of needing to make an income in order to survive. Unlike Lovecraft, Smith didn’t mince words about making a living: he not only needed to support himself but also his two aged parents. Lovecraft, could pretend that writing was his “gentleman’s pursuit”, his craft of idle moments, but Smith had three mouths to feed and loans to service.

What makes Smith so interesting is that his prolific output is so good. Sure, there are duds, but they are few and far between. He started off writing poetry and achieved a fair degree of fame for his work in this mode. Books were published and prizes were won. After his “induction” into the Lovecraft circle, he turned to the type of stories demanded by the pulps and by which he is better known to this day. Unlike Lovecraft again, Smith wrote for a wider range of magazines and journals, always looking to make a sale rather than beating a recalcitrant “Weird Tales” editor into capitulation. As a result, Smith’s work is sometimes quite bawdy, or conforms more directly to what we think of nowadays as science fiction. In short, Smith had the weird down pat – like HPL – but he also had range.

Some of that diversity is presented in this volume. Smith wrote his weird fiction in several collections: best known is probably his Averoigne stories, set in a pre-Enlightment France in a fictional province beset by the cruelty of the Church and the resurgence of pagan and Mythos beliefs. There are also his Zothique tales, set in a time long after the current era in a post-Utopian decadent future. There too, are his Hyperborean stories set upon the ancient continents of Poseidonis, Hyperborea and Lemuria, and there are tales which switch between these locales and borrow from various milieu. The online blurb concerning this book implied strongly that all the stories which made up these various canons were included; sadly, they aren’t.

William Dorman, the executor of Smith’s estate, has chosen the content of this compendium and, while it does cover all the various styles of Smith’s oeuvre, it is limited. Of the Averoigne stories only “The Holiness of Azéderac” and “Mother of Toads” are present, while the Zothique stories comprise the main bulk of the short story section. This amounts to eighteen stories, which is nothing to sneeze at; however, given that both “Ubbo Sathla” and “The Treader of the Dust” – both very good tales – are freely available at Project Gutenberg it begs the question as to why they were included. As well, “Mother of Toads” can be found reprinted in the Dark Horse Book of Witchcraft, so it’s hardly a rare treat. If the goal of this collection was to simply display the best of Clark Ashton Smith, then perhaps there’s a justification for the selection, because these are all fine stories; however, if the goal was to bring back into print those gems of his work which rarely get time in the spotlight, then the reader is poorly served. S.T. Joshi writes the Introduction to this volume but it feels as if he’s doing his best with what Dorman has given him.

The cherry-picking of tales from the various Smith canons also serves to undermine the presentation. The Hyperborean tales and the stories of Zothique, despite being set poles apart chronologically, bear marked similarities. Both sets of stories are set in fictional periods where technology is a distant dream and magic has (re)surged into the present; at base, there is very little to differentiate the two collections apart from some geography and famous names. Thrown fractionally together as they are here, they blend into each other too much and lose their distinctive flavour. The novice reader will perceive simply a random bunch of pleasingly bland narratives, which – apart from what in this context appears to be a sloppy re-using of proper names and throwaway concepts – are enjoyable-enough fantasies without any particular bite. In short, they come off like sci-fi/fantasy tofu: solid, but light and lacking piquancy.

About a quarter of the text is devoted to Smith’s Prose Poems and Poetry. The Prose Poems continue the faux pas made with the story selection: most of these, while pretty to read, say very little and feel unfinished, even pointless. Just as the sense of completeness has been lost in the story canons, the ambient noise of these pieces simply underscores that feeling. These are pretty word-pictures without weight; there is the occasional witty observation and some stylish description but not much else. In tandem with the selected stories they don’t work.

Finally there’s the poetry. Firstly, let me point out that poetry isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, although it is mine. By any standard, Smith’s poems are polished but not special. None of them will ever find its way into a Norton Anthology for example. These pieces are overly-dramatic (“Ode to the Abyss”, “The Medusa of Despair”, “The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil”) and far too florid; they stand outside of the poetry tradition that abided while he was writing them and are mannered on a style that was outdated before he was even born. At best they are homage; at worst they are kitsch. Best to just draw a veil across them...

It seems that the editors’ goals in compiling this collection were unfocussed, or driven by opposing needs: on one hand there is the necessity to present a holistic view of Smith, covering all his manifold writing styles; on the other hand, there’s the possibility of bringing back into print the little-seen and rarely-reprinted gems of his opus. To my mind, it would have served the collection better to choose just one of these aims and to run with it. The result, as it stands, is a bland and sometimes queasy assemblage that will disappoint fans and which will leave newcomers scratching their heads and wondering what the fuss is all about.

Individually, the stories here are excellent; just search around before shelling out for this collection – you can find much of this material elsewhere for less, or for free. The Prose Poems might be inspirational as gaming resources; ignore the poetry - unless you really want to read sonnets using the word “Cthulhu”. Clark Ashton Smith has been poorly-served by his editors here, and that’s the sole reason I’m marking the volume down.

Disappointingly, three Tentacled Horrors.

Review: "Mimic"

DEL TORO, Guillermo (Dir.), “Mimic”, Miramax Film Corporation, 1997.

In the time before “Crimson Peak” and “The Hobbit”, Guillermo del Toro did really interesting and visceral films, that scare the heck out of people for all the right reasons. As a director he’s capable of creating great menace and also great beauty. When he’s on form, it works a treat; when he’s not – well let’s not contemplate that. This movie is the quintessential del Toro film. It contains all of his obsessions and all of the tricks that he uses to make a statement. The only thing missing here is Ron Perlman.

To begin with, it’s about insects. Del Toro loves creepy-crawlies. When he did “Blade 2”, the vampires were less Bela Lugosi and more bug-like, making for a disturbing and – many would say – somewhat less than effective take on the old stand-by. My experience of that film was that most of the audience spent their time trying to get a better look at the vampires rather than flinching away from them behind their popcorn. It was probably not the right time or place for this variation on an old theme. “Cronos”, on the other hand, was a completely different matter: adding an insectoid variation to the vampire theme – in the shape of the clockwork scarab-thingy that infects its owners with the ‘vampire virus’ – was a stroke of genius and it worked a treat.

Del Toro likes the alien quality that insects bring to a story and it’s obvious that’s why he decided to dramatise this story by David A. Wolheim. The inability to empathise with a bug; the complete dissimilarity to human anatomy; the strange movements and odd noises: all these things are to del Toro what the xenomorph was to H.R Giger. The inability to communicate or relate to the insect makes it a perfect monster for this type of story. I wonder why – since he’s such a Mythos fan - he hasn’t thought about trying to do Basil Copper’s The Great White Space? Plenty of creepy bugs in that story...

Using a favourite motif, del Toro gives us the backstory to this tale in a series of flickering montages at the movie’s start. Through a selection of ‘found footage’ and still images, Manhattan Island, we learn, was afflicted by an insect-borne disease which affected children and which was named “Strickler’s Disease”. From the fleeting images with which we’re provided, it looks a lot like polio crossed with scarlet fever, or diphtheria – either way it’s nasty. By the time the opening credits are over, we’ve also learned that a cure was found by targeting the cockroach – the disease’s vector – and that Dr. Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) was the bug-loving geneticist who found the means to do this. Her answer was to hybridise a mantis-type insect called the “Judas Breed” which, insinuated into the cockroach population, not only killed it with its noxious secretions but would then render itself infertile after six months, thus eradicating the ‘roaches (along with the disease that they were carrying) and also the means of deployment. Very tidy; very neat.

However, F. Murray Abrahams – Susan Tyler’s academic mentor – is there to provide a timely warning. He might not be wearing a sandwich board declaring that “The End is Nigh!”, but he certainly has one tucked away at home, I’m sure. “Nature abhors a vacuum”, he metaphorically tells his former pupil; The Judas Breed worked as advertised in the laboratory, but then they let it out, and the world, he reminds her is a far bigger and less-controlled laboratory. Anyone who’s ever seen a “Jurassic Park” film knows what’s coming next!

Time moves forward. Three years on, Susan is now married to her CDC (Centre for Disease Control) contact from the crisis, Peter Mann (played by Jeremy Northam). They are trying to have children; however she (it’s implied) is unable to conceive (why this is automatically assumed, rather than anyone asking Peter to have his sperm count checked, is one reason this film bothers me). Then, on an otherwise uneventful day at the Natural History Museum, two kids show up with a big bug in a Corn Flakes box: hello, the Judas Breed, supposedly self-immolated by genetic trickery, has resurfaced and is, against all odds, breeding.

While all of this is going on, across town a cut-rate church mission in a condemned building, is having issues. Something comes up from under the streets into the basement and chases the reverend up to and off the roof. His body is rudely yanked into a drain by something very strong and silence descends upon the streets once more. There is a witness, however, to these events: an autistic boy named Chuy (pronounced “Chewy”) has watched everything without understanding its import. What he notices is the assailant’s “funny shoes”, fixated as he is on the objects of his single-parent father Manny’s (Giancarlo Giannini) occupation as a shoe-shiner. Next day, Peter and his sidekick Josh Brolin (imaginatively named “Josh” in this feature) are called to the church to check for viral outbreaks. They liberate the human population from the building and then sweep the locale for strangeness, which they find in the form of an enormous stalactite of faeces hanging from the roof in a back room. This is examined and found to contain a handful of buttons.

Things continue apace and the clues mount up from here on in. Mira Sorvino’s lab assistant discovers a bizarre crab-like corpse in a water treatment plant which turns out to be a larval form of the Judas Breed, complete with nascent lungs, absence of which is what keeps insects at a swattable size. The two kids who found the insect go into the subways to try and find an Öotheca, or egg case, with a promise of good money if they turn one up: they do, but neither of them gets to claim the reward as the Judas Breed don’t like their children being disturbed (they do like human children though, which they butcher and eat with happy abandon). This is probably why del Toro stands out from a bunch of other directors in this genre – other film-makers might have shied away from killing innocent children in this kind of movie but not Guillermo, and it makes the film much more powerful as a result.

Next thing we know, we’ve all joined up with a curmudgeonly transit cop named Leonard Norton (Charles S. Dutton) and we’ve headed down under the streets to find out What’s Going On. During the descent we discover that Chuy has been lured down here as well by “Mr. Funny Shoes” and that Manny, cutthroat razor and rosary in hand, has come down after him. Combining forces, we face the nightmare together. Although, it has to be said, things don’t look so bright because Peter – the same Peter who headed the scorched-earth take-down of the city’s cockroach population - asks Susan “what does this bug look like?” as they head out. Sorry? Maybe he missed the re-cap.

Deep in the subway, it might be expected that the story will run on well-travelled rails towards its conclusion, and, to be fair, that is pretty much the case. It’s the details though which make the difference.

Each of the players has something different to bring to the table: Susan Tyler knows bugs; Leonard knows the abandoned subway stations and how they work; Manny is the tool man, bringing the straight razor, the rosary and the Zippo lighter, all of which give our little party the equipment they need to execute their plans. The two CDC guys, on the other hand, contribute very little, although I’m sure the bugs found them very diverting. Peter is increasingly marginalised as the narrative continues: he is unnecessarily abrasive towards Leonard and constantly undermines Susan’s contributions. It’s as if the only role left that he thinks he can feasibly play is ‘leader’ and he has a hard time claiming and owning that position. There’s that old chestnut that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle and no-one in this outfit seems to need Peter. Although his annoying spectacles do come in handy.

This is the element of the film that bugs me (see what I did there?). There is an assumption of male superiority all the way through this script. Peter claims Susan and provides a home for her, despite her ‘failure’ to provide offspring; she is constantly cosseted in the drama, being thrown into danger to be rescued, or prevented from engaging with the threat (despite being the best able to understand what’s going on). Finally, she gets saddled with an all-consuming protective ‘mothering instinct’ which sets her on a course to attack the Male - the insect nest’s only fertile male representative - in order to save Chuy. Meanwhile Peter gets to confront the myriad Females which populate the nest and wipe them out en masse in a Schwarzenegger-worthy fiery inferno. The patriarchal politics is more than somewhat heavy-handed, no matter how many legs you might have.

There are nice bait-and-switch moves in the unfolding of events. The Zippo doesn’t set off the explosion for example, and the straight razor never gets effectively used as a weapon. Del Toro sets them up as things to pin our hopes upon and then renders them ineffective, causing the characters (and us) to flail about wildly trying to find alternatives. It’s a nice, clever way to keep the viewers from getting complacent.

In the end, science and grim determination win the day. Our heroes get the child that they thought they’d never have and just enough loose material remains to set up the possibility of a sequel. In fact two sequels followed this, the first a splatterpunk gorefest that’s best avoided and the second a rather piss-poor re-make of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” wherein the serial killer across the way is actually a six-foot cockroach that’s eaten the neighbours. Neither are worth seeking out.

There is a final note I must make although perhaps del Toro would rather I didn’t. At the end of the film, Susan and Leonard are the only ones left in the abandoned subway car: Leonard is bleeding to death and Peter and Manny have left earlier to enact a plan which will get the subway car running once more, although - for various reasons - they’ve both been gone far too long. Susan decides to exit the safe zone and see what’s happening. They change the plan. Leonard says: “if the car starts,” (which means Manny and Peter have attained their separate goals) “I’ll meet you at the end of the platform” (to help her back into the train carriage). She nods and then opens the door. As she departs, we clearly hear her call out “Chuy?” into the darkness. Now, we the audience know that Manny has just found his lost child and is having a brisk and pointed talk with the Judas Breed about paternity issues, and Susan has been inside the train the whole time with no idea as to what’s been going on outside. How does she know that Chuy’s out there? Why does she call out his name? I blame an editorial slip myself but I can just imagine del Toro doing the face-palm thing at the premiere screening.

In the final analysis, this is a thoroughly gruesome and very entertaining (and scary!) horror film that ticks all my boxes. It’s way too preachy in places what with the lack of divine assistance being symbolised by crumbling Church institutions, ineffective priests, headless Jesus statues and Madonnas wrapped in plastic (another image that del Toro likes using, along with shoes) and with the paternalistic attitude of the male players a constant grinding of axes in the background. However it’s easy enough to skip over the worst of this. The jewels in the crown are the insects designed by Rob Bottin, and their ability to mimic their human prey: the way these creatures have been put together, you’ll be looking twice at any shadowy, coat-wearing stranger you encounter from now on!

Four ‘Horrors from me.

Review: "Tremors"

UNDERWOOD, Ron (Dir.), “Tremors”, Universal/No Frills Film Productions, 1989.

I have no love for vampire films: after 1933 and Lugosi’s interpretation, the whole genre falls, for the most part, into a seamless homogeneity until every new movie becomes a copy of the previous outing. This isn’t always the case: “Near Dark” is a very special confection, as is “Cronos” and “The Reflecting Skin”, but these tend to be the exceptions which prove the rule. Nevertheless, “The Lost Boys” is a vampire film for which I have some affection, however it has nothing to do with the genre.

At the time when “The Lost Boys” came out, horror movies were turning from fright-fests into comedy routines – if the film didn’t serve up comedy and horror in more-or-less equal proportion, then the studios didn’t want to know about it (which is why “Evil Dead 2” is simply a slapstick re-make of the first Evil Dead flick). If you watch “The Lost Boys” very carefully you will see that there’s enough junk DNA of the original screenplay left behind in the final take to show what the writers’ original intentions were: the video-store owner was not supposed to be the head vampire; the Frog Brothers were not supposed to be there; the grandfather was to be revealed as the top leech at the end of the third act (remember his ‘special off-limits refrigerator shelf’?). The script wasn’t re-built from scratch to accommodate the studio’s demands (which included showcasing the Coreys); instead, it was patched and tweaked, with a lot of clues for the original format becoming red herrings in the final version. From a scriptwriting perspective, this is a very revealing movie about the workings of Hollywood.

How much better then, is a film where the original concept doesn’t get broken and re-worked after the fact to conform to a producer’s expectations? “Tremors” is a film with a solidly-written foundation that knows where it’s going and what it’s doing every step of the way. Nothing happens by accident; practically every line of dialogue does one of two things – it moves the plot forward, or it underscores a character’s motivations or personality. This is a movie that has universal appeal and that appeal is due to the fact that it is so tightly constructed. 

As an example, have you noticed that the beginning and the climax of the film form a complete circle? In the opening scene, we see Val (Kevin Bacon) pointing his – um – “worm”, off the edge of a cliff; in the final confrontation with the Graboid called “Stumpy”, it’s another instance of Val doing the same thing, only this time it’s not his manhood, but his wormy Graboid nemesis. (I never said this was a high-brow film!) Thus, the plot forms a perfect loop from beginning to end.

Every element that adds to the drama is flagged and activated at precisely the right moment. When the refrigerator unit complains in Walter Chang’s store, there’s a discussion about a worn ball-bearing and who’s going to fix it; later, while trying to remain deathly quiet in the same locale, the machine kicks up again and the Graboid targets the ruckus. The gag is flawlessly set up and executed, and not just in this instance. Pogo-sticks, basketballs, generators and jackhammers all get the same treatment.

The slow-reveal of the monsters at the heart of the story is another element which is precisely monitored. At first, all we see are flickering readouts in the seismographs and slowly moving patches of dirt; when Old Fred and his flock get attacked, it’s borne in upon us that he’s been thumping the ground with his hoe. We, the audience get our first hints that the problem comes up from underground way before the characters do, but we’re still in for a surprise:

Our first glimpse of the Graboids are their tentacular “tongue-things”, and, while these seem suitably snake-like and ominous, it’s nothing compared to the big reveal of the creatures on the other end. Having seen the tentacles grab and bury an entire car, the full horror of the rampaging beasties is a second-wave shocker in a two-step monster deployment. Very satisfying stuff!

Also satisfying is the quiet moment on the residual boulders where Val, Earl (Fred Ward) and Rhonda (Finn Carter) contemplate the origins of the critters. Rhonda muses upon their absence in the fossil record; Val posits their source in a government laboratory, “a big surprise for the Russians”, while Earl opts for an alien invasion scenario – “no way these are local boys”. In the final analysis, they get nowhere and the topic is dispensed with as pointless, just as it is for we movie-goers: the monsters just are. No more time for thinking; let’s move on.

All of the characters we’re presented with are treated with affection. Like the various plot points and gags, they too have their purpose within the milieu and a contribution to make towards the story’s resolution. Walter (Victor Wong) provides the group with sandwiches, horses, and bullets as well as a CB radio. He’s also the one who names the creatures and underscores Val and Earl’s hopeless business planning. Melvin the slacker is a universal target for contempt whose only talent is for unifying the rest of the characters against him. Mindy and her mother provide nervous responses and querulous questioning as to what can be done, as well as opposing the gung-ho assertions of the survivalist Gummers. Not all of the characters survive; however, each time one of them is taken, they demonstrate some other wicked wrinkle of the Graboids’ cunning. In the meantime, despite having varying quantities of screen time - from the ‘almost-in-every-scene’ level to a handful of seconds - there’s not one for whom we don’t feel some degree of sympathy. Except for Melvin.

(I should just state here that there should be a retroactive Oscar given to whomever had the brilliant idea of casting Reba McEntire as Heather Gummer. Sublime work! “Lord, honey! You didn’t even get penetration with the elephant gun!” – kills me everytime!)

There’s another ‘character’ too, which deserves mention, and that’s the location – Perfection, Nevada. Although not actually filmed in Nevada, the countryside and the town are as described on the box – perfect. We get to see quite a lot of the landscape throughout the course of the film and it works a treat. For starters, the planning of the town – from the junkyard, to the water tower, to the single road access through its rocky pass – serves a purpose in defining the narrative (“it’s one long smorgasbord!”); secondly, it’s spectacular to look at. Soaring skies, rocky ridges and precipitous mountains: it’s a beautiful backdrop.

Produced with a budget of US$11,000,000, this film racked up US$3,731,520 in its first weekend, finally raking-in US$16,667,084 in the USA across its opening cinema run. Outside the US, the film made US$48,572,000 before being consigned to video; I dare say video, DVD and BluRay sales have kept investors quite comfy since then!

There have been no less than three sequels to this film (that I know of) and each of them is a lesser creation. The second film features Fred Ward again as Earl, along with Michael Gross returning as Burt Gummer, but the concept is creaky and the writing less than stellar. The next two films are even more patchy, with the fourth film being a ‘prequel’ to the first movie, revealing that the Graboids have been menacing Perfection since at least the late 1880s (in the days when it was called “Rejection”). None of these films shine any new or beneficial light on the original concept, nor do they substantially reward any repeat viewing – they’re for completists (and Burt Gummer fans) only.

The full five Horrors from me!

Our Hero Walks Into A Bar: An Exercise

Reading through the works of the Lovecraft Circle (and its extensions), it’s possible to see quite clearly how much they influenced each other. It’s not simply the borrowing of concepts and tropes, but also the style and forms of stories that they chose to tell. In doing so, they moved the “weird fiction” tale out of its original format and into what we would today call “fantasy”, “swords and sorcery”, or “dark fantasy”. It’s widely touted that Robert E. Howard “invented” the fantasy novel, but I would suggest that he merely refined the format after consultation with his peers; and all of these guys have a clear debt to Lord Dunsany as inspiration.

As a fun exercise, I’ve gathered here a similar scene from as many ‘Circle writers as I can find in order to compare and contrast. In each instance, our (anti)hero(es) walk into a bar (or similar) on a (possibly) dark and stormy night. In each instance (and they’re listed chronologically) it’s possible to see how each author influenced the others in terms of both style and content.

H.P.Lovecraft – “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” (1926-27)

“The black galley slipped into the harbour past the basalt mole and the tall lighthouse, silent and alien, and with a strange stench that the south wind drove into the town. Uneasiness rustled through the taverns along that waterfront, and after awhile the dark wide-mouthed merchants with humped turbans and short feet clumped stealthily ashore to seek the bazaars of the jewellers. Carter observed them closely, and disliked them more the longer he looked at them. Then he saw them drive the stout black men of Parg up the gangplank grunting and sweating into that singular galley, and wondered in what lands – or if in any lands at all – those fat pathetic creatures might be destined to serve.

And on the third evening of that galley’s stay one of the uncomfortable merchants spoke to him, smirking sinfully and hinting what he had heard in the taverns of Carter’s quest. He appeared to have knowledge too secret for public telling; and though the sound of his voice was unbearably hateful, Carter felt that the lore of so far a traveller must not be overlooked. He bade him therefore be his own guest in locked chambers above, and drew out the last of the zoog’s moon-wine to loosen his tongue.”

Clark Ashton Smith – “The Tale Of Satampra Zeiros” (1931)

“One evening, in an alley of the more humble quarter of Uzuldaroum, we stopped to count our available resources, and found that we had between us exactly three pazoors – enough to buy a large bottle of pomegranate wine or two loaves of bread. We debated the problem of expenditure.

‘The bread,’ contended Tirouv Ompallios, ‘will nurture our bodies, will lend a new and more expeditious force to our spent limbs, and our toil-worn fingers.’

‘The pomegranate wine,’ said I, ‘will ennoble our thoughts, will inspire and illuminate our minds, and perchance will reveal to us a mode of escape from our present difficulties.’

Tirouv Ompallios yielded without undue argument to my superior reasoning, and we sought the doors of an adjacent tavern. The wine was not of the best, in regard to flavour, but the quantity and strength were all that could be desired. We sat in the crowded tavern, and sipped it at leisure, till all the fire of the bright red liquor had transferred itself to our brains. The darkness and dubiety of our future ways became illuminated as by the light of rosy cressets, and the harsh aspect of the world was marvellously softened. Anon, there came to me an inspiration.”

Robert E. Howard – “The Tower of the Elephant” (1933)

“Torches flared murkily on the revels in the Maul, where the thieves of the east held carnival by night. In the Maul they could carouse and roar as they liked, for honest people shunned the quarter, and watchmen, well-paid with stained coins, did not interfere with their sport. Along the crooked unpaved streets with their heaps of refuse and sloppy puddles, drunken roisterers staggered, roaring. Steel glinted in the shadows where wolf preyed on wolf, and from the darkness rose the shrill laughter of women, and the sounds of scufflings and strugglings. Torchlight licked luridly from broken windows and wide-thrown doors, and out of these doors, stale smells of wine and rank sweaty bodies, clamour of drinking-jacks and fists hammered on rough tables, snatches of obscene songs, rushed like a blow in the face.”

Gary Myers – “The Four Sealed Jars” (1975)

“That shop bearing Getech’s mark on its iron lintel is very lean and high, and set between two tottering old houses with no lamps in their windows, that wear an evil look. But there was little comfort in certain menacing shapes in the shop-window either. Only one twinkling eye of a quaint little jade idol recalled the stars Wesh had seen from his own window... A bell rang when Wesh opened the door. He had already examined three wonderful dusty tomes bound all in copper (whose pages were closely writ in bestial characters he was unable to decipher), and nodded as he passed the amethyst cups, and was picking up from the counter an ivory daemon, when someone behind him uttered a cough. And the proprietor peered up into the face of Wesh with watery little eyes and made him eagerly welcome.”

Fritz Leiber – “Sea Magic” (1977)

“Although called the Wrack and Ruin by its habitués (he’d learned as he was leaving), it had seemed a quiet and restful place. Certainly no disturbances, least of all by his berserks (that had been last week, he reminded himself – if it had really ever happened), and he found pleasure in watching the slow-moving servers and listening to the yarning fishers and sailors, two low-voiced whores (a wonder in itself), and a sprinkling of eccentrics and puzzlers, such as a fat man sunk in mute misery, a skinny greybeard who peppered his ale, and a very slender silent woman in bone-grey touched with silver who sat alone at a back table and had the most tranquil (and not unhandsome) face imaginable. At first he’d thought her another whore, but no-one had approached her table, none (save himself) had seemed to take any notice of her, and she hadn’t even been drinking, so far as he could recall.”

Thomas Ligotti – “Masquerade Of A Dead Sword: A Tragedie” (1986)

“So three well-drunk and hog-faced men seated in a roisterous hostelry might well be excused for not recognising Faliol, whose colours were always red and black. But this man, who had just entered the thickish gloom of that drinking house, was garbed in a craze of colours, none of them construed to a pointed effect. One might have described this outfit as a motley gone mad. Indeed, what lay beneath this fool’s patchwork were the familiar blacks and reds that no other of the Three Towns – neither those who were dandies, nor those who were sword-whores, nor even those who, like Faliol himself, were both – would have dared to duplicate. But now these notorious colours were buried under a rainbow of rags which were tied about the man’s arms, legs, and every other part of his person, seeming to hold him together like torn strips hurriedly applied to the storm-fractured joists of a sagging roof. Before he had closed the door of that cave-like room behind him, the draft rushing in from the street made his frayed livery come alive, like a mass of tattered flags flapping in a calamitous wind.”

Brian Lumley – “In The Temple Of Terror” (1991)

“Inside it had been business as usual. The sigh and flutter of cards and the skittering of ivory and jade dice: the oohs! and aahs! of spectators; curses or guffaws of gamers; the lamps suspended from the high-beamed ceiling, lending the scene glints of coppery colour; and the half-clad Yhemni slave-girls, moving sinuously among patrons with trays of spicy sweetmeats and clinking goblets of wine, their dusky skins agleam with oils and their filed teeth flashing white in dark faces.”

*****

I know which of these I prefer, but which is your favourite style? Which one suits your own personal style for writing and/or gaming in this genre? Let’s debate!