Lovecraft
and his crowd lived by submitting their writing to various pulp magazines that
were willing to pay for their contributions. Sadly for them, this means of
living dwindled away for most of them and left them hanging with literally
nowhere to go, except to find day-jobs and get on with things. For HPL this was
anathema and he died rather than take this step; for Robert E. Howard as well,
after bending his material to fit the shapes of various magazines increasingly
uninterested in printing his A-game stuff, he decided that a bullet was the
only answer. Of all of them, perhaps Clark Ashton-Smith was the only realist
among them who could stay the course and last at least some of the distance.
In
recent years, the only way to get into print with a Mythos-based short story
was to find an agent and pay for it to happen. The big publishing houses, have
become ever-more impatient with writers of short fiction and demand only
novel-length literary fiction, or factual material. Increasingly, the big
houses only want 1) novels by authors with a proven track record, or 2) stuff
that’s been done (and which has sold) before. It seems the likes of Penguin, or
HarperCollins, are refining their tried-and-true material into increasingly
rarefied stuff and, if you aren’t Salman Rushdie, you won’t get a foot in the
door. Self-publishing has filled the gap here, allowing those passed over by
the Big Guns to get something into
print (or, at least, onto Kindle). There are pitfalls with this, however: if a
big publisher picks up your stuff, they give it their all – packaging and
promotion – and it can be an easy ride; for a self-publisher, all of this falls
into their (often inexperienced) lap. Despite all the hype, blog-site promotion
doesn’t really equate to book sales.
Fortunately,
there’s a positive response. With things like Kickstarter and an increase in
the availability of print production (including print-on-demand facilities),
the pulp magazine has had something of a re-birth. If you look hard enough, you
can find a growing bevy of underground magazines hoping to revive the heyday of
the classic pulps. One of these which I’ve been pleased to make the
acquaintance of is the “Occult Detective
Quarterly”. The purview of this magazine is fairly specific: they publish
material which examines the notion of criminal detectives who use, or encounter,
supernatural phenomena in the course of their investigations. There is a solid
basis for this specification: many great weird fiction authors have used this
concept, from Edgar Allan Poe, to William Hope Hodgson, to Algernon Blackwood,
and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. When you factor in television material
like “The X-Files” and “Supernatural”, and comics offerings
like “John Constantine: Hellblazer”,
you can see that there’s a wealth of territory to be covered.
The
print run of this journal is very short – the fourth instalment is being
compiled – but enough water has passed under the bridge to give a critical
overview. My feeling is that this is a positive and well-helmed vehicle; there
are some quibbles (inevitably) but I will address these at the end. For now
let’s jump in to issue 1:
GAFFORD, Sam, & John
Linwood GRANT (eds.), “Occult Detective
Quarterly #1 – Winter 2016/2017”, Electric Pentacle Press, Printed in
Wroclaw Poland.
Quarto;
perfect-bound paperback; unpaginated (100pp.), with many monochrome
illustrations. Mild wear; covers lightly curled. Near fine.
With
efforts of this nature you’d be forgiven for thinking that there would be some
misfires in a first issue, while the editorial and production staff find their
feet; surprisingly, there is very little of that in evidence here. The
compilers are sure of what it is that they’re trying to do and they hit the
ground running. This instalment has a wealth of solid literary performances
accompanied by some high-quality artwork, commissioned especially for the
pieces that they’re illustrating. There are some entertaining articles and a Reviews section which speaks directly to
the type of material which this exercise is focussed upon. All in all,
especially with the Mythos material contained herein, this is definitely value
for your hard-earned.
Things
kick off (after the welcoming editorial Introduction
which spells out the scope of the project) with a rather surprising
collaborative effort from David T. Wilbanks and William Meikle which channels
Raymond Chandler via Curious George, in that it features a gorilla named Gus
who works as a private detective in Los Angeles. In the course of “Got My Mojo Working”, he manages to
isolate an incursion into this reality by menacing Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime
entities by means of a series of bizarre paintings, which activity he thwarts
with his finely-honed understanding of Louisiana-based folk magic. This is a
mildly-entertaining piece of fluff, which ticks a whole bunch of boxes that
seem to be touchstones of the assembled material, the Chandler-pastiche being prime
among them.
Moving
on, we come to “When Soft Voices Die”,
by Amanda de Wees. Straightaway, we’re into the other trope that’s a constant of
the fare on offer – the late-Victorian, Hope Hodgson knock-off. Even moreso
than the Chandler pillaging, this is a high-wire act in that, if the details
aren’t hit squarely on the head, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
Outlining a psychic investigator-cum-stage actress’s dilemma in finding a place
to stay after her house burns down, de Wees presents to us the character of
Sybil Ingram Lammle (after the "Frankenstein" director), whose sensitivity to ghostly presences leads her to the
resolution of a mystery long-ignored by the family with whom she finally finds
a (haunted) billet. This is an amusing effort, somewhat undercut by its
anachronisms of language and attitude, that wends its way to a rather obvious conclusion.
Next,
comes “Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You”
by Adrian Cole. This is another Chandler-esque romp - this time with a snappier
line in descriptive writing - that throws us into an urban-fantasy milieu wherein our characters hop from
this world into the “Pulpworld” and back. The Pulpworld contains all of the
Noir-ish things you’d expect with a name like that, along with dragons and
magic. Our detective – Nick Stone – is a trench-coat-wearing, twin-Beretta-packing
investigator who runs a shady deal across the divide between realities,
becoming mired in a game of revenge, justice and retribution. It’s at this
point that “Occult Detective Quarterly”
really starts to deliver the goods.
“Orbis Tertius” by Josh Reynolds springboards off the
works of Jorge Luis Borges and tries to reach above the simple one-note tune of
‘spooky detective romp’. We meet his Occult Detective - Charles St. Cyprian -
with his dissolute female sidekick, “Ebe” Gallowglass, on a mission to defend
the Empire against the incursions of the arcane. In the course of ridding a
moderately-respectable Gentlemen’s Club from a hideous mind-altering entity
unleashed from a mouldering tome, they are forced to confront the fact that the
paradigm shift which the entity was impinging upon them might actually have
been better than the reality in which
they find themselves. This was a moderately successful turn, although the arch
quality of the character’s names, along with their fashion-conscious posing
with coats, hats and firearms, made them sound more like someone’s roleplaying
favourites, rather than fleshed-out protagonists. There is an issue at play
here too, in that Americans have an odd perception of what it means to be ‘Victorianly
English’: I’d probably have enjoyed Mr. Reynold’s attempts at an Occult
Detective from the other side of the Pond rather than this. And just what is
“Ebe” short for actually?
Up
next is T.E. Grau’s “Monochrome” and,
hands down, the best piece of writing in this issue. An early note on the
Editorial page states that this story is re-printed from Celaeno Press’s "The Court of the Yellow King", edited by
Glynn Owen Barrass in 2014, and it’s easy to see why the Electric Pentacle
people wanted to give it an airing here too. This is ground-shaking stuff. Set
in L.A., our disaffected, drink-sodden investigator, now working as a
free-lance journalist, follows a trail of disturbing events which dramatically
shift the landscape around him as it begins to crystallise its hideous shape.
This takes Robert W. Chambers’ “The King
in Yellow” premise, beefs up the stakes and updates it perfectly for
contemporary times. This is the uncaring dispassionate negligence of the Cosmos
made real, behind a mask of the Rodney King assault and the ensuing L.A. Riots.
If I have a quibble, it’s that the illustration commissioned for the piece lets
too many cats out of the bag before the conclusion. This story alone is worth
the price of admission, especially for Mythos fans.
“Baron of Bourbon Street” by Aaron Vlek follows the investigation
of a New Orleans detective – Alfonse de Cartier – as he gets to the bottom of
an outbreak of soulless corpses. This wouldn’t be too unusual a deal except
that these corpses were soulless before
they were killed and Alfonse’s patron, Baron Samedi himself, wants it stopped.
Here we see the third tine of the Occult Detective pitchfork in full flight –
the Vodoun element. From “Got My Mojo
Working”, to the villain in “Don’t
Say I Didn’t Warn You”, to this articulation, it’s clear that the go-to
option for ‘States-side supernatural dicks is to wallow in the ways of creole
folk religions. Not that this is a bad thing necessarily; it’s just that it’s
going to get quite old, quite quickly. Anyway, the premise for this tale is a
nice slant, but by the end I was wondering why we needed an Occult Detective at
all, since the Baron was pushing along most of the action by himself.
Oscar
Dowson’s “The Adventure of the Black Dog”
examines the mess that dabbling in the paranormal can leave behind when a
soldier, lately returned from the Boer War, takes up his friend’s offer to
house-sit only to discover that a hideous Tulpa in the form of an eyeless black
hound is haunting the place. In the course of the tale we meet the
portentously-named Dr. Henry Jerusalem Crow who clears the supernatural slate
and takes our un-named narrator onboard as his new assistant. We’re back in
late-Victoriana mode here but with a writer who better knows his chops about
the time period; sadly, his writing could’ve done with a bit of a polish as,
apart from ending rather too abruptly, he constantly makes assertions about his
characters only to undercut them a few paragraphs later – our narrator, for
example goes from being comfortably well-off to financially ignorant in a
handful of sentences, according to the changing needs of the story, which was unsettling.
A good potential tale that just needed that little bit more work.
The
final literary offering of this issue is the first instalment of a round-robin
story incorporating the work of several of the editorial staff and their
associates in an ongoing tale of occult detection, entitled “The Occult Legion”. To be honest, I
passed over this as it felt a little like a pointless exercise. Of course, in
an endeavour such as this, it follows that the writers who have a desire to pen these kinds of stories are also the
ones who got together to create the
vehicle to showcase their efforts, so it figures that there would be just such
a forum for them to strut their stuff. That’s fine, but I just feel –
personally – that this type of thing is like knocking off ‘artworks’ simply to
fill in space on a wall. I’d rather read something that had its own point and
expression in preference to watching an ‘in-crowd’ slapping each other on the
back.
In
terms of articles, there’s a witty essay on “How
to Be a Fictional Victorian Ghost Hunter (in Five Easy Lessons)” by Tim
Prasil, who runs us through the Victorian literature of the Occult Detective
and gives us the low-down on the art of fin-de-siécle
spook detection. After this there’s a look at “The Occult Fiction of Doctor Spektor” a character from the Gold
Key Comics range of the 70s and an interview with his creator in “The Man Behind Doctor Spektor – An
Interview with Don F. Glut” underlining the fact that the concept upon
which the magazine has been predicated is wide-ranging and well-interpreted.
Finally, the Reviews section covers
more bases with overviews of two collections of short stories focussing upon
the Occult Detectives created by Tim Prasil and Jessica Amanda Salmonson as
well as a recently–released audiobook version of William Hope Hodgson’s Dr.
Carnacki stories.
All
in all, a solid start to this enterprise. Now on to Issue Two!
GAFFORD, Sam, John Linwood
GRANT & Dave BRZESKI (eds.), “Occult Detective
Quarterly #2 – Spring 2017”, Electric Pentacle Press, Printed in Wroclaw
Poland.
Quarto;
perfect-bound paperback; unpaginated (104pp.), with many monochrome
illustrations. Mild wear; covers lightly curled. Near fine.
The
second instalment kicks off as before and this time with an ongoing comic
series featuring an Occult Detective who happens to be a dog. “Borkchito: Occult Doggo Detective” by
Sam L. Edwards and Yves Tourigny had me grinning right from the word ‘go’ with
all of its tangled grammar and pleasing doggie-ness. I’m a sucker for an
ongoing comic… The first thing to notice this time around is that the number of
ads between the covers has increased, which is good if you’re looking for
alternative venues to publish your material, but which might annoy some
punters. Still, it’s a good sign for the continued health and prosperity of the
magazine overall.
First
cab off the rank is a pastiche tale of Dr. Carnacki’s younger days, “The Arcana of the Alleys” by Brandon
Barrows. This is a tight little story of an untold event in Carnacki’s past
which is set up in a manner of which Hope Hodgson might well have approved and
even incorporates a bit of fisticuffs which rings true from Hodgson’s
real-world activities. It suffers, sadly, from being a New Age occult experience
wholly outside of Carnacki’s purview and feels somewhat like it was originally
another story idea, co-opted to a new purpose.
“The Black Tarot” by Mike Chinn takes a page from “The Shadow” and sets us up with a trio
of two-fisted pulp era mystical crime-fighters trying to stop a letter-bomb
hoodoo - a la M.R. James’ “Casting The Runes” - from targeting a
bunch of US tycoons. Here again, we have a story that feels like everyone’s
favourite RPG characters taking parts in an old classic, but it’s well-penned
and amusing enough in its own way.
With
“Conquer Comes Calling” by Edward M.
Erdelac we’re back to American folk-magic wrapped up in Chandler pastiche with
a dose of “Shaft” thrown in for good
measure. John Conquer is a Harlem-based private eye with hoodoo in his arsenal taking
down a hex-y villain who has the ability to turn into a cat. Not only does he
show up the detectives investigating the case (including saving them from being
shrunk down to doll-size) but he makes off with the girl at the end of the
story. It’s a little bit of 70s period fun, but A Rage in Harlem it ain’t.
Tim
Waggoner’s “The Grabber Man” is a
well-written story that seems to be an entrée
into a wider world of dark deviousness. Having encountered “The Shadow” as a
child – a dark, parallel world of creepy mutagenic monsters - our narrator
Ismael, now grown and working as a psychologist, examines his patients for
signs of them falling under the evil influence of this outside force. In this
short tale, which begs for some kind of follow-up, Ismael rescues a girl from a
“psychovore”, a caterpillar-like creature which lurks undetected behind her ear
and generates fear of manhandling strangers during her dreams and, later,
waking life, off which it feeds. This story was highlighted by a blurb on the
issue’s front cover, which made me turn to it first; sadly, it was full of
spelling errors which seriously undercut its impact.
Tricia
Owens’ “White Ghost in the City” is a
diversion from the usual run of paranormal sleuths we’ve had thus far. Ashton
Lesser is hunting through Kowloon for a clue leading to the discovery of a
missing soldier on leave from the Vietnam Conflict. Unfortunately, Lesser is a
hard-bitten bigot who’s well outside his comfort-zone. Engaging a Hong Kong
whore to help gain an entrée into the
world of soldier-kidnapping, he soon discovers that the handful of missing men of
which he was vaguely aware numbers a whole lot more than that… just before he
joins their ranks in a suitably nasty way. This is one of only a few examples in
these collections which make a deliberate and positive effort to subvert the
stereotype.
Now
we have “Devil
in the City of Lights” by Bruno Lombardi. There’s one thing that bothers me
and that’s a story that plainly hasn’t done its research. This is a great story
with entertaining characters about a nightmarish, sewer-dwelling creature
attacking people in the French capital that completely overlooks the fact that
the sewers in Paris are wide and run directly under the streets specifically in
order to not wind up as the sort of hellish lavatorial mess that exists under
the streets of London. If you decide to think of this tale as a story of two
French policemen taking a stroll – for whatever reason - in ‘London Below’,
then it works; if you know anything about the sewers of Paris, this is an error in judgement.
Kelly
A. Harmon is a writer who pushes a series of novels concerning an Occult
Investigator named Assumpta Margaret-Mary O’Connor who deals with demonic happenings
in her mid-west American setting. “Light
from Pure Digestion Bred” is a short piece that wraps up some left-over
business from her earlier, longer material while providing a nice entrée to the characters in the ongoing
series. Frankly, I’m not a fan of Laurel K. Hamilton’s work and Kelly A. Harmon
obviously is; I’ll leave it at that.
“Death and the Dancing
Bears” by Steve Liskow
is a story that partakes of its indigenous American setting with gusto. This is
a tale of lycanthropy and circuses in a reservation locale filled with
inter-racial miscommunication and local sheriff intervention. Our sheriff is a
racist bigot and his deputy is a Native American woman with a greater insight
into what’s going on than her boss. There’s a lot to like in this story given
its cultural cross-grain revelations. Annoyingly though, it reads a bit like a
literary version of a decorated Franklin Mint china plate, with eagles and
rainbows and semi-clad sexy squaws.
“The Occult Legion” round-robin narrative continues in this
issue with “Terror on the Links” by
Joshua Reynolds. Again, I let it lie, for the reasons listed elsewhere.
In
terms of articles, Danyal Fryer provides us with a solid potted history of “John Constantine: Hellblazer” - talking
us through his character and motivations and revealing why he fits the bill as
an Occult Detective - followed by “The Man
Who Is Carnacki: An Interview With Dan Starkey”, who voiced the character
on the audio-book which was reviewed in the previous issue. Tim Prasil then
provides us with a breakdown of what makes an occult medical 'man' in “Doctors of the Strange: the tradition of
the Occult Physician”, covering everybody from Dr. Heselius, to Abraham van
Helsing, to Dana Scully. The Reviews
section covers a bunch of self-published and e-published potboiler series (some
of which skim the margins of the erotica tag) released though a number of
representative presses and is worthwhile perusing for those on the lookout for
a new series to get their teeth into.
A
very solid follow-up on the first issue; now onto the third instalment.
GAFFORD, Sam, John Linwood
GRANT & Dave BRZESKI (eds.), “Occult Detective
Quarterly #3 – Fall 2017”, Electric Pentacle Press, Printed in Wroclaw
Poland.
Quarto;
perfect-bound paperback; 122pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Mild wear;
covers lightly curled. Near fine.
Back
again and third time’s the charm. For Lovecraft fans there’s a wonderful story
about the Mi-go here, set just after Professor Wilmarth’s return from Vermont,
and there’s a very nice overview of Robert E. Howard’s attempts at generating
his own Occult Detective. Let’s hook in:
There’s
a touch of “Predator” about S.L.
Edwards’ “Magdalena” and I’m certain
that several viewings of that film (and its sequels) were undertaken by the
author as part of the research process. A village in South America is attacked
by a demonic entity which is trying to wriggle out from under Satan’s boot-heel
and stake a claim on its own personal version of Hell. Our Occult Detective,
backed up by a cadre of CIA-activated death squad veterans, goes into the wilderness
to sort things out. It’s pretty much a train-ride to a vaguely splatterpunk end
at this point. The best feature was the opening section wherein the Devil comes
to our Detective’s office to enlist his aid in ousting the usurper – it’s a
magical beginning, let down in part by what comes next.
Aaron
Smith pitches a nice tangential sequel to Dracula
in “Blood Sings To Me”, the tale of
the small child taken by Lucy Westenra at the start of Stoker’s novel, now
grown to adulthood. Since her abduction by the “bloofer lady”, Katharine Mason
is able to ‘read’ impressions of blood splatter left at the scenes of murders,
thus allowing her to track down the perpetrators. This is a nice conceit and a
very nice story, enlivened by the hint of a blossoming romance between the
seriously-sanguine Miss Mason and her erstwhile partner, Inspector Walter
Franklin.
A
post-script story based on H.P. Lovecraft’s “The
Whisperer in Darkness”, “Disconnected”
by Brian M. Sammons sees a Pinkerton agent set on the trail of a trio of Mi-go
nuisances, bent on enacting their fungal revenge upon Albert Wilmarth. In a William
Burroughs-like fashion, the narrative has been cut into pieces and re-combined
into a crazy-quilt story that cleverly segues
between its own disjointed sections – the reason for this is the
deliciously-evil surprise at the end.
I’m
not a fan of Holmes pastiche. Either, it was written by Conan Doyle, or it
wasn’t; if it wasn’t, then it’s almost invariably bad. The trap that most
writers fall into is in thinking that Sherlock Holmes is a slight,
two-dimensional caricature and is therefore easy to replicate on paper: this is
a fallacy. If it were that easy, we’d all be doing it and there’d be no reason
to print “A Study in Scarlet” ever
again. It is with just such a mindset that William Meikle presents us with “The Ghost Shirt” a tale of Holmes and
Watson tracking down paranormal goings-on at a London-based “Buffalo Bill Wild
West Extravaganza”. Quite apart from the fact that fans of “Penny Dreadful” with be familiar with this trope, once again we
have a writer with a surface knowledge of the time and characters trying to
write convincingly when their efforts would be better-spent telling a story about
the things that they actually know. This is a well-crafted story, but it’s bad
Holmes-and-Watson and it’s bad Victoriana: “quarter to eight” people, not “7.45”!
Edward
M. Erdelac gives us another dose of John Conquer, 70s hoodoo detective, with “Conquer Gets Crowned”. Here, we see a
tension between a writer attempting to adhere to an established template but
also instil some information on another subject that they’ve become interested
in: Erdelac is juggling his “Shaft”-with-juju-bags
premise with an extended insight into the street-art sub-culture of New York in
the 70s. Frankly, I think he should have saved the graffiti bombers for a
stand-alone tale. Trying to blend afros and red leather jump-suits with spray
cans and street-art smarts is too much and detracts from both without adding
anything to either.
“Homo Homini Lupus” by Sam Schrieber is another case where
we’ve obviously been dumped into a world that’s larger than what a short story
can comfortably hold. This is a slice from a larger reality where supernatural
magic, and the policing of it through government-mandated authorities, is taken
as a fait accompli. We have a sinister
Wall Street mystic cabal with a Brett Easton Ellis fetish dealing illegally in
the trade of souls, artificially inflating the share prices and attempting to
crash the market. Going undercover into the ‘soul exchange’ is our Occult
Detective – a werewolf – who confronts the villains, only to find a double-,
and then triple-cross. It’s a nice story, but it flags its twists a little too
freely.
Here,
at last, is a writer who’s read more than a surface amount of the stuff that
they’re writing about. In “Cowherd”
we have a couple of club members hearing a spooky tale from a third member with
a supernatural reputation, along the lines of a Carnacki story frame. The
narrative re-counts the awakening (by a sloppy spiritualist) of an ancient Otherworldy
power at an ancestral estate, at which point our Occult Detective, Simon Wake,
is brought in to deal with it. The dialogue is well-rendered, the characters
believable and barely an anachronistic note is rung throughout. The evil at
work here is of the Fey kind and here too, Melanie Atherton Allen has done her
homework. The only thing letting it down is the artwork, which doesn’t really
do the story justice.
Alice
Loweecey offers us a tale (“It Runs In
The Family”) of an antiquarian who inherits an estate from his wealthy
ex-wife, eight years after she has vanished and who has now been declared dead.
Travelling to the mock-"Addams Family" building, the only ghosts that bother him
are those of the past and the unresolved issues of his broken marriage. Then
the psychic sister of his ex’s boy-toy shows up and reveals that All Is Not As
It Seems. This was an amusing yarn, although the stakes were never very high,
and I was never convinced that our narrator was an actual antiques dealer.
This
next story – “Out Of The Sea” by
Soumya Sundar Mukherjee - introduces us to Bipul Pandaji, a seller of
sweetmeats in the town of Puri on the Bay of Bengal. Having almost been drowned
within the waters of that sea, he survived to discover that he had gained the
power to summon the spirits of those who had died in that same watery grave
and incarnate them in giant bodies composed of water. When approached by two
young men who ask him to revive the spirit of the man who killed the sister of
one of them – the lover of the other – he at first refuses, only to discover
that the man they wish to take pleasure in reviving and killing is the same one
who murdered his own sweetheart and who later almost killed him. While set in a
unique locale quite different from any seen so far in any of these collections,
the story concerns itself mainly with the mechanics of the revenge scenario letting
all the excitement of the local colour fall by the wayside. Interesting notion,
however.
Bob
Freeman’s “The Occult Legion: Birds of a
Feather” follows on from here, part three of the ongoing, tag-team
write-fest. I know that even Lovecraft undertook one of these exercises in his
day; that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily a good thing. In the short
term, they provide a way for a nascent magazine to fill in empty pages but,
after awhile, new contributions by writers should be given preference, and such
gimmickry should not be allowed to become the raison d’etre of the publication. ‘Didn’t - as a mad Lovecraft fan - read his page-filling attempt; didn't read this.
In
terms of articles, there’s a very interesting and well-researched column by
Bobby Derie on Robert E. Howard’s attempt to create a Carnacki, or John
Silence-type figure to fill a growing demand in the publishing market, which
was stumped by his inexperience in the form, along with his own personal
preferences. This is not a ground-shaking revelation into the ways of the
Conan-creator, but is a well-considered and interesting examination of the
author’s style and process, backed up with excerpts from his correspondence to
others within the Lovecraft Circle.
This
is followed up by an article which focuses on Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan
Doyle and their half-baked careers as “Dabblers
in Ghost Hunting”. The article references instances where both authors set
out to determine if a locale pointed out to them was actually haunted or not,
and how comment and controversy followed these attempts afterwards. Dickens is
held up as the “Scully” of the duo, in that he approached his haunting from a
sceptic’s viewpoint, while Conan Doyle is our “Mulder”, desperately wanting to
believe (if only in fairies). This is a thoughtful and well-balanced report by
Tim Prasil and certainly provides valuable insight into these two giants of
English literature.
The
pleasing, and very grammatically-tangled, “Borkchito”
returns and is a welcome continuation.
The
Reviews section continues to impress
by the sheer range and quantity of material covered, proving that detective
fiction with a supernatural bent is as wide-ranging and multi-faceted as the
editors would want us to believe. Here are e-books, paperbacks, novel series,
graphic novels and audio-books enough to cover all tastes and input
preferences.
*****
So
much for the good stuff, every review has to have a down side. There are a few
points that I would like to make about this journal that I found less than
edifying. The first is the tone. In all of the various interviews and some of
the reviews herein (and – thank heavens! – only
in those segments), there is a breathless ‘fan boy’ attitude which is tedious
and also embarrassing. As far as reviews go, it’s great to be excited about the
topic but this fact should never allow the critic to drop their even-handed
perspective and simply gibber “this is fantastic! This is fantastic!” over
and over again. As an interviewer or critic, if you ever feel tempted to end an
observation with an exclamation point, you should stop, leave your desk and
come back ten minutes later, having carefully reconsidered your options. There
are several instances of this not having happened here and it certainly comes
off as less than professional.
Awhile
back, I examined two separate publications from Miskatonic River Press and
found them wanting. A major issue that I had with them was the fact that the ‘editors’
had done very little in regards to actually
editing the material and, having established the outline of the project,
had proceeded to throw the concept out the window. Here, our Electric Pentacle
people know exactly what they’re about, so the vision and content are not really
an issue; still, in the copy-editing and proof-reading department, there is room
for improvement. Two instances stand out, and they do so because they fall at
extremely unfortunate moments: in the first
story of the first issue, a sentence
has been dropped at the bottom of the initial page causing a loss of sense;
and, in a story in issue two that the editors chose to highlight by listing it
as a feature on the front cover, there are a multitude of spelling errors that
have thus become awkwardly underscored for the reader. I had to re-read the
sentence “I straightened up in my hair” several times before I realised that
“chair” was the required term, not “hair”. The issues here are nowhere near as
bad as those evinced by Miskatonic River Press and, as I say, are most likely teething
issues: with any luck, they should smooth themselves over as time goes by. Unfortunately,
in such a project as this, these are also
the sorts of things that can kill repeat sales.
(On
a related note, if you’re going to include a contents page, then - by default -
you must number the pages of the
publication; this didn’t happen until issue three. ‘Good to see that it was
addressed.)
Copy-editing
and lay-out is one thing, but line-editing is another. There are several
instances here – mentioned above – where the presented works contain errors of
sense, or internal logic, that an astute editor should have picked up on and
addressed before going to print. It’s possible that with imminent deadlines and
a lack of other - better - copy, the editors simply couldn’t get in contact
with the writer in time to say “how about sprucing this up a little?” before
the kick-off. Again, as things roll on, hopefully this will be less of a
concern.
I
completely understand that such endeavours as these are a labour of love and
that they get slaved over outside of working hours, after the serious business
of making a living and earning a crust have been accomplished. Nevertheless, a
production as professional-looking as these books are, should be - at the very
least - able to match the standard of a daily news-print publication that
manages fewer errors per page-count each issue on a far more demanding basis.
Every error – of sense, or typography - makes the punter question the price tag
being asked for admission, no matter who’s at the helm and under what
circumstances.
*****
Aleister
Crowley, who (I was certainly surprised to note) did not make a cameo in any of
the first three issues of this magazine, worked long and tirelessly on his own
journal, “The Equinox”. The first
issue contained a wealth of colourful material, some provided by well-known
writers of the day. Shortly thereafter though, the number of contributors
dropped sharply, as Crowley was recognised as the con-artist and snake-oil
salesman he truly was. In the later issues, every item – article; fiction;
poetry; review; letter to the editor – was written exclusively by himself,
under a plethora of pseudonyms. Finally, exhausted and burnt-out by the demands
of his rag, he let it be known that the final volume would be one “of silence”.
I’d hate for this periodical to go the same way, and that is particularly why
I’m so dismissive of the tag-team writing exercise by the editorial staff –
does anyone else out there remember the travesty that was Thieves World? If a journal is to survive it must actively seek out
contribution, not provide it in-house as space and time pressure demands. That
way lies madness.
So,
it’s with fingers-crossed and warm wishes for a bright future that I cheer on “Occult Detective Quarterly” and wish
them the very best of luck in their future endeavours. Four Tentacled Horrors
from me, overall, for the first three instalments.
As the main editor at ODQ, many thanks for taking the time to do this, and giving so much detail. Much appreciated. I shall take notes, at the same time as I pull clumps of hair out at trying to hit the deadlines. Anyone who puts genuine effort into a review these days is welcome in our cardboard box.
ReplyDeleteAs the other fiction editor at ODQ I feel I should mention that you were in error in judging the Occult Legion series without reading it. It is, in fact, not a round robin story at all. It's an interconnected series of complete standalone stories, featuring each author's own characters. Each one can be read on its own, but there's a common thread running through them. Also Sam Gafford, who penned the 4th installment, which isn't even out yet, is the only member of the editorial staff to be involved in the writing of the series.
ReplyDeleteAs for the production/editorial issues, one of my main personal concerns is to eliminate these & at least I believe every issue has been an improvement on the previous one.
Thank for taking the time to put together such an in depth review. Feedback of this sort in invaluable.
Point taken - I'll give it a shot!
DeleteKeep up the good work: I'm looking forward to issue 4...